Roswell King - Plantation Managers

Plantation Managers

As powerful and successful men, Roswell King and his sons lived out some of the complexities of their times. Roswell King, Sr. had conflicts with Major Pierce Butler when he managed his island plantations in Georgia, because Butler took a more moderate approach to the treatment of slaves than King did. Butler was one of the wealthiest men in the South when King worked for him. After he left in 1820, Butler hired his son Roswell King, Jr. as plantation manager.

In the winter of 1838-1839, the new owner Pierce (Mease) Butler and his wife Fanny Kemble stayed for the winter at Butler and St. Simons islands. According to Kemble's journal of the visit, Roswell King was reported to have fathered one or more mixed-race children by enslaved women. She wrote that Bran, a mixed-race slave said to be King's son, was conceived and born while King's wife was still alive. He became a driver (supervisor) of other slaves on the plantation.

Roswell King, Jr. (1796–1854), the second son and namesake, took over as manager of the Butler plantations in 1820 and worked there until 1838, after which he went to his own plantation in Alabama. Kemble wrote in her journal, published in 1863, that he was said to have fathered several mixed-race children during his tenure. She identified them as including Renty, the twins Ben and Daphne, and Jem Valiant, whose mothers were the slave women Betty, Minda, Judy, and Scylla (her child was unidentified). These children were born into slavery, as under slave law, children took the status of their mother by the principle of partus sequitur ventrem. Kemble attested to these children by her direct observations and from stories told her by slaves during her residence. During this period, she complained to her husband about King, Jr.'s harsh treatment of slaves, as the women especially appealed to her for help to lighten their work. With their marriage deteriorating, Butler threatened Kemble with no access to their daughters if she published any of her observations about the plantations.

Kemble did not publish her account until 1863, long after their divorce in 1849 and after her daughters had reached their majority. According to the historian Catherine Clinton, King Jr.'s granddaughter, Julia King, wrote to a friend in 1930, saying that Kemble had told lies about her grandfather because he refused to return her affections. The historian Bell documented that the marriage of Kemble and Pierce Butler was fraught with conflict by that time, and was undermined by episodes of spousal infidelity. It ended in separation in 1847 and divorce in 1849.

According to Clinton, Kemble may have falsified portions of her journal. The historian Deirdre David says some readers have found Kemble's descriptions of slaves' appearances and lives to be racist. But, David notes that Kemble's views on race were "not anomalous" in the 19th-century among English writings on the topic. In that context, David described Kemble's descriptions as "relatively mild and moderately conventional." (Historians of the period have noted such contradictions in many contemporary writings, including those of Thomas Jefferson, who opposed slavery but was prejudiced against blacks.)

David notes that King Jr. published his own account of the "brutal system he deplored" in a long letter to The Southern Agriculturalist on 13 September 1828, in which he said that overseers were responsible for much of the cruelty to slaves. He preferred to use differing work rather than physical punishment, for instance, and said he did not condone whipping. David notes that if his account in his letter is accurate, the diet and treatment of slaves on the Butler plantation seemed to have deteriorated dramatically between 1828 and what Kemble saw and reported in 1838, shortly after King Jr. had left.

Kemble's journal appears to quote King Jr. verbatim:

"I hate the institution of slavery with all my heart; I consider it an absolute curse wherever it exists. It will keep those states where it does exist fifty years behind the others in improvement and prosperity."

She reveals his contradictions of character.