A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans (review)

In 1844 Paul Cameron used some of his family's substantial wealth to purchase a plantation near Greensboro, Alabama. Cameron, whose family's plantation outside Durham was the largest in the North Carolina Piedmont, bought the Alabama property in order to participate in the rush for rich cotton-growing land in the Deep South. Cameron sent 114 slaves to live and work on the new plantation, but he remained in North Carolina, leaving day-to-day operations to an overseer.

Hoping to learn something of Cameron's slaves' experience migrating from North Carolina to Alabama, Sydney Nathans tracked down some of their descendants in the late 1970s. He discovered that Cameron had sold the 1,600-acre Alabama plantation to some of his former slaves in the 1870s and that their descendants still held it as "heir land," which Nathans defines as "land for all the heirs, to be held in common for all, to be divided among none" (p. 2). Since 1845 Cameron had hated the plantation, which had inconsistent soils, and he believed that he had been duped by the man who encouraged him to buy it. After the Civil War, the plantation suffered a series of especially poor cotton crops due to drought and army worm. Desperate to rid himself of the property and lacking white buyers, Cameron allowed his agent to sell parcels of land to African Americans, letting the purchasers pay him in cotton over several years. The buyers and their heirs called the land "Cameron Place," possibly out of gratitude to a man who allowed them to "homestead" (pp. 8, 135). In speaking with the buyers' descendants, Nathans found a rich trove of family lore, including tales of Paul Cameron's gift of gold to a favored slave, Paul Hargis, who may have used it to purchase his share of the property, and the suspected paternity of family patriarch Ned Forrest Hargress, born nine months after his enslaved mother was sent to the tent of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who stopped in the area with his troops in April 1865. However, A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland is not based solely on oral history. As luck would have it, the Cameron family left thorough plantation records and detailed letters, and Nathans has mined these as well.

A Mind to Stay is a pleasure to read. It unfolds like a story, full of interesting characters and illuminated with details pulled from the archives. The most fully drawn is Paul Cameron, who suffered from kidney stones and hemorrhoids exacerbated by long hours in the saddle and who shifted from a somewhat paternalistic management style to one focused solely on maximizing profits as he settled into the role of absentee planter. The archives provide less information about the slaves and freedpeople on Cameron's land, but interviews allow Nathans to sketch out the personalities and activities of subsequent generations of African Americans on Cameron Place. We learn about their involvement in civil rights, their efforts to use cooperative programs to keep black farmers on the land, and the importance of the land as a place that down-on-their-luck family members could return to. The book tells an unusual and fascinating story that is often overshadowed by the Great Migration: a story of African American families who owned and through great determination held on to southern farmland. It is a labor of love and the product of decades of relationship building and research.

Sydney Nathans focuses A Mind to Stay on the Cameron plantations and the people who owned and worked them. With such a narrow focus, it would not have worked to attempt a sweeping argument, and Nathans does not seek to provide much context. He rarely uses relevant historical literature to explore broader questions such as how most black farm owners came to own their land. There are many cases where the historiography would have...