Designed for both professional and amateur genealogists and other researchers, this index provides a detailed guide to materials available in the extensive Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations microfilm set. By using this index to identify specific collections in which materials pertinent to a specific family name, plantation name, or location may be found, and then reviewing the details in the appropriate Guides (see Preface), the researcher may pinpoint the location of desired materials. The items indexed include deeds, wills, estate papers, genealogies, personal and business correspondence, account books, slave lists, and many other types of records. This new edition also includes a list of all of the manuscript collections included in the microfilm set.
Materials indexed include: Samuel Barker Estate Account Books, Thomas Aston Coffin Plantation Book, Gourdin-Gaillard Family Papers, Reverend Alexander Glennie Parish Diary, Glover Family Papers, Dr. Andrew Hasell Medical Account Book, Richmond Plantation Overseer Journal, John B. Milliken Plantation Journal, Thomas Walter Peyre Plantation Journals, Henry Ravenel Papers, Thomas Porcher Ravenel Papers, John Sparkman Plantation Book, Joshua John Ward Plantation Journal, Daniel Webb Plantation Book, and the Paul D. Weston Papers.
Historians have traditionally viewed the Creek War of 1836 as a minor police action centered on rounding up the Creek Indians for removal to Indian Territory. Using extensive archival research, John T. Ellisor demonstrates that in fact the Second Creek War was neither brief nor small. Indeed, armed conflict continued long after peace was declared and the majority of Creeks had been sent west. Ellisor’s study also broadly illuminates southern society just before the Indian removals, a time when many blacks, whites, and Natives lived in close proximity in the Old Southwest. In the Creek country, also called New Alabama, these ethnic groups began to develop a pluralistic society. When the 1830s cotton boom placed a premium on Creek land, however, dispossession of the Natives became an economic priority. Dispossessed and impoverished, some Creeks rose in armed revolt both to resist removal west and to drive the oppressors from their ancient homeland. Yet the resulting Second Creek War that raged over three states was fueled both by Native determination and by economic competition and was intensified not least by the massive government-sponsored land grab that constituted Indian removal. Because these circumstances also created fissures throughout southern society, both whites and blacks found it in their best interests to help the Creek insurgents. This first book-length examination of the Second Creek War shows how interethnic collusion and conflict characterized southern society during the 1830s.
From his birth in 1807 to his death in 1864 as Sherman’s troops marched in triumph toward South Carolina, James Henry Hammond witnessed the rise and fall of the cotton kingdom of the Old South. Planter, politician, and an ardent defender of slavery and white supremacy, Hammond built a career for himself that in its breadth and ambition provides a composite portrait of the civilization in which he flourished. A long-awaited biography, Drew Gilpin Faust’s James Henry Hammond and the Old South reveals the South Carolina planter who was at once characteristic of his age and unique among men of his time. Of humble origins, Hammond set out to conquer his society, to make himself a leader and a spokesman for the Old South. Through marriage he acquired a large plantation and many slaves, and then through their coerced labor, shrewd management practices, and progressive farming techniques, he soon became one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served as governor of his state. Evidence that he sexually abused four of his teenage nieces forced him to retreat for many years to his plantation, but eventually he returned to public view, winning a seat in the United States Senate that he resigned when South Carolina seceded from the Union. James Henry Hammond’s ambition was unquenchable. It consumed his life, directed almost his every move and ultimately, in its titanic calculation and rigidity, destroyed the man confined within it. Like Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, Faust suggests, Hammond had a “design,” a compulsion to direct every moment of his life toward self-aggrandizement and legitimation. Despite his sexual abuse of enslaved females and their children, like other plantation owners, Hammond envisioned himself as benevolent and paternal. He saw himself as the absolute master of his family and slaves, but neither his family, his slaves, nor even his own behavior was completely under his command. Hammond fervently wished to perfect and preserve what he envisioned as the southern way of life. But these goals were also beyond his control. At the time of his death it had become clear to him that his world, the world of the Old South, had ended.
Celebrated as a classic work of historical literature, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by the leading historian of African American slavery of the first half of the twentieth century. Life and Labor in the Old South represents both the strengths and weaknesses of first-rate scholarship by whites on the topics of antebellum African and African American slavery during the Jim Crow era. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and economic facets of slavery, and gracefully written, Phillips's germinal account set the standard for his contemporaries. Simultaneously the work is rife with elitism, racism, and reliance on sources that privilege white perspectives. Such contradictions between its content and viewpoint have earned Life and Labor in the Old South its place at the forefront of texts in the historiography of the antebellum South and African American slavery. The book is both a work of high scholarship and an example of the power of unexamined prejudices to affect such a work.
