A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 by Daniel J. Vivian (review)

Daniel J. Vivian. A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

ISBN 978-1-108-41690-0
Hardback: 317 pages

Daniel J. Vivian's A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 is an anthropological investigation into the social, material, and cultural lives of wealthy northerners who bought southern antebellum plantations and converted them into country estates. The book is a study of an area confined to a 175 square mile swath in lowcountry South Carolina in the interwar period, within the cultural context of nostalgia for the Old South coupled with prevailing national trends in historic preservation. Vivian uses the material, environmental, and social transformation of plantations into estates as a lens by which to examine how Americans dealt with the material and social vestiges of slavery in the early twentieth century. The plantations were material artifacts of colonial and antebellum periods, but their northern owners cleansed them of remnants of slavery through the destruction of material relics of slavery-based agriculture as they converted them into leisure and sporting estates. However, the new sites became the loci of reproducing racial hierarchies, which emancipation had attempted to upend. In fact, the racial order of the antebellum plantations was replicated in a new social order in which former slaves constituted a vast pool of impoverished labor in the Jim Crow era. Thus, Vivian argues that the intersection of race and class was the fulcrum around which the transformation of the plantations into leisure estates took place.

The focus of the book is on seventy-six plantations lying between Georgetown, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, which aristocratic northerners acquired in the early years of the twentieth century. Sportsmen initially came to the South in the late nineteenth century for short periods of time to hunt. As women and children joined them, extended winter tourism became more popular and necessitated larger and more comfortable lodging. After 1910, "the second Yankee invasion," as it was known in the parlance of that period, began in earnest, and by 1925, northerners bought and consolidated huge tracts of land for seasonal residences and recreational venues. According to Vivian, there is a gap in scholarship on northerners' acquisition of southern plantations to establish country estates. He cites numerous memoirs, newspaper articles, books, and treatises written on individual plantations, but none of these accounts probe the correlation between the sociocultural and material realms in the makeover of the plantations into estates. Vivian posits that the northerners' estates on former plantations boosted the interwar national mythologization of the Old South through the omission of the inhumane treatment of thousands of former slaves who had been left in abject poverty in the aftermath of emancipation.

The northern newcomers altered the land use, architecture, landscape, and organization of the plantation structures in order to model their new southern estates on the American country houses of the North. In the process, they demolished former slave dwellings, rice fields, privies, barns, and other material relics of slavery. In doing so, they conformed to the prevailing national historic preservation paradigm, which John D. Rockefeller sponsored in Williamsburg, Virginia (1920s and 1930s) and Henry and Clara Ford in Greenfield Village, Michigan (1933). The preservation of these sites comprised selectively preserved and aesthetically pleasing historic architecture, which was further embellished with carefully maintained landscapes that prominent architects formulated. Thus, these sites were based on a romantic imagination of the past to recreate material worlds that could only be realized through an erasure of the unpleasant aspects of the past. In the interwar period, a national trend emerged in the popular media—film, literature, and advertising—that mythologized the South of the bygone era through descriptions such as "Moonlight and Magnolias" and "happy darkies." These romantic representations perpetuated the myth of the Old South as a golden age of aristocracy. The northerners actively contributed to this national trend of mythmaking through the conversion of plantations into recreational estates.

Vivian examines the histories of two significant plantations, Mulberry and...