Masters and Mistresses in the Big House

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Figure 13.2 A Southern Plantation Slavery determined how masters laid out their plantations and where they situated their big houses and slave quarters. This model of the Hermitage, the mansion built in 1830 for Henry McAlpin, a Georgia rice planter, shows the overseer’s house poised halfway between the owner’s mansion and the slave huts.
Data source: Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery by John Michael Vlach. Copyright © 1993 by the University of North Carolina Press. Original illustration property of the Historic American Buildings Survey, a division of the National Park Service.

Nowhere was the contrast between northern and southern life more vivid than on the plantations of the South. A plantation typically included a “big house,” where the plantation owner and his family lived, and a slave quarter. Near the big house were the kitchen, storehouse, smokehouse (for curing and preserving meat), and hen coop. More distant were the barns, toolsheds, artisans’ workshops, and overseer’s house. Large plantations sometimes had an infirmary and a chapel for slaves. Depending on the crop, there was also a tobacco shed, a rice mill, a sugar refinery, or a cotton gin house. Lavish or plain, plantations everywhere had an underlying similarity (Figure 13.2).

The plantation was the home of masters, mistresses, and slaves. A hierarchy of rigid roles and duties governed their relationships. Presiding was the master, who by law ruled his wife, children, and slaves as dependents under his dominion and protection.