Ten Years On A Georgia Plantation Since The War

$35.00

Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation Since the War
By Francis Butler Leigh
Introduction By Charles E. Wynes
Hardcover, 157 pp

From the Publisher:
In 1866, Francis Butler Leigh returned to Georgia to help her father reclaim his family plantation on the Georgia coast, and she managed them, after his death, for nearly ten years. Surrounded by several hundred former slaves looking to her for food, shelter and employment, she felt “like Robinson Crusoe with three hundred men Fridays.” Among other things, her journal records the struggle of a woman to survive in a man’s world.

Welcomed upon her arrival by the freedmen, Mrs. Leigh believed that old-time affection and loyalty survived until being destroyed by agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau and political agitators from the North. She viewed her former slaves with mingled love and exasperation. Her determined belief that blacks were inferior, as well as unprepared for full citizenship, is doubly interesting, because this conservative, sometimes reactionary, account was written by a Yankee!

Mrs. Leigh found the defeated Georgians too sad to be bitter, troubled by uncertainty, wild rumors, military occupation and a new economic political and social system. During the winter of 1868-69, the freemen became angry and uncooperative, and Mrs. Leigh began sleeping with a loaded pistol beside her bed. “I felt the whole time it was touch-and-go whether I or the Negroes got the upper hand.” This journal is a sincerely felt and colorful description of Georgia during the turbulent years of Reconstruction, when a new society was building amidst the ashes of the old.

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