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May 20, 2024

The Southern Plantation System

Fictional depictions of Southern plantations often present romanticized visions of genteel country life, but for the people enslaved on plantations the reality was that of a forced labor camp. At the same time the plantation was also their home. And although they had no choice in where or how they lived, enslaved people did work to make their residences home, for instance by sweeping their yards, keeping items like books and ceramics, and even hiding personal objects in the walls or under the floor where they couldn’t be found by enslavers.

 

Joining me in this episode to help us understand the importance of homemaking by enslaved plantation workers is historian Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas, and author of This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations.

 

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Welcome, Honey, to Your Old Plantation Home,” composed by Albert Gumble with lyrics by Jack Yellen, and performed by the Peerless Quartet in New York on June 19, 1916; the audio is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox Project. The episode image is “Picking cotton on a Georgia plantation, 1858;” the photograph is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress.

 

Additional sources:

 



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Transcript

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

At the 12th Academy Award Ceremony in February, 1940, one film dominated both the nominations and awards, winning a then record eight Oscars, including for Best Picture. That film was David O. Selznick's "Gone With the Wind," adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell. Both the book and the film present a romanticized vision of the antebellum or pre Civil War South, drawing on the moonlight and magnolias myth, as did other literature and cinema. They envisioned southern plantations as the homes of aristocratic and genteel landowners, benevolent masters of the region. To the extent that slavery is acknowledged at all, enslaved people are seen as loyal servants, as in the character of Mammy, a maternal figure played by Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to win an Oscar, for her portrayal of the house slave who seemingly loves the family she serves. McDaniel, it's important to note, could not even attend the premiere of "Gone With the Wind" in Atlanta, because the theater, nearly 75 years after the end of the Civil War, still only permitted white people to attend. Margaret Mitchell, a descendant of plantation owners and Confederate Civil War veterans, was influenced by the writing of preacher and novelist, Thomas Dixon, Jr, author of a trilogy of Reconstruction Era novels, including, "The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan," in 1905, which was adapted into the film, "Birth of a Nation," credited with spurring the 20th century rebirth of the KKK. Dixon was one of the major disseminators of the lost cause mythology, which, beginning just after the end of the Civil War, argued that the Confederacy's cause was noble, and just, and that the Civil War was fought not over slavery, but in defense of states rights and the agrarian economy of the South, with the war being whipped up by troublemaking, abolitionists. In this telling, enslaved people, were happy to serve on plantations. As former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis wrote in 1880, "Their servile instinct rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches. Their strong local and personal attachment secured faithful services to those to whom their services or labor was due. Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other." Davis was right that enslaved people toiled to create unmeasured riches, but he glossed over the fact that the labor was forced, and that the riches went entirely to the enslavers. The reality of plantation life was far from the idyllic scene that Mitchell, Dixon, and Davis described. The southern plantation system dated back to 1606, when King James I formed the Virginia Company of London, to establish the colonies in North America. Settling the land, which of course was already home to Indigenous people, was a daunting task. And to sweeten the pot, the Virginia Company offered each adult man who took them up on it, 50 acres of land. As some of those farms were combined into larger estates, they began to focus on cash crops, especially tobacco and cotton. Growing crops on large tracts of land, especially in the days before heavy farm machinery, required a lot of labor. A little over a decade after the founding of the Virginia Company, Virginia joined the transatlantic slave trade, and over time, the planters stopped employing indentured servants at all, relying increasingly on enslaved labor. A plantation, which may be 500 to 1000 acres or larger, might employ the forced labor of just 20 to 30 enslaved people. Larger plantations were rare. Around a third of white families in the states that joined the Confederacy, enslaved people as of 1860. Less than 1% of the southern families enslaved over 100 people. One of the largest, Brookgreen Plantation in Georgetown County, South Carolina, enslaved over 1000 people to grow and harvest rice. These plantations were both forced labor camps, and homes for the enslaved people who lived there. Slave quarters differed depending on the size and location of the plantation. But typically, the slave quarters for those who worked in the fields featured very basic construction, which could be a small one room wooden hut with a thatched roof, built to house up to 10 people, or a larger dormitory style building, again made from wood with no insulation against the elements. Although some were raised off the ground, most of these buildings had dirt floors. Although they had no choice in where or how they lived, enslaved people did work to make their residences home by sweeping their yard, keeping items like books and ceramics, and even hiding personal objects in the walls or under the floor, where they couldn't be found by their enslavers. As of 2022, at least 375 plantations in over 19 states are open for public tours. Some plantation sites like McLeod Plantation in South Carolina, and Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, feature both the history of slavery on the plantations and information about the lives of the enslaved. At other plantations though, a separate tour with an extra admission fee is available to visitors who want to learn about slavery. According to a three year National Science Foundation funded study from 2014 to 2017, the tours on a shocking 50% of museum plantations did not mention slavery at all! In 2020, actors Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively publicly apologized for holding their 2012 wedding ceremony at the Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, a plantation that includes nine extant brick cabins that were home to enslaved workers on what is now called Slave Street. Following George Floyd's murder by a white Minneapolis police officer, Reynolds and Lively donated $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Reynolds said in an interview, "What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after, was a place built on devastating tragedy." Boone Hall still hosts weddings, advertising it's 280 year old Avenue of the Oaks, which parallels Slave Street, blocking it from view, as one of the most breathtaking wonders of nature anywhere in the world, and encouraging prospective couples to consider their most popular venue, the Cotton Dock. Joining me now to help us understand the homemaking of enslaved people, is historian Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas, and author of, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations."

