Page 287 - American Stories, A History of the United States

The Planters’ World
11.1 The great planters, although few in number, had a disproportionate influence on

southern life. They set the tone and values for much of the rest of society, especially for
the less wealthy slaveowners who sought to imitate the planters’ style of living to the
11.2 extent their resources allowed. Although many wealthy planters were too busy tending
to their plantations to become openly involved in politics, they held more than their
share of high offices and often exerted a decisive influence on public policy. In regions
11.3 where plantation agriculture predominated, they were a ruling class in every sense of
the term. Contrary to legend, most of the great planters of the pre–Civil War period
were self-made rather than descendants of the old colonial gentry. Some were ambi-
tious young men who married planters’ daughters. Others started as lawyers and used
their fees and connections to acquire plantations.
As the Cotton Kingdom spread west from South Carolina and Georgia to Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, the men who became the largest slaveholders were
less and less likely to have come from old, well-established planter families. Many of
them began as hard-driving businessmen who built up capital from commerce, land
speculation, banking, and even slave trading. They then used their profits to buy plan-
tations. Sharp dealing and business skills were more important than genealogy in the
competitive, boom-or-bust economy of the western Gulf states.
To succeed, a planter had to be a shrewd entrepreneur who kept a careful eye on the
market, the prices of slaves and land, and his debts. Few planters could be men of leisure.
Likewise, the responsibility of running an extended household that produced
much of its own food and clothing kept plantation mistresses from being the idle ladies
of legend. Not only were plantation mistresses a tiny minority of the women who lived
and worked in the slave states before the Civil War, but even women from the planter
elite rarely lived lives of leisure.

Read the Document Harriet Jacobs, A Slave Girl Tells of Her Life (1861)

CHICORA WOOD Chicora Wood was an extremely successful rice plantation in South Carolina owned by Robert
Allston. Allston owned several plantations and, of course, many slaves. in 1850 he owned 401 slaves; by 1860 that
number had increased to 603.
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