"One of the most valuable contributions yet made to our knowledge of the state of the South." - Saturday Review Frances Butler Leigh (1838-1910) was the daughter of Pierce Mease Butler and famous English actress Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble, who owned cotton, tobacco and rice plantations on Butler Island, among the largest in Georgia, just south of Darien, Georgia, and the hundreds of slaves who worked them. The family visited Georgia during the winter of 1838-39, where they lived at the plantations at Butler and St. Simons islands, in conditions primitive compared to their house in Philadelphia. Kemble was shocked by the living and working conditions of the slaves and their treatment at the hands of the overseers and managers, which led to her divorcing Pierce. In 1863, Kemble published "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839," which included her observations of slavery and life on her husband's Southern plantation in the winter of 1838-39. After the divorce Frances Butler Leigh sided with her father on the plantations and later inherited them after the Civil War. Based on her experience, Leigh published "Ten Years on a Georgian Plantation since the War (1883)," as a rebuttal to her mother's account. Leigh notes that after the Civil War "the whole country had of course undergone a complete revolution... our slaves had been freed; the white population was conquered, ruined, and disheartened, unable for the moment to see anything but ruin before as well as behind, too wedded to the fancied prosperity of the old system to believe in any possible success under the new." After the war the plantation fields had not been cultivated in four years and the former slaves agreed to work, but they would now have to be paid. Regarding the productivity of hired help, Leigh writes critically: "The prospect of getting in the crop did not grow more promising as time went on. The negroes talked a great deal about their desire and intention to work for us, but their idea of work, unaided by the stern law of necessity, is very vague, some of them working only half a day and some even less. I don't think one does a really honest full day's work, and so of course not half the necessary amount is done and I am afraid never will be again, and so our properties will soon be utterly worthless, for no crop can be raised by such labour as this, and no negro will work if he can help it, and is quite satisfied just to scrape along doing an odd job here and there to earn money enough to buy a little food." Regarding the wages to be paid, Leigh relates: "On Wednesday, when my father returned, he reported that he had found the negroes all on the place, not only those who were there five years ago, but many who were sold three years before that. Seven had worked their way back from the up country. They received him very affectionately, and made an agreement with him to work for one half the crop, which agreement it remained to be seen if they would keep." The former slaves were given "in the meantime necessary food, clothing, and money for their present wants (as they have not a penny) which is to be deducted from whatever is due to them at the end of the year. This we found the best arrangement to make with them, for if we paid them wages, the first five dollars they made would have seemed like so large a sum to them, that they would have imagined their fortunes made and refused to work any more." Leigh hired Irish immigrants to dig and maintain the plantation's irrigation ditches, and described them as "faithful" workers. She also imported English workers, but fired them after two years because they were "troublesome ... constantly drunk, and shirked their work so abominably."

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1883 Edition.

"One of the most valuable contributions yet made to our knowledge of the state of the South." - Saturday Review Frances Butler Leigh (1838-1910) was the daughter of Pierce Mease Butler and famous English actress Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble, who owned cotton, tobacco and rice plantations on Butler Island, among the largest in Georgia, just south of Darien, Georgia, and the hundreds of slaves who worked them. The family visited Georgia during the winter of 1838-39, where they lived at the plantations at Butler and St. Simons islands, in conditions primitive compared to their house in Philadelphia. Kemble was shocked by the living and working conditions of the slaves and their treatment at the hands of the overseers and managers, which led to her divorcing Pierce. In 1863, Kemble published "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839," which included her observations of slavery and life on her husband's Southern plantation in the winter of 1838-39. After the divorce Frances Butler Leigh sided with her father on the plantations and later inherited them after the Civil War. Based on her experience, Leigh published "Ten Years on a Georgian Plantation since the War (1883)," as a rebuttal to her mother's account. Leigh notes that after the Civil War "the whole country had of course undergone a complete revolution... our slaves had been freed; the white population was conquered, ruined, and disheartened, unable for the moment to see anything but ruin before as well as behind, too wedded to the fancied prosperity of the old system to believe in any possible success under the new." After the war the plantation fields had not been cultivated in four years and the former slaves agreed to work, but they would now have to be paid. Regarding the productivity of hired help, Leigh writes critically: "The prospect of getting in the crop did not grow more promising as time went on. The negroes talked a great deal about their desire and intention to work for us, but their idea of work, unaided by the stern law of necessity, is very vague, some of them working only half a day and some even less. I don't think one does a really honest full day's work, and so of course not half the necessary amount is done and I am afraid never will be again, and so our properties will soon be utterly worthless, for no crop can be raised by such labour as this."

1992 Myers Center Outstanding Book on Human Rights Historians have produced scores of studies on white men, extraordinary white women, and even the often anonymous mass of enslaved Black people in the United States. But in this innovative work, Adele Logan Alexander chronicles there heretofore undocumented dilemmas of one of nineteenth-century America’s most marginalized groups—free women of color in the rural South. Ambiguous Lives focuses on the women of Alexander’s own family as representative of this subcaste of the African-American community. Their forbears, in fact, included Africans, Native Americans, and whites. Neither black nor white, affluent nor impoverished, enslaved nor truly free, these women of color lived and died in a shadowy realm situated somewhere between the legal, social, and economic extremes of empowered whites and subjugated blacks. Yet, as Alexander persuasively argues, these lives are worthy of attention precisely because of these ambiguities—because the intricacies, gradations, and subtleties of their anomalous experience became part of the tangled skein of American history and exemplify our country’s endless diversity, complexity, and self-contradictions. Written as a “reclamation” of a long-ignored substratum of our society, Ambiguous Lives is more than the story of one family—it is a well-researched and fascinating profile of America, its race and gender relations, and its complex cultural weave.