Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940 ed. by Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian

Abstract

Reviewed by: Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940ed. by Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian Tycho de Boer Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940. Edited by Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian. New Studies in Southern History. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. viii, 214. $85.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-9578-9.) Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940is a collection of essays that gives greater prominence to the creation, operation, and function of "sporting plantations"—southern estates purchased by wealthy northerners during the early twentieth century and transformed from agricultural plantations into hunting reserves and luxurious winter abodes. Editors Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian argue that these transformed plantations, concentrated in the South Carolina Lowcountry and Florida's Red Hills region, "represented a greater innovation than [is] generally recognized" (p. 3). Historians have acknowledged the purchase of southern plantations as a curious side note to large-scale northern investment in the postbellum South's economy. But scholars have paid scant attention to how the creation of sporting plantations imposed a sportsman's ethic, with its attendant game laws, on southern hunting culture; brought modern architectural and landscaping styles to old plantations; and instilled a romantic vision of antebellum plantation life on the modernizing New South. Many of the collection's essays suggest that the transformation of large-scale farms into even larger-scale hunting plantations—financier Bernard M. Baruch, for example, "amassed a 14,500-acre estate"—really constituted the making of a new Old South (p. 8). In fact, Drew Swanson's essay, a bit of an outlier as it focuses on the preservation of Wormsloe plantation as a historic site in the Georgia Low-country, explicitly argues, as the title indicates, that "tending the new Old South" entailed the cultivation of a "plantation image" and the creation of [End Page 725]elaborate botanical gardens as a tourist attraction (p. 83). Daniel Vivian's "'Plantation Life': Varieties of Experience on the Remade Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry" similarly shows how northern elites who were engaged in the creation of sporting plantations imagined and thus partly invented what southern "plantation life" had been and therefore ought to be, changing sites of agricultural production into sites of upper-class leisure. As Vivian remarks, "Elegant architecture, elaborate landscaping, and plentiful labor signified their role as venues for socializing, entertaining, recreation, and ritualized performances" (p. 21). To be sure, as Matthew A. Lockhart indicates, several northern plantation owners, with the help of skilled black labor, continued to grow rice on their Lowcountry estates, but this cultivation served the purpose of attracting ducks and other waterfowl for hunting—the exact opposite of the endless struggle to keep waterfowl and bobolinks from eating the rice crop during antebellum days. In addition, Jennifer Betsworth's contribution, "Reviving and Restoring Southern Ruins: Reshaping Plantation Architecture and Landscapes in Georgetown County, South Carolina," shows how northern investment in southern estates involved the employment of northern architecture and landscaping firms, which tended to build additions to existing homes, replace burned-down structures with entirely new buildings, and lay out plantation landscapes that were grander and more majestic than what had existed during the antebellum era. As such, northern elites helped invent and develop a quasi-aristocratic way of life, as well as sites on which to enact it, that have since been read back into the southern past. What is less clear from this collection is whether northern elites helped shape race relations in the postwar South or merely affirmed the existing racial order by assuming a paternalist stance toward the black southerners they employed, which may have helped shape a more benevolent memory of slavery. Two of the essays—Hayden R. Smith's "Knowledge of the Hunt: African American Guides in the South Carolina Lowcountry at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" and Robin Bauer Kilgo's "Life and Labor on the...