ests were cleared, cotton harvested, and money made, perhaps more dis-
tant slave quarters might be constructed, or slaves might take over both
sides of the dogtrot as a larger separate house, perhaps two stories, was con-
structed for whites. Or perhaps the planter would instead invest in more
slaves rather than domestic comfort (much less grandeur), then move be-
fore there was ever anything resembling a manse. This was the plantation
landscape—temporary, in process, abandoned, repossessed, and so on, sel-
dom pretentious, manicured, or lovely. Yet altogether it was home to mil-
lions, economically productive, and the subject of scornandpassionate
sentiment. This landscape was notnatureas virgin untouched, even though
patches of wilderness persisted all over the South. Native landscapes had
not been unmanipulated either, and plantation landscapes do bear impor-
tant resemblances to Mississippian ones: very large fields as well as vege-
table gardens, colonies of plants far removed from their places of origin,
and expanses of girdled forests, burned and reburned, later to be aban-
doned or at least idled for years. Both were landscapes made, reshaped,
abused, and often as not, as best we can tell, used well, too. They were ver-
nacular landscapes.
tThen came the planters’ war. Edmund Ruffin, brother fire-eaters from
the lower South, and their clerical and other intellectual allies had suc-
ceeded in galvanizing the great majority of white southerners to defend
slavery and white supremacy. Ruffin most of all welcomed the war, fired his
famous shot at Fort Sumter, kibitzed on eastern battlefields for a couple
of years, and sacrificed a teenaged grandson in , then his favored son,
Julian, in . Skirmishes and full-scale battles were fought on planta-
tions, including Ruffin family properties. Yankees vandalized Edmund Jr.’s
estate and stole Edmund Sr.’s library and correspondence; they also mis-
takenly burned the house of Edmund Sr.’s neighbor by the Pamunkey,
thinking it was the old fire-eater’s. Robert E. Lee’s family estate on the Poto-
mac became Arlington National Cemetery. U. S. Grant made Dr. Richard
Eppes’s big house at the confluence of the Appomattox and the James
his headquarters during the siege of Petersburg. Earlier, Grant’s soldiers
had laid waste to Tennessee, Louisiana, and especially Mississippi planta-
tions. Then William Tecumseh Sherman’s midwesterners scourged north-
ern Georgia and South Carolina. Photographers following the troops rel-
ished capturing images of blackened brick chimneys standing sentinel over
the ashes of once-proud plantation big houses.
Gone too were millions of livestock. Horses and mules were taken for