Butler Island Plantation

Famous rice Plantation of the 19th century, owned by Pierce Butler of Philadelphia. A system of dikes and canals for the cultivation of rice, installed by engineers from Holland, is still in evidence in the old fields, and has been used as a pattern for similar operations in recent years.

Major Pierce Butler: Major Pierce Butler was an Irish-born American, Founding Father of the United States, and one of the largest slaveholders in the country. A drafter and signer of the U.S. Constitution, Butler fought in the Revolutionary War and subsequently became a U.S. Senator who introduced the Fugitive Slave Clause into the constitution. He made a fortune from his rice plantation in McIntosh County, Butler Island Plantation, and his cotton plantation on St. Simons Island, GA. “By selling his British commission two years later, in 1773, Major Butler got the money to buy a seventeen-hundred-acre sea-island plantation on St. Simon, Georgia; and in 1791 he bought, not far from St. Simon’s, what became the jewel of his estate—Butler Island” (Dunisberre, Them Dark Days, 215). “Increasingly a mere absentee, Butler visited his rice and cotton plantations only once between 1810 and his death in 1822. He was in 1812 master of 638 slaves, and consequently was one of the richest men in the United States” (Dunisberre 215).
Pierce Mease Butler: Overview: Grandson of Major Butler and half-inheritor of the plantation with his brother John, Pierce Mease Butler is responsible for one of the largest auctioning of enslaved Africans in the United States’s history, termed “the Weeping Time” as a result of the 436 men, women, and children who were torn from their families and sold across the country.
Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble: Fanny Kemble was a British actress and writer who met her soon-to-be-husband, Pierce Mease Butler, in 1834 during her theatrical tour of the United States. She wrote plays, travel narratives, poetry, and upon visiting Butler Island Plantation with Pierce Mease in 1838, abolitionist memoirs and other writings advocating for the end of slavery. “Fanny came to learn through her own experience that the idea of improving the condition of the slave through appealing to the master was a Utopian dream” (Scott, “On the Authenticity of Fanny Kemble’s Journal,” 236). “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, published in London and New York in 1863, was a blistering exposé of plantation slavery and mentioned many of the enslaved sold in 1859” (DeGraft-Hanson, “Unearthing the Weeping Time”).
Frances Butler Leigh: Daughter of Fanny Kemble and Pierce Mease, Frances Butler Leigh shared her father’s political views rather than her mother’s abolitionist ones. She writes in Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation Since the War, originally published in 1883, “The white people were disfranchised, the local government in the hands of either military men or Northern adventurers, the latter of whom, with no desire to promote either the good of the country or people, but only to advocate their own private ends, encouraged the negroes in all their foolish and extravagant ideas of freedom, set them against their old masters, filled their mind with false hopes, and pandered to their worst passions, in order to secure for themselves some political office which they hoped to obtain through the negro vote” (2-3). Observations from Frances Butler Leigh, after the Civil War: “Most of the finest plantations were lying idle for want of hands to work them, so many of the negroes had died; 17,000 deaths were recorded by the Freedmen's Bureau alone. Many had been taken to the South-west, and others preferred hanging about the towns, making a few dollars now and then, to working regularly on the plantations” (15).

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