Lakeport Legacies · June 21 · Yankee Mistress of the Old South: Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866 · Dr. Gary Edwards (Arkansas State University-Jonesboro)

Lakeport Legacies · June 21 · Yankee Mistress of the Old South: Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866 · Dr. Gary Edwards (Arkansas State University-Jonesboro)

Trulock Family Papers, Correspondence, 1837-1869 are held by the University of Arkansas Special Collections

 

Lakeport Legacies & Book Signing

Yankee Mistress of the Old South: Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866
Dr. Gary Edwards (Arkansas State University-Jonesboro)
Lakeport Plantation, 601 Hwy 142, Lake Village, AR
Thursday, June 21 at 6:00 p.m.

Amanda Beardsley Trulock (1811-1891) is a rare example of a northern woman, born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who married a Georgia cotton planter; later migrated to Arkansas; and eventually became a plantation proprietor and sole mistress of 62 slaves near Pine Bluff. Like many slaveowning widows of the Old South, Trulock was a very competent financial manager. But she delegated many other responsibilities, in fact a surprising amount, to an enslaved man, Reuben. And through her relationship with him she reveals a distinctive example of antebellum enslavement, which combined an unusual mixture of white leniency and black autonomy. Trulock also shares some things in common with the tiny handful of New England women who married into slavery at the time. Most informative of these commonalities (or perhaps the most surprising, depending on one’s preconceptions) was her immediate acceptance and selective advocacy of slavery during her twenty-nine years of residency in the South during both war and peace.

A limited number of copies of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary T. Edwards will be available for purchase. The book includes Dr. Edwards’ chapter on Trulock. $35