Basic Plantation
Types
The Southern plantation
landscape consists of three distinctive socioeconomic and spatial phases,
and each is still visible on the landscape today:
1) antebellum plantations, before 1864
[antetbellum means in Latin "before the war."]
2) postbellum sharecropper plantations,
1864-1940s [postbellum means in Latin "after the war."]
3) neo-plantations, since the 1940s
Specific Examples of Plantations
and
Other Slave Places:
Boone Plantation, SC; Middleton Place, SC; Lazaretto Landing, GA
Antebellum
Plantations
By 1830 planters had established antebellum plantations
from
the Carolina coast to lower Louisiana; by 1860 plantations could be found
throughout the South. Yet most whites in southern states never owned slaves
and those who did usually owned fewer than 10. Large plantations with hundreds
of slaves were very uncommon, yet they disproportionately left their distinctive
marks on the landscape and culture of the South.
What does this Currier
& Ives painting tell us about the life of slaves and planters
on cotton plantations
along the Mississippi River? Check your
answer.
 |
Plantations had very similar geographies, and several examples from
across
the South are cited here. The layout of Mount Vernon, George Washington's
plantation in Virginia, is how plantations were laid out. In his will George
Washington did free his slaves but only after his wife's death. Supporting
too many ageing slaves on the farm was bad business. In contrast, Thomas
Jefferson maintained that he could not afford to free his slaves because of
his expensive life style, among them importing French wine. The Hopeton plantation, in Georgia, is a representative example with an owner's house, service buildings, slave quarters, large acreage, and large fields. See the National Park Service's web site on Mississippi plantations. White planters, like Thomas Jefferson, often had sexual relations (voluntary or forced) with their female slaves.
|
What are the commercial crops? Which are the food crops for the slaves
and white
owners?
Answers:
By 1820, the USA was exporting 400,000 bales of cotton a year; by 1861, it was 4 million bales. By the start of the Civil War, cotton had over taken sugar and tobacco as the foremost traded crop in the world. By 1861, the USA produced 66 percent of all the raw cotton exported around the world and most of it went to Lancashire, United Kingdom, which produced 66 percent of all the cotton fabric that was traded world-wide!
Source: Merle Prunty, "The Renaissance of the
Southern Plantation,"
Geographical Review, Vol. 65, No. 4 (October 1955), pp.
459-491.
|
|
| 
|
