Commemorating Hidden Landscapes of Slavery linked by Enslaved Africans and their American Descendants from the Butler Plantations in Georgia

This dissertation project is simultaneously about people and place---enslaved Africans and their American descendants, and the American places they inhabited. My focus is three currently silent, hidden or erased landscapes of slavery---two no-longer extant antebellum era plantations in Georgia that were owned by the Butler family of South Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and a former racecourse in Savannah that was the venue, in 1859, for a large sale of four hundred and twenty-nine Butler enslaved; the largest single slave sale recorded in American history. The main questions were:;1) Is it possible to reify places that have been significantly changed, and which have few vestiges of their past? and,;2) Is it possible to recreate some of the hidden narratives of the former enslaved people who left little or no written records?;This dissertation argues that landscapes are archives that can be "read;" that all places are an accumulation--a layering of natural and human deposits, constructions and concomitant erasures; which understanding allows that landscape can be deciphered by literally and figuratively peeling back its stratums.;Using an interdisciplinary methodology and reviewing pertinent African American history, literature, and culture, in relation to these hidden landscapes and people of slavery, the dissertation successfully recreates the spatial layouts of, and reimages, these places, and proffers them a s sites of commemoration for the former enslaved who lived, worked and died (or were sold from) there. The project also revealed the genealogy of some of the enslaved Butlers, and locates their ancestral home among the Akan of West Africa. Methodologies employed included archival research, focused on locating and analyzing maps, deeds, wills, letters, and pertinent plantation documents; and ethnographic research which included interrogating landscapes---interpreting and creating maps; and interviewing descendants of former Butler slaves. The results of this project provide a guide for the unearthing of similar hidden landscapes and people of slavery, and fills a gap in the historiography that is trying to find the African origins of formerly enslaved Africans, as well as how to interpret former plantation landscapes, many of which, currently have no traces of, especially, their slave settlements.