Plantation Quotes

When we went into World War II, I was a tractor driver then. I drove tractors on the plantation. So when they start calling people my age, 18, up, I was one they called.

Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.

My mother's family raised grains and crops. My father's grew sugarcane and mangos. So I knew more about the basics of farming than of acting.

My forebears refused to cut the sugar cane for plantation owners, and I am recognisably a product of that background.

I was influenced a lot by those around me - there was a lot of singing that went on in the cotton fields.

Since the commencement of 1830, I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment of me.

Born a slave, Harriet Tubman was determined not to remain one. She escaped from her owners in Maryland on the Underground Railroad in 1849 and then fearlessly returned thirteen times to help guide family members and others to freedom as the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad.

My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

Cotton is my life.

I am supposed to be, according to what I am told, one of the children of the cotton plantation owner's sons. If I could prove that, I'd own the whole goddamn everything.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

I am a planter - a cotton planter. I am a Southern man and a slaveholder - a kind and a merciful one, I trust - and none the worse for being a slaveholder.

These are terrible times. All our young in the Armies, not [any] men left to suppress a Negro insurrection …. As yet I have not sold a lock of Cotton

When Landon Carter, a Virginia plantation owner, read the Declaration of Independence two days after it was issued, he wondered whether its ringing affirmation of equality meant that slaves must be freed. If so, he confided to his diary, 'You must send them out of the country, or they must steal for their support.'

The plants are principally kept in large pots arranged in rows along the sides of narrow paved walks, with the houses of the gardeners at the entrance through which the visitors pass to the gardens.

While I fundamentally reject the notion that anyone who owned other human beings was either good, moral, or decent, Francis Scott Key left absolutely no doubt that he was a stone-cold bigot. He came from generations of plantation-owning bigots. They got wealthy off of it.

The land is excellent and agreeable, full of noble forest trees and grapevines, and nothing is wanted here but the labor and industry to render it one of the finest and most fruitful lands …

Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century.

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until the fame of its grassy meadows and fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peacable lives on its banks.