Doug,
That about sums it up. 

Anita 



-- [log in to unmask] wrote:
 The most recent postings are finally nudging this discussion in a new, and I think, more profitable direction. The original query basically said, "I didn't know 'planter' and 'plantation' were defined by possession of twenty slaves. Where did this come from? When and where were these terms used in this way?" That is one set of reasonable questions to ask. Another might be something like this: "How much baggage--and what kinds--do these seemingly innocuous descriptions carry? Do their connotations change over time or space? What do we learn about specific individuals and families in particular places (communities) when such terms are applied to them?"

Maybe the answer to that last question is "not much." The volatility of the definitions of such terms illustrates why biography and community studies are sometimes to be preferred to quantitative social-science-like approaches. When the latter use categories that we know to be changeable yet assume to be comparable, if not equivalent, such approaches are likely to be unreliable. The goal of the historian is not to categorize people in the past in order to learn more about them. Rather it is to interrogate the use of a contemporary category to see whether it carries any genuine information at all or is merely a term of etiquette or a kind of "boilerplate". We don't learn much about planters and their influence by choosing a cut-off criterion (twenty slaves) and then counting how many there might be in a given place at a given time. We do learn something about them by reading what they wrote, what others wrote about them, following the trajectory of their economic activities and religious beliefs, finding out who they were related to by blood or marriage, and taking stock of their participation in politics--to list just some of the obvious angles to investigate. 

Then as now, wealth alone did not and does not mean its possessor is a "big shot" (or, for that matter, an admirable or a despicable person).

Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego 

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