Transcripts For CSPAN3 American Artifacts Whitney Plantation Slavery Museum 20240712

If they had to use the third one in the japanese still resisted. Learn more about the Manhattan Project here on American History tv. Announcer each week, american and history tvs american artifacts takes you to museums and historic places. Coming up next, we traveled west of new orleans to visit Whitney Wallace louisiana, to learn about the history of slavery in america. Ashley my name is ashley rogers. I am the director of Museum Operations at the whitney plantation. We are beginning our tour today in an historic church, which was built circa 1870 by people who lived on the opposite side of the river in helena, louisiana. In paulina, louisiana. The structure was donated about 10 years ago by the descendents of that congregation. They bought the land in 1870, two parcels of land, for the express purpose of building a house of worship. In the excel document, which we have from the courthouse, they named their congregation the antiyoke baptist congregation. That message of being against yolk or slavery is something important to our story here. This is a Significant Church for newly freed slaves on the east bank of the river. It is important in talking about lives of people who saw freedom after the end of the civil war. We like to start our to her here our tour of the whitney in this building so we can see what happened to people after freedom came. The whitney plantation is the only plantation in louisiana exclusively dedicated to telling the story of enslaved people. This land we are on now was historically known as habitation hideout, and our owner, John Cummings, purchased the property 15 years ago and has been restoring the original structures and also moving in buildings around the church. We had to build some things here, restore existing buildings, and bring this bring inn historic Historic Structures all of these things help us tell the story of slavery. When John Cummings bought the property in 1989, there were no original slave cabins. They had all been torn down. We had to move those in from elsewhere in louisiana. This structure, like i said, helps us round out that story of enslavement to after the civil war. We have some other buildings that were here that we have read that we have rebuilt. At the whitney plantation, we have a collection of statues created by an ohio artist, woodrow nash. He built these statues to represent people who were in slaved at the end of slavery and then later gave their testimony to the Work Progress Administration in the 1930s. We use the narratives of slaves taken in the 1930s throughout our interpretation on the site. These give life to who those people were. In the 1930s, when the wpa traveled across the south they , were talking to people who were in their 80s, 90s, even hundreds, who, when they were slaves, had just been children. At the highest end, maybe 15 when freedom came, but most of them were under the age of 10. This is to remind us who those voices are coming from, people who were talking about their experiences of slavery as children, oftentimes recalling things that happened to their parents and grandparents. Ins plantation was founded 1752 i a gentleman immigrant who by a gentleman immigrant who came in the company of john wall with his family. They sailed from france and came here. In 1752 when he founded this plantation, it was much smaller. It was a tract on which he grew rice and indigo as the main cash crops. Indigo was the significant cash crop of the land in the 18th century. He and his children continued planting indigo until the late 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. In 1795, a louisiana planter successfully granulated a crop of sugar in louisiana. Its a strange climate zone. Nobody had been able to take at the full way before that. Of someoneth the from haiti, he was able to granulate the crop. Right around the same time that the first sugar crop was being granulated, indigo was not a viable crop anymore. So, this plantation transitioned at some point after that. By about 1805, it was a sugar plantation, and it still is today. Sugar is a gigantic industry in south louisiana. All around us are historic cane fields that are now sent to the dixie crystals and domino sugar refineries. In plantation was started 1752, three successive generations ran the plantation, always with the labor of enslaved africans and african descendent people. Over the course of 100 plus years that they owned this land, there were many successful generations of people enslaved here, so the population would have shifted over time with Market Forces. The highest number we ever had recorded at one single time as enslaved people is 101, but we believe that is low. We think there were perhaps as enslaved atpeople the highest point. We have found records of 357 over the course of 100 plus years, but there would be a lot of people missing from that. Where we will start introducing that population is at our first memorial. Memorials were built to people enslaved in louisiana and on this land. This is the wall of honor. On this memorial, we recorded the names and basic information about 354 individuals we have been able to find who were enslaved on this land. This memorial is it moves through time, roughly chronologically. On the earlier side, people born in the 18th century, but we are missing an entire generation entire first generation of enslaved people here. We dont know anyones name who was enslaved here from the very beginning in 1752. All of these people were born after the founding of the plantation. This information comes mostly from sale documents. Peoples names were not always recorded when they were enslaved. If you look at things like census records, it will include a tally of how many men and women, but it will not tell you names. We have to look for those names in sale documents, in the city of new orleans there was a notary involved. So we go to the archives to find sales and purchases of people. All of the information we have here, this biographic information, is also related to selling. Where someone came from, how old they were, whether they came with children, the jobs they knew how to do, these are all things that would affect their price at sale. Louisiana had different laws than