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Louis Manigault (1828-1899) was a member of a prominent and influential family of rice planters from South Carolina and Georgia. In 1833, his father, Charles Manigault (1795-1874), purchased Gowrie and East Hermitage plantations located on Argyle Island in the Savannah River, several miles upstream from the port of Savannah. Louis managed these properties for his father from the 1850s through the Civil War and Reconstruction.\n\nThe Manigault Plantation Journal, compiled by Louis Manigault between 1856 and 1879, includes information on plantation life, slaves and slavery, rice cultivation, market conditions, accounts, and other topics. Notes and memoranda kept by Charles Manigault regarding the plantations during the 1830s and 1840s were pasted into the journal.

Manuscript Resources on Plantation Society and Economy in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley. From Special Collections, LSU Libraries.

The author William Faulkner appears to have drawn the names of characters and other inspiration from a plantation diary just discovered by scholars.

Lowcountry Africana, sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina, will be entirely dedicated to records that document the family and cultural heritage of African Americans in the historic rice-growing areas of South Carolina, Georgia and extreme northeastern Florida, an area that scholars and preservationists have identified as a distinct culture area, home to the rich Gullah/Geechee culture. The Lowcountry Africana website will be a treasure trove of primary documents, book excerpts and multimedia for exploring and documenting the dynamic cultural and family heritage of the Lowcountry Southeast. Lowcountry Africana is now live!

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief.

From Sankofa's Slave Data Collection