Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter

Theodore Rosengarten deserves the thanks of all scholars of the Old South due to his work on "Tombee." Rosengarten opens the book with a long account of the life and odd career of Thomas B. Chaplin: a planter who never quite managed to live up to his inheritance. Chaplin should have been one of the leading planters of the South but he struggled as the years went on. Rosengarten offers light on the coming of the Civil War, slavery and plantation life. He also presents a fascinating account of how a planter dealt with the women in his life as well as his children. Chaplin had a strained relationship with his mother and even worse relations with his children. While we can sneer at Chaplin as inhuman for owning other human beings, we also can feel his pain as his first wife slowly dies and experience his joy as he finds love with her sister who becomes his second wife. It is a remarkable look at a way of life and its era-but also of the human heart. This is one of the most powerful works of biography I have ever come across.

A captivating account of antebellum life on a Sea Island cotton plantation. This is a genuine depiction of innocent people pressed into unremitting labor under the most onerous conditions right here in the United States of America! It's not "Gone With the Wind." If you believe the Civil War wasn't about slavery, read this! Tombee House still stands today. Just drive to the southern end of St. Helena Island and look seaward. Read the book, then go visit the house -- it's a haunting experience!

Tombee provides an amazingly immediate view of the life of a "typical" slaveholder and cotton plantation owner in the years leading up to the Civil War. The book is divided into two parts, Rosengarten's commentary on Chaplin's life, and Chaplin's diary. If you read only one part, read Rosengarten's. You can feel the heat and the haze of the steamy low country in summer as the slaves toil and Chaplin frets over his life and finances. And you watch the story unfold knowing the Civil War is about to stamp out slavery and a tragic way of life. This is great history!