Clearly I am missing something. How is it that the name "Providence  
Plantations" makes people cringe. Plantation was a word used  
interchangeably with "colony" back in the 17th century. For instance  
Lord de la Ware wrote (1610) A True and Sincere declaration of the  
purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia. And Sir Francis  
Bacon wrote On Plantations in 1625. The former concerned de la Ware's  
thoughts on the appropriate uses for the Virginia colony. The later  
with economic uses of plantations. Neither were concerned with slavery.

So is this just a PC thing? Granting of course the major involvement  
of New England in the transportation part of the African Slave Trade.

Jim Brothers
On Jun 30, 2009, at 11:49 AM, S. Corneliussen wrote:

> Concerning this interesting discussion of the denotations and  
> connotations of the words "plantation" and "farm" in old Virginia,  
> here are a tangent and then a tangent to the tangent:
>
> THE TANGENT: Today's New York Times offers an article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/30rename.html 
> ) headlined "Rhode Island Weighs Using Shorter Official Name." It  
> begins, "It does not appear on the state flag or license plate. You  
> won't see it on road maps or welcome signs. But Rhode Island has a  
> lightning rod of a formal name -- Rhode Island and Providence  
> Plantations -- that harks back to its prominent role in the slave  
> trade and makes some of its residents cringe." The article reports  
> that after "years of defending the state's name, the State Senate  
> and House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly last week to allow  
> a referendum asking voters whether to shorten it by seven syllables,  
> to Rhode Island." The article also reports that one of three House  
> members who opposed the measure charged that striking "and  
> Providence Plantations" from the state's name would be "like tearing  
> down our history. They're trying to be revisionist, and revisionism  
> doesn't work." (Whether or not this particular bit of revisionism  
> proposed in Rhode Island would be unwise -- and I offer no opinion  
> on that -- I remain baffled at the belief that a given understanding  
> of the past, once received, is perfect in every way, and  
> unchangeable, and undiscussable.)
>
> THE TANGENT TO THE TANGENT: It seems to me that this story shows yet  
> again that in America, and I don't mean just the South, we're  
> nowhere near finished developing our understanding of our slavery- 
> era past. Too bad that many of the Virginia authorities in charge of  
> deciding Fort Monroe's post-Army fate agree that the past is already  
> quite well understood. That's what they've continued to demonstrate  
> by continuing to produce official documents treating the Contraband  
> freedom story not as the story of enslavement-escaping Americans  
> standing up for the natural law on which the country was founded,  
> but merely as the story of a white politician in a general's uniform  
> making the best of a squalid legal and military situation grounded  
> in the obscenity of federal slavery law ca. 1861. I should add,  
> however, that historians have re-entered the discussion in a formal  
> way. Maybe there'll soon be good things to report about the  
> constructive revisionism that's obviously needed concerning the  
> story of the Union's bastion in Confederate, slaveholding Virginia.
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