Surveillance and Control on a Plantation: L'Hermitage at Monocacy

Written from an article by Megan Bailey, University of Maryland, College Park.

Park Service archeologists check ground-penetrating radar results in the search for slave dwellings on the Best Farm, Monocacy National Battlefield. NPS.

The finding

Excavations at L'Hermitage, a former plantation on the grounds of Monocacy National Battlefield in Frederick, Maryland, uncovered strong evidence of slave quarters from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The dwellings were spaced and aligned with obvious planning and a taste for order and symmetry.

As folklorist John Michael Vlach put it, "the design of a plantation estate was an expression of the owner's tastes, values, and attitudes." Where the quarters sat relative to other buildings shows how owners saw the people they enslaved and how they tried to control them: a strict layout made resistance and revolt harder. At L'Hermitage, the arrangement reads as a deliberate effort to keep order and hierarchy.

The place

• The park: 1,647 acres, best known for the 1864 Battle of Monocacy, though people lived here as far back as the Paleoindian period (12,000–8,000 BCE).
• The Best Farm: 274 acres, carved from the southern part of L'Hermitage, which stood on park land from 1793 to 1827. It takes its name from the Best family, tenants at the time of the battle.
• The owners: the Vincendières, a French family who came to Maryland around 1794 from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), fleeing the slave rebellions that threatened their sugar plantation. Much about them — and especially about the people they enslaved — is still unknown.

Ninety people enslaved

By 1800 the 748-acre plantation's household counted 6 men, 8 women and 90 enslaved people, at least 12 brought from Saint-Domingue — one of the largest slaveholdings in Frederick County, even in Maryland. That was unusually many for a small farm growing clover and perhaps grain. Historians have suggested the family:

• meant to grow a labor-hungry crop such as tobacco;
• planned to hire out enslaved workers to nearby mills, farms, furnaces or glass factories;
• kept so many as a mark of status, wealth and their French-Caribbean roots.

Cruelty, and resistance

• 1798: Julian Niemcewicz, a Polish visitor, saw instruments of torture used on the plantation's workers — though none has been found by archeologists.
• Nine state court cases charged daughter Victoire Vincendière and her uncle Jean Payen Boisneuf with excessive cruelty: too little clothing and food, and "cruelly and immercifully beating and whipping" the people they held.
• Some were sold away from their families to traders in Baltimore and Louisiana.
• Resistance: Pierre Louis successfully petitioned for his freedom, and at least two others escaped.

What still stands

Three buildings from the Vincendières' time survive, stabilized since the Park Service bought the farm in 1993:

• the main house, built in phases onto a stone building already there (a log kitchen was added in the 1860s);
• a secondary house — stone below, log above, the upper story added in the 1790s;
• a large hipped-roof stone barn from the late eighteenth century, with a mortared-stone addition.

Earlier (Phase II) testing had found a dump, two trench-like features, and anomalies that might be the quarters Niemcewicz described.

The quarters

With shovel test pits, excavation and ground-penetrating radar, archeologists found six structures, each marked by a stone-and-mortar chimney base.

The main house and the secondary house sit on nearly parallel axes, and so do the secondary house and the quarters: a planned, precisely executed landscape.

A house to watch from

The secondary house is the surviving building closest to the quarters and overlooks where they stood. Its purpose is unclear — perhaps for other French refugees, perhaps an overseer. It sits almost at the center of the row: 563 feet from its southern end and 596 feet from its northern. A seventh dwelling may have stood at the south end, too faint to detect in the 2010 season.

• From the secondary house, one could see the main house, barn, quarters and fields; the quarters were also in plain view of the main house.
• A swale between the secondary house and the quarters kept anything from blocking the view.

Having lost land and relatives in the Haitian Revolution, the family may have feared a second uprising and ruled more harshly because of it.

Reading the landscape

Archeologists read plantation space as a record of power: how layouts created and enforced oppression, and how people resisted it (Delle, 1998). Others have traced in such layouts racist ideology, the making of "otherness," security worries and displays of wealth. The owner's house often dominates, with the quarters behind or beside it. At L'Hermitage, the quarters lie east of the main house, cut off from it by the secondary house.

As archeologist Theresa Singleton wrote, "Nearly every aspect of plantation space resulted from conscious decision making on the part of planters to maximize profits, exercise surveillance and reinforce the subordinate status of enslaved people." Watching had a practical side — making sure the assigned labor was done — and a symbolic one: enforcing hierarchy.

The conclusion: the even spacing and the sight lines to the secondary house show the quarters were not thrown up in haste. The Vincendières shaped their land to watch, dominate and stifle the autonomy of the people they enslaved — perhaps out of fear that Saint-Domingue would happen again.

Sources

Based on "Surveillance and Control on a Plantation Landscape," by Megan Bailey, University of Maryland, College Park, published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. It draws on J. Beasley, ed., Archaeological Overview and Assessment … of the Best Farm (NPS, 2005); P. S. Reed, "L'Hermitage: A French Plantation in Frederick County," Maryland Historical Magazine 97(1) (2002); S. J. Rivers Cofield, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10(3) (2006); J. Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree (1965); J. M. Vlach, Back of the Big House (1993); J. A. Delle, An Archaeology of Social Space (1998); T. A. Singleton, World Archaeology 33(1) (2001); and S. Joyner's thesis on Georgia slave housing (2003). The excavation photograph credited to Kate Birmingham and Tom Gwaltney's site map are not reproduced.