Plantation

By Sophie Trist

General Context

The Oxford English dictionary defines a plantation as "an estate on which cash crops are cultivated by resident labor." LSU history professor John Bardes discusses how revolutions in cotton and sugar processing in the 1790's made plantation slavery so profitable that Mississippi and Louisiana became the wealthiest states in the nation per capita. The resulting demand for labor meant that when the Civil War broke out in 1860, there were over 331,000 enslaved people in Louisiana. The plantation system allowed wealthy planters to consolidate land and power by employing cutting-edge technology to agricultural production on a large scale.

Enslaved plantation workers typically lived in rows of two-room wooden cabins called quarters, while the owner lived in a luxurious mansion known colloquially as "the big house." While most plantation slaves were field hands, carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, and other craftspeople ensured that each estate was as productive and self-sufficient as possible. For most enslaved workers, the plantation and its surroundings represented their entire world.

Connection to Novel

After the Civil War, the plantation system rebranded. Most wealthy landowners rented small plots to black families they had once enslaved. These tenants, or sharecroppers as they became known, worked the land in exchange for a small share of the profits. Historian Roger Shugg argues that because these sharecroppers were often indebted to and completely dependent on their landlords, white planters retained their social, political, and economic power.

Ernest Gaines came from a sharecropping family and was raised in the former slave quarters on River Lake Plantation. Pichot's Plantation in A Lesson Before Dying is a fictionalized version of the community in which he grew up. For its black residents, the entire world—work, church, school—still revolves around the plantation, just as it did during slavery. When Grant Wiggins brings Vivian onto the plantation to meet his aunt, he tells her that his people have worked these fields since slavery and points out the graves of his ancestors, emphasizing the endurance of this quasi-feudal system. Long after Reconstruction, the plantation remained a locus for white supremacy and black subjugation.