Plantation slavery existed throughout the Americas in the early nineteenth century. Extensive plantations worked by large numbers of slaves existed in the West Indies and South America. In the U.S. South, however, the volatile cotton market and a scarcity of fertile land kept most plantations relatively small before 1830. But over the next two decades, territorial expansion and the profits from cotton, rice, and sugar fueled a period of conspicuous consumption. Successful southern planters now built grand houses and purchased a variety of luxury goods.

As plantations grew, especially in states like South Carolina and Mississippi, where slaves outnumbered whites, a wealthy aristocracy sought to ensure productivity by employing harsh methods of discipline. Although James Henry Hammond imagined himself a progressive master, he used the whip liberally, hoping thereby to ensure that his estate generated sufficient profits to support a lavish lifestyle.

Increased attention to comfort and luxury helped make the heavy workload of plantation mistresses tolerable. Mistresses were expected to manage their own families and the domestic slaves as well as the feeding, clothing, and medical care of the entire labor force. They were also expected to organize social events, host relatives and friends for extended stays, and sometimes direct the plantation in their husband’s absence.

Still, plantation mistresses were relieved of the most arduous labor by enslaved women, who cooked, cleaned, and washed for the family, cared for the children, and even nursed the babies. Wealthy white women benefited from the best education, the greatest access to music and literature, and the finest clothes and furnishings. Yet the pedestal on which plantation mistresses stood was shaky, built on a patriarchal system in which husbands and fathers held substantial power. For example, most wives tried to ignore the sexual relations that husbands initiated with female slaves. Catherine Hammond did not. She moved to Charleston with her two youngest daughters when she discovered James’s sexual abuse of an enslaved mother and daughter. Others, however, took out their anger and frustration on slave women already victimized by their husbands. Moreover, some mistresses owned slaves themselves, gave them as gifts or bequests to family members and friends, and traded them on the open market.

Not all slaveholders were wealthy planters like the Hammonds, with fifty or more slaves and extensive landholdings. Far more planters in the 1830s and 1840s owned between twenty and fifty slaves, and an even larger number of farmers owned just three to six slaves. These small planters and farmers could not afford to emulate the lives of the largest slave owners. Still, as Hammond wrote a friend in 1847, “The planters here are essentially what the nobility are in other countries. They stand at the head of society & politics.”