The Women's Fight: A Coda

The Japonicas, Banksia, Lamarque, and Cherokee roses bloomed as usual in the late spring of 1861 alongside wild white lilies in their first glory, and the beautiful but possessive wisteria. Soon the cotton blooms would make their first appearance, and if, like Caroline Porcher, one stood far enough away from the labor and sweat that brought them forth, it was possible to appreciate the beauty of the fruit of the hibiscus plant. In the time after the Civil War, Porcher's husband recalled how much she had admired "the beauty of the cotton field" and enjoyed "the white blooms on the first day that turned red the next before falling off."¹ From their perch as members of South Carolina's slaveholding and ruling class and with the screening distance of power and privilege, Caroline and Frederick A. Porcher had the luxury of contemplating cotton blossoms and cotton fields, like Japonica roses, as things of beauty. Northerners who visited the South penned similar musings. To Thomas W. Knox, a journalist with the New York Herald, "a well-cultivated cotton-field" was a thing "of singular beauty." And from "a distance," he wrote, the cotton boll was as beautiful as "a fully bloomed water-lily," until at last "they have burst open and scattered their rich contents to the ripening winds."²

The beauty that slaveholders and Northerners alike saw in cotton blooms was like the "heavy sweetness of oleander and hyacinth in the air" that Walter Johnson likens to the "agony of the world recomposed into magnificent sensory tribute." It was the pleasure taken "from a distance," "the direct experience of mastery—what it felt like," its "empirical proof, its exemplification," that masked the violence and racial slavery on which it depended.³

The "sensory tribute" endures and continues its work of masking. It is the lure and allure of the plantation heritage business, where gardens and restored plantation houses compete to attract tourists, masking the forced labor of enslaved people and violence at the heart of their making and endurance. The plantation landscape is still celebrated at places like Magnolia Gardens in South Carolina, the oldest public garden in the United States. Its website describes an Eden-like place where "humanity and nature are in harmony."⁴ It invites visitors to come for a river ride and "slip back in time as your boat glides through Magnolia's old flooded rice field along the Ashley River," and transports one back "to the age of rice growing and river-going." It is a place where "alligators still slip silently across canals as egrets wade along shore, stalking fish or frogs," where "the rice is gone, but the history is still alive."⁵ Absent in this evocation of a paradise lost and reborn is any indication that Magnolia Plantation is product of the labor of enslaved people. As Scott Reynolds Nelson writes in this forum, there remains "too much of the old plantation still standing," perfumed by gardens and unstained by its history of human bondage. This is an outcome guided not by the facts of history but by still unreconstructed dreams.

Though not fully discernable at the time, South Carolina's secession from the Union in December 1860 marked a signal moment in, as Nelson writes, "the unraveling" of slavery. The plantation was a key site of the unraveling as the Civil War exposed to wider view enslaved people's resistance to slavery, their rejection of cotton fields, "big houses," and plantation gardens as spaces of beauty and desire rather than militarized and policed sites of labor. By war's end, the insurgency ignited by secession had been forced to reckon with the insurgency of the enslaved, backed, sometimes unwittingly, by the power of the US Army and Navy. The hundreds of thousands of enslaved women who risked everything for freedom played a critical role in turning, in the words of Scott, "secession into revolution." That revolution included an assault on slaveholders' power over a landscape designed to express their mastery and suppress the agony beneath.

Black women's refusal of this landscape and what Saidiya Hartman terms...