Slavery, Space, and Social Control on Plantations

Abstract

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the public history presented at American and Caribbean plantations has been the subject of growing scholarly critique (e.g., Carter 2016; Eichstedt and Small 2002; Modlin and Arnold 2008; Walcott-Wilson 2020). Geographers, linguists, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have decried the continuing tendency of many plantation museum tours to sanitize, minimize, or even erase slavery. The daily labor, suffering, and terror of past enslaved Black residents is masked when tours focus on the beauty of formal gardens, stately houses, and orderly landscapes. Indeed, the racial violence that was latent in such estates’ picturesque designs can easily remain obscured in the present, allowing plantations to present as beautiful spaces untethered to their painful histories. Certainly, the beauty and “orderliness” of plantations in the U.S. and the Caribbean was created intentionally by their owners. Architectural historian Dell Upton (1984) has argued that plantations were far from singular unified spaces; rather, they encompassed both white and Black landscapes in the same space, created for and experienced by different audiences. For one, plantation landscapes were tools of communication by which white owners might signal social standing (aspirational or real) to white neighbors. At the same time, as contributions to this special issue demonstrate, plantations were purposefully spatially organized to better enable the control and domination of enslaved Black residents. For decades, archaeologists have analyzed how plantation spatial organization fostered the social control of enslaved people. In previous studies, the idea of the panopticon as popularized by Michel Foucault (1977) has been particularly emphasized (e.g., Bates 2015; Delle 2011; Singleton 2001). A panopticon is a place from which total surveillance of the surrounding area is possible; crucially, the panopticon at the same time obscures the presence or absence of an observer from those who may be observed. Foucault explored this concept most extensively in his thinking about prisons and how prisoners’ uncertainty about whether they were being observed at any one time from, say, a guard tower, might lead them to monitor their behavior as if they were being watched even when, in actuality, the tower might be empty. Archaeologists working at plantations have applied the idea of a panopticon to understand how an owner’s house or an overseer’s residence could act as an actual vantage point to surveil enslaved people while also suggesting the possibility of surveillance at all times, thus causing enslaved people to monitor themselves and participate in their own subjugation even when in reality they were unwatched by overseers or enslavers. This collection builds on the insights of these previous studies with methodological and theoretical innovations that move us toward a more complete understanding of social control as spatially expressed and enacted on plantations. The latent violence of plantation landscapes is explored in microcosm at Maryland’s L’Hermitage Plantation by Megan Bailey. The plantation’s owners, the Vincendières, arrived in Maryland in the 1790s from Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti). The Vincendières’ particular cruelty and vindictiveness is recorded historically through multiple legal cases brought against them by their enslaved workers for mistreatment as well as