Plantation life

Kingsley Plantation is a poignant site on a small river, surrounded by a vast salt marsh. Nearly empty of visitors on a gorgeous day, it was serenely beautiful. (Click to enlarge the photos, if you like.)

Two hundred years ago, it was a thriving sea island cotton plantation. The National Park Service provides an audio guide that is detailed and includes lots of first-person narratives (and it couldn't be stopped once it started, so you had to either abandon it or listen to every word). By the time it was over, I was knocked flat.

I learned that slavery isn't as all-of-a-piece as I tend to think. This Kingsley had a freed-slave wife who ran the plantation in his absence. And he believed in treating slaves reasonably well, keeping out of their private lives, and allowing some to earn their freedom. 

Sounds like a flaming liberal, yes? Not really. He firmly believed that paternalistic slavery was good. His motives were largely pragmatic: relatively content slaves produced more and caused fewer problems. Regardless of the treatment, slave life was, of course, grim. The cotton harvest began in July, when it's 100 degrees here, and lasted six months. Sea island cotton can't be ginned, so they had to pick the seeds out by hand. Slaves also had to do the planting of the cotton, the harvesting and processing of sugar cane, and all the gardening for the owner's large family, as well as specialty jobs like blacksmithing, carpentry, and whatever else it took to make a plantation work. When their work for the day was done, they could work on feeding their own families.Oh, and they built their own houses, as well as all the other building on the plantation.

It was the slaves' houses that did me in; today their skeletons stand like gravestones in a semi-circle, with an overseer's house in the middle so he could keep an eye on things. 

Today they're surrounded by trees and grass in a park-like setting, but at the time, there would have been no shade and only open, dusty ground. The houses are so tiny – two rooms and a sleeping loft, but the rooms weren't much bigger than a walk-in closet.

The audio stressed that, despite all this, the slaves made their families their chief priority and the thing that kept them going, and they never abandoned the dream of freedom. They built a society and culture that sustained them and eventually added richness to our national life.

It's easy to think of the U.S., the world's first democracy, as the good guys compared to those greedy Spanish conquistadors and other colonial powers. But when Kingsley Plantation flourished in the early 1800s, Florida was still a Spanish territory, and Spanish law allowed a level of citizenship for free blacks like Mrs. Kingsley. When the U.S. took over in 1821, with passionate white-only politics coming to the fore, that possibility vanished. Kingsley sent his family to Haiti, along with any of the freed slaves who wished to go. There, the dream of freedom and a good life still flourished for a while.