Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Ellis, Clifton; Ginsburg, Rebecca

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Description: Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

BOOKCabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22207

Archaeological and historical scholarship completed over the past decade has revealed much about the built environments of slavery and the daily lives of enslaved workers in North America. Cabin, Quarter, Plantation is the first book to take this new research into account and comprehensively examine the architecture and landscapes of enslavement on plantations and farms.

This important work brings together the best writing in the field, including classic pieces on slave landscapes by W. E. B. Du Bois and Dell Upton, alongside new essays on such topics as the building methods that Africans brought to the American South and information about slave family units and spiritual practices that can be gathered from archaeological remains. Through deep analysis of the built environment the authors invite us to reconsider antebellum buildings, landscapes, cabins, yards, and garden plots, and what these sites can teach us about the real conditions of enslavement. The starting point in any study of slavery and the built environment, this anthology makes essential contributions to our understanding of American slavery and to the fields of landscape history and architectural history.

The essay by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche in this volume has been revised and expanded for the A&AePortal.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

Author

Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date June 2010 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300120424

EISBN 9780300267723

Illustrations 52

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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List of illustrations

An example of Du Bois's description of a "patriarchal" slave house
An example of Du Bois's description of "detached" slave housing
An example of Du Bois's description of "town group" slave housing
Location of Utopia Quarter, Williamsburg, Virginia
Occupations areas at Utopia quarter, Williamsburg, Virginia
Utopia, Williamsburg, Virginia: period 3
Utopia, Williamsburg, Virginia: period 3, detail
Utopia, Williamsburg, Virginia: period 3, soil chemistry data
Utopia, Williamsburg, Virginia: period 4
Utopia, Williamsburg, Virginia: period 4, detail
Utopia, Williamsburg, Virginia: period 4, soil chemistry data
Cellar kitchens at (a) Rosebank, (b) Greendale, Paget Parish, (c) second-floor lodging at Bellevue, Paget Parish, and (d) kitchen lodging at Seaward, Hamilton Parish
Kitchen lodgings at (a) Hog Bay, Sandys Parish and (b) Milford, Paget Parish
Somerville, Smith's Parish, showing routes for delivery of food (a) in the eighteenth century and (b) ca. 1820–1830
Dudley, main floor, Paget Parish, (a) ca. 1815 and (b) ca. 1830–1840
New Herrnhut, Saint Thomas
Old slave quarters being used in slum villages, St. Croix, Virgin Islands
Slave quarters, Queen's Quarter, Castle Coakley, Saint Croix County
Tuckahoe plantation, Goochland County, Virginia
Plan of slave house at Tuckahoe, Goochland County, Virginia
Slave house at Tuckahoe, Goochland County, Virginia
Mount Airy plantation, Richmond County, Virginia
Mount Airy plantation, Richmond County, Virginia
Mount Airy plantation, Richmond County, Virginia, north façade
Plans used by James Bruce when building slave houses and overseers' houses at his plantations in Halifax and Charlotte Counties, Virginia
Cook's house, Berry Hill plantation, Halifax County, Virginia
Ellick Pamplin's house, Berry Hill plantation, Halifax County, Virginia
Plan for a hall and chamber type called a Virginia House
Slave house, Morotock plantation, Charlotte County, Virginia
Overseer's house, Morotock plantation, Charlotte County, Virginia
Map of West Africa
Coastal origins of Africans imported to the Chesapeake between 1698 and 1774 by Naval District
Plan of a slave quarter in James City County, Virginia, dating to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
Structures excavated at Utopia Quarter, Virginia
Mendi village showing group of dwellings
Seven native children posed in front of thatched-roof house, Portuguese East Africa
Dairy, outhouse, and smokehouse, Kendall Grove Plantation, Northampton County, Virginia
View of Mulberry, House, and Street
Christiansborg Castle, Ghana
Coincoin-Prudhomme House, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana
Map of Rhode Island, showing the location of Narragansett
Fitts table 1
Fitts table 2
Map of Tennessee
Slave quarter and springhouse, Allison Farm
Slave house and overseer's house, Fairvue Plantation
Stairway to basement room for a slave at McNeal Place
Western land claims of the original thirteen states
Chart of the balance principle
Map of New York State
Map of Virginia
The Northwest Territory
Map of Illinois
Map of Texas Showing Public Land Strip (also known as No Man's Land)
Neutral Strip or No Man's Land, Oklahoma, detail
District of Columbia as designed by L'Enfant
LaRoche fig. 10
Territory opened to slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill

