reading response

Chapter 5

John Michael Vlach

The plantation landscape

Beyond the white master's residence, back of and beyond the Big House, was a world of work dominated by black people. The inhabitants of this world knew it intimately, and they gave to it, by thought and deed, their own definition of place. Slaveowners set up the contexts of servitude, but they did not control those contexts absolutely. There were many chinks in the armor of the "peculiar institution." Taking advantage of numerous oppor- tunities to assert counterclaims over the spaces and buildings to which they were confined, slaves found that they could blunt some of the harsh edges of slavery's brutality. The creation of slave landscapes was one of the strategies employed by blacks to make slavery survivable. It is now widely accepted that blacks and whites both played important roles in shaping everyday life in the South. Many expressions of southern folklore-tales, proverbs, sayings, dance steps, tunes, recipes, beliefs, quilt patterns, house types, and the like-are known equally well by both races. Consequently, we can expect to accurately understand southern plantation landscapes only if the contributions of slaves are acknow- ledged and included. To study these places without including the slaves' perspectives would not only be inadequate, it would be futile.

The creation of a slaves' landscape was a reactive expression, a response to the plans enacted by white landowners. To mark their dominance over both nature and other men, planters acquired acreage, set out the boundaries of their holdings, had their fields cleared, selected building sites, and supervised the construction of dwellings and other struc- tures . The design of a plantation estate was an expression of the owner's tastes, values, and attitudes. To appreciate what slaves eventually did with the realms fashioned by planters and to more fully understand the choices available to them, it is necessary first to consider the world the slaveholders made. The achievements of the planter class provided the social context that slaves would manipulate for their own ends. Ultimately, the slave- holders' world would become the raw material with which slaves would attempt to satisfy some of their own social aspirations.

THE PLANTER'S LANDSCAPE

A plantation was not always understood to be a large agricultural estate. Indeed, in its earliest usage, the word plantation referred simply to an "act of planting." Any farm, even a garden or a clump of trees, might be called a plantation. It was only after England's

96 John Michael Vlach

conquest of Ireland in the sixteenth century that the meaning of the word was expanded to signify a large holding, namely "a settlement in a new or conquered country," like the newly formed Plantation of Ulster and later the Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. Not until 1706, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was there written evidence that the word indicated "an estate or farm producing a crop with servile labor," the connotation generally intended by contemporary usage.

For most of the seventeenth century, a southern planter was a poor farmer who held claim to about a hundred acres and owned no slaves. 1 His house was, according to British traveler ]. F. D. Smyth, likely to be a tumbledown dwelling built "almost all of wood covered with the same; the roof with shingles, the sides and ends with thin boards, and not always lathed and plastered within; only those of the better sort are finished in that manner, and painted on the outside. The chimneys are sometimes of brick, but more commonly of wood, coated on the inside with clay. The windows of the best sort have glass in them; the rest have none, and only wooden shutters. "2 English revenue agent Edward Randolph reported in 1696 that when Virginia planters laid claim to new lands, they would merely "clear one Acre of that land, and ... plant and tend it one year ... but take no care of their Crop, nor make any further use of their land." 3 Generally, a common planter's fields were haphazardly tended; crops were raised in odd-shaped plots scattered about his holdings. Hills of tobacco and corn were scratched up with hoes between dead trees and the remnants of charred stumps, while livestock foraged freely, without super- vision, across unfenced woodlands, marshes, and pastures. Ground that was worn out by too many seasons of planting a single crop was allowed to grow up in briars and bushes. These scraggly holdings, although productive enough to support their owners, were denounced by many visitors, who saw in the increasingly gullied and eroded farms only ruin and waste. 4

By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, this apparent disregard for the look of the land was effectively countered by a small group of well-off planters, those who were able to assemble large holdings extending over thousands of acres.5 Among this rising group of fashion-conscious social elites, which included no more than two dozen family lines, neatness and order were considered important attributes of landscape management. According to the new dictates of the Georgian mode, a proper gentleman's house was not only substantially constructed but was, in plan, symmetrically balanced. The predictable order of a house's facade and of its spatial arrangement was extended to the surrounding gardens and, as far as was reasonable, to the layout of the entire estate.

Bacon's Castle in Surry County, Virginia, built about 1665, was among the earliest of these new, imposing estates (Figure 5.1). Although the house was modest in size, it was constructed in brick at a time when almost all of the houses in Virginia were wooden frames sheathed with thin skins of riven boards, and therefore it was no doubt seen as a mansion. Standing two-and-a-half stories high, Bacon's Castle was also distinguished from the houses of the common folk by its fashionable curved gables, triple diamond-set chimney stacks, and full-height porch and stair towers. Another expression of status was the large, formal pleasure garden, enclosed by walls and hedges, that stretched out in front of the building. Divided into eight rectangular units by graveled paths, the garden

The plantation landscape 97

5.1 Bacon's Castle, Surry Co., Virginia, begun 1665

JI 0 contained several secluded nooks equipped with built-in benches where visitors might 1,1ke their ease. 6

