Historian Drew Gilpin Faust published "Culture, Conflict, and Community: The Meaning of Power on the American Plantation" in 1980 in The Journal of Social History. Faust's purpose was to analyze the power dynamics on a Southern plantation, specifically the South Carolina plantation of James Henry Hammond. Hammond kept extraordinarily detailed records, a fact that Faust attributes to his desire to more closely control the enslaved population of the plantation. Faust intends for the article to provide a more detailed and nuanced look into the relationship between master and slave. In so doing, she specifically aims to add to Eugene Genovese's seminal work on this topic, the book Roll, Jordan, Roll.

Faust looks at a series of attempts by Hammond to exert his control over the enslaved population of his plantation. This took a number of forms, including religion—he constructed a chapel on the plantation to avert religious gatherings by slaves beyond his supervision. He sought to rationalize work patterns on the plantation, seeking to do away with the task system, which afforded them more free time and autonomy. Faust's argument is that the enslaved population of Hammond's plantation did not accept these changes passively. In some cases, they openly resisted, refusing to carry out his orders and being generally insubordinate. They also resisted in other ways, manipulating his attempts to ply them with rewards and favors. They demonstrated a strong sense of solidarity, and in so doing, forced Hammond to negotiate, retreating from many of his efforts to change their lives in ways they did not approve of. Ultimately, Faust sees this as the most important lesson of Hammond's struggles: the lives of the enslaved people on his plantation were more defined by their community, she argues, than by the intrusions of Hammond.