Hi, Whitney, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  11:32  
Pleasure to be here. 

Kelly  11:32  
I want to start by asking how you got started on this project that your your book is, and I believe it had its basis in your dissertation, but that you changed it some moving into the book. So could you talk about how you got started on this? 

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  11:49  
Absolutely. I wrote a dissertation that was a broad cultural history of the role of home in the Black freedom struggle across the 19th century. And after I defended and took a little breather from the dissertation, I thought back to an experience that I had a few years before, where I spent a summer in the field researching the decorative arts of the antebellum south. And during that I spent four weeks rummaging through antebellum plantation mansions and the basements and in the attics looking for the material culture of the old South. And while doing that, we also were going on tours of plantations in Natchez, Mississippi, and in St. Francisville, Louisiana. And I had just finished my first year of graduate school at Rice University, having read a lot about the American South, especially the institution of slavery. And so while I was in these private homes, and in these at these public sites, I witnessed a erasure or silencing of slavery. And that was not a unique thing. Many people have written about that institute that, the fact that that was the case. But I did also recognize that there was a racialization of home happening on historic plantation sites where when enslaved people were discussed, they were only discussed as laborers, and their spaces were only discussed as workspaces, whereas home was something that was kind of reserved for the white families. And I wanted to better understand that and the kind of place based in nature of homemaking. And so after doing this broad dissertation, I realized I wanted to go really granular and understand at the ground level, how enslaved people created a sense of home within the confines of the institution of slavery, the oppressions of slavery, the violences of slavery, but yet the persistent attempts to create spaces of meaning nonetheless. And so that's when I would said, "Okay, I gotta go to places and I have to dig into, sometimes literally, because I got to participate in some archeological digs, and sometimes dig into the material ways that enslaved people are creating home across the antebellum south." So I chose five plantation sites, each of which has four meats, kind of four categories or four elements. They are open to the public, so I could physically go there and be in the presence of this site. There are extant buildings that I could see, there are archeological digs or records that I can get into the material culture of these places. And lastly, there are archival records that can support the material culture research. And after going to all of these places, so many road trips, so many snacks along the way, I then kind of stepped back and assessed what the overarching aspirations of home were that I found at these five plantation sites and then structured the book in that way. So each site gets its own chapter, looking at the different ways that enslaved people are creating the sense of home and particular aspirations of home on those sites. 

Kelly  15:17  
So what does it mean then to create a sense of home in a place that you did not choose to be, you do not choose to stay, you did not have any choice in even which building or what room in a building maybe you are sleeping in? What does it mean to create that sense of home?

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  15:35  
So I am building on the work of Black feminist scholars like bell hooks, who many years ago wrote an excellent essay about homeplace. And she was thinking about how home could be a site of resistance, and a site of meaning because place as distinguished from space, the way that geographers think about it, place is something, yes, it's a physical space, but it is, has meaning that humans make out of it. So space can be almost anything but place is something that we give meaning to. And I was really struck by this idea that people within many different situations can still attempt to create a sense of meaning in a space. And so with the work of bell hooks, and others, who are pushing us to think about the institution of slavery, not only as a struggle for survival, but also a struggle for meaning, and Vincent Brown wrote really beautifully about this back in 2019, and the idea that one can be seeking something more than just survival, in even things such as pleasure. Jessica Marie Johnson, or Stephanie Camp's work, pushing us to go beyond just assuming that people were stagnant or seeking, were only seeking to survive. So that kind of really motivated me to, to open my eyes to the other types of meaning making that enslaved people could be pursuing. And I found that in the archival and the material culture record through these various homemaking practices.