The inspiration for estates like Bacon's Castle and the others that followed it was provided by English manorial estates, which usually co(sisted a "smaller Georgian house set in a park of modest proport10ns- a warmth of red bnck, a flash of stucco, Jmong luxuriant trees." The parklands surrounding these manor houses were, writes land- cape hjstorian W. G. Hoskins, their most impressive feature: "Parks grew yet more

extensive during the eighteenth century, in the age of the territorial aristocracy. Building themselves magnificent houses, they needed {or thought they needed) more square miles of conspicuous waste to set them off. "7 It was qwte understandable, then, that the estates developed by the Virginia gentry would remind British visitor William Hugh Grove of the pleasant parks and manor houses of the English midlands.8 The members of this upper class, too, had made themselves into a "territorial aristocracy," and they, too, quickly put a much distance as possible between themselves and the rest of the population.

The resemblances between the aristocratic estates of England and the American colonies were more than coincidental. Frances Carter, wife of Robert Carter of Nomini I lall, informed her husband that she would not feel comfortable in Virginia until he had "made her a park and stock'd it. "9 Some Virginia planters either patterned their houses upon specific English country houses or availed themselves of architectural guidebooks published in London to ensure that their homes would conform to the latest British fa hions. William Byrd Il, for example, is believed to have based the design of Westover,

great house overlooking the James [river] that he built in 1735, on Drayton Court, the · orthamptonshire seat of the Earl of Peterborough.10 Almost a decade earlier, Mann Page

98 John Michael Vlach

had fashioned his mansion at Rosewell after Cound Hall in Shropshire.11 English . ences were also conveyed by such books as William Lawson's A New Garden (1618), which contained detailed diagrams and instructions for laying our f and gardens, or Walter Blith's English Improver; or, a New Survey of Husbandry (lorrna] The new Virginia plantations were so thoroughly linked to British antecedents that 649 · two decades after the American Revolution, a Polish visitor to Washington's M even Vernon would remark: "The General has never left America, but when one sees his h ouni and his garden it seems as if he had copied the best samples of the grand old hom ouse esteads of England." 12

Similar developments were also visible during the early eighteenth century in the Carolina lowcountry. In the hinterlands of Charleston, for example, members of the Middleton family established two impressive estates. The house at Crowfield, the plan . tion built by William Middleton in 1730, was approached by a long, ramrod-strai;. avenue, and its grounds were ornamented with numerous "garden contrivances" includi basins, fishponds, canals, elegant parterres, and a bowling green. The whole estate w ng laid out symmetrically along a north-south axis extending from the road through the house and gardens to the rice fields beyond. Ten years later, Henry Middleton acquired a large plantation tract along the Ashley River, one of twenty he was to own in his lifetime. By 1755 his Middleton Place was as sumptuous as his brother William's plantation. Both were thoroughly British in character; Crowfield was, in fact, named for an English holding belonging to the family. The gardens on the two plantations are readily compared with the detailed views of the landscaping of English country estates found in J. Kip's Britan11111 Illustrata (1709), a book that may have guided the Middleton brothers.13

These grand estates in the Carolinas and the Chesapeake region were extraordinary places. Vast beyond comprehension in size and elaborately designed and decorated, they were atypical, showplace plantations. Yet, their very exceptionalism made them impressive that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the definition of plantation would change once more. No longer just a large farm run with supervised captive labor, from the middle of the eighteenth century onward the ideal plantation was a large, tastefullr appointed country estate belonging to a prominent gentleman.

The tangible glory of manorial estates served as the most persuasive propaganda for the celebration of the plantation ideal. Implicit in the structured layout of Georgiaa houses, formal gardens, and extensive stretches of fenced and cultivated fields was a sense of the planter's dominance over both nature and society. The wide gap between the material condition of a great planter and that of even his closest local rival was unckr- scored by the way in which his house was approached. Access was achieved by mo · along a route marked by a series of threshold devices- gates, drives, forecourts, st terraces, porches, passageways, doors- all of which were intended to make the ho and its owner, appear more impressive.14 At Thomas Lee's Stratford Hall, for example. low wall stretched across the forecourt of the building, effectively stopping visitors frnll riding their horses up to the steps. Only a "humbling pedestrian access" to the ho was allowed.15

Guiding these planters in setting up their estates was a highly rational fo rmali The world was, in their view, suitably improved only after it was transformed from

The plantation landscape 99

UNCLE SAM PLANTATION CONVENT, ST, JAMES PARISH, LOUISIANA LA .74 LJ1 ·- - ---· ·-- - ···········---··-·

5.2 Uncle Sam Plantation, Convent, St. James Parish, Louisiana, 1837- 49; aerial view drawing

chaotic natural condition into a scene marked by a strict, hierarchical order. The planters' landscapes were laid out with straight lines, right-angle corners, and axes of symmetry, their mathematical precision being considered as a proof of individual superiority (Figures 5.2 and 5.3).

