The Brutal Buildings Behind Beautiful Plantation Houses

On the wall of a sugar mill, there was very often an axe. It wasn't for firewood, and it wasn't for cane. Behind every beautiful plantation house stood the buildings that made the money: the sugar mill, the gin house, the slave pen. The houses were restored down to the wallpaper. The buildings behind them were torn down, burned, and paved over. This is the story of what stood just outside the photograph, and why almost none of it survived. In this video: → The one region in America where deaths outnumbered births among enslaved people, and the building responsible → The phrase you've almost certainly said yourself, and where it really came from → The object on a cotton plantation that people feared more than the whip → The slave-trading building you can still walk inside today → The jail that ended up buried under a parking lot, three blocks from a state capitol → The largest thing enslaved people built in America, which was never a building at all PLACES IN THIS VIDEO Oak Alley Plantation, Vacherie, Louisiana Nottoway, White Castle, Louisiana Whitney Plantation, Wallace, Louisiana Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park, Louisiana Freedom House Museum (Franklin & Armfield Office), 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia Lumpkin's Jail site, Shockoe Bottom, Richmond, Virginia Cooper River rice fields, South Carolina Lowcountry SOURCES Louisiana sugar and enslaved labor: 64 Parishes, "Plantation Slavery in Antebellum Louisiana" Norbert Rillieux: Historic New Orleans Collection; American Chemical Society, National Historic Chemical Landmark The cotton gin and the growth of slavery: Eli Whitney Museum; National Archives Solomon Northup, "Twelve Years a Slave" (1853) The domestic slave trade: Equal Justice Initiative; Historic New Orleans Collection, "Purchased Lives" Franklin & Armfield: City of Alexandria, "History of 1315 Duke Street" Lumpkin's Jail: Encyclopedia Virginia; Virginia Department of Historic Resources excavation report Lowcountry rice earthworks: S.C. Sea Grant Consortium; Charleston County Public Library Magnolia cotton press: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey Whitney sugar kettles: Whitney Plantation Historical photographs: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey. This video discusses the history of slavery in the United States for educational purposes. #History #Architecture #AmericanHistory