Background
The Plantation Way of Life
Introduction
A plantation is a large agricultural business which produces a cash crop for sale. It consists of all the things needed to grow, harvest, and sell that crop.
Plantation agriculture has its origins in India in the eighth century. Since that time plantation regions have developed in North Africa and various parts of the New World. In the continental United States, our plantation region comprises the old Confederacy plus some adjoining states. Plantations are an important aspect of American agricultural history, being distinct from Jeffersonian yeoman farms, manorial estates of the Hudson River and similar areas, and ranches and missions of the West. A plantation revolves around a cash crop grown on a large scale for profit. A successful plantation region requires: 1) fertile, easily tilled land available in large units; 2) a climate characterized by a long growing season and adequate rainfall, 3) abundant landless, and cheap rural labor; 4) bulk reduction and preliminary processing techniques; 5) abundant, cheap transportation; and 6) a network of factors and factoring houses to market cash crops to other regions of the world. The invention of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, Bore's process of refining sugar, and Norbert Rillieux's (a free man of color) vacuum pan evaporator made previously unprofitable cotton and sugar cane into important cash crops. Thus, all the elements needed for a plantation system were present in Louisiana during the antebellum period.
A cat inspired Eli Whitney
to invent the cotton gin! He witnessed a cat pulling bird feathers through
a cage and quickly associated that action with the possibility of mechanically
removing seeds from cotton by a combing mechanism. The cotton gin made
the growing of cotton profitable for Louisiana planters. (Source: Chowder,
Ken, "Eureka!" Smithsonian, September 2003, p. 93.)
Growing
sugar cane was a riskier business than growing cotton, but sugar cane
could yield a much greater profit. "It took a rich cotton planter
to make a poor sugar planter," said an old Louisiana adage. The
average antebellum Louisiana sugar plantation was valued at $200,000;
whereas, the biggest cotton plantations were valued at only half that
much.
The
production of sugar was industrial in nature and necessitated more machinery
than the growing of any other cash crop. Norbert Rillieux, a free black
man born in New Orleans and educated in Paris as an engineer and scientist,
developed the vacuum pan method of producing refined sugar from cane juice. Description of a Plantation
Located some distance from both commercial centers like New Orleans and smaller urban areas, it was necessary that plantations include all elements needed to support their people and produce their crop. Every plantation had a series of outbuildings or support structures that made it function. These ranged from kitchens and washhouses to slave quarters and privies. There would also be mule barns, a carriage house, stables, other barns, warehouses, and sometimes even a smoke house. After the Civil War, many larger plantations even had their own stores to sell supplies to the workers.
Closer to the fields would be buildings to house the equipment needed to process the harvested crop. A cotton plantation would certainly have a cotton gin to remove the seeds from the boll and often a cotton press to compress the crop into 400-pound bales. On a sugar plantation a large and intricately designed sugar house was on site to grind and process sugar cane into raw sugar. Plantation produce was either shipped directly by steamboat from the plantation dock or carted to interior ports where it would be loaded onto steamboats. Then it would be shipped to New Orleans and sold through factoring houses. Often factors (brokers) made more money from the crop than the planter.
Somewhere behind the main plantation house would be a row of quarters cabins and an overseer's house. Cabins occupied by enslaved peoples typically were roughly made and lacked any features of comfort. Generally they consisted of dirt floors, lacked proper doors and windows, and the furniture was limited to what the slave could make.
Joseph Holt Ingraham, a Northern trader traveling in Louisiana in the 1830s, described one Mississippi River plantation as looking like a village:
On my left, a few hundred yards from the house, and adjoining the pasture stood the stables and other plantation appurtenances, constituting a village in themselves—for planters always have a separate building for everything. To the right stood the humble yet picturesque village or "quarter" of the slaves, embowered in trees, beyond which, farther toward the interior of the plantation, arose the lofty walls and turreted chimneys of the sugar-house, which, combined with the bell-tower, presented the appearance of a country village with its church- tower and the walls of some public edifice, lifting themselves above the trees.Ingraham was describing nothing new, and what was true of the plantation he visited upriver from New Orleans was true of plantations throughout the state.Source: Joseph Holt Ingraham, Travels in the Southwest by a Yankee (2 vols); 1835; rpt. Anne Arbor. Mich., 1966),Il, 242; quoted in Poesche, Jessie and Bacot, Barbara SoRelle, editors. Louisiana Buildings 1720-1940: The Historic American Buildings Survey.
Typical plantations had anywhere from 9 or 10 to 25 slaves. But by the 1850's, Louisiana was known for its high percentage of large slaveholdings (more than 50 slaves). In 1860, 48% of slaves in the state were on large plantations. Mainly, the slaves were field hands who planted and picked the cotton or cut the sugar cane. A few might be skilled in blacksmithing or other manual arts. The largest slave holding in Louisiana was just under a thousand -- at Houmas House in Ascension Parish. Wealthier planters often owned several plantations but had a permanent residence at only one. Ancillary properties such as this were usually administered by a paid overseer. Generally speaking, slaves were worse off materially in the cases of absentee ownership.
Some free African Americans numbered among Louisiana's prosperous farmers and planters. Three of every ten free African American estate owners in the state of Louisiana were women. The free black Metoyer family of the Natchitoches area acquired large landholdings and slaves before the Civil War. In 1830 they owned a greater number of slaves than any other free black family in the country. The Metoyer family members were descendants of Marie Thérèse (African name of Coin , who put together a vast estate with her fourteen children from the small land acreage left to her in 1778 by Pierre Metoyer, her white common-law husband.
The Plantation House
Although always consisting of various outbuildings and support structures, not every plantation had a great and elegant mansion house. Although a smattering of the grand mansions with imposing and impressive columns were built by the wealthiest sugar and cotton kings, this type of house is basically a stereotype promoted by Hollywood. The typical plantation house was a one- or one-and-one-half story cottage with a columned gallery.
Southern
courting customs differed from those in Northern states. Chaperones
were always near in Southern plantation houses. Courting couples were
often left alone in Northern parlors, but in Southern parlors they
were never left alone. The mother or some other member of the family
was in the room. Sometimes a female slave would be seated on a rug
at the door when no family member was in the room. [Clinton, Catherine,
The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South, p.
63] The Greek Revival style was slow to develop, but once established, spread rapidly. Americans of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s loved to adapt the columns and porticoes of ancient Greek temples for a wide variety of buildings ranging from courthouses to outhouses. The plantation system bloomed in Louisiana at a time when the Greek Revival was the most popular national architectural style. Thus, it became the chosen style for both large and small plantation houses. Carpenters' guides and pattern books helped spread the style. Greek Revival architecture became so popular in the last three decades before the Civil War that it is sometimes referred to as the National Style. However, Louisiana developed its own interpretation of the style, known as the peripteral mode. These houses were encircled by colossal columns. An example is Oak Alley in St. James Parish. It was the Greek Revival that gave the South its long-lasting stereotype of the white-pillared mansion.
There
were strict social prohibitions against antebellum women sunning themselves.
Refined Southern ladies did not want to overexpose themselves to the
sun; some did not want any exposure at all. Southerners viewed beauty
measured on several standards—one of the most important was that
of facial pallor. Freckles were seen as natural blemishes; whereas,
tanned skin became viewed as an unnatural and unforgivable departure
for the refined Southern woman. Unfavorable racial connotations were
associated with darker skin as well as the stigma of a non-pampered
lifestyle and lack of status in the social structure. Thomas Jefferson
in a 1786 letter to his daughter Maria said, "Remember too as
a constant charge not to go out without your bonnet because it will
make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much."
[Clinton, Catherine, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in
the Old South, p. 63]