Although the aloofness and reserve signaled by this rigid imposition of order was intended chiefly to ensure that the plantation owner receiN@ the respect he felt was his due, ironically such expressions of social hierarchy made the new plantation ideal appealing to "middlin'" yeomen. The commoners who were effectively put in their place upon visiting a Westover or a Stratford Hall were anxious to have their own turn to exercise a similar social authority. It is not too surprising, then, that when new planta- tions were created in interior portions of the South during the nineteenth century, the old manorial model served as their inspiration. This new gen_eration of planters, often young Virginians or Carolinians gone west to seek their fortunes, hoped to attain at last the prominent social rank that their foreparents had sought. As they moved first to the frontiers of Georgia and Kentucky and later as far west as Texas, they carried an eighteenth-century idea with them as an important item of cultural baggage. Architectural historian Roger G. Kennedy aptly observes that this "New South was the Old Tidewater South transported across the Piedmont." 16 .

100 John Michael Vlach

5.3 Uncle Sam Plantation, plan

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Certainly the plantation established by Benjamin Grey in central Kentucky was as impressive as any back in old Virginia. A journalist visiting Grey's estate in 1843 wrote that his house "stands near the centre of the domain on rising ground, and commands a fine view of the country around. . .. A pretty yard of smooth greensward, decked with shrubbery and evergreens, is enclosed around with pointed white palings, and adjoining this is a noble park." Grey's neighbor Nicholas Hart, in an attempt to imitate the ancient ways of the English nobility, stocked his own park with a herd of elk. 17 The conspicuous grandeur of Oak Valley, a plantation located in Yazoo County, Mississippi, as described by private tutor DePuy Van Buren, once again suggests manorial aspirations: "In the front ground, you see magnificent China-trees. The orange myrtle, with its glossy green foliage trimmed in the shape of a huge strawberry; the crape myrtle with its top hanging thick with long cone shaped flowers of a peach-blow color; the cape jasmine, with its rich polished foliage spangled all over with white starry blossoms ... and that richest and sweetest blossom of tropical shrubs- the japonica."18

Further evidence of the westward diffusion of the Tidewater plantation form is provided by some of the sugar plantations in southern Louisiana. Along the shores of Bayou Teche, plantations developed by Anglo-Americans were laid out in what geographer John B. Rehder calls a "block plan." On these estates, the planter's mansio

The plantation landscape 101

buildings, and slave houses were all clustered closely together in a gridlike pattern. farrn ·ans of this type were easily distinguished from the estates of French planters, plantatJ . employed a linear format. While the block plan probably stems from the formal who try first used in the design of gentry estates in Virginia and Carolina, mid- georne nth-century visitor Thomas Bangs Thorpe thought he recognized along the shores ninetee f the Teche "expressions so often witnessed in the lordly parks of England. "19 0 Although plantations were established all over the South, by 1860 the largest, and therefore the roost lavishly developed, estates tended to be concentrated in three distinct

The oldest and generally most prominent plantations were located in a coastal areas. . · n extending from the Chesapeake Bay to northern Flonda and not more than a reg10 . . .

hundred rniles inland from the Atlantic. A second concentrat10n of large plantat10n estates occupied a fifty-mile-wide area of cotton lands running through the middle ortions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, terminating in eastern Mississippi.

third plantation zone consisted of the fertile bottomlands of the lower Mississippi Valley, frorn just above Memphis to below New Orleans. There were also noteworthy lantation zones in the Florida Panhandle, northwestern Alabama, and along the Gulf

of Texas, but these were smaller enclaves rather than major regions. Large plantations dotted the southern countryside fairly evenly from Maryland to

Texas, signaling to all passersby the financial and social rewards of the plantation system. However, well into the nineteenth century, those benefits were still only realized by a few families. Historians have usually granted planter status to those men and women who owned at least twenty slaves. Thus in 1860, when plantation agriculture had reached its furthest extent, there were only 46,274 plantations in the entire South. Though this figure may seem large, it represents only 12 percent of all slaveholding families, who in turn made up only 24 percent of all white southerners.20 The greatest proportion of these estates- some 20, 789- were run with between twenty and thirty slaves and though considered small plantations, they were, in fact, only slightly larger than slaveholding farms and not very different in character. Only the plantations that were run with large numbers of slaves, a hundred or more, approached the manorial ideal. By this measure, there were in 1860 only about 2,300 truly large-scale plantations, and perhaps only half of those were developed to the state of elegance promoted by the widespread southern mythology.21 By the middle of the nineteenth century, less than 1 percent of all slave- holding families fit the plantation stereotype, a percentage that had remained constant since the middle of the eighteenth century.22

How such an unrepresentative place as the great plantation estate came to dominate the self-perception of the South is a matter about which there has been considerable discussion. It is enough to say here that both those farmers who owned only a few slaves and those who owned none were impressed by the lavish plantations inhabited by the gentry, and they looked upq,rithem with a mixture of admiration and envy. The deference with which the few great planters in any county were regarded is related no doubt to the messages that were visually conveyed by the design of their estates, crystal-clear indica- tions of a landlord's dominance that required the submission of black laborer and white visitor alike.

