Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss Robert K. Nelson Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans. Edited by Laura Kilcer VanHuss. Reading the American Landscape. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. [x], 243. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7479-1.) In a recent interview with Fast Company (August 4, 2020), celebrity Ryan Reynolds offered an apology for holding his wedding at a plantation. "What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest," he explained. "What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy." The seven essays in Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans probe the lingering disconnect between the popular imagery of grand plantation estates and the material realities of agroindustrial labor camps of enslaved people. The collection uses something more historically germane than a Ryan Reynolds interview as its framing device: Marie Adrien Persac's 1858 Norman's Chart of the Lower Mississippi River. Persac's map not only delimits the volume's geographic focus but also exemplifies the ongoing work of white elites before and after emancipation to project an image of social order and beauty that ignored or denied the harsh realities of enslavement. The lead essay, Laura Ewen Blokker's "Construction and Construct: Architecture of the Louisiana Plantation," frames these issues admirably. Blokker argues that as sugar production came to dominate the lower Mississippi River Valley in the [End Page 386] nineteenth century, the "organic spatial relationships" of earlier Creole plantation architecture were replaced by "rigid geometries" laid out to optimize commodity production (p. 22). These new architectural patterns distanced the domestic world of enslavers from the slave cabins and sugarhouses, a distancing that for two centuries was utilized to focus attention on aristocratic leisure and away from the enslaved labor that sustained it. Christopher D. E. Willoughby's excellent essay, "Plantations as Landscapes of Medicine," analyzes how antebellum racial science was used to project an image of the Deep South as healthy and its hot, humid climate as ideally suited for Africans' supposed biology. The reality he catalogs could not have been more at odds with this racial imaginary. Adjacent wetlands, forests, and global trade routes brought diseases from near and far—cholera, yellow fever, malaria. Sugar and cotton production regularly resulted in industrial accidents that literally cost the lives and limbs of the enslaved; unceasing reproduction resulted in gynecological ailments. Another strong essay, Christopher Morris's "The Rise and Fall of Uncle Sam Plantation," puts the lie to the fecundity of the plantation landscape. Backbreaking labor by the enslaved resulted in impressive feats of water control that transformed forests and swamps into sugarcane fields. But this work exacted a devastating environmental toll that deprived the land of fertilizing silt, exposed the soil to erosion, and made plantations vulnerable to destructive flooding. The collection includes two essays focused on politics: one by Charles D. Chamberlain III on the maneuvering of the Whig Creole plantation elite, the other by William Horne analyzing how both freedpeople and their former enslavers "weaponized" the plantation landscape as they vied with one another for political power during Reconstruction (p. 131). Jochen Wierich's essay focuses on how artistic representations of plantations of the lower Mississippi Valley changed dramatically between emancipation and the Depression. An essay by Suzanne Turner reads the gardens of both enslavers and the enslaved as expressions of their respective cultural identities and heritage. The introduction to the volume says that it aims to make "material normally reserved for academic discussions accessible to the general reader" (p. 9). It might be too much to hope that this collection will find much readership beyond the academy. But it certainly will be of interest and value to scholars of Louisiana, slavery, and landscape architecture. And if it ends up being picked up in a plantation gift shop by an occasional layperson, that is all to the good. Robert K. Nelson University of Richmond Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association