Plantation house

“ The girl found that the plantation was a little empire in itself. The mansion house was the seat of government, with dependencies, such as kitchens, smoke-houses, work-shops and stables. There were numerous house servants for domestic service, and a host of field negroes for the culture of the crops. Their quarters formed a kind of hamlet apart, composed of various huts with little gardens and poultry yards, all well stocked, and swarming with little darkies gamboling in the sunshine. ”

“ The Virginia plantation of 1760 was much more sufficient unto itself than was the same plantation of the next century when methods of communication had improved, articles from the outside world were easier to obtain, and invention was beginning to become "the mother of necessity." Many of the large plantations, in fact, bore no small resemblance to medieval manors. There was the planter himself residing with his family in the mansion, which corresponded to the manor house, and lording it over a crowd of white and black dependents, corresponding to serfs. ”

“ A SOUTHERN plantation lying, as so many of them do, at some distance from any town or village, presents a phase of life peculiar to itself, and very singular to one unaccustomed to it from childhood. It has not the loneliness of isolation, for each planter's house is in its way a sort of a palace, the residence of the superior authority, while at a little distance are clustered together the cabins of his retainers, sometimes in such numbers as to form almost a little village of their own. ”

“ The negro houses stand in the middle of the field; for on modern plantations it is very rare to gather the hands in quarters near the great house; their cabins are distributed all over the estate. On the main road is a manager’s house, distinctly better than any of the negro cabins. Near by a white family is moving in where a black family has moved out, for this plantation (though the thing is uncommon) has a few white hands working alongside the Negroes. ”

“ I never saw him until after the war, when he came home with one arm.
"The overseer lived on the farm. He was the brother of Mrs. Randolph. He would whip men and women and children if he thought they were not working fast.
"The plantation house was a large brick house over-looking the river from a hill, a porch on three sides, two-stories and attic. In the attic slept the house servants and coachman. We did not come in contact with the white people very much. Our place was away from the village.
"There were 8,000 acres to the plantation, with more than 150 slaves on it. ”

“ The plantation was the model, and the patriarchal master of slaves the ideal character which the ambitious poor imitated everywhere. The elegant life of the colonial plantation houses, which adorned the banks of the winding rivers of the old South in the days of the Revolution, had gradually moved westward and southwestward until the larger tobacco area of the Piedmont region extended from Petersburg, Virginia, to Greensboro, North Carolina, and from the falls of the rivers to the slopes of the Blue Ridge. ”

“ There is a difference between a farm and a plantation, though they are carried on in nearly the same style; the main difference is that the one is gotten up on a larger scale than the other. What is usually called a farm is owned by a poor white man—while the plantation is owned by a wealthy planter, with his hundreds of negroes. The farm is known by its small area, by its improvements and its little old log house with its appendages; the plantation, by its vast area, its stately mansion and numerous negro shanties. ”

“ I found that some of the large plantations had, besides a white superintendent, two black overseers,—one whose sole business was to take care of the ploughs and hoes, and one who looked after the mules and other live stock.
The buildings of a first-class plantation form a little village by themselves. There is first the planter’s house, which is commonly a framed dwelling of good size, with two or four brick chimneys built outside. There is not a closet in the house. The pantry and dairy form a separate building. The kitchen is another ”

“ He was called by the slaves a good overseer.
The home plantation of Colonel Lloyd wore the appearance of a country village. All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed here. The shoemaking and mending, the blacksmithing, cartwrighting, coopering, weaving, and grain-grinding, were all performed by the slaves on the home plantation. The whole place wore a business-like aspect very unlike the neighboring farms. The number of houses, too, conspired to give it advantage over the neighboring farms. It was called by the slaves the Great House Farm. ”

“ A lonely log-house under these old trees, is a sight for sore eyes; and only two or three plantations, properly so called, meet the eye in the whole distance. The cultivated and more productive lands lie apart from this tract, near streams, and interspersed with more frequent ponds and marshes. Here you find plantations comprising several thousands of acres, a considerable part of which always lies in forest; cotton and corn fields of vast extent, and a negro village on every plantation, at a respectful distance from the habitation of the proprietor. ”

“ At every plantation there was a family burying ground, not far distant from the house, and usually in or near the garden, where the blossoms carefully nurtured, brightened the last resting places of deceased members of the family. The plantation burying-ground originated through necessity rather than in sentiment. In the seventeenth century a real problem would have been posed by any attempt to transport the deceased and the funeral procession to the distant churchyard. ”

“ With respect to the artificers, such as house-carpenters, coopers, and masons, and the drivers and head-slaves, who form the remaining part of the plantation slaves, they are described as having in general a more certain allowance of provisions, and as being better off.
Having now described the state of the plantation, it will be proper to say a few words on that of the in-and-out-door slaves. The in-door slaves, or domestics, are allowed by all the witnesses to be better clothed and less worked than the others, and invariably to look better. ”

“ Tibeats to a considerable amount in consideration of his services in building the mills on Indian Creek, and also a weaving-house, corn-mill and other erections on the plantation at Bayou Bœuf, not yet completed. ”

