Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839

Imagine that you are an educated, early-19th century British woman who marries a cultured, wealthy, charming Philadelphia bluestocking and lives a happy and refined life and has two daughters and THEN you learn that your husband's great wealth, passed down through generations, comes from several slave plantations in Georgia. Next imagine that your husband, who wants to check out his property, takes you and the girls to Georgia for a few months. The trip to Georgia is, to the modern eye, a nightmare, but I think it probably represents the travel experience of the time. This journey, however, is as nothing compared to the 4 or so months spent on the various Butler plantations. This book is not so much a journal, per se, as a collection of letters Fanny wrote to her friend Margaret, describing the land, customs, food, daily life, etc., of the plantations. But above all what Fanny reports on is slavery. She is horrified at what she sees all around her, and with the eye of a documentary filmmaker she records what she learns and experiences---the work in the fields, the diet, the family structure, the economics of the plantation system, the clothing, the illnesses and injuries, the medical care, the conversations, the rewards and punishments. Fanny can't escape from her belief that the Butler slaves are human beings, and the slaves, responding to the tiniest drop of Fanny's kindness in their great ocean of misery, quickly come to believe she is an angel sent by God. Fanny's letters fueled the flames of the antislavery movement both in the U.S. and in England. Articulate and highly descriptive, her writings were widely published. This is a can't-put-it-down book--------even if you think you know all about the evils of slavery. Highly, highly recommended.

I'm delighted at all the attention NOW being paid to Fanny Kemble. I was in an acting class at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1948 when the teacher asked one of us to write a nineteenth century play, since there were few to choose for our acting class. So I stumbled across her name in "All This and Heaven, Too" and wrote a drama about her life on the plantation and all the slavery conditions. Now, I'm 81, and books are piling up about her. I got my information from a FIRST EDITION of this "Journal" which my grandfather had acquired soon after it appeared, around the Civil War. It kept England from joining the Confederate side.

I came across Fanny Kemble during a chance visit to a Georgia plantation on the Altamaha River, near Butler Island, where Fanny wrote her journal. An acclaimed Shakespearean actress born into a theatrical family, she had been touring America with her father when she met Pierce Butler, a wealthy member of Philadelphia society with possessions in the South. He courted her with such persistence that she finally agreed to give up her career and marry him. (Needless to say, Philadelphia society did not smile upon the union.) After the birth of two daughters, she persuaded Pierce to take her and the children to Butler Island, where she learned firsthand about the source of the family's wealth: hundreds of slaves worked in the rice paddies on Butler Island and in the cotton fields on St. Simon's Island, where the prized long-fiber Sea Island cotton was grown. Fanny had been in contact with New England abolitionists and was well aware of the slave problem; but she was unprepared for the appalling conditions she found in the slave quarters, in the fields, and especially in the infirmary. She prevailed on her husband to mitigate the harsh rules imposed by the overseer, procured blankets for the infirmary and sewing material for the women; taught them to make clothes and take care of their babies; and even tried to teach some of them to read - which was, of course, frowned upon. She found that some of the slaves were skilled craftsmen and suggested that they should be paid for their work like any artisan. An accomplished horsewoman and energetic walker, she also learned to row a boat so she could explore, unchaperoned, the coastal waterways. Her unconventional, spirited life style drew reprimands from her husband, but earned her the respect and admiration of the slaves.The journal she kept on Butler Island gives a lively account of her daily routine. For those who imagine the lives of southern plantation owners along the lines of Hollywood movies, this book provides a healthy dose of reality. With an outsider's keen and critical eye, she chronicled her own involvement in a dark chapter of American history. She did not publish the journal until 1863, when she was divorced from Pierce and had returned to England. It came out just before the battle of Gettysburg and may have influenced public opinion in England which had been drifting toward favoring the South.Today, the Butler plantation no longer exists; but neighboring "Hofwyl" gives a visitor a fairly good impression of what plantation life may have been like before and after the Civil War.

Fanny Kemble Butler was a remarkable woman. In a time, circumstance, and place which precluded her following her life's dream, she settled down into marriage with Pierce Butler, who had adamantly and ardently pursued her hand. She left a very successful career as an actress and gave up, for a time and at her husband's request, her ambition and even her beliefs. She strove to make this marriage work and to "save her husband's soul," when she discovered, after the marriage, the actual source of her husband's family's income, the rice plantations that lay in Georgia. They had two children together before she finally persuaded him to allow her to visit his Georgia rice plantations, where hundreds of negro slaves labored to support the family's wealthy lifestyle in New England. Fanny's heartfelt pleas to free the negroes not only fell on her husband's deaf ears, but he eventually forbade her to even tell him of their plight, and even went so far as to forbid her to continue the practice of helping out in their infirmary. Still, the slaves of her husband's two plantations temporarily benefitted from her visit, which must have been like a ray of light in a very dark existence. The stories speak for themselves, and Fanny makes it her duty to record every one in the slaves' own voices. This book affected me deeply, especially when I read of Fanny's eventual unhappy divorce from her husband, whom she still loved, and her enforced separation from her children. Scholarly reading for every student of the nineteenth century, in the subjects of enslavement, the plight of married women, and general attitudes toward women and slavery by men in power and the common people.