other states and territories in the United States. In louisiana, for a very long time, it was illegal to sell children away from parents before puberty. Later, it was codified to before the age of 10. You see things like this, here is agatha and she is being sold with the children. These people are in a lot, being sold together. We have basic information. There is not a lot this information can tell us, but we are able to tease out a little bit. One thing we notice is most of these people were born in africa. That is listed here, their places of origin, yet their names, like michelle, our re european names. We see a few spanish names as well. We know that the people who have these european derived names were not born in africa with those names. So that tells us something about cultural annihilation, the way peoples cultures were taken from them when they were sold into slavery in the new world. Slave traders often renamed people. Thats something that continued to happen throughout the course of slavery over the course of the 19th century. When people were sold from one plantation to another, their new to renameld choose them. In louisiana solomon northrup, was famously 12 years a slave they made a movie about it. Years aon he was 12 slave in louisiana under the name of platt, which was not his given name. Thats an experience a lot of people had and you can see that written in various narratives. Even though there is this problem of the names taken away from them, there are a few people who have african names. Here is a person named mingo, which is an african name. We also have someone named samba, and coacou. That means a male born on a wednesday. These are cultural names that tell us something about the circumstances of their birth. This is an islamic name, moussa, who was most likely a muslim. People who were traded from north africa were likely to have been exposed to islam through the arab worlds trading networks. This is something that tells us a Little Something about the religion and culture of the people who came to the new world as slaves. People who came to the americas enslaved were, in some cases muslim, in some cases catholic. The kingdom of congo was officially catholic by the 1500s. Some people would have been bringing their indigenous cosmology. That was especially in louisiana connection with the caribbean. A lot of ships made stops in the caribbean before coming to the United States, so there again, another chance for blending with west african and caribbean religions coming into louisiana. Its also important to note that these people were selected by slave traders for specific skills and traits that they had. Cameof the people enslaved to different parts of the u. S. As slaves for different reasons. A lot of it had to do with the crops they were familiar with growing. The first two slave ships that came to louisiana, the captains of those ships were under orders to find skilled indigo growers because they were trying to , establish an indigo economy here in louisiana, and the european traders and planters did not have the skills to grow indigo. It was not grown in europe. They had to find people who knew how to grow it and process it, complicated, and who knew how to build those skills. Same thing with rice. Rice growers were wrought into brought into louisiana and south carolina. You find this trading in africa going to specific markets in the United States to fill the plantations and to create that crop wealth. So, most of the people in the early years we can see were coming from west and central africa, a few people born in the caribbean coming from trading. Not too many people are coming internationally. Something that is important to note about the Movement Across the atlantic during the time of the atlantic slave trade is that the vast majority of settlement of the new world was african compulsory settlement. Of all the people who crossed from the old world to the new world until 1807, four out of five came from africa. The vast majority of movement was enslaved africans being forced on ships and across the atlantic. There are not good estimates about the actual number. The best historian who has done that work david altus, has come , to the figure of about 12. 5 Million People, not including people who didnt make it, people being driven from the died en route. O about 12. 5 Million People involved in the middle passage. An enormous diaspora. Of that 12. 5 Million People, less than 5 came to the territories that became the United States. The vast majority of movement in Slave Society in the new world was into the caribbean and brazil. In the United States, we outlawed the International Slave trade in 1807, which did not fully cut it off, but its it significantly lowered that movement. People were still being pirated and smuggled in. The last slave ship arrived in the United States around 18591860, right up to the end of the civil war. It did caught cut off the majority of that trade. Around 1807, the land down here in the Mississippi River valley was just beginning to be developed. The Louisiana Purchase happens. 1807, you cant bring any more slaves into the United States. At the same time people are buying up large tracts of land and increasing their need for an reliance upon compulsory or slave labor, they did not have enslaved people coming from africa. We see that this changes the culture here. What happens is a very robust domestic slave trade develops in the wake of that. You can see on our wall here that there are a few people born on what is called the east coast, instead of in the old world or in the caribbean, and on the reverse side of the wall, you will see a large collection of them. So here, all of a sudden, all of these people are listed east coast. East coast is probably virginia. You can see that they came from an english owned plantation by their names, edwin,. , peary, claim, jack, tom, sam. They no longer have french or spanish names. You dont see many african names. We see people coming from english owned plantations. So, the domestic slave trade was an enormous movement of people across the country. In total, after the conclusion of the International Slave trade in 1807, 1 Million People were moved from the upper south, virginia, maryland, tennessee, south carolina, and North Carolina, and