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Introduction When the young Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes visited his college friend Guy M. Bryan on the Lower Brazos in the winter of 1848, he was impressed with what he saw. His lodgings at Peach Point, the plantation owned by Bryan’s stepfather , James F. Perry, were “delightfully situated in the edge of the timber, looking out upon a plain on the south extending five or eight miles to the Gulf.” The residents and neighbors he found to be “exceedingly agreeable, gay, and polished,” and in the weeks he spent there, Hayes embraced the ways of the local elite, hunting deer and panthers, flirting with belles, dancing until dawn, and playing chess. The food he found especially good and plentiful, one meal consisting of “seven or eight kinds of meat, sweet potatoes in two or three shapes, half a dozen kinds of preserves, and pastry in any quantity.” Of the region’s slaves, who made up a majority of the population, Hayes saw “nothing to change my Northern opinions.” Yet more than he was willing to admit, his experience seems to have disposed him favorably to the planters’ view of slavery. “We have seen none of ‘the horrors’ so often described,” he wrote to his mother, and he even suggested to her that the “Sambos” tried their masters more than the masters imposed on their slaves. Other than to note the isolation and the “wildness” of the country, Hayes sketched what he took to be a typical southern plantation.1 There was much, however, that escaped Hayes’s attention, for Peach Point was not quite a typical southern plantation. For one thing, Hayes apparently never noticed that at least two of the slaves at Peach Point, and hundreds more on the neighboring plantations, were African-born. At a time when perhaps 2 percent of the black population of the United States was African-born, between 15 and 30 percent of the blacks in Brazoria County, the site of Peach Point, had experienced enslavement and the Middle Passage.2 Hayes also missed the region’s German immigrant population. Although the center of the Brazos German population lay two counties upriver, there was a small enclave in the town of Brazoria, not far from Peach Point. In fact, Perry did business los br azos de dios 2 with a German merchant there and occasionally hired Germans to do work on his plantation, such as fixing his sugar mill. Lastly, though he visited less than a year after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Hayes had nothing to say about the plantation’s origins under Mexican sovereignty. Here, Hayes’s oversight is more understandable—Mexican rule was more than twelve years past, and its influence was now subtle. Still, on several occasions Perry employed a Mexican teamster to move produce between Peach Point and his stock farm a few miles away.3 This book is about a slave society, one that was in many ways “typical” of the antebellum southern United States but at the same time quite different. Historian Ira Berlin’s call, now more than a quarter century old, to pay greater attention to variations in “time and space” in the history of slavery has transformed the field. The tendency of historians to treat North American slavery as a monolithic institution transcending temporal and geographic variation has subsided in recent years, replaced with a far more nuanced and varied perspective. Virtually all would agree that the eighteenth-century Carolina Low Country was a world apart from Chesapeake, Louisiana, or New York and that antebellum Maryland was quite different from Florida or Mississippi.4 In keeping with this geographic and temporal sensitivity, the primary assumption of this book is that antebellum plantation society had a spatial dimension and that there is considerable value in examining slavery in the local context. Every place was not exactly like every other place, and different localities developed in different ways, at different rates, and in different political contexts. Rather than seeking out the typical, this book unapologetically emphasizes the unique and the exceptional. No doubt some will see this as an intellectually anarchic position, and to them I respond that the “typical” seldom exists and that all places and things are unique in some sense. Moreover, exploring the exceptional is valuable because it allows us to understand the limits of the norm, as well as to appreciate the immense variability of historical experience. Texas was the only slave-based plantation society to originate under Mexican sovereignty, a...

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