The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation by Lucy Maddox

Abstract

Reviewed by: The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation by Lucy Maddox Whitney Nell Stewart (bio) The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation. By Lucy Maddox. ( Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. 244. Cloth, $54.95.) Scholarly consensus of what defines a plantation has often focused on the estate's number of laborers or the type of crop they harvested, yet we know that these sites were about far more than agriculture. They were workplaces, but also homeplaces. They were shaped by the individuals who lived there and by the relationships, both imposed and chosen, those individuals formed. And they were structured by a violent, oppressive system that denied so much to Black southerners for the benefit of white enslavers. What makes plantations fascinating, then, is that they can reveal to us big stories of deeply ingrained structural inequality and small stories of personal experience. In The People of Rose Hill, Lucy Maddox attempts the difficult task of telling both the macro and micro of plantation life in the U.S. South, giving us an engaging deep dive into a single estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Maddox provides a history of Rose Hill and, with the plantation mistress's diaries as her primary account, extracts an impressive amount of information about dozens of plantation residents, their work, and their relationships. The narrative is, for the most part, chronologically structured and focused on the first half of the nineteenth century. Maddox reveals how, in this transformative time, a Maryland plantation could embody the simultaneous stability of the plantation model and its capacity to quickly change, emphasizing for the reader just how contingent, unexpected, yet drearily repetitive life could be on an antebellum plantation. Long before the sectional crisis came to full civil war, most Maryland enslavers recognized that slavery was on the decline in their state. However, in the particular area where Rose Hill sat—the Eastern Shore—planters such as Rose Hill owner Thomas Forman refused to believe it. Historians Ira Berlin and Barbara Jeanne Fields have noted that peculiar stubbornness among Eastern Shore planters before; yet Maddox's single plantation [End Page 119] focus allows her to dig deeper into the particularities that produced a different kind of Maryland enslaver and plantation. The tobacco industry had collapsed in the Chesapeake by the late eighteenth century, eventually leading to the rampant selling or emancipating of enslaved Marylanders throughout the state in the nineteenth century. Yet Rose Hill was relatively stable economically, maintaining its enslaved population of roughly thirty to forty throughout the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Rose Hill had adjusted, focusing on sustainable agriculture, selling such household products as butter, and reaping profits from Forman's other properties in Delaware. Rose Hill is not necessarily representative of a southern plantation or even of a Maryland plantation. But its history reiterates the flexibility and longevity of slavery and capitalism even in a time and place in which many believed the institution was floundering. Maddox is not only interested in the enslaving, plantation-owning Forman family, however. She weaves together stories of Black and white folks, enslaving and enslaved people, hired hands and wealthy visitors to reveal the array of experiences at Rose Hill. The short biographical vignettes of Rose Hill's enslaved residents found throughout the book are especially key in decentering enslavers and showing diversity within the shared experience of plantation slavery. At the heart of The People of Rose Hill is Maddox's investigation of the complicated, difficult, and often destructive relationships between the various individuals and groups that made up the plantation. For instance, the analysis of Thomas and Martha Forman's relationship is balanced and persuasive, painstakingly comparing two different versions of Martha's diary to illuminate the tension between a husband and wife's ideals of marriage, manhood, and womanhood on a southern plantation. Indeed, Maddox's work in recovering these contemporaneous diaries, both written by Martha but one with the editorial oversight of Thomas, is an important reminder of why careful archival research is so necessary. Maddox is especially clear about what her main source—Martha...