mostly centered in North Carolina and one million , people were moved down the river to louisiana, alabama, mississippi, where there were largescale plantations. To give you an idea of the difference in labor, i come from North Carolina. A lot of our plantations in North Carolina, tobacco plantations, tobacco is really awful for the soil. Fields have to remain fallow for a long time after growing tobacco. It cuts down on the amount of land you can work and a lot of the plantations there had 2550 slaves. Here in louisiana, 101 on this plantation, and thats on the smaller end. Very close by, there was a slave labor force of 750 people. You can see there was a greater need here for largescale labor. In the upper south, they had a Larger Population of women. They were encouraging family units, family growth. Part of the value of an enslaved woman was a reproductive attentional. Talked about this by using the word increase. If a woman was being talked about for trade all of that , reproductive potential belonged to the person who owns that woman, so there was a great value in encouraging the growth of families because you could make exponentially more money by selling so the majority of those people who came down from the upper south were in their late teens and early 20s. They would be born and raised on the plantations in the upper south, and most of them marched over land. Most of that movement was over land. Some of it was on a riverboat coming down the mississippi. Some of it was on boats coming down the atlantic seaboard into the gulf of mexico. But new orleans was the heart of that trade. So new orleans was tied to virginia and alexandria, virginia, and there was this constant flow of people coming down to new orleans to be spread out from the territories from there. So this is where you can see all of that happening. So on this plantation we have an oral history given to us by the descendants of one of the people enslaved here. It describes this process of being taken from the upper south and sold in the lower south. Anna is a girl who was born on the east coast, probably virginia. And the story about anna is she was purchased for this plantation to be a gift for the lady of the house, who had no children of her own. Anna, as the family has related to us, lived inside of the big house. And so, would have had an interesting kind of relationship with the family. People who lived in the big house who were slaves often had a strange kind of relationship that we cannot really understand today. She was a slave and would have been treated as such, but also would have been very close to the family as well. And the reason why that is because of her son, victor hydel. Victor hydel was born in the year 1835, when anna was a young woman. Her mistress had a brother, antoine, who who impregnated who impregnated anna. We dont know this was so long ago, we dont know if anna was raped by antoine, or if they had some kind of relationship. Although for enslaved women, there was no such thing as consent because they did not own their bodies. So victor was born of a hydel Family Member and an enslaved woman. Anna was a mixed race woman. Victor would have been called a quadroon, one quarter african descendent, three quarters european descendent. And enslaved by his own family. This is one instance that we know of, for certain, of all of these 354 people, over 100 years of ownership for the hydel family, we know there are many, many more people born here of enslaved mothers and white hydel fathers. And this kind of thing was common throughout the south. And those children born of those enslaved women would belong to their own family and would not necessarily be treated any better, and in many cases, we can read narratives of where the children were treated just a little bit worse because usually there was a white wife somewhere in there who understood where those children were coming from. So the separations between enslaved people and enslavers were not really there. There was a lot of mixing in terms of sexual assault, in terms of actual relationships. Certainly here in louisiana, a lot of free people of color existed here because of consensual relationships, where enslaved women would then be freed and given their own property. So in louisiana, its a very different class thats kind of created here. Free people of color and also people enslaved by their own families as well. This is called the midlowe hall l. A. In this memorial we have transcribed the names of 107,000 people who were enslaved in the state of louisiana through the year 1820. This is based on a database that the historian from new orleans put together, and that database ends in 1820. There is talk of extending it to 1865. But 107,000 people are inscribed here. We have just their first names. Again, these are mostly coming from sale documents. And what we have also done here is recorded little snippets from the works Progress Administration slave narrative. So in this area we allow people to walk through on their own and take a few minutes to reflect and read those names and those testimonials. This is the last memorial we visit before we move into the historic grounds of the plantation. This is called the field of angels. And we put this memorial here for 2200 children who died in died en nslaved slaved in st. John the baptist parish. That is the parish we are in here at the whitney plantation. It is sculptured by rod moorhead and is called coming home. We have along the walls here, the names, date of death, ages, and names of the mother of all of these children who died. And these are recorded in the church records. So our historian did the research in pulling those records out of the church and recording them here. So here is a large collection of people that are not listed with any name whatsoever. These are people who are listed as little slaves, negro slave girl, negro slave boy. Some of these people who have no names were perhaps too young, they died too young to be named. But sometimes we see when they were two years old or three years old, people who definitely had names, but even at death, when they were born they were born into a lowerclass. Of course, as enslaved people, it was not seen as important enough to record the names they had or to look into it to find what their name