Kelly  17:13  
So I love your appendix on how you do material culture research. And I want to talk some about that. I think one thing that you said in there that really struck me is that part of this doing this kind of research involves conjecture, involves imagination. And I think that may be hard for some people who have a certain vision of what maybe history is and what historians do to understand. So I wonder if you could talk through a little bit what what you're doing in material culture research, why it's so important to do in a study like this, and the book, the range of what we can and can't know, but also the limitations then of what what we can and can't know.

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  17:55  
Material culture is a source based theory and a methodology. So in the appendix, I break down each of those, the the what, the why, and the how, and especially in terms of the source space, it allows us access to communities of the past who have not, often because of repressive institutions, been able to leave behind an extensive written record. And that opens up for us the possibility of getting to know the ideas and beliefs and relationships that people were forming, that are not documented in for instance, in enslavers' plantation records. Doing that requires that we take seriously that objects can reflect and reveal much about the past, that they are not static objects, but in fact, have meaning over time and across often many people who utilized, owned or discarded those objects. And then also that there are so many contexts within which we have to understand the object, yes, the individual who was wielding it, but also the community with which that person was a part of the society, the larger society that person was participating in. And so as we pursue a material culture methodology, we have to take seriously the object as a thing and understand its materiality. And then from there, we can open up into these other contexts. So often material culture scholars love to have the thing itself, either to touch or right in front of us if we can't touch it if it's at a museum. But sometimes we don't have that and especially for the case of the material culture of enslaved people, archeology is a core part of this work and I did not have access to the physical remnants that had been dug up but instead, they are actually in a written record in these archaeological and survey reports that I have. So you're doing work analyzing a textual record, in order to understand the material. And along with that other kinds of textual records are really important to be used as corroborating evidence for what you are finding, and what you're hypothesizing about your material objects. And I do take seriously and I want to, I want historians to feel okay with hypothesizing, because that's not the end of the methodology. That is really in some ways, a kind of starting point, it opens up for us the possibilities of exploring different perspectives, looking at other kinds of sources as this corroborating evidence, and perhaps telling new stories, instead of replicating the same kinds of narratives again, and again, which is something that I really am, I was I was hoping to do in this book, because the plantation south has some very deep rooted mythology. And no matter how much work historians do, it seems like the "moonlight and magnolia" myth is, it continues to persist. And historians have over the past two decades or so kind of swung the pendulum so far to the other side to argue that plantations were merely or only labor camps, and I do not discount the violence, and the trauma and oppression that are at the core of what a plantation was. I do believe that these are, in fact, labor camps. But what I found is that they could be something more than that. So that does not mean that these are, quote, happy slaves in happy homes, like the lost cause myth told us for so long, nor does it mean that they were only labor camps. There is an ability to hold two things at once, to strive for home and meaning within these confines of the institution of slavery. And that is what I think material culture allowed me to be able to show is that there are these multiple, these multiple truths within the plantation. 

Kelly  22:29  
Could you walk us through one of the material objects that you look at in the book to try to understand, you know, sort of how we take this methodology and make meaning from it? So perhaps the cowrie shell that is found on one of the plantations and what what we can know about that how you go about doing that research and figuring out what that might mean for the people who owned this item who left this item.

