Three Southern planters (ab. 1850)
Three Southern planters photographed ab. 1850. My restoration and colorization of a daguerreotype in The Met (New York) archive. "Their button-fly pants date the picture to after 1845, when this style was introduced to America despite the protests of the religious community, who saw the flap as a license to sin" (from The Met caption).
"The planter class, known alternatively in the United States as the Southern aristocracy, was a racial and socio-economic caste of Pan-American society that dominated 17th and 18th century agricultural markets. The Atlantic slave trade permitted planters access to inexpensive African slave labor for the planting and harvesting of crops such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar cane, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, hemp, rubber trees, and fruits. Planters were considered part of the American gentry.
In the Southern United States, planters maintained a distinct culture, which was characterized by its similarity to the manners and customs of the British nobility and gentry to whom many planters were related. The culture had an emphasis on chivalry, gentility, and hospitality. The culture of the Southern United States, with its landed gentry, was distinctly different from areas north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Appalachians. The northern and western areas were characterized by small landed property, worked by yeoman farmers without slave labor.
After the American Civil War (1861–1865), many in the social class saw their wealth greatly reduced, as the enslaved Africans were freed. After emancipation, many plantations were converted to sharecropping with African freedmen working as sharecroppers on the same land which they had worked as slaves before the war. During the Gilded Age, many plantations, no longer viable as agricultural operations, were purchased by wealthy northern industrialists as hunting retreats. Later some plantations became museums, often on the National Register of Historic Places.
Planters were prolific throughout the European colonies of North and South America and the West Indies. Members of the class include colonists Robert "King" Carter, William Byrd of Westover, many signers of the Declaration of Independence including Benjamin Harrison V, Thomas Nelson, Jr., George Wythe, Carter Braxton and Richard Henry Lee, Founding Fathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Valcour Aime, Sallie Ward, and the fictional Scarlett O'Hara from the film Gone with the Wind (1939)."
(Wikipedia)
Three Southern planters (ab. 1850)
Three Southern planters photographed ab. 1850. My restoration and colorization of a daguerreotype in The Met (New York) archive. "Their button-fly pants date the picture to after 1845, when this style was introduced to America despite the protests of the religious community, who saw the flap as a license to sin" (from The Met caption).
"The planter class, known alternatively in the United States as the Southern aristocracy, was a racial and socio-economic caste of Pan-American society that dominated 17th and 18th century agricultural markets. The Atlantic slave trade permitted planters access to inexpensive African slave labor for the planting and harvesting of crops such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar cane, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, hemp, rubber trees, and fruits. Planters were considered part of the American gentry.
In the Southern United States, planters maintained a distinct culture, which was characterized by its similarity to the manners and customs of the British nobility and gentry to whom many planters were related. The culture had an emphasis on chivalry, gentility, and hospitality. The culture of the Southern United States, with its landed gentry, was distinctly different from areas north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Appalachians. The northern and western areas were characterized by small landed property, worked by yeoman farmers without slave labor.
After the American Civil War (1861–1865), many in the social class saw their wealth greatly reduced, as the enslaved Africans were freed. After emancipation, many plantations were converted to sharecropping with African freedmen working as sharecroppers on the same land which they had worked as slaves before the war. During the Gilded Age, many plantations, no longer viable as agricultural operations, were purchased by wealthy northern industrialists as hunting retreats. Later some plantations became museums, often on the National Register of Historic Places.
Planters were prolific throughout the European colonies of North and South America and the West Indies. Members of the class include colonists Robert "King" Carter, William Byrd of Westover, many signers of the Declaration of Independence including Benjamin Harrison V, Thomas Nelson, Jr., George Wythe, Carter Braxton and Richard Henry Lee, Founding Fathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Valcour Aime, Sallie Ward, and the fictional Scarlett O'Hara from the film Gone with the Wind (1939)."
(Wikipedia)