Principles and Privilege: Two Women's Lives on a Georgia Plantation

When internationally famous British actress Frances Anne Kemble married Philadelphian Pierce Butler in 1834, she had no idea that he was heir to a vast slave plantation in Georgia. Kemble was an abolitionist, a position reinforced by what she considered to be the superiority of politics. Horrified at the situation she found herself in, she kept a journal in the form of letters to her close friend,Elizabeth Sedgwick. The result is an impassioned, dynamic chronicle of her work to improve the living conditions of the slaves and intercede on their behalf with her husband and the plantation overseers.Published in 1883, Frances A. Butler Leigh's memoirs focus on her return to the plantation where she had been raised by her father - who had won exclusive custody when he and Kemble divorced - and her attempt to renegotiate her relationship to her father's former slaves in the days after emancipation.