19th Century Ante-bellum Life
From WolfWikis
For the last 60 years or more, scholars in the humanities have focused widely on the stories and structures of various communities in the Antebellum South. The efforts of the Federal Writers’ Project and works such as The Negro in Virginia (1940) by the Virginia Writers’ Project reflected an expansion in how scholars viewed and studied the past. Community and social histories began to fill in gaps in our understanding of how people lived and worked in all sorts of authentic contexts. The study of plantation life and culture was deeply influenced by this expanding academic and scholarly focus (see Gutman, 1977). The 1972 publication of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South by John Blassingame popularized the academic study of slave communities. Along with popular fictionalized works such as Alex Haley’s Roots, the new scholarship on the slave community in the American South began expand the public consciousness and understanding that there was more to the story of the Antebellum South than paternalistic, narrow, and simplistic Gone With the Wind stories. As part of a larger emerging genre of community studies, Blassingame and his colleagues shed light on the lesser known stories of the past and helped to create a more rigorous structure for analyzing the experiences of a wide range of people in the context of their community experiences.
What we know of the Stagville community is primarily informed by research on the patriarchs of the Bennehan and Cameron families of North Carolina in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Jean Anderson’s 1993 book Piedmont Plantation: The Bennehan-Cameron Family and Lands in North Carolina details the public and private lives of the family patriarchs including Richard Bennehan and Duncan Cameron, both of whom settled separately in western North Carolina in the late 17th century. Bennehan came to North Carolina from Virginia in the 1770s as a store owner and in short order developed extensive agricultural land holdings. Duncan Cameron also came to North Carolina from Virginia, but 20 years later in the 1790s. Cameron settled in North Carolina as a lawyer, but also became a planter and in 1803 married Richard Bennehan’s daughter Rebecca. The Bennehan and Cameron family plantation ventures gradually merged into one of largest plantations in North Carolina with accumulated land holdings of over 30,000 acres and more than 1,000 people living and working on the land. Two male offspring, Thomas Bennehan (son of Richard Bennehan) and Paul Cameron (son of Duncan Cameron and Rebecca Bennehan Cameron) also figure prominently in Anderson’s book. What is not evident in the book are the stories of African American slaves, women, and children.
Fortunately the papers of plantation farmers such as the Bennehan’s and Cameron’s are rich with primary source materials which can help use better understand the stories of the people who have so often been marginalized in the study of history. In his introduction to Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations From the Revolution Through the Civil War, Kenneth Stampp (1999) described the depth which collections such as the Cameron Family Papers reveal stories of the lives of all those on the plantation.
Plantation records reveal nearly every aspect of plantation life. Not only business operations and day-to-day labor routines, but family affairs, the roles of women, racial attitudes, relations between masters and slaves, social and cultural life, the values shared by members of the planter class, and the tensions and anxieties that were inseparable from a slave society are all revealed with a fullness and candor unmatched by any of the other available sources. Moreover, these records are immensely valuable for studies of black slavery. Needless to say, since they were compiled by members of the white master class, they provide little direct evidence of the inner feelings and private lives of the slave population…Plantation records detail a wide range of life activities including day-to-day routines; attitudes toward women, children and blacks; management and treatment of slaves; the role of women in plantation life; art and artistic activities of all sorts; and the education of children.
In some rare cases, we have sources which emerged directly from African American slaves, women and children. Three African American slaves at the Stagville Plantation gave brief interviews to Federal Writers Project workers in the 1930s. The stories of Abner Jordan, Doc Edwards, Cy Hart available online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html. Their stories reveal a tentative image of life for African Americans before and after the Civil War on the Stagville plantation. Although the interviews are brief and consist of decades old recollections of childhood experiences, they can be used to create a context for a deeper and inferential study of these three men’s lives. Many slaves are mentioned by name in the Cameron family papers. Specifically, Jones bares mentioning, because he tried to escape from a plantation in Alabama. He was eventually captured by two men and their flock of dogs.
The Cameron family papers also include personal correspondence from many of the women in the Bennenhan and Cameron families. These materials provide insight into the thoughts, beliefs, and hopes of women whose voices are only otherwise heard only through the pen of their husbands and fathers.
These plantation records too reveal the daily business operations and labor routines of the Cameron-Bennehan families. Agriculture was the main way of life for men in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Neither Duncan Cameron, Paul Cameron, nor Richard Bennehan had any planting experience. They became planters only because in their time, that was the way men of wealth lived (see Anderson, 1985). Techniques such as fertilization, crop rotation, and prevention of erosion had not been in use for very long. Thus, when lands had become completely settled, planters were forced to migrate to new, undeveloped lands. This would explain Paul's letters to his father from a plantation in Alabama.
From his letters, it is evident that Paul relied heavily on his overseer to run his day-to-day business. Anderson (1985) described the role of the overseers by saying, "For the routines of farming, they relied on their overseers, who in turn, as sons of farmers, relied on the practices of their fathers." Paul referred to the crop many times as the "overseer's crop." He relied on the overseer to give him predictions of how much the crop would yield. Thomas Ruffin (Paul's father-in-law) helped Paul with his knowledge of the business. Paul was fortunate enough that Thomas was in the "vanguard" or experimental and scientific farming in North Carolina, which allowed him to utilize the best available crop knowledge (Lefler & Newsome, 1973).
Edmond Ruffin, Thomas' cousin, published The Farmer's Register, a journal that provided new ideas for the better management of farms, slaves, and overseers. In the Cameron Family Papers, Paul refers to the "Register" throughout his letters to his father. He talks immensely about the importance of the words in the "Register." Paul Cameron claims that he "reads every word in it." Anderson (1985) described the impact the journal had on the agricultural economy in the south.
"It had far-reaching impact on Southern farmers. [Ruffin] travelled widely throughout the South giving advice, gathering information, and cross-fertilizing the best thinking on agricultural subjects. The "Register" contained articles with suggestions that both Thomas Ruffin and Paul Cameron put into practice. They recommended hillside ditching and deep plowing, and the use of lime, clover, and plaster of Paris as fertilizer, all practices that Paul adopted on his plantations"
This wiki helps establish a context for historical inquiry using a digital collection of letters from the Cameron Family Papers. The full collection is house at the University of North Carolina Wilson Library Manuscript Department - http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/c/Cameron_Family.html From this full collection, an initial set of letters were selected and digitized that represented information about life on the various plantations in the larger Cameron Family holdings. These letters were written from 1845-1846 by individuals who were managing the plantations. The digital collection is online at http://plantationletters.com/
More about the Context of letters written by Paul Cameron