According to architectural historian Dell Upton, the highly formalized layout of showplace plantations constituted an "articulated processional landscape," a spatial

102 John Michael Vlach

system designed to indicate the centrality of the planters and to keep them aloof from any visitors behind a series of physical barriers that simultaneously functioned as social buffers.23 A yeoman farmer entering a planter's estate would follow a prescribed formal route that led to the planter's parlor or office. Although the intricate sequence of gates, terraces, pathways, and other threshold markers was intended to emphasize the yeoman's lack of standing in relation to the planter, it could just as easily have indicated whether the yeoman's social position was improving. In other words, a visitor's status was measured by how far into the planter's world he or she was allowed. The plantation ideal remained pervasive in the South for more than a century because the will of the elite was matched by the acquiescence of those who could only dream of owning such a grand place.

Even though ownership of a lavish plantation estate was beyond the reach of most southerners, planters of more modest means still tried to make their homes and gardens fashionable by incorporating some formal qualities of design or decoration. A Greek Revival porch, for example, complete with columns and entablature, might be grafted awkwardly onto a humble log cabin as a statement of presumed sophistication. Self- proclaimed arbiters of taste promoted the formal plantation style, usually by berating struggling would-be planters for their failures. In 1857 a Georgia newspaper editor wrote that, on plantations in his locale, there was "the singular want of elegance and comfort about the domestic arrangements of those who are able to provide them . ... A log house half decayed with age, or a frame house without paint, and . . . a yard without a shrub or a flower ... are too frequently the insignia of a planter's premises. "24 Even more shrill was the attack launched by John Forsyth in an address to an Alabama horticultural society in 1851. He directed his listeners to "Go to the homestead of a Southern farmer and tell me what you see." Making no pause for an answer, he thundered, "The planter's home is generally a rude ungainly structure, made of logs, rough hewn from the forest; rail fences and rickety gates guard its enclosures. And why? . .. We murder our soil with wasteful culture because there is plenty of fresh land West- and we live in tents and huts when we might live in rural palaces. "25 The plantation ideal established such high architectural expectations that most planters were doomed to fail; the only acceptable level of success was great success.

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the most representative planters owned between twenty and thirty slaves and devoted the larger portion of their four or five hundred acres to cotton, probably on recently cleared "newgrounds." In 1853 Frederick Law Olmsted visited just such a plantation in northern Louisiana . He found that the owner's house was but a "small square log cabin, with a broad open shed or piazza in front, and a chimney, made of sti<i:ks and mud, leaning against one end." Nearby was "a smaller detached cabin, twenty/ tfet in the rear ... used for a kitchen." The spaces surrounding this cabin suggested an obvious concern with workaday routine that was relieved only slightly by a few ornamental shrubs:

About the house was a large yard, in which were two or three China trees, and two fine Cherokee roses; half a dozen hounds; several negro babies; turkeys and chickens, and a pet sow, teaching a fine litter of pigs how to root and wallow. Three hundred yards from

The plantation landscape 103

the house was a gin-house and stable, and in the interval between were two rows of comfortable negro cabins. Between the house and the cabins was a large post, on which was a bell to cal.I the negroes. A rack for fastening horses stood near it. On the bell-post and on each of the rack-posts were nailed the antlers of a buck, as well as on a large oak- tree near by. On the logs of the kitchen a fresh deer skin was drying. On the railing of the iazza lay a saddle. The house had but one door and no window, nor was there a pane of

p . 26 glass on the plantat10n.

Plantation life, particularly in the western portion of the cotton belt, was essentially a S artan pioneer experience on the edge of a constantly advancing frontier. 27 Settlements lik: the one visited by Olmsted were carved out of the wilderness in the optimistic hope that a substantial upgrading would follow after a few harvests. More often, however, these temporary homes were abandoned altogether as the cycle of planting was started a ain on a new, more promising tract of land. The common planter might follow the :ode! of a large plantation estate and create an ensemble of buildings including a separate kitchen, a string of slave houses, and several barns and storage cribs, but these were, as Forsyth had complained, only "rude ungainly structures," and no one would ever have mistaken such a house for a "rural palace."

