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Plantation complexes in the Southern United States

Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.

Plantations are an important aspect of the history of the Southern United States, particularly before the American Civil War. The mild temperate climate, plentiful rainfall, and fertile soils of the Southeastern United States allowed the flourishing of large plantations, where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for a white elite.[1]


Today, as was also true in the past, there is a wide range of opinion as to what differentiated a plantation from a farm. Typically, the focus of a farm was subsistence agriculture. In contrast, the primary focus of a plantation was the production of cash crops, with enough staple food crops produced to feed the population of the estate and the livestock.[2] A common definition of what constituted a plantation is that it typically had 500 to 1,000 acres (2.0 to 4.0 km2) or more of land and produced one or two cash crops for sale.[3] Other scholars have attempted to define it by the number of enslaved persons.[4]

African-American history

American gentry

Atlantic slave trade

(similar concept in Brazilian plantations)

Casa-Grande & Senzala

History of the Southern United States

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839

List of plantations in the United States

Lost Cause of the Confederacy

(1949 book by historian Frank Lawrence Owsley)

Plain Folk of the Old South

Plantation-era songs

Plantation house

(genre of literature)

Plantation tradition

(Florida)

Plantations of Leon County

Planter class

in the United States

Sharecropping

Slavery at Tuckahoe plantation

Slavery in the United States

Treatment of slaves in the United States

White supremacy

John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979)

Blassingame

* Evans, Chris, "The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity, 1650–1850," William and Mary Quarterly, (2012) 69#1 pp 71–100.

American Negro Slavery; a Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime. (1918; reprint 1966)online at Project Gutenberg; google edition

Phillips, Ulrich B.

Life and Labor in the Old South. (1929). excerpts and text search

Phillips, Ulrich B.

Phillips, Ulrich B. (1905). "The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt". Political Science Quarterly. 20 (2): 257–275. doi:10.2307/2140400. hdl:2027/hvd.32044082042185. JSTOR 2140400.

Phillips, Ulrich B.

Silkenat, David. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Thompson, Edgar Tristram. The Plantation edited by Sidney Mintz and George Baca (University of South Carolina Press; 2011) 176 pages; 1933 dissertation

Weiner, Marli Frances. Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80 (1997)

White, Deborah G. Aren't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (2nd ed. 1999)

excerpt and text search

Smith, Julia Floyd (2017). (PDF). University of Florida Press.

Slavery and plantation growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1860

Plantation and Frontier Documents, 1649–1863; Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial and Antebellum South: Collected from MSS. and Other Rare Sources. 2 Volumes. (1909). online edition

Phillips, Ulrich B., ed.

. YouTube. 1950. Archived from the original on November 7, 2021. Retrieved February 1, 2020.

"The Plantation System in Southern Life. Short documentary"