A Southern Planter (Classic Reprint)


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Excerpt from A Southern Planter The materials for these memorials were collected a few weeks after the death of my father. There was no thought then of having them made public. They were gotten together that the memory and example of his life should not pass away from his grandchildren, many of whom are yet too young to appreciate his character. They will come to mature years in a time when slavery will be a thing of the past. They will hear much of the wickedness of slavery and of slave-owners. I wish them to learn of a good master: of one who cared for his servants affectionately and yet with a firm hand, when there was need, and with a full sense of his responsibility. There were many like him. Self-interest - one might, with truth, say self-protection - was with most masters a sufficient incentive to kindness to slaves, when there was no higher motive. My father was so well assured of the contentment and well-being of his slaves, while he owned them, and saw so much of their suffering, which he was not able to relieve after they were freed, that he did not, for many years, believe that it was better for them to be free than held as slaves. But during the last winter of his life he expressed the opinion that it was well for them to have their freedom. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.




A Southern Planter


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Rice Planter and Sportsman


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Intimate glimpses into the daily life of a South Carolina family Reprinted here for the first time in more than forty years is Rice Planter and Sportsman: The Recollections of J. Motte Alston, 1821-1909. This lively memoir offers a candid look into the daily life of a Low Country South Carolina family, as well as commentary and opinion about such matters as rice cultivation, slavery, and the sporting life. J. Motte Alston's memoirs, originally numbering more than five hundred pages, were never intended for official publication. Alston wrote for his grandson, who was fascinated by his family's personal history and how it fit into the larger context of South Carolina and the southern region. For the Alstons, family was more than a domestic affair. It was also a powerful economic consortium. The buying or selling of land and the building or leasing of houses; the management of each detail of the rice crop; the decision to marry, to have children, or to summer in the mountains--all were more than private or economic decisions. Alston included such details to help his grandson navigate the often tense waters of family affairs. Rice Planter and Sportsman also offers an entertaining look at the sport of the day. Much of the land on which Alston hunted with such success is now in privately owned game preserves, running from the rivers to the coast. Alston also included many details on the abundance of fish and game throughout the South Carolina Low Country and Blue Ridge Mountains. Franklin Burroughs' evocative and warm personal memoir conveys the story of the Alstons and places this memoir firmly in its broader historical context.




Planters, Merchants, and Slaves


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"As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because to speak bluntly it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy."--




James Henry Hammond and the Old South


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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.




The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston


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The reissue of The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F.W. Allston makes available for a new generation of readers a firsthand look at one of South Carolinas most influential antebellum dynasties and the institutions of slavery and plantation agriculture upon which it was built. Often cited by historians, Robert F.W. Allstons letters, speeches, receipts, and ledger entries chronicle both the heyday of the rice industry and its precipitate crash during the Civil War. As Daniel C. Littlefield underscores in his introduction to the new edition, these papers are significant not only because of Allstons position at the apex of planter society but also because his views represented those of the rice planter elite.




The Southern Planter


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Cotton's Queer Relations


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Finally breaking through heterosexual clich s of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty "Jezebels," Cotton's Queer Relations exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. Focusing on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, Michael P. Bibler shows how each one uses figures of same-sex intimacy to suggest a more progressive alternative to the pervasive inequalities tied historically and symbolically to the South's most iconic institution. Bibler looks specifically at relationships between white men of the planter class, between plantation mistresses and black maids, and between black men, arguing that while the texts portray the plantation as a rigid hierarchy of differences, these queer relations privilege a notion of sexual sameness that joins the individuals as equals in a system where equality is rare indeed. Bibler reveals how these models of queer egalitarianism attempt to reconcile the plantation's regional legacies with national debates about equality and democracy, particularly during the eras of the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Cotton's Queer Relations charts bold new territory in southern studies and queer studies alike, bringing together history and cultural theory to offer innovative readings of classic southern texts.




American Mediterranean


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How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era? Matthew Pratt Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers. He traces the links that bound them to the wider fraternity of slaveholders in Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere, and charts their changing political place in the hemisphere. Through such figures as the West Indian Confederate Judah Benjamin, Cuban expatriate Ambrosio Gonzales, and the exile Eliza McHatton, Guterl examines how the Southern elite connectedÑby travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquestÑwith the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world. He analyzes why they invested in a vision of the circum-Caribbean, and how their commitment to this broader slave-owning community fared. From Rebel exiles in Cuba to West Indian apprenticeship and the Black Codes to the Òlabor problemÓ of the postwar South, this beautifully written book recasts the nineteenth-century South as a complicated borderland in a pan-American vision.




Life and Labor in the Old South


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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.