Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter - Softcover

Rosengarten, Theodore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688054129 ISBN 13: 9780688054120

Publisher: Morrow, 1986

Synopsis

Tombee was an unlucky slave owner and cotton planter on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. His real name was Thomas B. Chaplin, and we know him because of his plantation journal, kept between 1845 and 1858.

The fascination of this journal is enhanced by notes that Chaplin added periodically after 1865, bringing the lives of his characters up-to-date. Not unnaturally, he compared his poverty after the Civil War with antebellum opulence, lamenting the one, deploring the other.

Theodore Rosengarten has made accessible the last years of an American aristocracy. Besides containing a history of the Carolina Sea Islands during the second golden age of cotton, the book is a study of the dull horror of plantation slavery.

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From Publishers Weekly

Rosengarten, recipient of a National Book Award for All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, offers an excellent study that captures the life and times of a Southern slaveholder. Thomas B. Chaplin (182290), heir to a fortune in land and slaves, was 22 when he became master of the 376-acre Tombee Plantation on St. Helena Island, S.C. There, with a wife and four children, he lived extravagantly, managed poorly and sank deeper into debt and opium addiction, ultimately losing everything when federal troops arrived in 1861. Rosengarten's book, in two parts, opens with a well-researched biography of Chaplin, who was always cash-poor and struggling to keep up appearances while battling a much-hated stepfather for his mother's wealth. The second half, edited with the assistance of Susan W. Walker, is the daily journal kept by Chaplin for 15 years to make sense of his life of "loss and disappointment." Through the story of this planter and his family, the author illuminates innumerable aspects of the planter's way of life on the eve of the Civil War.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Morrow
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0688054129
• ISBN 13: 9780688054120
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 750