Registered: Nov 2001
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"Tombee, Portrait of a Cotton Planter by Theodore Rosengarten

Tombee was the name of a cotton plantation on St Helena Island
South Carolina near Savannah , Georgia.


This journal of a Cotton Plantatiion owner, Thomas B Chaplin. kept from 1845 to 1890 with some big skips will by no means interest every one. Chaplin at age 23, in 1845 was given 376 acres of good cotton land on St Helena Island and 70 slaves. He was married at the time and had one child. In that year he began to keep a detailed journal or diary of nearly everything that happened to him except the important things.

If you want a very good picture of what life was like for rural people in 1845 in South Carolina including how they lived, how they partied , how they dealt with their neighbors , how they hunted and fished and how they lived and died with every kind of disease this is a very good picture. I enjoyed the book.

Chaplin was a very immature young man at 23 and had very little self discipline but a high moral code and sense of civic duty. He suffered one setback after another financially. Some of these were due to his own profligance and some were due to the inept manner in which his mother coducted her life. After giving the slaves to Thomas she borrowed money at the bank using ten of the best slaves as collateral for the loan. She was unable to repay the loan and Thomas was first aware of any problem when the deputy came to repossess the ten slaves and sell them to pay the debt.

The slaves and their relationship to Chaplin is the most depressing characteristic of the book. Chaplin was not basically
cruel to his slaves but he did treat them with almost the same attitude that he addressed his pigs, horses and cattle. His debates over which slaves to buy shoes for for the comming winter based upon how much they would be outside in cold weather, his debate over whether an old slave was worth calling the doctor about when it appeared he would die. He gave his slaves just enough food to assure their working health and encouraged them to hunt and fish at night for their meat--but no guns for the hunting --that was against the law. Chaplins determination of which feamale slave should be paired with which
male slave to produce the best offspring for work in the fields.
Altogether the existence of the slaves was a very depressing element in the book. It was not easy to go to sleep after reading some of the chapters.

Chaplin finally got his due. He fought as a confederate soldier in the civil war. He was not killed or wounded, but lost all of his land, and of course all of his slaves and all of his money and all but one child died before he did. He did not keep the diary during the war years.

I can't honestly recommend this book to all but if you like true historic detail (and I do) this is it.

Published by Quill in 1986

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