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The forming and fracturing of families on a South Carolina rice plantation, 1812–1865

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This case study traces family formation among enslaved people on a South Carolina rice plantation owned by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the first half of the nineteenth century. It uses a rare set of documents to show how enslaved people were brought together mainly via inheritance (rather than purchase) to form a new community, and how they responded to frequent mobility within the holdings of a single planter. It also highlights the peculiar challenges to stable family formation that were unique to the South Carolina lowcountry, including individuals being separated from the main body of the community for periods of time while working on other holdings; the presence of a higher percentage of African-born individuals than was usual for the antebellum South; and the devastating impact of the highest mortality experienced by a mainland slave population.

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Lowcountry Hurricanes: Three centuries of storms at sea and ashore
  • W J Fraser
An address delivered in Charleston, before the agricultural society of South Carolina, at its anniversary meeting, on Tuesday, the 18th August 1829 reprinted in Young
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A dreadful childhood: The excess mortality of American slaves
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The final victims: Foreign slave trade to North America
  • J A Mcmillin
The slave trade to colonial South Carolina: A profile. The South Carolina Historical Magazine
  • W Minchinton
Slave health and southern distinctiveness
  • T L Savitt
The Leverett letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina family
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Chains of love: Slave couples in antebellum South Carolina
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