This photo of harvesting cotton was obviously taken long after 1828 but not a thing had changed         The following is courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society An essay on slave management by the overseer of the Butler Plantations.  Contrast this description with Fanny Kemble's in 1838 several years after her husband, Pearce Butler took over. THE SOUTHERN AGRICULTURIST DECEMBER, 1828                                       PART I                 ORIGINAL CORRESPONDENCE ART. I -- On the Management of the BUTLER Estate, and the Cultivation of the Sugar Cane; by R. King, Jr. addressed to William Washington, Esq.                [COMMUNICATED FOR THE SOUTHERN AGRICULTURALIST.]                             ...

(This is the first in a four part series)            If America's richest man married the most beautiful and talented actress in the English speaking world--and then she went to work in his warehouse or auto factory for four months and wrote a blistering report about conditions under which workers labored...      Well, that's happened before.      Pearce Mease Butler  had it all—and then some.  Handsome, well educated, charming, and very, very, very rich.   Pearce Mease Butler      His grandfather and namesake had been a British Officer who resigned his commission and settled in South Carolina in 1771 and soon built a fortune by the time of the Revolution.  Major Butler joined the Patriot cause.  An able soldier and distinguished politician, he was one of South Carolina’s representatives to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later wrote ...

                     Cherry Hill Plantation, Inez, North Carolina Old Times There Could be Rotten Southern Plantation Life Part 1 of Several Entries on Slavery The modern stereotype of a Southern plantation as an enormous “Tara” like mansion surrounded by groves of magnolia and oak set in endless fields of cotton is only partly accurate.   Admittedly, this writer’s 3 times great grandparents on my mother’s side did live such a life.   But they were a minority among the elite planters of Warren County, North Carolina.             The 1860 census found Warrenton, county seat of Warren County, to be home to 2,600 souls, black and white, a number the population has yet to reach again.   In contrast to the present, it was the richest place in the state, not, as now, one of the poorest. Now a red tin roof, originally, this was a veranda with a railing where ladies w...