Parenting & Family Quote by John Sergeant Wise

Wise’s sentence is a gentlemanly sleight of hand: it concedes the brutality of slavery with one clause, then rushes to soften it with “compensatory processes,” as if human bondage could be balanced on a moral ledger. The phrasing is the tell. “However” functions like a verbal shrug, a way to acknowledge the obvious without dwelling on it. “Master of the negro” is delivered in the calm grammar of property law, not the language of violence. Then comes the pivot: the claim that some enslaved people became “masters” of white children, a rhetorical reversal meant to feel paradoxical, even comforting.

The subtext is paternalist nostalgia. Wise, writing as a postbellum Southern memoirist, taps into a common Lost Cause trope: the enslaved caretaker whose intimacy with the household supposedly complicates the hierarchy. It’s not an argument that slavery was good; it’s a strategy for suggesting it was less stark than it was, domesticated by affection, mediated by the nursery. The word “certain” is doing quiet work too, narrowing the claim to exceptional cases while implying they were representative enough to matter.

What makes the line effective is its emotional bait. It invites readers to picture children, not whips; relationships, not extraction. Yet the “mastery” he describes is carefully bounded: influence over children, not agency over one’s own life, body, or family. By recasting coercion as mutual dependency, Wise offers a narrative that lets white readers feel complicated instead of complicit. The sentence doesn’t overturn the hierarchy; it rebrands it as a kind of intimate, allegedly reciprocal social order.