A New Plantation World

Daniel J. Vivian analyzes the restoration of lowcountry South Carolina mansions in the first decades of the twentieth century to write a new chapter in the history of memory and reunion. Exploring the efforts of wealthy northerners who purchased dilapidated properties and restored them for use as hunting lodges, winter getaways, and leisure sites, Vivian demonstrates how these northerners helped preserve the white ideals of the Old South for future generations. Central to this process was the recasting of the word plantation. In the hands of northerners, plantations became sites of leisure as opposed to commodity production by enslaved persons. Presented in this light, the darkest legacies of the antebellum era were stripped away from the lowcountry. Just as northerners rehabilitated some old buildings, built new ones, while leaving others in a state of decay, they did the same with the era's history. The result, as Vivian demonstrates, was a recasting of the American South, particularly in the minds of northerners who visited, vacationed, and hunted there. Thus, the southern landscape presented a physical manifestation of the historiography of this period in which racial hierarchies were reinforced and the legacies of slavery ignored

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