“ There was no barn on this plantation, according to the acceptation of the word barn in Pennsylvania; but there was a wooden building, about forty feet long, called the coach-house, in one end of which the family carriage and the chaise in which my master rode were kept. Under the same roof was a stable large enough to contain a dozen horses. In one end the corn intended for the horses was kept, and the whole of one [Pg 113] loft was occupied by the blades and tops of the corn. About a quarter of a mile from the dwelling house were the huts or cabins of the plantation slaves, standing in rows. ”

“ About a mile from the river stands the Jeff Davis Mansion, with its wide verandas and pleasant shade-trees. The plantation comprises a thousand acres of tillable land, now used as a Home Farm for colored paupers, under the superintendence of a sub-commissioner of the Bureau. Here are congregated the old, the orphaned, the infirm, and many whose energies of body and mind were prematurely worn out under the system which the Confederacy was designed to glorify and perpetuate. ”

“ But of what value will be such conclusions applied to those numerous plantations where no white man ever sets foot without the express permission of the owner? not estates lying close to Baltimore and Charleston, or even Lesington or Savannah, but remote and savage wildernesses like Legree's estate in 'Uncle Tom,' like all the plantations in the interior of Tennessee and Alabama, like the cotton-fields and rice-swamps of the great muddy rivers of Lousiana and Georgia, like the dreary pine barrens and endless woody wastes of north Carolina. ”

“ There were not more than half-a-dozen negro families on the plantation at the time of our visit. The agent of the new proprietor had been attempting, through the past week, to hire them, but they had refused to enter into any contract which he thought admissible. They all wanted special privileges of one sort or another. Many wanted considerable tracts of land set off to them on the plantation, which they could cultivate on their own account. Some thought they ought to have two or three acres to plant in cotton. Nearly all wanted to grow corn. ”

“ Nowadays some Whites are tenants or laborers on large plantations. Near Monroe, La., for instance, is a plantation carried on by Acadians brought up from lower Louisiana, with the hope that they will like it and save money enough to buy up the land in small parcels. There are plantations on which white tenants come into houses just vacated by negro tenants, on the same terms as the previous occupants; the women working in the fields, precisely as the Negroes do; there are plantations almost wholly manned by white tenants. ”

“ A just conception of its whole economic framework may be acquired by an investigation of the character of a single large plantation, whether that plantation was situated on the Potomac or the York, the Rappahannock or the James. Each component part of the community, that is, each plantation, was in itself a complete reflection of the entire community, whether bounded by the lines of one neighborhood or the whole Colony. ”

“ Between the plantation where harmony and industry still prevailed and that in which was complete upheaval of the old order, were thousands showing its disintegration in intermediate grades. On the James River, in Virginia, and on waterways in rice and cotton lands up which Federal gunboats steamed, and on the Sea Islands, plantations innumerable furnished parallel cases to that set forth in the following narrative, which I had from Captain Thomas Pinckney, of Charleston, South Carolina. ”

“ The law which allotted to every settler fifty acres of land for each member of his family insured all that could pay for their transportation a plantation far larger than they could hope to secure at home. ”

“ Near this was another plantation, abandoned by its Rebel owners, and occupied by lessees from the United States. The absence of responsible proprietors could be everywhere read in the dilapidated buildings and the general air of neglect. Still there was a fair crop of cane and cotton, and the negroes seemed to be working tolerably well for their Northern employers. ”

“ Arriving at the plantation, we found it a singular village. The houses were set on posts some eight feet from the ground, as the river overflows in some seasons of the year. No white people were there, as it was owned by the man who owned and lived at the place where we found Mr. Packard, and this swamp plantation was in charge of the driver named Isaac. ”

“ The fifty-acre farm means a basis for a new agriculture or intensive farming, also sharp, individual responsibility of buyer, plus family life and labour and friendly co-operation of a neighbourhood. The plantation, with its 'quarters' and renters and croppers, who 'stay' to make and pick crops, but have no home—the plantation, the old, before-the-war, economic unit, is transformed into an American neighbourhood of farms and homes, within sound of church and bell. ”

“ Every year more hands leave the plantations and flock to the town, and every year more funerals wend their slow way from the town to the country; for though they all want to live in town, none is so poor but his ashes must be taken "home"; that is, to the old plantation where his parents and grandparents lived and died and lie waiting the final summons. ”

“ Designed as security for the planters, it proved a powerful instrument in their undoing. Slavery five hundred miles away on a Louisiana plantation was so remote from the North that only the strongest imagination could maintain a constant rage against it. "Slave catching," "man hunting" by federal officers on the streets of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, or Milwaukee and in the hamlets and villages of the wide-stretching farm lands of the North was another matter. ”

“ There being few towns in the cotton country, the shops, or stores, are frequently kept at some cross road, or other public place, in or adjacent to a rich district of plantations. To these shops the slaves resort, sometimes with, and at other times without, the consent [Pg 130] of the overseer, for the purpose of laying out the little money they get. Notwithstanding all the vigilance that is exercised by the planters, the slaves, who are no less vigilant than their masters, often leave the plantation after the overseer has retired to his bed, and go to the store. ”

“ It is rare that a plantation of this class can have a dozen intelligent families residing within a day’s ride of it. Any society that a planter enjoys on his estate must, therefore, consist in a great degree of permanent guests. Hence the name for hospitality of wealthy planters. A large plantation is necessarily a retreat from general society, and is used by its owner, I am inclined to think, in the majority of cases, in winter, as Berkshire villas and farms are in summer by rich people of New York and Boston. ”