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Anna - The Letters of a St. Simons Island Plantation Mistress, 1817-1859 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,615
Discovery Miles 16 150
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Anna - The Letters of a St. Simons Island Plantation Mistress, 1817-1859 (Hardcover)
Series: Southern Voices from the Past: Women's Letters, Diaries & Writings
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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A firsthand account of a woman's life on a coastal Georgia
plantation; As the wife of a frequently absent slaveholder and
public figure, Anna Matilda Page King (1798-1859) was the de facto
head of their Sea Island plantation. This volume collects more than
150 letters to her husband, children, parents, and others.
Conveying the substance of everyday life as they chronicle King's
ongoing struggles to put food on the table, nurse her ""family
black and white,"" and keep faith with a disappointing husband, the
letters offer an absorbing firsthand account of antebellum coastal
Georgia life. Anna Matilda Page was reared with the expectation
that she would marry a planter, have children, and tend to her
family's domestic affairs. Untypically, she was also schooled by
her father in all aspects of plantation management, from seed
cultivation to building construction. That grounding would serve
her well. By 1842 her husband's properties were seized, owing to
debts amassed from crop failures, economic downturns, and extensive
investments in land, enslaved workers, and the development of the
nearby port town of Brunswick. Anna and her family were sustained,
however, by Retreat, the St. Simons Island property left to her in
trust by her father. With the labor of fifty bondpeople and ""their
increase"" she was to strive, with little aid from her husband, to
keep the plantation solvent. A valuable record of King's many
roles, from accountant to mother, from doctor to horticulturist,
the letters also reveal much about her relationship with, and
attitudes toward, her enslaved workers. Historians have yet to
fully understand the lives of plantation mistresses left on their
own by husbands pursuing political and other professional careers.
Anna Matilda Page King's letters give us insight into one such
woman who reluctantly entered, but nonetheless excelled in, the
male domains of business and agriculture.
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