Closer to Freedom

Content Warning: The source material discusses—often in graphic detail—slavery, white supremacy, killing, sexual assault and rape, torture, surveillance, and other forms of violence. Source materials also include racist and sexist language.

The subtitle of Closer to Freedom, “Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South,” defines the historical and geographical context of the book.

“South,” in the context of Stephanie M. H. Camp’s work, refers to the geographical and cultural space of the southern United States, particularly in the early and antebellum 19th century, roughly represented by the Confederacy during the Civil War.

“Plantation” is used in many geographical contexts, however, and is not specific to the South. Unlike the agricultural production on “farms,” which grow and harvest food to be eaten by humans or animals, plantations revolve around monocultures of plants that are not eaten but instead consumed on the market. In the American South, tobacco, cotton, hemp, and indigo were some of these “cash crops” grown on plantations.

By this purely agricultural definition, many Northern agricultural complexes in the 19th century could be considered plantations. By 1800, however, cash crop complexes above the Mason-Dixon line were generally called farms, while those below that line (the Confederacy) were referred to as plantations. The significant distinction between the two became based not on the kind of crops being grown but the kind of labor being used: Farms relied on free labor, and plantations on enslaved labor.

The Plantation South, then, refers to an agricultural system that revolved around cash crops, relied on enslaved labor, and developed from the late 1600s up until the Civil War. The Plantation South was expanded out from the original southern colonies on the East coast (the “Old South” of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) westward with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, with the Confederacy stretching as far west as Louisiana and Texas.

The Plantation South was a vast area that extended well beyond the plantation complex itself, yet current references to the grand 18th- and 19th-century plantation houses that were occupied by enslavers and their families as simply “plantations” function as a synecdoche, with the “big house” standing in for and eliding the much larger reality that was the full Southern plantation complex. This elision erases the very structures and spaces in which enslaved people lived and worked and upon which the white people who lived in the plantation house depended.

The discipline of slavery studies seeks to challenge the geographical and historical elision of these ironically named “dependencies.” Camp is interested in the specific geography of control that was developed in the Plantation South and the “rival geography” of enslaved people that developed in relation to—and sometimes in resistance to—this geography of control.

The Plantation South, then, was a space in which both white and Black people lived, a space that was “shared” yet occupied very differently. The full geography and history of the Plantation South includes the entire plantation complex as well as the space beyond that complex, where Black mobility continued to be restricted. The space in its entirety must be acknowledged so that enslaved rival geographies can be considered.