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Activities: Context Activities The Plantation: Cultivating a Myth  Back to Context Activities
The ideal of gracious plantation life continues to dominate American images of the antebellum South: Hollywood movies and nostalgic novels have portrayed the Old South as a land of enormous wealth and leisure, filled with beautiful white-columned mansions, gallant gentlemen, and coquettish belles in hoop skirts. In reality, life on antebellum plantations was characterized by hard work. Time-consuming household chores and backbreaking labor in the fields structured the daily lives of the slaves, and even some of the white owners, who inhabited these estates. Few plantations lived up to the standards of size and wealth generally associated with plantation mythology; in fact, in 1860 there were only about 2,300 truly large-scale plantations in operation. The planter group (usually defined as those who owned at least twenty slaves) made up just 4 percent of the adult white male population of the South. Much more common were the small farms on which white landowners lived in modest cabins and owned few or no slaves. Despite the fact that large plantations were far from representative of the general southern experience, the ideal of the plantation came to dominate southern culture, setting the tone of economic and social life and functioning as a standard to which many white men aspired. The architecture of the great plantations reinforced their status as icons of wealth, sophistication, and grandeur. Highly formalized in their layout, large plantations usually centered around the "big house," an imposing, often neoclassical structure designed as an expression of the good taste and prosperity of the owner. Wide terraces and long, tree-lined avenues controlled visitors' access to the plantation house, while extensive stretches of cultivated fields and fenced land demonstrated the planter's dominance over nature and society. Because few men even within the planter class could afford such splendor, landowners sometimes opted to dress up their modest homes with false fronts in order to emulate the plantation ideal. Many plain log cabins lay behind facades of Greek revival porches and neoclassical pediments. Today, little remains of the landscape of antebellum plantation life besides the large mansions (many of which are still standing), but in the nineteenth century much of the work that sustained the plantation economy went on in smaller structures, or outbuildings, scattered over the estates. Detached kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, and water towers were important sites of domestic labor. Barns and mills were necessary in the production of the plantation's staple crop, whether it was tobacco, cotton, rice, or sugar. Slave quarters housed the workers whose forced labor was central to the entire system. While some planters tried to hide the reality of the enslaved labor that created their prosperity--Thomas Jefferson, for example, constructed underground passageways so that visitors to Monticello would not see slaves at work--others placed slave quarters in prominent locations to function as a display of their own wealth and power. The long avenue leading to the Hermitage, Henry McAlpin's Georgia plantation, was lined with more than seventy slave houses, apparently to impress visitors with a view of the inventory of his labor force. Usually small, simple, boxlike structures, slave quarters stood in stark contrast to the magnificent "big houses" they supported. Interestingly, some architectural historians have argued that slave houses may have held a different aesthetic significance for the slaves who lived in them than their masters may have envisioned. Rather than seeing their homes as inferior to and dependent upon the "big house," slaves may have seen in their small, square dwellings a likeness to traditional African architecture. Questions
[4327] Anonymous, Slave Quarters on St. Georges Island, Florida (n.d.), courtesy of the New York Historical Society. Slaves photographed in front of cabins on the Gulf Coast. Slave quarters throughout the U.S. were similar in size and shape, but these cabins were built of "tabby," an aggregate of shells, lime, and sand more common to the Caribbean region. [4735] Anonymous, Gloucester, Near Natchez, MS (n.d.), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-58888]. Built in 1803, this neoclassical plantation house dates from the pioneering period of white settlement in Mississippi. The columns and hanging moss fit common images of plantations. [5096] William F. Warnecke, Margaret Mitchell (1938), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-109613]. Gone With the Wind, Mitchell's best-selling 1936 novel of the Civil War South, won the Pulitzer Prize and became an immensely popular movie in 1939. Romanticizing wealthy slave owners and slavery while depicting blacks in racial stereotypes, it appealed to conventional white opinion. [6834] Green Hill Plantation and Quarters (c. 1933-60), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey [HABS, VA,16-LONI.V,1-1]. Early-nineteenth-century plantation architecture in Campbell County, Virginia. This view of Green Hill provides an alternative to the romanticized image of the Old South. [6835] Berry Hill Plantation [Main House] (after 1933), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey [HABS, VA, 42-BOSTS.V, 1-4]. Photograph of a Classic Revival mansion with octa-style Doric portico in Halifax County, Virginia, designed between 1835 and 1840. The richest planters used imposing architecture to demonstrate their wealth and sophistication. |
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