Tin Pan Blues |
Friday, July 16, 2004
Microfilm Plantation Records
Series N. Selections from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History Mississippi’s Department of Archives and History in Jackson holds significant materials on Natchez and antebellum plantation culture in Mississippi and Louisiana. The Aventine Plantation diary, 1857–1860, documents slavery practices on an Adams County, Mississippi, estate owned by Thomas R. Shields. There are records on slave work, punishment and other treatment, food, clothing, births, illnesses, deaths, general welfare, plus amounts of cotton picked by individuals, total amounts of cotton and corn produced on the estate, and management by overseers. A journal kept by Leonora Bisland about her term at Pine Ridge Female High School in Adams County from 1856 to 1857 and the courtship correspondence of William A. Bisland and Caroline Pride during the Civil War appear in the Bisland-Shields family papers, 1773–1865. The Bisland-Shield papers also include copious documentation of life on a Louisiana sugar plantation, Hope Farm, in Terrebonne Parish, as well as extensive cotton estates in Adams County. James T. Magruder’s journal, 1796–1818, concerns this prominent planter’s extensive farming and social activities at Mt. Ararat Plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi. The Benjamin Drake collection, 1805–1914, includes the papers of a Methodist minister riding circuit in the Natchez and Washington, Mississippi, areas who was later president of the Elizabeth Female Academy and founder and later president of the Centenary College. The collection includes material on the American Colonization Society and the activities of freed slaves in Monrovia, Liberia. Because Drake married the daughter of James T. Magruder, there is much correspondence about Mt. Ararat. Several collections concern John A. Quitman and family, who resided in Natchez and at Springfield Plantation in Adams County. Quitman was a colorful lawyer, planter, politician, and general. His plantation account books record ferry runs, supply and livestock inventories, slave lists, sales of wood, and the general management of Springfield. There is also correspondence in the papers about an 1853 yellow fever epidemic that devastated the area. The Lettie Downs diary and notebook, 1859–1866, concern the life of Letitia "Lettie" Frances Booker Vick Downs while staying at her father’s plantation at Anuilla before, during, and after the siege of Vicksburg. Her entries record the life style of the Vick family during the tumult of the Civil War. Two collections of John C. Burrus family papers, 1831–1865, concern activities of family members on plantations in Hinds and Bolivar counties, Mississippi. The Charles Clark and family papers, 1810–1865, include extensive account books and day books kept by overseers at Doro Plantation and correspondence and other papers concerning family members in Jefferson and Bolivar counties, Mississippi. The Levin Covington diary, 1825–1845, includes minutes of the Adams Athenaeum and a plantation diary from Adams County. The Darden family papers, 1820–1899, include correspondence and business papers of male family members and diaries of Mrs. Susan Sillers Darden while living on a plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi. Two collections of William Dunbar’s papers, 1776–1842, include correspondence, account books, and diaries of the prominent early planter, explorer, and trader in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. The William R. Elley plantation book, 1855–1856, details events on his Washington County, Mississippi, estate, including daily records of cotton picked by individual slaves. The Alden Spoon Forbes account book, 1856–1857, concerns a merchant and planter of Port Gibson and Claiborne County, Mississippi. The Killona plantation journals, 1836–1886, document the activities of Jorden Bailey as overseer of the estate in the hill area of Holmes County, Mississippi. Other collections include the McNutt plantation papers, the Nancy Robinson collection, the Water Wade plantation journal, the Benjamin Leonard Covington Wailes diaries, the Wallace plantation book, and an unidentified plantation journal. Thursday, July 15, 2004
Interracial friendships and permeability
From American Memory http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/lhbum:@field(DOCID+@lit(lhbum04759div11)): Lucinda Hinsdale Stone, her life story and reminiscences. By Belle McArthur Perry ... Introduction by Ellen M. Henrotin ... CHAPTER IV. Observations and Experiences of Slavery. Now, this was a good man in many respects--kind to white people and relatives. Scenes like these I was obliged in a way to witness; stories like these to hear, and they were not uncommon. From the mistress of the family by whom I was employed as teacher, I often heard this expression, "The greatest curse of slavery comes upon white people." She told me of her brother's history. He had inherited a handsome fortune, been educated at West Point, and after his education was finished, he had been given the opportunities of a year's travel; but he came home, and sank to association with colored servants on the plantation, and at that time was acting as overseer on his brother-in-law's plantation. Forced by the agony that she was enduring, his sister confessed that her own brother could not mingle with the company that they continually entertained at their table, because he had associated with the negroes so long that he preferred their society to that with which his family mingled. Another younger brother returned from a Northern college while I was there, and was fast following his elder brother's example to the same Page 40 { page image } ruin. I could not but see and feel myself that the greatest evils of slavery came back upon the doers of the wrong.
There is a Grant County online database of civil war soldiers
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ingrant/cwarsold.htm#0001 Sunday, July 11, 2004
Negro Slave Insurrections in Mississippi, 1800-1865.
Davidson Burns McKibben The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 34, No. 1. (Jan., 1949), pp. 73-90. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2992%28194901%2934%3A1%3C73%3ANSIIM1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S |
