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Conventional wisdom about the Old South excludes slaves from the ranks of plantation overseers. However, a preference for restrictive types of evidence and a race-sensitive system for assigning titles in plantation culture raise questions about the accuracy of conventional wisdom. Reexamining conventional scholarship and supplementing it with slave narratives and legal resources suggest that slaves served as overseers more frequently and more competently than previously reported. First, an analysis of both Black and White narratives across the Old South reveals many instances where slaves performed the duties of overseers without carrying that title. Second, drawing on a comparison with the rivalry between Black and White urban workers, an analysis of salary data for White overseers suggests that their competition for work with slaves contributed to other factors that depressed their value to planters.Conventional wisdom about plantation culture in the Old South minimizes the enslaved Africans' opportunity and competence to work as overseers, but influential scholars who have collected and assessed relevant evidence have viewed it through restrictive if not race-sensitive filters. Early 20th-century historians reported that White overseers had a reputation for incompetence but that enslaved Africans were inherently unable to supplant them. Phillips (1918Phillips ( /1959 observed that planters derided overseers generally for their "dishonesty, inattention and self indulgence" (p. 283); however, he also concluded that plantations were schools

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