Plants and the Problem of Authority in the Antebellum U.S. South
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This essay attends to the language of antebellum farm journals and plantation records to argue that Southern planters encountered resistance from their lands and crops that they could not countenance. Planters’ failure to adapt to their environments stemmed from a set of assumptions about their role as masters over the natural world. In this essay, I argue that planters refused to comprehend the messages being sent by their unruly land because they feared conceding any of their supposed authority, for to do so would have been to compromise the "naturalness" of their control over their enslaved people.