These great plantations are symbols of the South and days gone by. Today perhaps only a hundred along the coast and another hundred inland remain. Many of the great plantation homes were lost during the time of war, and many more were simply allowed to collapse in the aftermath. This collection of photographs represents some of the most stunning work present in the Historic American Buildings Survey, an effort to catalogue and document the architecture and building culture of America. In the South, especially, these photographs became invaluable records of a way of life that was quickly disappearing. The selections here, presented by William P. Baldwin, capture these lost dwellings--sometimes as a fragment, sometimes a whole building--and showcase the grand tradition and romantic detail of these icons of the South.
This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry. European settlers came to South Carolina in 1670 determined to possess an abundant wilderness. Over the course of a century, they settled highly adaptive rice and indigo plantations across a vast coastal plain. Forcing slaves to turn swampy wastelands into productive fields and to channel surging waters into elaborate irrigation systems, planters initiated a stunning economic transformation. The result, Edelson reveals, was two interdependent plantation worlds. A rough rice frontier became a place of unremitting field labor. With the profits, planters made Charleston and its hinterland into a refined, diversified place to live. From urban townhouses and rural retreats, they ran multiple-plantation enterprises, looking to England for affirmation as agriculturists, gentlemen, and stakeholders in Britain's American empire. Offering a new vision of the Old South that was far from static, Edelson reveals the plantations of early South Carolina to have been dynamic instruments behind an expansive process of colonization. With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.
Architecture has been defined as "the gift of one generation to the next." In the South Carolina Low Country the gift is a particularly precious one-a rich treasure of buildings that not only charm us with their graceful beauty, but offer us a glimpse into a vanished world of prosperous plantations and provincial aristocracy.
From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century. In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers’ reputations. In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people. “A solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it.” —Journal of Southern History “A major achievement, restoring the issue of class to societies riven by racial conflict.” —Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne “Based on a detailed reading of overseers’ letters and diaries, plantation journals, employer’s letters, and newspapers, Tristan Stubbs has traced the evolution of the position of the overseer from the colonial planter’s partner to his most despised employee. This deeply researched volume helps to reframe our understanding of class in the colonial and antebellum South.” —Tim Lockley, University of Warwick
This receipt book provides a flavorful record of plantation cooking, folk medicine, travel, and social life in the antebellum South, with 82 recently discovered additional receipts.
Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.
A shackled West African tribe drags themselves off a slave ship while singing, drowning in a Georgia creek to avoid being sold. Mysterious letters from a long-ruined church near Mepkin Abbey solicit a man to join faith. A French teacher disappears from a school after marking final exams in blood. An Egyptian mummy triggers a heart attack in a city museum. These stories and more are wrenched from the gravest parts of America's past--real lives of people on plantations from Savannah and the coast of the Carolinas. Most deal with the hub of the East Coast slave trade, Charleston, South Carolina. All are richly illustrated with both historic and contemporary images. Dwelling in the affairs of plantation life is to tread the fires of emotionally raw history. Sifting through the folklore and legends, the old hushed embers of the south ignite once again in this collection. While these stories relate encounters with the supernatural, readers will find that what actually happened here doesn't always need a ghost to be disquieting.
Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.