was in life. So the whitney plantation was for the longest amount of time, was a sugar plantation. Today, our sugar fields come right up to the edge of where we interpret. And historically, the land had a sugar mill on its site as well. So, the people who were enslaved on this land worked in the fields, and probably the majority of them would have been occupied in sugar. So they worked in the fields. They also worked as domestics, as herdsmen. This is kind of like a little village. All of the jobs that needed to sustain this group of 100plus people were done here. They made all the food here, they grew the food here. They also worked on textiles and things like that. Carpenters and the like. Sugar processing happens at the end of the year. So, the growing season here, currently it is early october, sugar is still very much growing, and it is going to continue to grow until late october or early november. The goal with sugar is to have everything processed and done by christmas time. So, christmas day, they want the entire field done and granulated. These kettles were used in the granulation of sugar. We brought these kettles in from other places, but historically, at our sugar mill, there would have been eight kettles like this. And they would go from large down to small. You can see that this has a lip on it. So these would be sitting in a brick structure, and then opened on the bottom where there would be a fire underneath. So, the goal with these kettles is to take ground down sugar stalks, they would grind all of the cane using animal power, and then later on using a steam engine, they would take the juice that comes out of that sugarcane and boil it in these giant kettles. These would have to be tended. This is a 24 hour day process for about one month. And the people who worked on making sugar would be standing next to kettles like this using long handled ladles, and physically scooping the juice from one candle to the next to the next to the next, and then putting it in cooling pans where it would granulate. This, as you can imagine, this would be a very hot and dangerous process. They were boiling sugar sap, so it would be sticky. So not only would it get crusty and attach to the bottom there and burn, which made an inferior product, but it could also burn the people making the sugar, so it was dangerous in that way. And they worked in shifts 24 hours a day. The thing that makes sugar difficult and kind of unique in the cash crops grown in the new world is that it had to be processed as soon as it was cut. So, they could not, in other words, just cut it and sit on a sit on it a little while and start to process it later. As soon as it cuts, it starts to die and it will not make good sugar. That is why that harvesting season or harvesting season was extremely grueling. All the physical labor done outside was also done at a very cold time of year. South louisiana does get was really cold, humid does get cold in cold, humidly november and december. And enslaved workers would be working outside constantly on that. The whitney plantation does not have original slave cabins, as i mentioned. All of them were torn down by the 1970s. End of the civil war, there were 22 slave cabins on this site, and they looked about like this. Pretty typical. Its essentially a duplex. There would be a family on each side, or if not a real family, a fictive family. Which was common in slavery, for people to form fictive kinship bonds. The slave cabins that were on this site were arranged the way we have brought these in. So there would be two rows facing each other with a central courtyard in the center. So you can imagine that would have created a kind of community there. These were set back from the plantation big house by about a half a mile. So there was some physical distance between where the hydel family lived and enslaved workers lived. And that distance is important in creating a sense of autonomy, although their movements were still controlled. People could not leave the plantation without a pass. An overseer would be monitoring them at all times of the day to make sure they got up at the right time, were at work at the right time, and got back to the cabins at the right time. That said, especially because of the distance and how there is so much space here, there are a lot of plantations out here on the river road, something that was very common in this region was something called running away a little bit. Becoming a maroon maybe for just a night. Especially since families tended to be separated, and it wasnt even necessarily a Long Distance. If a husband and wife were on neighboring plantations, they might be away from each other about two miles, three miles. So running away for those two miles to see a loved one and then coming back before dawn was something that was extremely common. But that was all done with a certain degree of risk. Because if they left and they were caught off, it even if they intended to come back, they could be considered a runaway and be punished for that. Enslaved people would be in the cabins mostly at night. Their workdays stretched from what they said to cant see to cant see. So from dawn until dusk they would be at their jobs and then come back to the cabins at nighttime. Nighttime at the cabin would be a time for communion with people who were there, the families, or like we said, the fictive families, and food preparation. Enslaved people were given rations by the plantation owner. Typically, the most common thing that you can read about in slave narratives are cornmeal and bacon. Bacon would be essentially fat back, pork belly, lots of fat, not a nutritious cut, and not considered really the high, good cut that the family would be eating. There would also receive things like intestines, pig feet. These are things that have been sustained for a very long time in southern cooking, but had their roots in the lower cuts that were given to enslaved people during slavery. Also very common in terms of the food ways of enslaved people are things that originate in africa, blackeyed peas, watermelon, tose are things that came the new world with enslaved people. Of growth, which is also important here in louisiana for okra, which is also important here in louisiana for making gumbo. People brought with them their