Major Butler's Legacy

Major Butler's Legacy PDF Author: Malcolm Bell, Jr.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820323950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 701

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Book Description
Master of vast rice and cotton plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Major Pierce Butler bequeathed his family and nation a legacy of slavery--an inheritance of immense wealth sown with the seeds of Civil War. In Major Butler's Legacy, Malcolm Bell charts the unfolding of the Butler patrimony, an epic story that reaches from the eve of the Revolution to the first decades of this century and includes in its course such figures as George Washington, Aaron Burr, Fanny Kemble, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister.

Major Butler's Legacy

Major Butler's Legacy PDF Author: Malcolm Bell, Jr.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820323950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 701

Get Book Here

Book Description
Master of vast rice and cotton plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Major Pierce Butler bequeathed his family and nation a legacy of slavery--an inheritance of immense wealth sown with the seeds of Civil War. In Major Butler's Legacy, Malcolm Bell charts the unfolding of the Butler patrimony, an epic story that reaches from the eve of the Revolution to the first decades of this century and includes in its course such figures as George Washington, Aaron Burr, Fanny Kemble, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister.

A Southern Underground Railroad

A Southern Underground Railroad PDF Author: Paul M. Pressly
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820366870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Despite its apparent isolation as an older region of the country, the Southeast provided a vital connecting link between the Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years of the antebellum period. From the beginning of the revolutionary war to the eve of the First Seminole War in 1817, hundreds and eventually several thousand Africans and African Americans in Georgia, and to a lesser extent South Carolina, crossed the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast. Even in times of peace, there remained a steady flow of individuals moving south and southwest, reflecting the aspirations of a captive people. A Southern Underground Railroad constitutes a powerful counter-narrative in American history, a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States. It is a potent reminder of the strength of Black resistance in the post-revolutionary South and the ability of this community to influence the balance of power in a contested region. Paul M. Pressly’s research shows that their movement across borders was an integral part of the sustained struggle for dominance in the Southeast not only among the Great Powers but also among the many different racial, ethnic, and religious groups that inhabited the region and contended for control.

The Butlers of Iberville Parish, Louisiana

The Butlers of Iberville Parish, Louisiana PDF Author: David D. Plater
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161292
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In 1833, Edward G. W. and Frances Parke Butler moved to their newly constructed plantation house, Dunboyne, on the banks of the Mississippi River near the village of Bayou Goula. Their experiences at Dunboyne over the next forty years demonstrated the transformations that many land-owning southerners faced in the nineteenth century, from the evolution of agricultural practices and commerce, to the destruction wrought by the Civil War and the transition from slave to free labor, and finally to the social, political, and economic upheavals of Reconstruction. In this comprehensive biography of the Butlers, David D. Plater explores the remarkable lives of a Louisiana family during one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Born in Tennessee to a celebrated veteran of the American Revolution, Edward Butler pursued a military career under the mentorship of his guardian, Andrew Jackson, and, during a posting in Washington, D.C., met and married a grand-niece of George Washington, Frances Parke Lewis. In 1831, he resigned his commission and relocated Frances and their young son to Iberville Parish, where the couple began a sugar cane plantation. As their land holdings grew, they amassed more enslaved laborers and improved their social prominence in Louisiana’s antebellum society. A staunch opponent of abolition, Butler voted in favor of Louisiana’s withdrawal from the Union at the state’s Secession Convention. But his actions proved costly when the war cut off agricultural markets and all but destroyed the state’s plantation economy, leaving the Butlers in financial ruin. In 1870, with their plantation and finances in disarray, the Butlers sold Dunboyne and resettled in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where they resided in a rental cottage with the financial support of Edward J. Gay, a wealthy Iberville planter and their daughter-in-law’s father. After Frances died in 1875, Edward Butler moved in with his son’s family in St. Louis, where he remained until his death in 1888. Based on voluminous primary source material, The Butlers of Iberville Parish, Louisiana offers an intimate picture of a wealthy nineteenth-century family and the turmoil they faced as a system based on the enslavement of others unraveled.

