A regency of women: Female plantation management in the Old South

"A Regency of Women: Female Plantation Management in the Old South" examines slaveholding wives who managed their families' plantations in the absence of their husbands. Guiding this inquiry is an analysis of the life and administration of Ann Barnes Archer and the building of the Archers' Mississippi empire in slaves and cotton. Ann and Richard Thompson Archer, who were married in 1834, not only raised ten children, but also owned or managed at least eight plantations and enslaved hundreds of African Americans. Administering an enterprise of this magnitude was an enormous challenge that the most affluent and enterprising planter families faced. Many responded in the same fashion as the Archers: Richard took care of distant business interests while Ann managed their local affairs in his absence. Plantation management profoundly shaped Ann's thoughts, feelings, actions, and relationships and frequently demanded her first consideration, as well as the close attention of those who were affected by her decisions. Therefore in this dissertation, as in Ann's life, business considerations take priority over personal matters. The study commences by looking at the socioeconomic circumstances that created a need for female managers in the antebellum Deep South. Chapter Two explores the relationship between female managers and overseers in the context of the nineteenth-century managerial revolution and in light of the period's gender prescriptions. Chapter Three examines how slavery functioned under the managerial strategy and slaveholding ideology of maternalism. Chapter Four explores the personal ramifications of female plantation management for husbands and wives. This format signals a new analytical focus in the study of planters' wives and plantation slavery. To fully understand the lives and significance of slaveholding women, one must look beyond the planter's domicile and the domestic work that took place therein and examine the surrounding fields where slaves and overseers carried out the business of large-scale planting. Similarly, to completely comprehend how plantation slavery operated as a social and commercial institution one must look beyond the fields and the cotton market and into the planter's home, for administrative orders often came from the white woman who sat inside.