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  22:57  
So the cowrie shell is one of several objects that have been found at Stagville plantation in Durham, North Carolina. And I use these objects to think about the context in which the objects were left behind in which they were used, and what that can reveal to us about how enslaved people were relating to this space as a home. So one object is a walking stick that was left in the walls of an enslaver's house in the 1790s. There's also two divining rods that were found nailed inside the wall, a slave cabin on the plantation in the 1850s. But in between those two, there is a cowrie shell that archaeologists believe was deposited in a slave cabin, that is immediately adjacent to the enslaver's mansion, sometime between the let's say, the 1830s to 1840s. And this is a time when the plantation had grown substantially from its origins in the late 18th century. It wasn't to the point where it would be in the 1850s, where there was perhaps 900, enslaved people across four counties on a single plantation. That, of course, also was comprised of many different farms. But there were hundreds of enslaved people by the 1830s and 40s that had already been making this place home and that had been forced to live there for generations. This particular slave cabin is important in terms of the context of that time period. It is a large plantation. There had been several intra migrations forced migrations within the plantation. So one of the enslavers had forced families to move from quarter to quarter. And this kind of foreshadows a an interstate migration forced migration that he requires of about 200 enslaved people later in the 1840s and 50s, from North Carolina to the deep south of Mississippi and Alabama. So there's this time context of when the cowrie shell was deposited. Then there's also the place context. This is in a slave cabin that is immediately adjacent to the enslaver's house. It can be seen by the enslaver, it can be intruded upon by the enslaver at any time. So within these different contexts, I then looked at what the object might tell us. And I had to go into, I had to look into shell descriptions, I did a lot in terms of a lot of reading into African diasporic shells, and what those shells in West Africa versus the Caribbean and Latin America might have been used for. And the fact that we know that this shell is not native to North Carolina, at some point, it made its way from Africa, to North Carolina. And we don't know when that happened, but it happened at some point. And it would have been a reminder or some kind of physical and a physical reminder of Africa. But more than that, it could have been and I say could vary intentionally here. But we know that shells among other kinds of objects were used as amulets, or a kind of protective object. And keeping in mind the context of the intra plantation migrations, of the constant surveillance and intrusion upon this space, it's possible that the object could have been used as a source of protection for the individuals living in this house. That's not to say that it was in fact protection. But it could have been something that that enslaved people living in this plant and on this plantation in this specific cabin looked to to build a sense of, however small of an iota of security within this surveillance system that they were living in.

So this kind of small object, I think, is indicative of something you talk about, the portable home making portable homes, that yes, that there are things that as you're talking about these forced migrations that happens sometimes very long distances, home needs to be something you can pick up and take with you. Could you talk a little bit about that, and what you're able to find in this research that you've done about home being something that at a moment's notice, you might need to move with you?

Yes, so that is building on the work of of archaeologists who have noted that enslaved people spent the small amount of cash that they might have they had on things that they could take with them. So rather than investing in architectural improvements, they purchased small pieces of clothing, or they purchased a small amount of ceramics, something that they could put inside a bag, or just put inside a cloth and put over their shoulder if they needed to be able to move quickly. And you're right, that there are things that people always had to leave behind. And there is something in terms of, we seek to create a sense of rootedness as a way of making home. But for enslaved people, the reality of life was one of uprooting, especially as we move into the 1830s and 40s, 1 million, nearly 1 million enslaved people are forcibly migrated from the Upper South to the Deep South. And so that reality and the possibility of uprooting is always there. And so I do think that there's something about the ability to take meaningful objects with you. And through those objects, create and maintain a sense of home. And I think, too, that this really, this gets to the the correlation in some ways between home and family. I'm thinking of Tiya Miles' work in her incredible book about Ashley's Sack and how that itself is a portable object that was a material example of enslaved women's family making and love across the expanse of time. Because it was so portable, it could easily be moved with individuals and then passed down through families. So I do think that the portable nature of certain objects could be a way for enslaved people to try to maintain a sense of stability within a system of uprooting and forced migration.

Kelly  29:58  
And of course, then one of the things that they're not able to take with them is the remains of ancestors. And so you talk about grave sites and the importance of grave sites to home and defining home where home is, what home is, that may be something that is hard to grasp for some people because, you know, I know for me, like the all of my ancestors are in a cemetery that's far away, not something that would be nearby. But that's, of course, very different on a plantation. So could you expand on that a little bit? What what does it mean to have grave sites so close to home? What does it mean then when they're forced to move away from those and, and the huge loss we have that so many of these grave sites have been just erased?

