Plantation slavery in the Americas saw fundamental changes in the nineteenth century. Revolutionary dynamics of a modernizing capitalist transatlantic economy created new zones of plantation slavery and renovated older ones, while equally revolutionary dynamics of abolition and emancipation generated complex contradictory pressures on economies based on slave labor. Historians of this “second slavery” in the nineteenth century (second because it replaced an earlier, more baroque form of slavery across the Americas) have traced this shift using a wide variety of sources, but most historians, and I include myself in this number, have used visual sources only to ornament their arguments rather than as valuable sources in themselves (p. 7). Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery takes a different tack by asking what we can learn from the visual record in this era of flux.
The book's international, multilingual team of stellar authors have produced an impressively international book. They focus on three regions where new forms of plantation slavery took off in the nineteenth century: the Natchez District of Mississippi, heart of the cotton kingdom; western Cuba's booming sugar frontier; and the coffee-growing Paraíba Valley of Brazil. These “commodity frontiers” were organized locally into plantations that worked enslaved people to supply international markets with cotton, sugar, and coffee in unprecedented volume (p. 13). Just how globalized these plantations could be is exemplified by the contiguous Echeverría and San Martín sugar mills (ingenios) in Cuba. These giant operations used advanced technology manufactured in Europe and employed hundreds of enslaved Africans alongside Chinese contract workers. They were truly “factories in the field,” as the historian Kenneth Stampp put it in the 1950s (The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South [1956].)
A slim and beautifully-illustrated volume, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery offers a model for reading the visual record of the “working landscapes” of plantation slavery (p. 6). The book is divided into two parts, each corresponding to a different scale of representation. The first scale is regional, represented above all by cartography. Maps often reveal as much or more about the mapmakers’ own values than the terrain being mapped. The maps and surveys of the three regions display an interest in certain natural features of the landscape, particularly its topography, rivers and wetlands, and forests. But they also depict decidedly man-made aspects of the terrain, above all the contours of property ownership and transportation infrastructure. Norman's Chart of the Lower Mississippi River, a massive map of the plantations along the Mississippi from Natchez to New Orleans published in 1858, vividly illustrates the persistence of the colonial cadastral system along the river, the shift from cotton to sugar plantations as one travels south, and the names of the plantation owners who commanded some of the richest farmland in the world. The parallelograms of Norman's Chart contrast sharply with the circular pattern of land ownership on maps of Cuba's sugar frontier, but both are representations of local power.
The second scale is that of the plantation itself. Despite long histories as sites of brutal violence, plantations have been subjected to such relentless romanticization that many are now popular venues for weddings, tourism, and corporate retreats. The visual representation of these places, as in the movie Gone With The Wind, has powerfully shaped the popular imagination of them. Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery is not an encyclopedic history of how plantations were depicted; rather, it offers close readings of a few telling and important sources from the nineteenth century. For example, the chapter on Cuba pores over Eduardo Laplante's magnificent collection of lithographs of sugar plantations, Los ingenios, published in the late 1850s. Laplante's colorful lithographs depicted plantations such as Echeverría and San Martín with great technical accuracy and stunning detail, showing the technological modernity of the most advanced mills and their integration into the world market, a marriage of iron and cane.
One of the book's key visual records of the cotton plantation in the southern United States is Alfred B. Waud's woodcut “Scenes on a Cotton Plantation,” published in Harper's Weekly in 1867. Waud depicted not only the labor involved in cotton production at the Buena Vista plantation in Alabama—plowing, sowing, hoeing, picking, ginning, and pressing—but also aspects of the social life of the plantation's black workers, including a prayer meeting, dance, and cemetery. The authors assert that Waud's woodcut is “a striking portrayal of plantation slavery,” but a second look at the date (1867) indicates Waud was actually portraying a cotton plantation after emancipation (p. 70). A “good hand” worth $1,500 before the Civil War, explained Harper's, could now be hired for $10 per month, and the newly emancipated worker “pays his own doctor's bill and taxes, clothes himself, deducts all time lost by sickness, and if he dies is his own loss—a consoling reflection to some planters.” Although Waud's illustration indicates real continuities in the plantation system from the era of slavery to that of emancipation, it also registers an underlying disruption to what the authors call the “web of paternalist relations” on southern plantations (p. 70).
Technological progress in plantation societies can be seen not just in the machinery of production but also in the evolving modes of representation, which culminate in the book with Marc Ferrez's stunning photographs of coffee plantations (fazendas) in the Paraíba Valley in the 1880s. In contrast to the invisibility of slaves in many of the visual sources of plantation slavery, Ferrez's photographs make visible the men, women, and even children who worked the fazendas. Looking at them in this revelatory book reminded me of how little most of us know about the people who harvest our food, stitch our clothing, and mine the metals that power our phones and the computer that you may be using to read this review today.