african foodways and supplemented the best they could with the ingredients they had here. People cooked in their cabins. There was usually a fireplace in the cabin where they could prepare meals. But in a place like south louisiana where it is very, very times wet of the imagine they would be preparing a campfire, outside, so that they didnt have the smoke and heat inside their cabins. The furnishings in cabins were varied across time and space. All of these things would be different on different plantations. The way people were treated was different from plantation to plantation and also different regionally as well. What we have represented here are a few things you can read about in slave narratives, where people talk about the types of furnishings they had. So a rope bed like this is something that is kind of common. This is basically planks with ropes attached. And what we have here is this rough kind of fabric with hay in the middle. So you can see how that is constructed. In louisiana, it was also common to use moss, spanish moss for stuffing for a bed. Another thing people did if they didnt have a bed, people talked about making a pallet on the floor. Thats something a lot of people experienced at different plantations. In fact, solomon northrup, who was enslaved in louisiana, never described sleeping on a bed for 12 years. He described sleeping on the pallet on the floor. So people would be treated differently in different places. Beds like this, about the size of a full bed today, would be a bed for an entire family, so children, mom and dad, if they are all there together, all sharing the space. You can see that there is not a lot of space in these cabins. There would not be much of a sense of privacy, what we would think of as being appropriate in a family and being private. All of that living was done in just a couple of rooms with everybody together. This is in 1868 jail that we brought in from gonzales, louisiana. This is not a slave jail. Built in 1868, it is from a few years after the conclusion of slavery, but we brought it in as a learning tool so that we can see the types of typical spaces where enslaved people were confined, especially leading up to sales. This is a very typical design of that era. And you can see, there are a few extant photographs of pens at the backs of auction houses that were similar in design to this. At an auction house, typically, like you would find in the city of new orleans, there would be a front room where the auction would take place, and in the back, a small courtyard with a row of cells enclosed in a courtyard, so people could come out during the day and sleep in the cells at night. In addition to pens used in the marketing of enslaved people, there were also slave jails. In the city of new orleans in the Central Business district, there were two dozen slave jails at one time. Additionally, enslaved people were locked up in the state penitentiary as well. So all of the same rules applied to enslaved people if they were convicted of murder or theft, or any of those infractions, they could be locked up the same way a free person would, but of course, a lot of the punishment of enslaved people was done in a sort of extralegal fashion on the plantation. Plantations also did have jaillike structures sometimes, where people could be confined as punishment, but typically they were not iron structures like this. They might be made of wood or brick, or people might be confined in a barn or extra room somewhere. That kind of confinement was very typical. A lot of people who were enslaved in the state of louisiana would at one time or another experience being sold at an auction, especially since so many people who were enslaved in the lower south had come from the upper south. So they had been sold off of a plantation and purchased by a slave trader and brought to new orleans to be sold at auction. This whole transaction of moving people from one part of the country to another to sell them is something that kind of elucidates the Market Forces behind enslavement. This is not just a southern institution. Of course, the raw goods we were producing in the south supplied northern and foreign factories. Of course, that slave trade itself involved insurance agents, mortgage brokers, bankers. There was a lot of industry, northern and southern, involved in that. So the kind of so to kind of give you an example, if a slave trader working out of virginia and new orleans and here the biggest one was Isaac Franklin if he purchased an enslaved person off a plantation in the upper south, he would sometimes pay full cash value, but he would pay a wholesale rate. So you can see how people were commodified. They were paid at a wholesale rate in the upper south. If he did not have the full cash amount, he could put a mortgage on that person. And then they would be insured for the time that they were being transited to the lower south. He would cover all the expenses of moving them down to the lower south, and then he would sell them here at a retail raise. About 100 more than what he bought them for. If he had a note, a mortgage, he would pay off the mortgage and pocket the profit. So the same way we commodify houses, cars, livestock, these are the exact same Market Forces that were in the commodification of human beings during the time of enslavement. This is all being done on a alculated way in calculated way, but on the ground floor of it, that is separation from loved ones. People were locked up in pens similar to this. They might be with their family and about to be sold from their family. Or theyve just traveled a Long Distance away from everything theyve known. All of that is being done with a price tag. People who were locked up in slave pens also had to sometimes wait for a long periods of time for the market to be at the appropriate value to sell them at the highest return. So, if people made it to an auction house in new orleans and the price for slaves was low, sometimes, slave traders would just wait. Keep them locked up in a jail or locked up in the boat they had come on, and just wait for those markets to improve so they could make a higher return on their investment. As far as the actual dollar amount, what people were being sold for here in louisiana, a good rate that you see pretty commonly was