BUTLER PLANTATION PAPERS
The Papers of Pierce Butler (1744-1822) and successors,
from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

The Butler Plantations were made famous by Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839 (1863). In this work, British actress Fanny Kemble, who had married plantation owner Pierce Butler II in 1834, described the horror of her first experience of the slavery system.

She felt "the weight of an unimagined guilt" on her conscience and was appalled by "the manifest injustice of unpaid and unforced labour; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, the mother of ten children, to exact from her toil which was to maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation."

Scholars can now examine Fanny's written descriptions of life on the Plantations in conjunction with these original records which will help to provide answers to questions such as:

- How brutal was slave management on the Butler estates?
- How profitable was rice-growing and cotton-planting, and how important was slavery to that profitability?
- How did the situation in 1786 compare with the situation in 1800, 1820, 1840, 1860 and 1880?

This microfilm publication provides long, detailed runs of documentation concerning the running of the South Carolina and Georgia estates from 1786 to 1885. As a series of plantation records they provide a total overview of the business from the Revolutionary period, through the Civil War, to the 1880's. Records include:

Plantation managers' correspondence:
- George Hooper, 1786-1803; Roswell King, 1803-30;
- Roswell King Jr, 1815-54; Alexander Blue, 1847-59;
- S W Wilson, 1848-49; James M Couper, 1879-85;
- Owen J Wister, 1879-85; James W Leigh, 1877-85;
- Frank K Leigh, 1879-85; and J H Johnston, 1879-85.

Slave Registers, 1775-1815 - with details of name, age and character.

Birth and Death lists of slaves, 1800-1834

Purchases and sales of slaves, and notes of punishments, 1780-1804

Crop and livestock reports, 1800-1884

Shipping agents' correspondence and accounts, 1773-1884

Land transactions, 1779-1881

Taken together these sources build up a complete economic picture of slave-holding and the cotton planting business - but they are also rich in insights into the social history of slavery. The correspondence of the plantation managers, in particular, is full of observations concerning life on the plantations both for the slaves and the managers.

This project also makes available the Political Papers of Pierce Butler senior (1744-1822), Signer of the Constitution and founder of the Butler Plantations, including:
Letterbooks, 1787-1822 - featuring letters to John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Aaron Burr, Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson, Roswell King, General James Wilkinson and others; Notes on the finances of South Carolina, 1775-1788; Notes on debates, 1787-1803; Congressional Papers on Domestic Debt and the U S Treasury, 1790-1793; Papers on Foreign Affairs, 1791-1799 - including the Treaty with Algiers, 1791 and John Jay's envoy to Britain, 1794; and Papers on the Bank of the United States, 1801-1819.

This source will be of interest to all those studying Slavery and US and World History and will help to illuminate an important work of abolitionist literature.