planter

Examples of planter in the following topics:

• Plantation Masters and Mistresses

  • The owner of a plantation was called a planter.
  • In the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama and Mississippi, the terms ""planter" and "farmer" were often synonymous; a "planter" was generally a farmer who owned many slaves.
  • Planters are often spoken of as belonging to the planter elite or planter aristocracy in the antebellum South.
  • The historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman define large planters as owning over 50 slaves and medium planters as owning between 16 and 50 slaves.
  • Campbell classifies large planters as owners of 20 slaves and small planters as owners of between 10 and 19 slaves.

• Slavery in the Rice Kingdom

  • In the 17th century, wealthy planters from Barbados, accompanied by their African slaves, immigrated to South Carolina looking for arable lands.
  • The planters were well aware that African slaves had skills and attributes well suited to the semi-tropical environment of South Carolina.
  • By 1850, a South Carolinian rice planter, Joshua John Ward, was the largest American slaveholder, with an estate that held 1,130 slaves and gave him the title "King of the Rice Planters."
  • It is no coincidence that white planters in the region starting importing African slaves as rice cultivation was introduced into the South, as the first English planters in South Carolina knew little about rice cultivation.
  • The planters relied on the expertise of their African slaves imported from the Rice Coast.

• The Plantation Economy and the Planter Class

  • The owner of a plantation was called a planter.
  • The wealthiest planters, such as the Virginia elite with plantations on the James River, had more land and slaves.
  • In the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama and Mississippi, the terms "planter" and "farmer" were often synonymous.
  • A "planter" was generally a farmer who owned many slaves.
  • Planters are often spoken of as belonging to the planter elite or planter aristocracy in the antebellum South.

• Plain Folk of the Old South

  • The "Plain Folk of the Old South" were a middling class of white farmers who occupied a social rung between rich planters and poor whites.
  • The "Plain Folk of the Old South" were white subsistence farmers who occupied a social rung between rich planters and poor whites in the Southern United States before the Civil War.
  • The nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement who controlled large plantations and numerous slaves.
  • The major challenge to the view of planter dominance came from historian Frank Lawrence Owsley's book, Plain Folk of the Old South (1949).
  • Planters with numerous slaves had work that was essentially managerial, and often they supervised an overseer rather than the slaves themselves.

• Chesapeake Slavery

  • As the demand for Chesapeake cash crops continued to grow, planters began to increasingly invest in the Atlantic slave trade.
  • As the headright system attracted more and more settlers to the Chesapeake, an increasing divide between coastal planters and farmers on the frontier began to emerge, with those in the westernmost areas usually poorer than planters in the east.
  • These wealthy slave-owning planters came to dominate the top of the social and political hierarchy in the Chesapeake, placing pedigree and wealth as significant social identifiers.
  • The class division between wealthy planters and small farmers continued well into the 19th century, until the Civil War united these factions together against the Northern states.
  • Discuss how planters in the Chesapeake region increasingly invested in the Atlantic slave trade to support their rural tobacco-based economy.

• Agriculture

  • As the upper South of the Chesapeake Bay Colony developed first, historians of the antebellum South defined planters as those who held 20 or more slaves.
  • Planters earned wealth from two major crops: rice and indigo, both of which relied on cultivation by slave labor.
  • Near the beginning of the 18th century, planters began rice culture along the coast, mainly in the Georgetown and Charleston areas.
  • South Carolina did not have a monopoly of the British market, but the demand was strong and many planters switched to the new crop when the price of rice fell.
  • Carolina indigo had a mediocre reputation because Carolina planters failed to achieve consistent high quality production standards.

• "Poor Whites"

  • Elite planters with numerous slaves were essentially managers, and often supervised an overseer rather than the slaves themselves.
  • Before the war they had become more active in the cotton and slave markets, but overall they remained unwilling to jeopardize their self-sufficiency and the stability of their neighborhoods for the economic interests of planters.
  • By March 1862, the piney woods region of Georgia had a 60% enlistment rate, comparable to that found in planter areas.
  • Wartime shortages increased the economic divide between planters and yeoman farmers; nevertheless, some planters honored their paternalistic obligations by selling their corn to plain folks at the official Confederate rate "out of a spirit of patriotism. " Wetherington's argument challenges other scholars' suggestions that class conflict contributed to the Confederate defeat.

• Skin Color in the South

  • Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their own children or the children of their relatives.
  • Planters who had mixed-race children sometimes arranged for their children's education, even sending them to schools in the North, or securing their employment as apprentices in crafts.
  • In its early years, Wilberforce University, which was founded in Ohio in 1856 for the education of African-American youth, was largely financed by wealthy Southern planters who wanted to provide for the education of their mixed race children.
  • Some planters freed both the children and the mothers of their children.
  • Though fewer in number than in the Upper South, free blacks in the Deep South (especially in Louisiana and Charleston, South Carolina) were often mixed-race children of wealthy planters and received transfers of property and social capital.

• Middle Class

  • The term Plain Folk of the Old South refers to the middling class of white farmers in the Southern United States before the Civil War, who occupied a rung between the rich planters and the poor whites.
  • The nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement, controlling large plantations and numerous slaves.
  • The major challenge to the view of planter dominance came from historian Frank Lawrence Owsley in Plain Folk of the Old South (1949).
  • Hundley, who in 1860 had defined the southern middle class as "farmers, planters, traders, storekeepers, artisans, mechanics, a few manufacturers, a goodly number of country school teachers, and a host of half-fledged country lawyers, doctors, parsons, and the like. " To find these people, Owsley turned to the name-by-name files on the manuscript federal census.
  • Plain Folk argued that southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role.

• White Society in the South

  • Ownership of large numbers of slaves made the work of planters completely managerial.
  • Third, many small farmers with a few slaves and yeomen were linked to elite planters through the market economy.
  • In many areas, small farmers depended on local planter elites for vital goods and services including (but not limited to) access to cotton gins, access to markets, access to feed and livestock, and even for loans, since the banking system was not well developed in the antebellum South.
  • Southern tradesmen often depended on the richest planters for steady work.
  • Furthermore, whites of varying social castes, including poor whites and "plain folk" who worked outside or on the periphery of the market economy (and who therefore lacked any real economic interest in the defense of slavery) might nonetheless be linked to elite planters through extensive kinship networks.