“Into the hands of negroes”: Reproducing plantation geographies in the South Carolina Lowcountry

This article examines the post-emancipation contests over agricultural land in the South Carolina Lowcountry - the coastal region surrounding the port city of Charleston - in the context of recent theorizations of plantation geographies and the racial politics of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). In the aftermath of slavery, freedpeople in the Lowcountry were remarkably successful in securing control over their labor and access to land. The measure of relative autonomy that came with these gains spurred enormous anxiety for white elites, however, who realized that black control over land and labor threatened to upend the region's racial hierarchy. I argue that plantation geographies persist through the white monopolization of land, and suggest that successfully challenging this historical trajectory depends on challenging liberal modes of improvement.