Reconstructing Somerset Place: Slavery, Memory and Historical Consciousness
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RECONSTRUCTING SOMERSET PLACE: SLAVERY, MEMORY AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS by Alisa Y. Harrison Department of History Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William Chafe, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Thavolia Glymph, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ John Herd Thompson ___________________________ Susan Thorne ___________________________ Peter Wood Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2008 ABSTRACT RECONSTRUCTING SOMERSET PLACE: SLAVERY, MEMORY AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS by Alisa Y. Harrison Department of History Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William Chafe, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Thavolia Glymph, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ John Herd Thompson ___________________________ Susan Thorne ___________________________ Peter Wood An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2008 Copyright by Alisa Y. Harrison 2008 Abstract In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina’s Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site’s narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story—as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865—require careful historical analysis and critique. This dissertation considers Somerset’s history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans’ historical consciousness of slavery during their nation’s long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset’s gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural iv representation, situated within North Carolina’s developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect—the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth—and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery’s diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas. v Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………... iv List of figures……………………………………………………………………………. vii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….……viii Introduction: Slavery, Antebellum Plantations and Epistemology……………………… .1 Chapter One: Imagining the Lords of Lake Phelps: Reconstruction to 1939………..…24 Chapter Two: Developing a Land of “abundant life”: Rural Resettlement at Scuppernong Farms, 1935 to 1945………………………………………………….. 70 Chapter Three: “No longer anybody’s pride”: Redevelopment Begins, 1939 to 1960…………………………………………………………………………………144 Chapter Four: “History as tourist bait”: Inventing Somerset Place State Historic Site, 1960 to 1969……………………………………………………..………………….203 Chapter Five: Making a Bow to Minority History: Roots of Revision, 1970 to 1986…………………………………………………………………………….….. 266 Chapter Six: “We are not here to talk about slavery”: Heritage and Healing, 1986 to 2001…………………………………………………………………………………332 Epilogue: “Broomsticks and Orange Blossoms”……………………………………….415 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………….... 422 Bibliography of Primary Sources……………………………………………………….430 Bibliography of Secondary Sources…………………………………………………….440 Biography………………………………………………………………………………. 473 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Map of northeastern North Carolina ............................................................... 422 Figure 2: Rag doll ........................................................................................................... 423 Figure 3: Rag doll on bed................................................................................................ 424 Figure 4: Nurse’s room ................................................................................................... 425 Figure 5: Stocks .............................................................................................................. 426 Figure 6: Mansion and garden ........................................................................................ 427 Figure 7: Parlor ............................................................................................................... 427 Figure 8: Bedroom .......................................................................................................... 428 Figure 9: Dining room .................................................................................................... 428 Figure 10: Kitchen hearth ............................................................................................... 428 Figure 11: Stairwell......................................................................................................... 429 Figure 12: Mansion......................................................................................................... 429 vii Acknowledgments As an historian, I’m tempted to go back to the beginning to thank all of the people whose cumulative efforts over the last 35 years allowed me to produce this dissertation. But since that would result in acknowledgments longer than the text of the work itself, a few highlights will have to suffice. This project was completed thanks to doctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Graduate School and Department of History at Duke University. Additional support was provided by Duke’s Department of African and African American Studies, and a Guion Griffis Johnson Southern Studies Research Stipend from the North Caroliniana Society at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. I owe immeasurable gratitude to the archivists, librarians and public administrators who helped me navigate manuscript collections and secure access to crucial sources. In particular, I’d like to thank the archivists at the southeast branch of the National Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the North Carolina State Archives, especially Ron Vestal, Earl Ijames and David Chiswell; Elizabeth Dunn and Kelley Lawton at Duke University; Richard Knapp and James McPherson in North Carolina’s Historic Sites Section; Dorothy Spruill Redford and Karen Hayes at Somerset Place State Historic Site; and staff in Interlibrary Loans at the University of Victoria. I am also deeply grateful to all of the people who agreed to share viii their memories and insights in interviews for this project; this dissertation is far richer for their contributions. I wrote most of this dissertation away from North Carolina, from a different country on the opposite side of the continent. As such, I relied on thorough long-distance help from three research assistants who retrieved documents at the State Archives in Raleigh: Caitlin Donnelly, Matt Vernon and Lindsey Hinds-Brown. I would not have become an historian at all if not for the inspiration of several professors at the University of British Columbia, where I completed my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I am especially grateful to Paul Krause and Joy Dixon, who helped build my intellectual foundations, on whom I’ve modeled much of my own teaching and conduct with students, and who provided personal guidance at key points in time. I have been blessed with the opportunity to learn from a group of people at Duke who, all in very different ways, exemplify the best of what it means to be a scholar. I have learned something unique from each member of my dissertation committee and I feel incredibly lucky and proud to be able to call myself their student. I thank my co- supervisors, William Chafe and Thavolia Glymph, for their unwavering support and wise advice. Their confidence in my project and in my ability to see it through has been more valuable than words can express. I tried in this project to follow Professor Chafe’s suggestion to combine narrative and analysis. I am grateful to him for encouraging me to test out new ideas and methods of articulation and for creating an advising relationship ix where I was free to follow my curiosity and to take intellectual and professional risks. I could