Plantation Life on the Mississippi

Plantation Life on the Mississippi PDF Author: W. E. Clement
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455610570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
One day in 1852, The Princess, one of the finest steamboats afloat on the Mississippi River one hundred years ago was rounding the bend a Duncan�s Point about ten miles below Baton Rouge, when the boilers exploded with a frightful loss of life. The disaster occurred in front of the Conrad cottage where a descendant, the late G. Mather Conrad, of New Orleans, was born and lived as a youth. Lyle Saxon in his Old Louisiana tells of having known an old gentleman who remembered the awful holocaust. Then a little boy, this old gentleman was awaiting the return of his mother and father from New Orleans. He saw the Princess come around the bend and then turn in toward the bank. As he watched he heard a terrific explosion and saw the steamboat burst into flames. Mr. F. D. Conrad, plantation owner of that generation, so Saxon tells us, sent his slaves out in skiffs to rescue the men and women who crew struggling in the water. Many of them were frightfully scalded by steam from the broken boilers. Sheets were spread on the ground under the oak trees on the lawn and barrels of flour were broken open and the contents poured on the sheets. As the scalded people were pulled from the river, they were stripped and rolled in the flour, where they writhed and shrieked in agony. The little boy went from one sufferer to another seeking his father and mother. They were not there. They returned from New Orleans on a later boat, but he never forgot the anguish of his search.

Plantation Life on the Mississippi

Plantation Life on the Mississippi PDF Author: W. E. Clement
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455610570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
One day in 1852, The Princess, one of the finest steamboats afloat on the Mississippi River one hundred years ago was rounding the bend a Duncan�s Point about ten miles below Baton Rouge, when the boilers exploded with a frightful loss of life. The disaster occurred in front of the Conrad cottage where a descendant, the late G. Mather Conrad, of New Orleans, was born and lived as a youth. Lyle Saxon in his Old Louisiana tells of having known an old gentleman who remembered the awful holocaust. Then a little boy, this old gentleman was awaiting the return of his mother and father from New Orleans. He saw the Princess come around the bend and then turn in toward the bank. As he watched he heard a terrific explosion and saw the steamboat burst into flames. Mr. F. D. Conrad, plantation owner of that generation, so Saxon tells us, sent his slaves out in skiffs to rescue the men and women who crew struggling in the water. Many of them were frightfully scalded by steam from the broken boilers. Sheets were spread on the ground under the oak trees on the lawn and barrels of flour were broken open and the contents poured on the sheets. As the scalded people were pulled from the river, they were stripped and rolled in the flour, where they writhed and shrieked in agony. The little boy went from one sufferer to another seeking his father and mother. They were not there. They returned from New Orleans on a later boat, but he never forgot the anguish of his search.

Black Life on the Mississippi

Black Life on the Mississippi PDF Author: Thomas C. Buchanan
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
All along the Mississippi--on country plantation landings, urban levees and quays, and the decks of steamboats--nineteenth-century African Americans worked and fought for their liberty amid the slave trade and the growth of the cotton South. Offering a counternarrative to Twain's well-known tale from the perspective of the pilothouse, Thomas C. Buchanan paints a more complete picture of the Mississippi, documenting the rich variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked on the lower decks and along the river during slavery, through the Civil War, and into emancipation. Buchanan explores the creative efforts of steamboat workers to link riverside African American communities in the North and South. The networks African Americans created allowed them to keep in touch with family members, help slaves escape, transfer stolen goods, and provide forms of income that were important to the survival of their communities. The author also details the struggles that took place within the steamboat work culture. Although the realities of white supremacy were still potent on the river, Buchanan shows how slaves, free blacks, and postemancipation freedpeople fought for better wages and treatment. By exploring the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, Buchanan sheds new light on the ways African Americans resisted slavery and developed a vibrant culture and economy up and down America's greatest river.

Mississippi in Africa

Mississippi in Africa PDF Author: Alan Huffman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604737549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.

The Slaves of Liberty

The Slaves of Liberty PDF Author: Dale Edwyna Smith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815330820
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Worse Than Slavery

Worse Than Slavery PDF Author: David M. Oshinsky
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439107742
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era—and beyond. Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was, in the pre-civil rights south, synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives us the true story of the notorious prison, drawing on police records, prison documents, folklore, blues songs, and oral history, from the days of cotton-field chain gangs to the 1960s, when Parchman was used to break the wills of civil rights workers who journeyed south on Freedom Rides.

Development Arrested

Development Arrested PDF Author: Clyde Woods
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844675610
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A new edition of a classic history of the Mississippi River Delta Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the 200-year-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. The book measures the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations firsthand, while tracing the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debate. Despite countless defeats under the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice. Throughout this remarkably interdisciplinary book, ranging across fields as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies, and anthropology, Woods demonstrates the role of music—including jazz, rock and roll, soul, rap and, above all, the blues—in sustaining a radical vision of social change.

The Deepest South of All

The Deepest South of All PDF Author: Richard Grant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501177842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man for mayor with 91 percent of the vote"--

Life on a Southern Plantation

Life on a Southern Plantation PDF Author: Sally Senzell Isaacs
Publisher: Heinemann-Raintree Library
ISBN: 9781575723167
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Provides information about what daily life was like on a southern plantation, including how slaves worked and dressed and what they ate.

River of Dark Dreams

River of Dark Dreams PDF Author: Walter Johnson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674074882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery PDF Author: Dale W. Tomich
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.