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Contents

Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Contents

Author

Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22208

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Acknowledgments

Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

~To edit a volume is, in part, to create a community. We have indeed enjoyed and benefited from the warmth and wisdom held by the members of the community of Cabin, Quarter, Plantation. First, to the authors who wrote chapters especially for this book, thanks for believing in this project, for supporting it with your contributions, and for your...

Author

Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22209

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Introduction

Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Chattel slavery was always much more than the “peculiar institution” of the antebellum South. From the earliest days of Europeans’ arrival on the North American continent, slavery was the basis of New World prosperity...

Author

Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.1-15

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.1

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22210

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsSlavery--United States--HistoryArchitecture--Southern StatesPlantationsVernacular architectureLandscape architectureArchitecture and society--United States

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The Home of the Slave

W. E. B. DuBois

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is best known for his studies of contemporary racial problems in the United States, well-known examples of which include The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and The Souls of Black Folks (1903). However, he also wrote frequently about slavery and its legacy. In his seminal essay reprinted here, originally published in 1901 as part of a series he called...

Author

W. E. B. DuBois

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.17-25

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.2

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22211

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsSlavery--United States--HistoryArchitecture--Southern StatesCotton plantation workers

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Excavating the Spaces and Interpreting the Places of Enslaved Africans and Their Descendants

Garrett Fesler

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Garrett Fesler’s essay is in part an explanatory summary of archaeologists’ work at sites of slavery. As Fesler notes, it was archaeologists who discovered evidence that enslaved Africans preserved traditional customs and knowledge, a discovery that confirmed assertions of slave agency, but also one that opened a new dialogue about life under slavery. As the title of the essay...

Author

Garrett Fesler

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.27-49

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.3

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22212

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsExcavations (Archaeology)Domestic spaceAfrican diasporaPlantationsArchitecture--Southern States

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Escaping through a Black Landscape

Rebecca Ginsburg

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

In this essay, Rebecca Ginsburg analyzes the landscape of slavery from an unusual perspective, that of fugitive slaves. Escape was a slave’s most daring and hope-filled act of self-assertion and rebellion, but Ginsburg finds that such bold action most often led to disorientation, confusion, and bitter disappointment. Escapees often found themselves in a landscape in which they had no...

Author

Rebecca Ginsburg

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.51-66

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.4

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22213

Chapter subject tags:Slavery--United States--HistoryFugitive slavesAutobiography--African American authorsNavigation

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Accommodating Slavery in Bermuda

Edward A. Chappell

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Edward Chappell’s valuable study demonstrates that we cannot understand local building without reference to its global contexts. Chappell identifies architectural changes to big house and slave quarter design in the small North Atlantic island of Bermuda between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and links these changes to shifts internationally in attitudes toward refinement...

Author

Edward A. Chappell

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.67-98

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.5

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22214

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsBermuda Island (Bermuda Islands)AbolitionistsSaint Croix (United States Virgin Islands)

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Slave Villages in the Danish West Indies: Changes of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

William Chapman

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

William Chapman identifies and analyzes a change in the quality and style of slave housing in the Caribbean. Chapman finds that beginning in the late eighteenth century, enslavers began to replace slave houses built of wattle-and-daub with those built of stone. Moreover, the new stone houses were articulated with classical details, which were derived most likely from English pattern books.

Author

William Chapman

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.99-120

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.6

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22215

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsUnited States Virgin Islands--HistorySugar plantationsBuilding materials

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White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Dell Upton

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Dell Upton’s widely cited article has inspired many subsequent studies of slave landscapes, as the essays in this volume attest. Like Robert K. Fitts, Upton is concerned with the ideological function of landscape and how it perpetuates social hierarchies by manipulating behavior and consciousness. In his concern for how different populations viewed the landscape, Upton’s essay...

