Harmon, Max 2018 Critical Geography Thesis Title: In the Valley of the Giant: Plantation Geographies of the Lower Mississippi River Advisor: Nicholas Howe Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No In the Valley of the Giant: Plantation Geographies of the Lower Mississippi River by Max Harmon Professor Nicolas Howe, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Critical Geography WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 15th 2018 Harmon 2 Acknowledgements This thesis owes itself first and foremost to the support of my friends and family whose care for me and the world have made this project possible and meaningful. Thank you as well you to Professor Howe for helping me to formulate my major in Critical Geography, and for the many hours of advising and support. Thank you especially to Professor Howe for the last several months of dedicated advising on this project. Thank you to Professor Njoya for first suggesting the possibility of a contract major and for the continuing encouragement and invaluable feedback on this project. Thank you to Professor Hidalgo, whose class (and lending of books) in the spring of 2016 marked a turning point in my intellectual and personal development and whose perceptive comments helped clarify this project. Thank you to Professor Eqeiq for a crucially important conversation in developing thoughts for this thesis, and for generally pushing my ideas and forms of expression. Without Professor James Manigault-Bryant’s class on “The Plantation,” many of the ideas in this paper would not have cohered—thank you to JMB for his teaching and support. Although not a direct influence on this project, Professor Singham has had a profound impact on the ways I think about and engage the world. Thank you. Much of this work came out of a shared experience on the Mississippi River in the fall of 2016 with my dear friend Brad Geismar. This thesis would not have been possible without the countless hours of conversations, reading, and collaborative learning with Brad. Thank you to Marylee, Michael, and Paul Orr for their incredible generosity in sharing their insight and experience with Brad and I, and for their continuing and tireless work for the people of Louisiana. I was honored to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Beverly Wright in an incredibly powerful and informative interview that deeply impacted my lines of inquiry in this project. Thank you to Dr. Wright for taking the time to speak with me and for all the work you have done in supporting communities fighting environmental racism. But in addition to the positive contribution of friends, family, teachers, and mentors, this thesis also rests upon (as I intend to make clear) the ongoing structural violence that supports the position of my scholarship and institutions like Williams College. It is to this reality that I seek to make my work accountable. Harmon 3 Harmon 4 Introduction Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection: it is space not time that hides consequences from us. -John Berger, Ways of Seeing In 1858, Marie Adrien Persac and Benjamin Moore Norman created and published a map known as Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi River.1 The map follows the course of the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi to New Orleans, Louisiana. The map details over two hundred and fifty miles of river and hundreds of plantations flanking the banks. Destrehan, Fagot, Labranche, Marmillion—the map is a window into the rectangular grid of property ownership in 1858, a grid crystallizing the relationships between cotton and cane, slave and master, land and water. The map shows a river with clearly defined banks, plantations with hard borders, colors signifying whether the land is covered by cotton or cane. The space and time this map depicts is organized. Blue and red mean cotton, green and yellow mean sugar cane, this line is the river, that symbol is a church. The map claims to contain this landscape under the organizing principles at its disposal. Yet the map is bursting at its seams. There at the top, beneath the ink that marks a city, is the place where the indigenous Natchez massacred a French garrison in an effort to stop encroaching settlement. There, under the green of the sugar cane was the start of the largest slave rebellion in the United States, a transgression of the dark lines of plantation borders. It has been covered over, but the river flooded all along the western bank, land and water mixing in the muddy flow. Beneath the organizational grid of Norman’s chart, beneath the legally and cartographically codified property lines, are a series of unstable structures. Congealed within the socio-spatial organization of the plantation, so neatly and smoothly represented by this map, is an 1 Persac, Marie Adrien & Norman, Benjamin Moore. “Norman's chart of the lower Mississippi River,” J.H. Colton & Co 1858, Library of Congress: Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/78692178/ Harmon 5 ongoing history of dispossession and violence. Both beneath and within the ink