This history of two plantations on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge examines the people and places around the tiny town of Bayou Goula in Iberville Parish from 1699 to 2000. It describes the different governmental policies that shaped the land tenure of the region. In chapter 3 the book describes the Acadian settlement and how two free people of color purchased several farms and consolidated them into the Tally-Ho plantation. Later chapters described the John Hampden Randolphs and the John D. Murrells, both investors from Virginia. Chapter six describes the rise and fall of the community of Bayou Goula. Chapter seven describes the African-Americans along Bayou Goula. Some of the family relationships are identified. Links between workers in the twentieth century and workers in slavery appear. Chapter eight relies on memoirs of life at Tally-Ho and the community of Bayou Goula. It presents happy remembrances of things past. The chapter discusses education in the community, daily life, transportation, and relations between the families. Chapter nine describes the founding of the George M. Murrell Planting & Manufacturing Co., the major sugar grower and heir of the 19th century planters. Finally, the book discusses the 20th century successes and failures in the sugar business.

Few thoroughfares offer as rich a history as Louisiana's River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. This book provides a revised introduction, images, and information on sites and attractions as well as tales and local lore about favorite and overlooked destinations. Featuring background information about the area and a detailed guided tour - upriver on the east bank and downriver along the west - the book gives an overview of the River Road.

The truck system was a global phenomenon in the period 1865-1920, where workers were paid through the company store. In Beyond Racism and Poverty Karin Lurvink looks at how this system functioned on plantations in Louisiana in comparison with peateries in the Netherlands. In the United States, the system is often viewed as a 'second slavery' and strongly associated with racism. In the Netherlands, however, not racism but poverty has been seen as the main reason for its continued existence. By using a variety of historical sources and by analyzing the perspectives of both employers and workers, Lurvink provides new insights into how the truck system worked and can be explained. She reveals how the system was not only coercive but had advantages for the workers as well, which should not be overlooked.

In 1833, Edward G. W. and Frances Parke Butler moved to their newly constructed plantation house, Dunboyne, on the banks of the Mississippi River near the village of Bayou Goula. Their experiences at Dunboyne over the next forty years demonstrated the transformations that many land-owning southerners faced in the nineteenth century, from the evolution of agricultural practices and commerce, to the destruction wrought by the Civil War and the transition from slave to free labor, and finally to the social, political, and economic upheavals of Reconstruction. In this comprehensive biography of the Butlers, David D. Plater explores the remarkable lives of a Louisiana family during one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Born in Tennessee to a celebrated veteran of the American Revolution, Edward Butler pursued a military career under the mentorship of his guardian, Andrew Jackson, and, during a posting in Washington, D.C., met and married a grand-niece of George Washington, Frances Parke Lewis. In 1831, he resigned his commission and relocated Frances and their young son to Iberville Parish, where the couple began a sugar cane plantation. As their land holdings grew, they amassed more enslaved laborers and improved their social prominence in Louisiana’s antebellum society. A staunch opponent of abolition, Butler voted in favor of Louisiana’s withdrawal from the Union at the state’s Secession Convention. But his actions proved costly when the war cut off agricultural markets and all but destroyed the state’s plantation economy, leaving the Butlers in financial ruin. In 1870, with their plantation and finances in disarray, the Butlers sold Dunboyne and resettled in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where they resided in a rental cottage with the financial support of Edward J. Gay, a wealthy Iberville planter and their daughter-in-law’s father. After Frances died in 1875, Edward Butler moved in with his son’s family in St. Louis, where he remained until his death in 1888. Based on voluminous primary source material, The Butlers of Iberville Parish, Louisiana offers an intimate picture of a wealthy nineteenth-century family and the turmoil they faced as a system based on the enslavement of others unraveled.

Historians have long discussed the interracial families of prominent slave dealers in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere, yet, until now, the story of slave trader Bacon Tait remained untold. Among the most prominent and wealthy citizens of Richmond, Bacon Tait embarked upon a striking and unexpected double life: that of a white slave trader married to a free black woman. In The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, Hank Trent tells Tait’s complete story for the first time, reconstructing the hidden aspects of his strange and often paradoxical life through meticulous research in lawsuits, newspapers, deeds, and other original records. Active and ambitious in a career notorious even among slave owners for its viciousness, Bacon Tait nevertheless claimed to be married to a free woman of color, Courtney Fountain, whose extended family were involved in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. As Trent reveals, Bacon Tait maintained his domestic sphere as a loving husband and father in a mixed-race family in the North while running a successful and ruthless slave-trading business in the South. Though he possessed legal control over thousands of other black women at different times, Trent argues that Tait remained loyal to his wife, avoiding the predatory sexual practices of many slave traders. No less remarkably, Courtney Tait and their four children received the benefits of Tait’s wealth while remaining close to her family of origin, many of whom spoke out against the practice of slavery and even fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. In a fascinating display of historical detective work, Trent illuminates the worlds Bacon Tait and his family inhabited, from the complex partnerships and rivalries among slave traders to the anxieties surrounding free black populations in Courtney and Bacon Tait’s adopted city of Salem, Massachusetts. Tait’s double life illuminates the complex interplay of control, manipulation, love, hate, denigration, and respect among interracial families, all within the larger context of a society that revolved around the enslavement of black Americans by white traders.