Author

Dell Upton

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.121-139

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.7

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22216

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsArchitecture--Southern StatesTuckahoe Plantation (Goochland County, Va.)Landscape architectureMount Airy Plantation (Richmond County, Va.)

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Building for “Our Family, Black and White”: The Changing Form of the Slave House in Antebellum Virginia

Clifton Ellis

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

The close and careful fieldwork that distinguishes committed vernacularists such as Clifton Ellis from “armchair investigations” of architecture is evident in this essay, which is based on extensive fieldwork in Halifax County, Virginia, combined with the rich resources of the Bruce Family Papers, held at the University of Virginia Special Collections Library. Vernacularists...

Author

Clifton Ellis

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.141-155

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.8

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22217

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsPlantationsArchitecture--Southern StatesBruce, James C. (James Coles), 1806-1865Berry Hill Plantation (Va.)

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Space and Place within Plantation Quarters in Virginia, 1700–1825

Barbara Heath

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Barbara Heath synthesizes recent scholarship on slave quarter sites in Virginia to trace how historical and cultural factors of enslavement influenced the creation of place. Heath considers the growth of kin-based households, the transplantation of African ethnic groups to the Chesapeake, and the participation of enslaved women and men in consumer culture. Her dominant analytical theme,...

Author

Barbara Heath

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.156-176

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.9

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22218

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsAfrican diasporaPlantationsDomestic spaceChesapeake (Va.)Excavations (Archaeology)

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The Big House and the Slave Quarters: African Contributions to the New World

Carl Anthony

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Carl Anthony was among the first scholars to consider the role of slavery in shaping the North American landscape. In 1976 he published a two-part essay in the journal Landscape. Part 1, Prelude to New World Architecture, traced settlement patterns in the colonial and antebellum South, linking these patterns to large-scale industrial agriculture and to a global economy. Long...

Author

Carl Anthony

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.177-191

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.10

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22219

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsArchitecture, Domestic--African influencesAfrican diasporaPlantations--VirginiaPlantationsArchitecture--Southern States

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The Landscapes of Northern Bondage

Robert K. Fitts

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

When he wrote this essay in 1996, Robert K. Fitts had long been fascinated by the question of how people maintain control over a subjugated population without resorting to daily violence. Here he argues that eighteenth-century Narragansett planters employed spatial control to this end. By housing “bondsmen,” as he terms them here, within their own homes, Rhode Island...

Author

Robert K. Fitts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.193-222

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.11

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22220

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsNarragansett (R.I.)PlantationsDomestic spaceSegregationAlienation (Social psychology)

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Slave Housing in Antebellum Tennessee

Michael Strutt

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

Fieldwork is often the foundation of architectural research, and the documentation of sites is essential to the validity of any analysis. In his survey of slave housing in antebellum Tennessee, Michael Strutt located sixty-three sites at which enslaved people lived. On those sites he located 169 separate spaces in which slaves were housed, including forty spaces in the houses of enslavers....

Author

Michael Strutt

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.223-232

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.12

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22221

Chapter subject tags:Slaves--DwellingsFairvue Plantation (Tenn.)Architecture--Southern States

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“The Balance Principle Revisted”: Slavery, Freedom, and the Formation of the Nation

Cheryl Janifer Laroche

Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery

In this essay, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche takes a long view of nationhood and African-American history, arguing that the entire United States is a landscape formed by slavery—if not through the actual handwork of enslaved workers, as a result of the machinations of Congress and state lawmakers as they sought to negotiate the slavery question. In her own words, “With few...

Author

Cheryl Janifer Laroche

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.233-262

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291.13

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22222

Chapter subject tags:Slavery--United States--HistorySlavery--United States--Legal status of slaves in free statesStatehood (American politics)--Law and legislationScott, Dred, 1809-1858United States. Kansas-Nebraska Act

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