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.
