delphian Pierce Butler. Butler’s fortune rested in part on his family’s hun-
dreds of slaves and huge rice and sea-island cotton plantations on Saint
Simons and Butler islands. Fanny went to live on Pierce’s Butler Island
estate, then Saint Simons, for fifteen weeks, from the end of December
into April . There she delighted (for a while) in engaging company, gar-
dens, and walks along edges of fields and forests. She was morbidly curious
about rattlesnakes until house slaves brought her a freshly killed specimen.
Meanwhile Fanny, already deeply committed to the international abolition-
ist movement, grew more appalled at the institution of slavery from her
daily exposure. So she began a journal (in the format of letters) that fre-
quently gave expression to her mounting disquiet. Decades later, divorced
from Butler and at home in England, herJournal of a Residence on a Geor-
gian Plantationwas finally published, in , the very year of Abraham Lin-
coln’s proclamation. Kemble’s book brims with fascinating minutae as well
as reflective thought on coastal Georgia, slavery, and much else, including
nearby rustic folks called ‘‘pinelanders.’’ Here she absorbed and perpetu-
ated a compelling myth that dissolved social stratifications among what the
aristocracy perceived as the lower reaches, revealing a persistent outsiders’
blind spot to the real economy and culture of the piney woods.
One evening ‘‘after dinner,’’ Kemble wrote, she had ‘‘a most interesting
conversation with Mr. K,’’ Roswell King Jr., who was Pierce Butler’s plan-
tation manager, a shrewd and learned gentleman and an agronomic im-
prover. ‘‘Among other subjects, he gave me a lively and curious description
of the yeomanry of Georgia,’’ she went on, ‘‘more properly termed pine-
landers.’’ Fanny carried British conceptual baggage, naturally, and properly
associated the word ‘‘yeoman’’ with ‘‘well-to-do farmers with comfortable
homesteads, decent habits, industrious, intelligent, cheerful, and thrifty[.]
Such, however, is not the yeomanry of Georgia.’’ Slavery had degraded all
labor, so white men without slaves refused to exert themselves, choosing
their own degradation but compensating with racial pride and bluster. The
poorest among them ‘‘squat (most appropriately is it so termed) either on
other men’s land or government districts—always near swamp or pine bar-
ren—and claim masterdom over the place they invade till ejected by the
rightful proprietors.’’ Their shelters were abominable, and ‘‘their food [was]
chiefly supplied by shooting the wildfowl and venison, and stealing from
the cultivated patches of the plantations nearest at hand.’’ Pinelanders’
‘‘clothes hang about them in filthy tatters, and the combined squalor and
fierceness of their appearance is really frightful.’’ Such was her summary