of Norman’s chart are formative and interlocking systems of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalist accumulation. By tracking the spatiality of the antebellum plantation, as its organizing principles continue to ripple across time and space, a shaken, disrupted, and altogether unstable landscape begins to emerge. The Mississippi River flows from North to South—from the headwaters of Lake Itasca to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Its flow created the landmass of its southern stretch: sediment transfer that built the delta of landmasses now called Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.2 The incredibly nutrient rich soils of this lower section of river, called the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, were the ecological underpinning of the particular plantation geography captured in Norman’s chart. While plantations in what would become the United States existed from Virginia to South Carolina to Texas, the stretch along the lower Mississippi River ultimately concentrated a density of large estates and enslaved people greater than any other region of the antebellum south.3 (fig. 1)4 2 Cox, Randel Tom; “A Geologiests Perspective on the Mississippi Delta,” in Defining the Delta ed. Janelle Collins, University of Arkansas Press 2015, pg 17 3 See fig. 1 and fig. 2 from Hilliard, Sam Bowers, Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture, Louisiana State University Press, 1984 4 Hilliard, Sam Bowers. Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture. Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pg. 36 Harmon 6 (fig. 2)5 In the Mississippi Alluvial Valley in the 19th century, the southern flow of the river brought slaves instead of sediment. Northern movement along the river became associated with the movement of commodities, especially cotton to feed Northern industry. One axis of the plantation and its legacy is North/South: water, commodities, capital, and enslaved people moved up and down the river, connecting distant locations in a material chain. The mere directionality of movement on the Mississippi carried with it implicit relations of power and violence, such that southern transit on the Mississippi for a slave, "the threat of being 'sold down the river,' was seen as tantamount to a death sentence.”6 On the plantations detailed by Norman’s chart, the river also provided the potential for northern movement for slaves, who escaped slavery “in numbers that dismayed their masters. The owner of one escaped slave declared that 5 ibid, 43. 6 Sandlin, Lee. Wicked River: the Mississippi When it Last Ran Wild. Vintage, 2010. Pg. 121. Harmon 7 slaves in the Mississippi Valley were ‘held by the most uncertain tenure by reason of the facilities held out’ for escape by steamboats.”7 While the North/South axis of the Mississippi includes chattel slavery and commodity flow as central features of the plantation geography, the Mississippi River also became a primary landmark across which the East/West axis of US settler colonialism pressed in the 19th century. The Mississippi that flows through the orderly map of property ownership contains the power relations of chattel slavery and settler colonialism within its waters. By looking at the plantations along the Mississippi River, the East/West geography of displacement of the Choctaw, Natchez, Tunica, Chitimacha, Houma, Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw becomes central to understanding the plantation. Prioritizing the East/West axis of settler colonialism clearly marks the violent imposition of the settler state and its institutions as the “site of originary violence,” and reduces the potential for a historical reading of a North/South axis that glorifies the North as a zone of liberation in contrast to the South.8 A claim for indigenous territorial sovereignty cannot be integrated into the historical North/South narrative of racial progress by a liberal democratic state that is always already a settler state. As Jodi Byrd writes, The tensions between…North/South, and East/West are instructive here because they are, ultimately, U.S. national geographies demarcated by similar elisions and competing cacophonies of race, colonialism, and imperialism that enjamb settlers, arrivants and natives into a competition for hegemonic signification.9 With this in mind, it is crucial that any engagement with the geography of the antebellum plantation must highlight both indigenous dispossession and genocide and African enslavement as constitutive of the landscape, or risk forcing “arrivants and natives into a competition for 7 Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams. Harvard University Press, 2013. Pg. 7 8 Byrd, Jodi . The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. U of Minnesota Press, 2011. pg. 12 9 Byrd, 12. Harmon 8 hegemonic signification” within the structure of my argument.10 The Mississippi not only contains both North/South and East/West histories of chattel slavery and Indian Removal, but also more contemporary links between sites of anti-black and anti-indigenous violence.