about 900 to 1000. For somebody who was skilled, that might go up to 1500. Theres another sort of seedy underbelly of the slave trade, which was called the fancy trade. Fancy women, fancy girls, girls who were seen as you all as beautiful might be sold as concubines, to be used as sex slaves, they would cost an additional fee. Were talking 19th century money. When you translate it today, its an enormous amount of money that people were spending on those individuals. This area we are standing in is the whitney plantation historic district. This is where we have the highest concentration of original structures, all centered around the 1790 big house. Here we have the original site of the kitchen. There was a kitchen here from, as far as we can tell, the earliest time, the construction of this big house. This structure is a little bit later. It was here by about 1830. And it was in very Poor Condition when our owner, John Cummings, bought the land in 1999. It was just about fallen over. So he had to write the building right the building and rebuild the hearth entirely. A lot of these structures were falling into the ground. Ambrose hydel who emigrated from son built 1752, his this big house. It was later occupied by his son. They operated it in a partnership until 1839, at which lines widow took over. The widow ran the plantation from 1840 to 1860. So the longest period of ownership was a woman, and those were also the most profitable years. Also during the time of the greatest, the largest slave population was under the ownership of a woman. The kitchen, where we are right now, is where the enslaved cook would prepare meals for the hydel family. And we have records of a couple of different cooks, marie and marie joseph. Cooks would be assisted by domestics, people who lived either inside the big house or close to the big house and assisted the family. And they would do things ranging from cleaning to helping the cook and moving food, serving it in the big house for meals. The cooks day in a kitchen like this would start very early in the morning. Because all of the preparing of food, all the cooking, was done on the hearth. This is called hearth cooking. So she would build a fire in the center here, and most of the cooking was not done on the flames, but on the embers built up by the fire. So the reason that she would have to start so early, she would have to get a large supply of coal by burning lots and lots of wood, and then rake the coal onto the hearth to prepare food. We have a couple of examples of ways people prepared food on the coals. This works almost like an eye. And you put a flat bottom pot there. We also have something called a spider pot, built with legs. The coals go underneath and on top as well. You can see an example here where this was constructed almost with fingers coming up to retain all of the coal on the top. So a lot of the cooks day would be spent bent over pots like this or crouching down, trying to get close to what she was preparing. Anything we prepare today in an oven or slow cooker could be prepared in pots like this over a hearth. It basically creates a dutch oven. So we know the food would be a cultural mix. The family was german descended, but but this was french louisiana. We had native american ingredients, african ingredients. And if you think about the foodways of south louisiana, there is kind of an african center. Something like gumbo, for instance, is an african food but it has this kind of european and native american vocabulary as well. But they would also be preparing any types of foods that the family had specifically requested. And we have archaeological remains of cow, apparently an extraordinary amount of beef, teethwere cow found on this site. That tells us that the cook was doing everything from butchering to preparing the food. We also found turkey, freshwater drum, turtle and pork. And turtle are interesting, because it is a sign of southern louisiana. This is a raised creole cottage this is the style of architecture built circa 1790. It seems to have been built in two campaigns, or perhaps raised at a later time, but it was complete to this configuration by 1805 and had a quick renovation in the 1830s to add dormers. Other than that, it is premuch pretty much unchanged. The house was lived in by two generations of hydels, and then after slavery, a number of families lived here when it was operated as a wage labor farm. Free labor farm. So we are going to enter through the ground floor. Any domestic slaves that worked on this plantation would come in to this house through the back. We have made a choice to enter through the back as enslaved people would enter it. The front of the house is where you get the grand vista. But the back is the labor center. There is a path that cuts from the kitchen to the back, and enslaved people would go into a pantry to prepare food for plating and service, and then take it into the dining room. So, we are in the dining room of the whitney plantation big house. The dining room is on the ground floor, and the floor has spanish tile, which we had recreated. We did find fragments of this tile here when we were doing the restoration. This speaks to the role of the Mississippi River in these peoples lives. Enslaved people built the levees along the mississippi. We are set back from the Mississippi River not terribly far, so all of the people enslaved along the river road were responsible for building the levee and maintaining the e. Ve there was a lot of giveandtake and a lot of flooding, so some of these big houses and this may have been one of them, but we dont know some of them were originally open air on the ground floor to allow for a kind of flooding, and then later enclosed as the levees improved. This is the dining area where enslaved people would serve meals. We have furnished the big house using not any original pieces from this family because they stopped living here in 1867, but we have inventories taken at two points in the 19th century, and we have used those as our guide. Basically Insurance Adjusters preparing for sale would walk room to room and record everything down to each individual fork. Over here we have another pantry that would be used for service. Around the corner on the floor, there is an interesting feature which is an olive jar