"What nature suffers to groe"

by Mart A. Stewart

This unique study explores the mutually transforming relationship between environment and human culture on the Georgia coastal plain between 1680 and 1920. Each of the successive communities on the coast - the philanthropic and imperialistic experiment of the Georgia Trustees, the plantation culture of rice and sea island cotton planters and their slaves, and the postbellum society of wage-earning freedmen, lumbermen, vacationing industrialists, truck farmers, river engineers, and New South promoters - developed distinctive relationships with the environment, and these in turn developed distinctive landscapes. The core landscape of this long history was the plantation landscape, which persisted long after its economic foundation had begun to erode. This study examines the connection between power relations and different perceptions and uses of the environment by masters and slaves on lowcountry plantations and how these differing habits of land use created different but interlocking la