What Nature Suffers to Groe

What Nature Suffers to Groe PDF Author: Mart A. Stewart
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820324593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"What Nature Suffers to Groe" explores the mutually transforming relationship between environment and human culture on the Georgia coastal plain between 1680 and 1920. Each of the successive communities on the coast--the philanthropic and imperialistic experiment of the Georgia Trustees, the plantation culture of rice and sea island cotton planters and their slaves, and the postbellum society of wage-earning freedmen, lumbermen, vacationing industrialists, truck farmers, river engineers, and New South promoters--developed unique relationships with the environment, which in turn created unique landscapes. The core landscape of this long history was the plantation landscape, which persisted long after its economic foundation had begun to erode. The heart of this study examines the connection between power relations and different perceptions and uses of the environment by masters and slaves on lowcountry plantations--and how these differing habits of land use created different but interlocking landscapes. Nature also has agency in this story; some landscapes worked and some did not. Mart A. Stewart argues that the creation of both individual and collective livelihoods was the consequence not only of economic and social interactions but also of changing environmental ones, and that even the best adaptations required constant negotiation between culture and nature. In response to a question of perennial interest to historians of the South, Stewart also argues that a "sense of place" grew out of these negotiations and that, at least on the coastal plain, the "South" as a place changed in meaning several times.

The Internal Enemy

The Internal Enemy PDF Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 622

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Book Description
Drawn from new sources, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian presents a gripping narrative that recreates the events that inspired hundreds of slaves to pressure British admirals into becoming liberators by using their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war.

Domesticating Slavery

Domesticating Slavery PDF Author: Jeffrey Robert Young
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807876186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
In this carefully crafted work, Jeffrey Young illuminates southern slaveholders' strange and tragic path toward a defiantly sectional mentality. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and integrating political, religious, economic, and literary sources, he chronicles the growth of a slaveowning culture that cast the southern planter in the role of benevolent Christian steward--even as slaveholders were brutally exploiting their slaves for maximum fiscal gain. Domesticating Slavery offers a surprising answer to the long-standing question about slaveholders' relationship with the proliferating capitalistic markets of early-nineteenth-century America. Whereas previous scholars have depicted southern planters either as efficient businessmen who embraced market economics or as paternalists whose ideals placed them at odds with the industrializing capitalist society in the North, Young instead demonstrates how capitalism and paternalism acted together in unexpected ways to shape slaveholders' identity as a ruling elite. Beginning with slaveowners' responses to British imperialism in the colonial period and ending with the sectional crises of the 1830s, he traces the rise of a self-consciously southern master class in the Deep South and the attendant growth of political tensions that would eventually shatter the union.

Strange Kin

Strange Kin PDF Author: Kieran Quinlan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807129838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The ties between Ireland and the American South span four centuries and include shared ancestries, cultures, and sympathies. The striking parallels between the two regions are all the more fascinating because, studded with contrasts, they are so complex. Kieran Quinlan, a native of Ireland who now resides in Alabama, is ideally suited to offer the first in-depth exploration of this neglected subject, which he does to a brilliant degree in Strange Kin. The Irish relationship to the American South is unique, Quinlan explains, in that it involves both kin and kinship. He shows how a significant component of the southern population has Irish origins that are far more tangled than the simplistic distinction between Protestant Scotch Irish and plain Catholic Irish. African and Native Americans, too, have identified with the Irish through comparable experiences of subjugation, displacement, and starvation. The civil rights movement in the South and the peace initiative in Northern Ireland illustrate the tense intertwining that Quinlan addresses. He offers a detailed look at the connections between Irish nationalists and the Confederate cause, revealing remarkably similar historical trajectories in Ireland and the South. Both suffered defeat; both have long been seen as problematic, if also highly romanticized, areas of otherwise "progressive" nations; both have been identified with religious prejudices; and both have witnessed bitter disputes as to the interpretation of their respective "lost causes." Quinlan also examines the unexpected twentieth-century literary flowering in Ireland and the South -- as exemplified by Irish writers W. B.Yeats, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bowen, and southern authors William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. Sophisticated as well as entertaining, Strange Kin represents a benchmark in Irish-American cultural studies. Its close consideration of the familial and circumstantial resemblances between Ireland and the South will foster an enhanced understanding of each place separately, as well as of the larger British and American polities.

