Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation

Description

Fanny Kemble, a twenty-nine-year-old English actress, and her husband, the aristocratic, arrogant Pierce Butler of Philadelphia, spent the winter of 1838-39 on the Georgia coast, where Butler owned three slave plantations with more than seven hundred slaves. Now the genteel, English-born Fanny found herself transported to a shocking frontier land of semitropical rain forests, bugs, snakes, shacks, cotton and rice plantations and slavery. Though Fanny’s journal reflects her strong antislavery sentiments, it is probably as accurate an account as can be found of life on large plantations–one face of a many-faceted institution.