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  30:50  
Whitney Battle-Baptiste is an archaeologist who wrote this great book called "Black Feminist Archaeology." She has this concept of the captive domestic sphere. And while that may sound confining, in many ways, what she did is opened up how we imagine home. So it is far more than just an individual cabin, or a room that someone may sleep in. It is the yard outside of it, it is the fields, and then we can even think about burial grounds as a part of a larger home place that enslaved people attempted to make. And Grey Gundaker who is is another archaeologist, again, you can see how important archaeology here is here. She looks at the ways that enslaved people related to burial grounds and ancestors' physical bodies, so many having been for so long removed from their ancestors in Africa, gave a special meaning to the ancestors' remains that they could be near in North America or in the Americas more generally. And the idea of being then separated from again, a kind of multiple separation from ancestors, was a kind of crushing blow, perhaps to the way that enslaved people were relating to the space around them. When then they get to a new place, it only makes sense that burial grounds would be a central part of creating connection and relationship to a space, even, even if it's a space that you are forced to live within, you are still attempting to root yourself and your people in this place to feel that stability, to feel a sense of control over your space. And enslaved people did, on several plantations, we don't know this can't be a universal statement, but did have control some level of control over especially on medium to large plantations, did have some level of control over their burial grounds. Sometimes they were told where they could be they were often on the very edges of a plantation, and had to be an area that was not going to be in any way profitable for the enslaver. But in that they could arrange the way that they wished. Being far from the enslaver's surveillance, they could mourn in ways that they wished. And so the creation and maintenance of burial grounds could be a way of understanding homemaking, that is literally rooting your people in a place and thus trying to, on a metaphorical level root yourself, even within this context of forced migration and uprootedness. 

Kelly  33:52  
And without the ability, whether or not they wanted to to create large monuments and tombstones and stuff, a lot of these places have been lost, right? And can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  34:05  
 Many plantations have become roads or suburban developments, or I mean, the development has often has paved over so much of the history of the plantation south which means so much of the history of African Americans, and especially on plantations, we see the important quote unquote buildings and spaces being preserved by often white- led historical associations and museums. So the plantation mansion, the family, the white family's cemetery, which has left other areas of the plantation to be sold off, to be forgotten, and to not being maintained over time. So we do see that many plantation cemeteries, for enslaved people are no longer we don't even know where they are on the plantation because this often is not something that enslavers are writing about. So the documentation is rare. The physical evidence, unless we have ground penetrating radar being performed by archaeologists, is rare. We do need to listen more to the oral histories of descendants. Because while these sites have been lost, we also know that for generations after emancipation, formerly enslaved people would return or attempt to return to the sites where their ancestors were buried. That's difficult when you don't own the land, and when the land might be owned by the people who used to enslave you. And so there are all of these difficulties to make it where it's to the point where we have very few documented, preserved African American cemeteries. But there is a movement by descendants, by archaeologists, landscape historians, historians more generally, to document and preserve these. So I, in Alabama, for instance, which is the chapter where I investigate burial grounds as a kind of homemaking, in Alabama alone, we see many different areas of the state where people are kind of taking up and making very public when a major corporation, for instance, is trying to build a store where we know, based on descendants' voices, that their people have been buried. So the work of people to speak up, to be active in combating the erasure of these places. I hope that my work can also speak to what they're doing, that the kind of contemporary movement is one of this centuries long tradition of burial grounds as homemaking and as claiming a space as one's own.

Kelly  37:19  
You mentioned that in selecting the plantations you were looking at, it was important that they were open to the public, so you were able to go and see them. Could you talk some about, you work at university, you're an academic historian, but you've done a lot with public history too. And I wonder if you could talk about the relationship between public history and academic history? These are not and should not be completely separate things, although often they are viewed that way. So what you've been able to do in that space, what you would like to see happen?

