Anna: The Letters Of A St. Simons Island Plantation Mistress, 1817-1859 (Southern Voices From The Past: Women's Letters, Diaries, And Writings Ser.)

Features of Anna: The Letters of a St. Simons Island Plantation Mistress, 1817-1859 (Southern Voices from the Past: Women's Letters, Diaries, and Writings Ser.)

As the wife of a frequently absent slaveholder and public figure Anna Matilda Page King 17981859 was the de facto head of their Sea Island plantation This volume collects more than 150 letters to her husband children parents and others Conveying the substance of everyday life as they chronicle Kings ongoing struggles to put food on the table nurse her family black and white and keep faith with a disappointing husband the letters offer an absorbing firsthand account of antebellum coastal Georgia lifeAnna Matilda Page was reared with the expectation that she would marry a planter have children and tend to her familys domestic affairs Untypically she was also schooled by her father in all aspects of plantation management from seed cultivation to building construction That grounding would serve her well By 1842 her husbands properties were seized owing to debts amassed from crop failures economic downturns and extensive investments in land enslaved workers and the development of the nearby port town of Brunswick Anna and her family were sustained however by Retreat the St Simons Island property left to her in trust by her father With the labor of fifty bondpeople and their increase she was to strive with little aid from her husband to keep the plantation solventA valuable record of Kings many roles from accountant to mother from doctor to horticulturist the letters also reveal much about her relationship with and attitudes toward her enslaved workers Historians have yet to fully understand the lives of plantation mistresses left on their own by husbands pursuing political and other professional careers Anna Matilda Page Kings letters give us insight into one such woman who reluctantly entered but nonetheless excelled in the male domains of business and agriculture