Life & Labor On Butler's Island

A review of rice cultivation on an antebellum plantation in coastal Georgia, utilizing as its case study Butler's Island where some six hundred slaves labored to plant and harvest crops of rice that in some years exceeded one million pounds in production. Covered are rice planting methods and slave management from the perspective of the plantation owners, the Butler family of Philadelphia, and from that of the enslaved people of Butler's Island themselves as seen through the writings of Frances Anne Kemble and her plantation journal. The book also reviews the other rice plantations in the Altamaha district, with particular emphasis on Hopeton, referred to as "the model plantation of the South."