That plantations existed along a spectrum ranging from superbly appointed mansions set amidst well-tilled fields to expedient shelters thrown together in slash-and- burn clearings is certainly borne out by the testimony of former slaves. Martha Colquitt from Lexington, Georgia, recalled: "Our Big House sure was one grand fine place. Why, it must have been as big as de Mill Stone Baptist Church. It was all painted white with green blinds and had a big old high porch dat went nigh all 'round de house." This dwelling presents a marked contrast to the house of Mary Ella Grandberry's master in Barton, Alabama, which she described in the 1930s as "a li'l old frame building like a ordinary house is now. He was a single man and didn't have so terrible much, it seem ... just to look at him you'd think he was a poor white man." 28

The appearance of a plantation certainly varied with the crop that its owner attempted to grow. The cultivation of tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar, the primary staples of the plantation economy, each followed different schedules and work routines and used different equipment and storage structures. One type of plantation could be distinguished from another by its barns, mills, and other gear. The identity of a tobacco plantation was marked by the distinctive tobacco barns used to cure the leaves before they were packed into huge barrels. Standing in the yards of most cotton plantations were both a gin house and a press for compacting processed lint into bales. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, rice plantations had large steam-powered mills to comple- ment the older threshing platforms and wi7 nowing houses where slaves had previously refined the rice by hand. The mills located on Louisiana's sugar plantations were large sheds, sometimes as much as three hundred feet long, containing boilers, engines, conveyor belts, rollers, and evaporators. Because these mills spewed clouds of smoke and steam as the cane juice was transformed first into syrup and then into raw sugar, it is not surprising that sugar plantations were said to resemble New England factory towns .29

104 John Michael Vlach

The appearances of plantation fields also varied with the crop that was grown. The rice fields of South Carolina and Georgia, for example, stood out prominently because the were developed on reclaimed wetlands. Rice paddies were diked off from the surroundiny marshes, leveled, and then irrigated ingeniously by means of a system of sluice gates canals. The landscape resulting from these efforts was, according to Olmsted, "Holland- like. "30 The sugar fields of Louisiana, laid out in rectangular units marked off by ditches and cross-drains, also had an engineered appearance. British observer William H. Russel thought John Burnside's sugar plantation was impressive in part because his fields were judged to be "as level as a billiard-table. "31 Because the crop did not require any special- ized techniques of cultivation, a cotton planter's acres did not look very different from any other farm. And because cotton planters tended to specialize only in their single cash crop, their fields showed the viewer little more than continuous furrows pushing up the same plant, often right up to the door of the planter's house. Contemporary visitors, hoping for more diversity, denounced the monotonous rows of cotton as drab.32

Other variables affecting the visual appearance of a plantation included the size and organization of the available work force, the condition of the soil, and the willingness of its owner to embrace up-to-date methods of cultivation, harvest, and processing. There were also inevitable subregional differences within an area as large as the South, a geographic zone reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the prairies of central Texas and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River Valley.

Any plantation reflected not only the local ecology and climate, but the conse- quences of a particular settlement history as well. Finding it difficult, if not impractical, to ignore the customs of the cultural region in which their estates were located, planters frequently used the same designs for houses, barns, and outbuildings as yeoman neigh- bors. In the Tidewater South, where single-pen barns were favored, for example, planters also used single-crib barns. Similarly, the planters in the Piedmont and upland South showed their regional allegiances by selecting double-crib barns over other possible barn types. Maryland plantation estates closely resembled mid-Atlantic farmsteads both in their layout and in their selection of buildings. It is apparent that so-called plantation architecture was often nothing more than a particular expression of whatever vernacular tradition happened to be dominant in a given region. It is difficult, then, to refer with confidence to a single "plantation style" of architecture, for these regional variations in building customs affected the design of houses as well as service structures.

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN PLANTATION LANDSCAPE

The experiences of plantation slaves were quite different from those of plantation owners, not only because of their status as captive laborers, but because so many of them were held on the larger and therefore less typical plantations. Historian John B. Boles demon- strates how so many slaves came to live on large-scale manorial holding(

Imagine a universe of ten slaveholders, eight owning two slaves apiece, one owning rwenty- four, and the tenth possessing sixty. Obviously most slaveholders (80 percent) would own

The plantation landscape 105

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"' .. } -

5.4 Slave houses, Hermitage Plantation, Savannah, Georgia, nineteenth century

fewer than five slaves, but most slaves (84 out of 100) would reside in units of more than twenty. Such an imaginary model suggests what the nwnbers reveal. In 1850 ... over half [of the slaves], 51.6 percent, resided on plantations of more than twenty bondsmen. The figures were more pronounced in the Deep South, and still more so in 1860, when fully 62 percent of the slaves in the Deep South lived in plantation units.33

Plantations, albeit unintentionally, served as the primary sites at which a distinctive black American culture matured. By 1860 over 800,000 slaves were living mostly in the company of other slaves, in groups of fifty or more. On almost 11,000 plantations, conse- quently, slave settlements were big enough to resemble, in the words of former slave occupants, "little towns. "34 No doubt their quarters did resemble villages (Figure 5 .4 ). A group of fifty slaves probably contained about ten families housed in as many as ten but 110 fewer than five cabins, depending on the type of buildings used as quarters. Slave settle- ments containing larger populations obviously required more houses and thus were even more townlike. Bill Homer, a former slave from Shreveport, Louisiana, described a large grid pattern of slave houses when he recalled that the quarters on his plantation "was fifty one-room cabins and dey was ten in a row and dere was five rows." 35 A map of the Stapleton plantation on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, drawn up in 1789, shows that the slave quarter, containing eighteen cabins, was set out in a block pattern three rows deep and six rows wide. 36

Although slaves had no legal power, they were often able nonetheless to use their marginal status to their advantage. Kept for the most part in small frame or log houses, slaves knew that they were being humbled by their master, who owned a big mansion- or at least a bigger house- that often was located on the highest ground available.

