It's easy to romanticize the lives of the privileged few living inside a plantation's Big House, but the vast, vast majority of people who lived, worked, and died on a plantation never even crossed the threshold of the Big House door. On some Lowcountry sea islands, slaves outnumbered slaveowners by 1000 to 1.
Trying to understand life on a pre-War plantation by focusing on its owners is like trying to understand the reality of life in Folsom Prison by studying the daily life of its Administrative Staff.
2 comments:
That's a very good way to put it! Scarlett O'Hara couldn't have had Tara without a lot of help. Why doesn't somebody tell the slaves' story?
Isn't that kinda the way it works, though? Go to Europe and you see old castles 1200 years old, but you don't see peasants' huts from the same era. Still, I see your point. It's like those war movies where you see everything from the General's point of view. The real battle is fought in the trenches.
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