An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez And New York (Southern Biography Series)

Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, Stephen Duncan (17871867) was a landowner, slaveholder, and financier with a remarkable array of social, economic, and political contacts in preCivil War America. In the first biography of Duncan, Martha Jane Brazy paints a new portrait of antebellum life by exploring Duncan's multifacted networks among elites in both the South and the North. Duncan grew up in a well-to-do Pennsylvania family with strong business ties in Philadelphia. There was little indication, though, that he would become a cosmopolitan entrepreneur who would own over fifteen plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, collectively enslaving more than two thousand slaves. With style and substance, Martha Jane Brazy describes both the development of Duncan's businesses and the lives of the slaves on whose labor his empire was constructed. According to Brazy, Duncan was a "hybrid," not fully a southerner or a northerner. He was also, Brazy shows, a paradox. Although he put down deep roots in Natchez, his sphere of influence was national in scope. Although his wealth was greatly dependent on the slaves he owned, he predicted a clash over the issue of slave ownership nearly three decades before the onset of the Civil War. A product of both North and South, Duncan illuminates how and when the regions were contradictory and when they could be made compatible. Perhaps more than any other planter studied thus far, Duncan breaks the mold created by historians to explain the southern slaveholding aristocracy. By connecting and contrasting the networks of this elite planter and those he enslaved, Brazy provides new insights into the "slaveocracy" of antebellum America.AUTHOR BIO: Martha Jane Brazy is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Read more