106 John Michael Vlach

However, because their more modestly constructed slave quarters frequently were located some considerable distance from the planter's residence, slaves also had ample oppor- tunity to take control of many domestic concerns. Beyond their master's immediate scrutiny, beyond its boundary lines, slaves created their own landscape. This was a domain that generally escaped much notice, mainly because it was marked in ways that planters either considered insignificant or could not recognize.

Rhys Isaac has suggested that paths and trails into the countryside were the central elements of the slave landscape in Virginia. Some of these secret tracks led to clandestine meeting places in the woods, used sometimes for ritual purposes and at other times for festive parties at which fiddles were played and stolen pigs barbecued. Paths also led from the slave quarters across the fields to a particular corn house or to some other food store that was known to have a conveniently loose board in its gable. A shortcut through the woods or marshlands that surrounded the fields may have allowed slaves from different plantations to rendezvous more conveniently and to return to their assigned tasks with less chance of detection. On those plantations located near navigable streams and rivers, the waterways were yet another domain over which slaves exercised particular control by means of their boating skills.37 The whole ensemble of sites and pathways constituted, in Isaac's terms, "an alternative territorial system. " 38

This system, used wherever large groups of African Americans were gathered together, encouraged racial solidarity and provided slaves with a means to escape, at least temporarily, from their masters' control. Moreover, the informal qualities of this type of landscape, specific material indications, may also have reflected an ethnic choice. The loose, ad hoc scheme of preferred paths and gathering places was created incrementally by a series of improvisational responses to the given landscape rules of white masters. Because similar improvisational responses by black people to Anglo-American culture are known to have resulted in the creation of distinctive African American forms of speech, music, and dance, it is not too farfetched to suggest a parallel development in their responses to their assigned environments. 39

Some slaves are known to have countered the geometrically circumscribed order imposed by their masters' logic with what seemed like chaos. For example, the forty-one slaves at Mount Vernon who were assigned to the so-called Muddy Hole Farm, where they worked under the supervision of a black overseer, located their cabins randomly among the trees at the edge of the cleared fields. Those slaves living on the plantation's other "farms," where they were supervised by white overseers, had their cabins set in straight lines at regular intervals along the edge of a road.40 One observer of Georgia rice plantations similarly noted that when slaves were given the chance to build their own houses, "they wanted their cabins in some secluded place, down in the hollow, or amid the trees, with only a path to their abode. "41 In one of the slave villages at J. J. Smith's cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina- apparently located far away from his central processing area- although the cabins consisted of a row of boxy frame buildings, all were set at odd, irregular angles to one another.42

If the black system of place definition positively embraced the random and mean- dering givens of the natural world, their spaces would naturally strike white observers as sloppy and poorly maintained. British visitor Edward Kimber, in fact, went so far as to

The plantation landscape 107

·t that slave settlements located on the backlands of plantations (those fields beyond cert! yawners' immediate scrutiny) produced "Indolence and Nastiness."43 What white theII . . . I ( " ,, ) h I f

0 le were prone to cnt1c1ze as soppy or worse, as nasty was t e save pre erence

pe p landscape marked by few overt boundaries and fixed sites, an environment open to fora . · . d characterized by movement. Planters who wanted theu places clearly and certainly

::fined could only be annoyed at the way slaves acted. In an 1833 issue of the Southern Agriculturist, a South Carolina planter wrote: plantation might be .considered as a

iece of machinery; to operate successfully all of its parts should be umform and exact the impelling force regular and steady. "44 Clearly slave actions went against this

d ·ce countering its suggestions with behavior that seemed deliberately careless. In the a VI , li ht of what is known about life within various slave communities, the inhabitants'

were indeed deliberate, for they hoped thereby to carve out a domain of their own and thus improve, however slightly, the conditions of their captivity.