Fanny Kemble

Fanny Kemble PDF Author: Deirdre David
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201744
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007 Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite her marriage to a wealthy slave owner, as a brilliantly successful solo performer of Shakespeare, and as the author of journals about her career and life on her husband's Georgia plantations. She was, in her own words, irresistible as a "woman who has sat at dinner alongside Byron . . . and who calls Tennyson, Alfred." Touring in America with her father in the early 1830s, Kemble impulsively wed the wealthy and charming Philadelphia bachelor Pierce Butler, beginning a tumultuous marriage that ended in a sensational divorce and custody battle fourteen years later. At the time of their marriage, Kemble had not yet visited the vast Georgia rice and cotton plantations to which Butler was heir. In the winter of 1838, they visited Butler's southern holdings, and a horrified Kemble wrote what would later be published on both sides of the Atlantic as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. An important text for abolitionists, it revealed the inner workings of a plantation and the appalling conditions in which slaves lived. Returning to England after her divorce, she fashioned a new career as a solo performer of Shakespeare's plays and as the author of memoirs, several travel narratives and collections of poems, a short novel, and miscellaneous essays on the theater. For the rest of her life, she would divide her time between the two countries. In the various roles she performed in her life, on stage and off—abolitionist, author, estranged wife—Kemble remained highly theatrical, appropriating and subverting nineteenth-century prescriptions for women's lives, ever rewriting the roles to which she was assigned by society and inheritance. Hers was truly a performed life, and in the first Kemble biography in twenty-five years to examine that life in its entirety, Deirdre David presents it in all its richness and complexity.

Palmetto Profiles

Palmetto Profiles PDF Author: W. Eric Emerson
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611172861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Palmetto Profiles documents the lives and accomplishments of the inductees of the South Carolina Hall of Fame during its first forty years. As Governor John C. West predicted in his dedication speech, the Hall of Fame has indeed become a "vital and integral part of the history and culture of South Carolina." Nearly ninety citizens have been inducted since Apollo 16 astronaut Colonel Charles Duke, Jr., became the first honoree in 1973. Each year one contemporary and one deceased individual is recognized by the hall for outstanding contributions to South Carolina's heritage and progress. To date, inductees have included political leaders and reformers, artists, writers, scientists, soldiers, clergy, educators, athletes, and others. U.S. president Andrew Jackson, authors Elizabeth Coker and Pat Conroy, jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, artists Jasper Johns and Elizabeth O'Neil Verner, Catawba King Hagler, Generals Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter, civil rights leaders Mary McLeod Bethune and Reverend Benjamin E. Mays, U.S. senators J. Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings, and Nobel Prize winning physicist Charles H. Townes are just some of the representative South Carolinians memorialized in the Hall of Fame for their lasting legacies in the Palmetto State and beyond. Published on the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the South Carolina Hall of Fame and drawn from biographical entries in The South Carolina Encyclopedia, this guidebook presents concise profiles of the inductees from 1973 to 2013. Palmetto Profiles, like the Hall of Fame itself, serves as a tangible link to South Carolina's rich and complex past to the benefit of residents, visitors, and students alike. The volume also includes illustrations of all inductees and a foreword by Walter Edgar, a 2008 Hall of Fame inductee, author of South Carolina: A History, and editor of The South Carolina Encyclopedia.

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009092138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.