Sweet potato planting, Hopkinson's Plantation
Date Created: Henry Moore. Date Created: April 8, 1862
Photograph shows slaves working in the sweet potato fields on the Hopkinson plantation.
Source: Library of Congress. Photographs, prints, and ephemera from the Gladstone collection
Revolution in an Image
On November 7, 1861, during the beginning of the American Civil War, a fleet of Union gunboats shelled the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Confederate planters quickly ordered their housemaids and farm workers to follow them as they went. The majority continued to do as they were instructed. To manage the properties that the landowners abandoned and to supervise the work of former slaves, the Union government eventually appointed northern antislavery reformers. These reformers sought to show that free labor was preferable to slave labor when growing cotton. However, the majority of freedpeople preferred to raise corn, potatoes, and other crops for subsistence rather than cotton or food for the market. After white planters had already fled Edisto island, New Hampshire native Henry P. Moore, who had journeyed to South Carolina during the Civil War, took this picture in 1862. Moore might have faked the people in the picture, but the clothes, crops, tools, and wagon were all real.