Within their settlements, slaves established strong family identities, created distinc- tive art forms, and developed meaningful religious rituals. 45 To the furthest degree ossible, they took charge of their lives. Among the many tangible signs of black initia-

and autonomy, the foremost spatial statements were the extensive vegetable gardens, sometimes as big as half an acre per person, in which slaves raised much of their own food . Such self-sufficiency was undergirded by other demonstrations of slave skill. Frances Anne Kemble, who in the late 1830s lived on a plantation in coastal Georgia with a slave population approaching five hundred, observed that slaves who had woodworking abilities built furniture and boats, which they sold for considerable sums in the nearby rown of Darien.46 On other plantations, slaves developed similar entrepreneurial enter- prises, selling chickens, ducks, and pigs that they raised, and even a horse or two. Others were able to improve their material conditions by offering their blacksmithing, tailoring, or coopering skills for hire.47 Frederick Law Olmsted noted that in one particularly large slave village, again in Georgia, the slaves daily secured their homes and possessions under lock and key, asserting their right to personal space and property.48 By acting as if they owned the quarters, these slaves had overturned the declared order of the plantation. Although everything they had could be taken away in a moment if the master so desired, few planters wanted to disturb the inner workings of large slave villages. As long as the slaves performed their assigned tasks with reasonable efficiency, planters concerned them- selves neither with the routines of the slave quarters nor the domestic claims being exercised there.

Once they were able to establish a level of proprietorship in the quarters, some slaves felt emboldened enough to exert a claim over their work spaces as well. Philip Fithian, a tutor in Westmoreland County, Virginia, during the late eighteenth century, found that the slaves at Nomini Hall regularly took over the stables as a place in which to hold their private entertainments. From his frequent complaints that his pupil, Henry Carter, spent

much time in the kitchen or in the various craft shops, we can infer that these build- ings, too, were regarded as black spaces and therefore off limits to white boys who hoped to become well schooled in the refined ways of gentlemen.49 The cook at the Merrick plan- tation in Louisiana not only ran the kitchen but determined who could have access to it. Caroline Merrick, at one time the plantation's Young Miss, remembered being driven out

108 John Michael Vlach

of the room by the cook's stern rebuke: "Go inter de house, Miss Carrie! Yer ain't no manner er use heah only ter git yer face red wid de heat. "50

After years of toil in the fields, slaves sometimes began to feel that the harvest was their achievement rather than their master's. He may have owned the crop, but they had created it. There is no more eloquent expression of a slave's identification with the soil he worked than the claim made by a former South Carolina slave named Morris. Early in the twentieth century, when he was about to be thrown off the plantation where he had lived all his life, he went to the landlord to state his case.

I was born on dis place before Freedom. My Mammy and Daddy worked de rice fields. Dey's buried here. De fust ting I remember are dose rice banks. I growed up in dem from dat high ... . De strength of dese arms and dese legs and of dis old back . . . is in your rice banks. It won't be long before de good Lord take de rest of pore old Morris away too. An' de rest of dis body want to be with de strength of de arms and de legs and de back dat is already buried in your rice banks. No .. . you ain't agoin' to run old Morris off dis place.51

The ironies of plantation slavery were many and profound, for although the plan- tation system was the very reason people of African descent were enslaved, it also provided them with an arena in which they could begin to piece back together their shattered lives. While ownership of a plantation clearly divided whites into distinct have and have-not classes, blacks generally found themselves drawn together in sufficient numbers to constitute coherent social groups. Comforted by the fellowship of the quarters, they were able to confront the injustice of their captivity in ways both subtle and obvious; among their various strategies of accommodation and resistance was the creation of their own version of the plantation. Recognizing that they could define a space for themselves, they took back the quarters, fields, gardens, barns, and outbuildings, claiming them as parts of a black landscape. Empowered by this territorial gesture, they were able to forge an even stronger sense of community, which few planters would ever recognize or acknowledge.

Even when slaves were most persistent in establishing their own landscapes, they attempted few bold gestures. Instead, they prudently relied on subtle adjustments to their dwellings, or they sought out spaces where their masters were unlikely to intrude. Their domains, consisting mainly of rough and ungainly dwellings together with their cluttered yards, reflected not a lack of ability but their material poverty. Denied the time and resources needed to design and build as they might have wanted, they simply appro- priated, as marginalized peoples often do, the environments to which they were assigned.

The slaves' agenda is the hidden dimension of a southern plantation. Looking over these places, one sees most clearly the pattern of well-known, European-derived fashions. The ordered surfaces of building facades and well-tended grounds, however, were under- pinned by a slave community whose labor provided the wealth with which planters created their impressive estates. The more than two-and-a-half-million slaves held on plantations in 1860 clearly dominated the southern countryside. It was, finally, their formidable demographic presence that transformed plantations into undeniably black places. This circumstance fostered such a self-reliant attitude among slaves that they were

The plantation landscape 109

. . ed to think about their captivity and its various physical contexts in ways that they most reassuring. Just as slaves usually did not consider it a crime to take extra

ns from the master's storehouse in order to satisfy their hunger, neither did they ranoider the buildings and in which they were forced to work to be solely his cons ty s2 Thus the kitchen might be claimed by the slave cook, the dining room by the proper ·

ervant the loom house by the weaver, the barn by the field hand. houses ' Acts of appropriation leave few physical marks, and therefore they must be ·ously recalled in order to be factored into our interpretation of surviving slave build-consc1

. 5

and spaces. Consequently, southern plantations can only be described accurately ::d analyzed fully if we remember the territorial prerogatives claimed and exercised repeatedly by slaves.

