Jim  I think the problem is that most people today "think" that a "plantation" was large farm with slaves.  That is how I responded to a question on this list, a few minutes ago, about the difference between farm and plantation.  Only we historians of the 17th century know it had the meaning of colony -- a "planting" of people in a new place

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--- On Wed, 7/1/09, James Brothers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: James Brothers <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Plantations
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Wednesday, July 1, 2009, 12:15 PM

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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