sunk into the floor for refrigeration. And this is original. So the enslaved domestics could use this to cool down food or one, things like that if they were preparing a chilled dessert, that would be a good place to help it chill before service. The oaks in the front of the house are actually not original. They are only about 50 years old, added much later. The best thing we know is, in a photograph in the 1920s, there was a fence coming up to the house and gardens coming up to the house. Which is an oldfashioned configuration for landscape design. So that would sometimes be food crops, sometimes flowers, but a real mishmash of things coming right up to the house. This house, the way it is constructed, is typical of french design, french and caribbean, something that is a little bit unusual for people who live in areas settled by the english. It doesnt have interior hallways or staircases. However, the porch here would function almost like a hallway. Each room comes out onto the porch, so you could walk from one room on the end to one room on the other just on the porch. Shotgun houses, its important to note, are african in origin. And the people who built these houses were african and african descended slaves who built things that were familiar to them. The Whitney House has the original murals. This is the only part we have had reconstructed. Our conservator had to redo this pattern because it was so deteriorated. However, we do have the original on the posts here. These are from the 1840s, a time of great sugar wealth. Thats why this is significant. Some people in the 1840s and 1850s built enormous mansions, and most of our visitors here are expecting to see Something Like tara, something they have read about or seen in movies. By comparison, these are modest houses, but they were able to make enough money, using the forced labor of africandescended slaves, to pay someone to come out and hand painted faux marble paint faux marble on their walls, their fireplaces, and all of that attention to detail cost a lot of money, and that money came from the forced labor in the fields. So, we are walking into one of the large bedrooms. This has the typical furnishing of the era, mid19th century. Also, again, has more of this decorative mural work on the fireplace. And you can see the pineapple motif here and the marbling on the fireplace as well. This was the familys home, the hydel familys home, but enslaved people were in every room of this house performing labor. In a bedroom like this, Family Members might have personal servants, people who in some houses we dont know here in some houses slept on pallets on the floor next to the beds of their owners. They would perform labor like cleaning, of course, dusting, getting all of the clothing ready for people to wear, lighting the fire, getting and there is a bed warmer on the bed as well. So in the wintertime, enslaved domestics would fill a bed warmer like that with coal and then run it underneath the sheets to get the bed warm before the family got in. Of course, also enslaved people would tend to personal hygiene of their owners as well. There were chamber pots in here that enslaved the mistakes hat enslaved domestics had to empty out. Everything from start to finish was done by enslaved workers including, of course, raising children. Any children raised in this house would be physically nursed and cared for by enslaved wet nurses. So enslaved nurses usually slept in the same room with the children and formed a real bond with those children. And this, again, is an interesting kind of relationship. One person is enslaved. One person is the enslaver. And yet there is an intimate there that has this division right in the middle. The center salon retains a lot of that original mural work. The most elaborate is on the ceiling. Ydel hadve that marie h this work commission. To was the owner from 1840 1860. Her husband died in 1839, so this may have been a commemorative piece. This room it is really difficult when we come in here to not just gawk at how beautiful it is. Theres a lot of really remarkable furniture. Is really quite lovely. Most visitors imagine themselves as the people who would be relaxing in a room like this. But its important to think about the different ways this room would be used. It would be a site of relaxation for the hydel family, but it would again be a site of labor for enslaved people. One thing we draw from solomon northrups narrative that we know was common was that there if we know that if we know there were enslaved people who were skilled musicians or skilled at entertainment. They might be called upon after their work in the field was concluded to entertain the family. Solomon northrup, of course, was a skilled fiddle player. After performing hours upon hours of work picking cotton in the sun, and all he wanted was to relax in his own cabin, he had to come into the house or be rented out to other plantations to perform fiddle for dances and balls all night long. You can understand that being forced or compelled to entertain when all you what to do is relax and be by yourself would be another form of psychological torment. In the last big bedroom, we have a statue to represent anna, the little girl who was brought from the upper south. And a reminder that people lived in the big house as well. From here, we go onto the back porch. Here you can see the end of the historic murals. These patterns, by the way, come from a standard french pattern book. So this is a motif that was copied from the pattern book and applied to the wall by a painter. Our conservator came out here and uncovered all of this painting. You can see the condition it was in right over here. There are a couple of spots she left that are dark. You can see how deteriorated it had been. One thing she found when she uncovered this was something that expresses a little bit of life after the civil war. You can see all of these scribbles. These are children who lived in this house after slavery ended. And some are dated. These are heights. July 14, 1984. Lillian at 10 years old. The family lived here for many years after slavery ended. These are written in french as well, so thats interesting in learning about the culture here. So, after slavery ended, this plantation continued operating as a cane and rice