Notes 1 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia

(New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), p. 94.

2 Quoted in Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 33.

3 Quoted in Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, p. 220. 4 John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1982), pp. 75-76. 5 Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial

Ruling Class (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1940), pp. 158, 190, 286, 346. 6 Thomas Tileston Waterman, The Mansions of Virginia, 1706- 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1946), pp. 22- 25; Nicholas Luccketti, "Archaeological Excavations at Bacon's Castle, Surry County, Virginia," in William M. Kelso and Rachel Most, eds., Earth Patterns: Essays in Landscape Archaeology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990),

7 8

9

10 11 12

13

14

15

16

17

18

pp. 24, 27, 32, 35. W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Pelican, 1970), pp. 167, 170. Gregory A. Stiverson and Patrick H. Butler III, eds., "Virginia in 1732: The Travel .Journal of William Hugh Grove," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977): 26. Louis Morton, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century (Williamsburg, Va .: Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., 1941), p. 207, n. 4. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia, p. 330. Waterman, Mansions of Virginia, pp. 108- 9. Quoted in Anne Leighton, "For Use or for Delight": American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 269; see also Clement Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790- 1860 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 3-4. Samuel Gaillard Stoney, Plantations of the Carolina Low Country (Charleston: South Carolina An Association, 1955), pp. 59, 61-62, 119, 170- 75. Dell Upton, "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," Places 2, no. 2 (1985): 66. Fraser D. Neiman, "Domestic Architecture at the Clifts Plantation: The Social Context of Early Virginia Building," in Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 311. Roger G. Kennedy, Greek Revival America (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1989), p. 286. Eugene L. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South Selected from Periodicals of the Times (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 2: 292, 295. Quoted in Eaton, Growth of South Civilization, pp. 122- 23.

110 John Michael Vlach

19 John Burkhardt Rehder, "Sugar Plantation Settlements of Southern Louisiana: A Cultural Geography, " Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1971, pp. 84-86, 100-3, 109; Schwaab Travels in the Old South, 2: 495. '

20 Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), p. 339. John B. Boles, Southerners, 1619- 1869 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983): p. 75.

21 Harold D. Woodman, ed., Slavery and the Southern Economy: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 15.

22 See Isaac, Trans formation of Virginia, p. 21 , for a discussion of figures on mid-eighteenth-century plantation ownership.

23 Upton, "White and Black Landscapes," p. 66 . 24 Quoted in James C. Bonner, "Plantation Architecture of the Lower South on the Eve of the Civil

War," Journal of Southern History 11 (1945): 372. 25 Ibid., p. 374. 26 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations an Cotton and Slavery

in the American Slave States, ed. by Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 280.

27 The small plantation in northern Louisiana described by Olmsted can profitably be compared to the profile of a slaveowning farm in Yell County, Arkansas, detailed by John Solomon Otto in "Slaveholding General Farmers in a Cotton County," Agricultural History 55 (1981): 167- 78.

28 Norman R. Yetman, ed. , Life Under the "Peculiar Institution": Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), pp. 61, 144.

29 Olmsted , Cotton Kingdom, p. 249. See also John Michael Vlach, "Plantation Landscapes of the AntebeUum South," in Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr. , and Kyrn S. Rice, eds. , Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 41, Figure 43.

30 Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, p. 181. 31 Quoted in J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1953), p. 47. 32 Bonner, "Plantation Architecture of the Lower South," p. 375. 33 Bales, Black Southerners, p. 107. 34 George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood Press, 1972), 3 (pt. 4): 177, 15 (pt. 2): 364. 35 Yetman, Life Under the "Peculiar Institution, " p. 168. 36 See Vlach, "Plantation Landscapes of the Antebellum South," p. 28, Figure 30. 37 Dell Upton, "Imagining the Early Virginia Landscape," in Kelso and Most, Earth Patterns, p. 74. 38 Issac, Transformation of Virginia, pp. 52-53. 39 ]. L. Dillard, Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York: Vintage,

1972); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971); Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press Books, 1972).

40 See Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth- Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 105, 109.

41 Quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 534.

42 Charles Joyner, "The World of the Plantation Slaves," in Campbell and Rice, Before Freedom Came, p. 79, Figure 70.

43 Edward Kimber, "Observations in Several Voyages and Travels in America," William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., vol. 15 (1906-7): 148.

44 James 0. Breeden, ed., Advice among Masters: The Ideal of Slave Management in the Old South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 31.

45

46

47

48 49 so

51

52

The plantation landscape 111

See Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750- 1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: oxford University Press, 1977). Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39 [1863] , ed . by John A. Scott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. 63. Philip D. Morgan, "The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low Country," Journal of Southern History 49 (1983) : 399-420. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, p. 185. Upton, "White and Black Landscapes," p . 70. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 142 (emphasis in original). Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 42-43. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 602- 3.