Book Review This is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations
This is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations. By Whitney Nell Stewart. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Softcover, 296 pp. $29.95.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
The sources that historians traditionally use to tell the story of slavery in the United States vary greatly and have strengths and weaknesses. Governmental records, plantation records, period newspapers, and narratives of those who escaped slavery to tell of it horrors, all offer valuable information, but have limitations, too. Also of importance are the interviews conducted during the elderly years of individuals who lived enslaved as young people. These interviews can provide supplemental insights into many of the characteristics of slavery that other sources only touch upon. The interviews also offer modern students a better understanding about how those who endured slavery remembered it. Like other sources, interviews have their own issues as well. However, in order to tell a fuller story about those who are not normally represented in the traditional archives, scholars are increasingly turning to material culture, archaeology, and the examination of historic landscapes to inform us about certain aspects of slavery.
In This is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations, historian Whitney Nell Stewart “explores how those forced to live and labor on sites of enslavement nonetheless sought to make meaning of spaces designed for exploitation.” (1) After all, despite all the laws and customs that attempted to reduce human individuals to property, plantations were as much Black homes as white homes. This book “defines home as a place we make and give meaning to, a place that at least partly feels like our own.” (3-4) It argues that “plantations were never only spaces of forced labor for enslaved people and that despite slavery’s attempts to dehumanize them, Black Southerners were never reducible to their labor.” (6)
Stewart organizes her study into five primary chapters. Each chapter opens with a vignette and goes on to focus on a plantation in different southern states and highlights primary sources that illustrate how enslaved people made that particular place into their own; their home.
Chapter 1 takes readers to James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange County, Virginia. There, we learn that despite Madison’s desires and attempts to organize his plantation landscape to his own ideals, the people he enslaved developed ways to make the spaces they lived and worked in their own, and “in doing so, they embedded their own ideas into the land, claiming space as a means of claiming some control over their lives.” (42) Archeological evidence found in Montpelier’s ground bears this out out.
Stagville, once the massive plantation owned by the Bennehan and Cameron families near Durham, North Carolina, is the focus of Chapter 2. Stewart uses a walking stick found within a wall of the Bennehan House, a cowrie shell located beneath a slave dwelling, and two forked sticks secreted in the wall of a slave dwelling to show how these objects commonly used in African and African American culture for their perceived protective or curing powers against harm or illness helped make spaces home. These items show how enslaved people, who had little power, attempted to make their home environments feel “safer” and more to their liking by hiding their talismans within them, whereas if left exposed, enslavers may have removed them, causing them to lose their comforting power.
Chapter 3 travels readers to Chatham Plantation in Alabama, where a North Carolina family moved in search of cotton riches in the 1830s. Of course, making the move, too, were over 100 enslaved people, who had to create a new sense of home in a new place against their wishes. One way of doing so, and connecting present and future to the past, was through their burial grounds, which are examined in this chapter.
Patton Place in southeast Texas, and the unusual story of an enslaved woman named Rachel, who for a time served as the lady of the plantation, highlight Chapter 4. Through her relationship with Columbus Patton, Rachel was able to exert a level of household power that few enslaved women experienced. Despite losing that power with Patton’s admittance to an asylum and then his death in 1856, Rachel continued to attempt to reclaim what she had once called home.
Redcliffe, the plantation of James Henry Hammond, a leading South Carolina politician and defender of slavery, centers Chapter 5. Now a state park, Hammond built the stately Redcliffe manor as an expression of wealth and power. It remains on the landscape today. But also on the same landscape is an original dwelling, where some of the people lived from whose labor Hammond derived his wealth and power. Although Hammond fractured numerous families during his lifetime, many of those who lived at Redcliffe after Hammond’s death in 1864, and emancipation in 1865, remained generation after generation, as they had made that place their home.
A thought-provoking conclusion and an appendix discussing material culture theory finish out the book. The notes and bibliography section, which runs almost 100 pages, illustrates the depth of Stewart’s research.
This is Our Home is wonderfully written and richly illustrated with numerous images showing the places it explores and the material culture items it discusses. Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach to studying the liberating sense of home among the enslaved makes for compelling reading. In addition, Stewart offers a strong case for the book’s relevance by stating that after emancipation “Contests over segregation, equitable access to home ownership, and surveillance of Black houses and bodies were fundamental issues at the center of the twentieth century’s long Civil Rights Movement. And they remain unsolved problems in the nation today. Who gets to make this place their home remains a perennial struggle.” (160)