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  37:51  
Thank you for this question. I think this is so important. And it's something that academic historians who work in public history and public historians who are in the field, do think about, and I hope, and I am optimistic that the, the kind of walls between the academic and the public are breaking down more and more each year, especially with the academic job market in the shambles that it is, we recognize those who are part of graduate programs, that we have to be teaching our students how to be public historians just as much as how they need to be academic historians. And the root of both is the same. It's being a good historian. It's knowing how to read carefully, assess evidence, make arguments, and articulate novel interpretations. We see that whether you are writing an academic book, or you're putting together a exhibition at a museum. And so for my work that I do with public history sites, I try to bring my expertise and my knowledge of contemporary scholarship. Because public historians are so often overworked and underpaid, I can be the kind of eyes and ears for the scholarly side that could be useful for them. And I also gained so much from them, because I see what they know, to be the public interest. So what is what are the publics' if we want to use it and as a plural? What are they interested in? What are they asking about? What do they want? How can we incorporate that into our academic history as well? And so I do think that there's a real exchange of ideas. There's a way that working with publics' demands that you learn to more succinctly articulate your points. Clearly not something that I have learned. But it's something that I really strive for. And I respect and I always learn from my public history colleagues, their ability to speak to a point with clarity and concision. I hope that listening to wider audiences is something that both academic and public historians will do for a long time. I do think that public historians, especially those working in historic sites, really only listened to the people who were coming to their sites. And we, those who have been paying attention to the attendance and the participation at especially historic plantation sites, know that these have been white audiences for a long time. Whitney Plantation in Louisiana has changed the game. This is a plantation that focuses solely on the story of slavery. And we see there that the attendance is overwhelmingly Black, that there are when you go to the site, there are huge tour buses coming from New Orleans. And it is people in it is it is Black individuals coming to engage with this history, the difficult history that for many of them is very personal. But they know they can trust this site to not tell that moonlight and magnolia myth, but to really dig deep into the difficult history, as well as the resistance history. So I think that Whitney has changed the way as well as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the way that public history sites are looking at who their audiences are and who they want them to be. So there are several plantation sites that I work with that are in the book. I was just at Radcliffe Plantation in South Carolina in mid March, and I got to participate in their Descendants Day. And that is something that is a fairly recent development, but is deeply meaningful to the both white and Black descendants who participate in it. If it weren't for the work of public historians, of descendants who have been demanding a voice at these sites and in the governing structure, for instance, the Montpelier Descendants Committee, I don't think this change would have been happening. And I think it's something that academic historians really need to take note of. And, and just remember that we can't just write for the audience that we expect. We need to write for the audience that we want. Who do we want to be engaging in our work? And who do we want to be having conversations with? And hopefully, it's not just the same old same old audience.

Kelly  42:48  
So there's a lot in your book, we're not going to get to. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  42:53  
The University of North Carolina Press website is an excellent place for that. Amazon, of course, if that is your if you need it ASAP. And also, if you are interested, I would be happy, if you want to reach out to me on WhitneyNellStewart.com, I'd be happy to send you an inscribed copy myself. 

Kelly  43:16  
Excellent. Was there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  43:20  
Just that I'm working on a couple of new projects. And I it's on my mind, because I am on sabbatical next year, which is I don't even almost want to say it because it's so it's such a beautiful possibility of what the next year can be. And so I'll be researching for my next book, which is an exploration of the relationship between slavery and winemaking in the United States. And it comes out of the fifth chapter of my book on Redcliffe Plantation. James Henry Hammond, who was the owner/enslaver there, became obsessed with making wine in the late 1850s, early 1860s. As the civil war rages around him, he is obsessed with creating a an 1860 vintage that he feels can be sold for profit. He indeed thinks that wine could be the next great slave made cash crop. And he actually sends his Black child, who was enslaved, to apprentice with a viticulturist in Georgia. And so it will explore enslavers and enslaved people and it will go from revolution to reconstruction, from Virginia to California, and explore how unfree labor is at the center of the origins of the American wine industry. So I just want to take a note of that. And if folks want to follow me on Instagram, I will be discussing and posting all about my research and my findings at Monticello and Mount Vernon plantations where I'll be a fellow next year, as well as my various other vineyard trips I'll be making across the United States.

Kelly  45:01  
So does the research involve some drinking of wine as well?

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  45:05  
There just might be some wine drinking involved too. Yes. I mean, you got to you know sample the history.

Kelly  45:11  
Yes, absolutely. Well, Whitney, thank you so much for speaking with me today. This has just been terrific and I am so glad to have learned this piece of history. 

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart  45:21  
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Teddy  46:16  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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Whitney Nell Stewart Profile Photo

Whitney Nell Stewart

I am a historian of the US South specializing in the history of slavery and plantations, material culture, the history of wine, public history, and Texas history. I’m a proud alumna of Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the University of St. Thomas, and Rice University, where I received my PhD in History in 2017. My first book, This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in November 2023. You can find out more about my work, including publications, through my Curriculum Vitae.

Born in Alabama and raised in Texas, I’ve long felt a deep desire to better understand the complicated history that made the South what it is today. There is no understanding this place and its people without grappling with how race-based inequality emerged and morphed over time, from Indigenous displacement and erasure to chattel slavery and convict leasing to racial terrorism, segregation, and gentrification. Through the inspiring work of teachers, scholars, public historians, descendant communities, and activists across the region, I began and continue to grapple with the past and its living legacy today, a necessary step on the road to making a better future for all Southerners. I aspire to uplift and contribute to this deeply important endeavor through my work as a historian, author, and educator.