plantation for many years. Close to the river road, we have the original plantation store. From about the 1890s. Plantation stores were another method of you could see them as a method of oppression, certainly. These plantations would build stores that were kind of like a company store. The workers would have to shop there for all of their goods. But they could charge whatever price they wanted and they could jack that up. And they would deduct that from the money they made working in the fields. Sharecropping is not common in sugar. You cannot share crop sugar. You need the whole crop. They had wage laborers. The wage laborers on this plantation lived in slave cabins. Many of them would be former slaves themselves or their descendents. People were living in these into the 1960s, working the same fields. We have a lot of records from the plantation store, and we are currently beginning a project to process those records and create oral histories of people who worked here in the 20th century. Those people had a different experience, but some things remained very much the same from slavery time. Oftentimes, the story of slavery and the history of African Americans in particular in this country is kind of consigned to this special Little Corner of history, african American History, and it doesnt apply to anyone else. I think in particular the story of slavery is integral to the history of the United States. You cant understand the United States without understanding slavery, certainly not today, not in 1960, not in 1900. None of these things make sense if you dont understand the forced migration of africans to this country. And thats in terms of culture and in terms of economy as well. I think this place is important because we dont talk enough about the realities of slavery. We dont talk enough about the inequality of African Americans and what they have faced in this country, and we dont talk inugh about our role today perpetuating that inequality. Its really, really significant, i think, and a lot of Historic Sites address it in fits and starts. I think its important for people to come here and get a more complete understanding of slavery. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] if you like American History tv, keep up with us during the week on facebook, twitter and youtube. Learn about what happened this day in history and see preview clips of up coming programs. Follow us at cspan history. In june of 1985, president Ronald Reagan talked in the oval the Readers Digest Washington Bureau chief. Three years later, the bbc sat down with the president late in his second term. This sunday, watch both of these interviews on the presidency. Heres a preview. Some former president s have talked of the loneliness of the presidency and the burdens of the presidency, yet you seem to approach the job with great relish. Do you find it lonely or burdensome . How would you describe it . No, i dont. I surrounded myself with people that i have confidence in, that i believe in. I dont think that i said here all alone and decide everything by myself. As i say, i want to hear everybodys viewpoint. Willt give any indication where i leave while i hear these viewpoints, and i have people who were cabinet officers other officers under other president s tell me that they were not as fruitful before. A lot of president s simply use well, they meet periodically and different members would report what their departments are doing. The word that i have gotten from were in, they never cabinet meetings where everybody, regardless of whether it affected their particular agency, where involved in the discussion. Again, it wasnt the eight years experience. I have to believe that for many years recently, we have taken our president s from the ranks of the legislators. I think the best training, the to be president of the United States is being a governor. A legislator is used to being in a group and on a committee and making decisions on a voting basis, majority rule. Governor knows that the final say has got to be his or. Er us or hers i attribute part of this to that. I dont say it is easy. That, thered all of is so much right on both sides, but it is very difficult. No, i dont have that feeling. What were you going to ask . I was going to ask about the day you were shot at the hilton hotel. Mr. President ,y, that was one of the moments that solidified your popularity in the country. That was a crucial thing. The only unique thing think about that, i got all the way to the hospital and walked into the emergency room and when the ,urse aim to meet me, i said im having trouble breathing. I didnt know id been shot. I thought one of the secret service men jumped on my back after throwing me into the car. I thought hed broken a rib. When i started this bit blot i thought the rib had punctured a blood i thought the rib had punctured along. When did you find out . When they got my clothes peeled off me, including cutting , a brandnewf me suit, they found a wound under my arm where the bullet had hit neither, and i hit neither, and i washere unaware of it. It careened off the car, the bullet, between the door space and caught me here. Your microphone is off and the producer would love to get this in the program. Would you mind beginning the story it is a great story we want to try again. [laughter] sorry. What does that say . Im sorry, yes. If we could do it very quickly there. Hear more from these Ronald Reagan interviews sunday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, 5 00 pacific, here on American History tv. The National Constitution center in hill and philadelphia hosted a discussion on congress, Political Parties and polarization from the time of americas founding through the civil war to today. Speakers include Joanne Freeman and political scientist norman orenstein. This event took place online due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the National Constitution center provided the video. Jeffrey now it is a great honor to introduce our guests. What an amazing panel. Americas most distinguished historians and scholars of congress to help us understand our current vexations. Edward ayres is president emeritus of humanities at the university of richmond. He is the author of many books on the civil war and reconstruction, including, i