Although the subtitle of Lorena Walsh’s Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit describes the book as being about “plantation management,” it is in fact about considerably more. Walsh’s book looks not just at the management of plantations, but also at the emergence of the plantation economy and culture of the Chesapeake region, from the earliest settlements to the 1760s, when the Southern plantation economy was fully developed.
After an introduction that outlines her sources, the region, and the general conclusions of her book, Walsh moves on to seven substantive chapters on the growth of the regional economy and culture. Chapter 1, “The Plantation Economy Begins, 1607-1639,” looks at the early settlements, which, contrary to what is sometimes taught, were often poorly planned and managed affairs. Reading Walsh’s account makes one especially aware of just how precarious the survival of these early settlements really was. They were put in badly chosen places—often within the oligohaline zones of rivers (45: “an oligohaline zone is where fresh and salt water mix, creating maximum concentrations of pathogenic water-borne organisms”). Disease was thus a major problem for the earliest settlers. Settlers also often focused on growing tobacco, a valuable cash crop, over food crops needed to sustain them. Yet another problem, for the large investors and settlers especially, was the lack of labor needed to work their plantations. This problem was ultimately solved through the introduction of the chattel slavery of Africans.
The second chapter, “The Age of the Small Planter, 1640-1679,” then examines the shifts in the plantation culture caused by the English Civil War. This is an important period because it is in this period that, as Walsh writes, “in their capacity as private individuals, elite Chesapeake slaveholders made a number of critical decisions that established African slavery as a form of bondage different from other kinds of unfree labor” (138). Among these changes was the principle followed afterwards that children “born to a white father and an enslaved African mother” would be “lifelong slaves” (139). The tobacco economy that dominated the early settlements increased its dominance of the economy of the region as well.
Chapter 4 looks at “Strategies of Adaptation and Change: Maryland, the Periphery, and Regional Divergence, 1680-1729.” Because the records for three planters are especially good, she uses these records in order to describe the ways that the labor force, crops, and markets of the region changed during the period. Tobacco was still the primary cash crop, though there was some diversification of crops, and slavery increased. Chapter 5, “The Tidewater Economy Comes of Age, Southern Virginia, 1730-1763”; chapter 6, “Managing for Prosperity: Rappahannock and Potomac Virginia 1730-1763”; and chapter 7, “Maryland, the Periphery, and Agricultural Change, 1730-1763,” all look at the region and its sub-regions during their pre-Revolutionary War economic height. The earlier economic, social, and agricultural trends continued, with slavery spreading even more widely “into the ranks of the middling planter families through both purchase and inheritance” (404), and tobacco, with its prices rising, still dominating the crops of the region. Walsh concludes the book with a brief chapter, “Reassessing the Golden Age,” and a brief epilogue that looks at the fortunes of the planters of the region in the post-Revolutionary War period.
Walsh shows in her book how the planters of the region became rational planners able to adapt to the changing economic situations they encountered: as she observes, “when it became cost effective to use more advanced technologies such as plowing or more complex methods such as manuring or crop rotations, planters adopted them. And when new markets developed for alternative staples such as grain, livestock, and naval stores, planters diversified their crop mix to take advantage of these opportunities” (24). These adaptations had social and cultural consequences as well, as when African slavery increased and poor whites were displaced by the expansion of the plantations.
The detailed studies Walsh presents are based on long study of the documentary and physical remains of the people and settlements in the region. In each chapter she meticulously examines the management of the farms and plantations of the region in the broadest sense, including important considerations such as the types of crops that were grown, how and why these crops were grown, how labor was gotten and managed, why the planters turned to slave labor over indentured labor, and how agricultural techniques changed during the period.
Although Walsh’s book is not written explicitly in the folklife studies paradigm, it could easily have been. Walsh’s descriptions of the economy and folklife of the colonial Chesapeake region are exemplary. Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit is an outstanding work of historical ethnography and regional history that should be read by anyone concerned with the history and folk culture of the South or with the development of the Atlantic world in the colonial period.
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[Review length: 807 words • Review posted on March 19, 2012]