
































The Plantation Spaces in Black and White 

Review by Catherine E. LaVoy

Ancestors of Worthy Life: Plantation Slavery and Black Heritage at Mount Clare 

by Teresa S. Moyer 

University Press of Florida, 2015

With recent national events bringing to the forefront the still present problems of racism in American

society, it is critically important to educate the public on the origins of our society’s racial divides and

the structures that continue to propagate racism. To this end, Teresa Moyer’s new book, Ancestors of

Worthy Life: Plantation Slavery and Black Heritage at Mount Clare (2015), attempts to accomplish

this, primarily by providing an alternative to the elite-centered narrative provided by the museum today.

Over a decade after Eichstedt and Small (2002) completed their study on the interpretation of slavery

on plantation museums across the southern United States, Moyer’s book reveals that the practice of

symbolic annihilation of slavery is still a problem at plantation museum sites.

Mount  Clare is  located in the suburbs of  Baltimore,  Maryland,  a  city  with a  large African

American  population.  Like  other  urban  areas  of  the  country,  Baltimore  City  has  a  problem  of

structuralized racism, which affects  the economic potential  of its  African American residents.  This

economic inequality has been recently highlighted in litigation about unethical lending practices, which

resulted in the high foreclosure rate in Baltimore for African American residents during the recent

economic crisis (ElBoghdady 2008). Moyer’s work, while focusing on the history of Mount Clare,

carefully draws the reader back to the very modern problem of the creation of racialized spaces. This is

far from a modern phenomena; plantation studies have frequently pointed to the creation of racially

segregated spaces as a tool of social control (Delle 1998; Singleton 2001). However, what is seen in the

modern practice of Mount Clare is not simply a division of space, but a willful erasure of history and an

unwillingness  to  engage  with  the  surrounding  predominantly  African  American  community  in  its



interpretation of the site.

Moyer’s  focus  in  this  book  is  to  create  a  counter-narrative,  to  prove,  despite  the  previous

research that has been done on the site and its white elite owners, there exists a story that can be told

within the physical structure about slavery. After providing the reader with a general introduction to

slavery  in  Maryland in  the  eighteenth  century,  Moyer  introduces  the  founder  of  the  Mount  Clare

Carroll’s family, Dr. Carroll, as a man whose wealth was built on slave labor, in particular through his

ownership of the Baltimore Iron Works.  Dr.  Carroll  was not only personally responsible  for using

enslaved labor at the iron works, but recruited investors who also provided enslaved laborers. These

investors,  in  turn,  were required  to  provide  provisions  for  the  ironworks  laborers,  which  enslaved

laborers on local plantations cultivated. Moyer successfully paints the picture of a life of wealth that

completely  hinges  on  enslaved  labor  for  elite  society’s  production  and  survival.  The  book  also

discusses  Dr.  Carroll’s  son,  Charles  Carroll  and  his  wife,  Margaret  Tilghman,  as  Dr.  Carroll’s

successors and founders of Mount Clare. Much of the discussion of Charles and Margaret Carroll’s

tenure is breaking down the idea of the genteel southern couple by focusing on their enslavement of

increasingly large numbers of Africans and African-Americans for their own comfort and economic

advancement on the plantation.

Throughout  the  book,  Moyer  takes  great  care  to  list  the  names  of  the  enslaved  whenever

possible, not only humanizing those enslaved, but pointing out the possibility of a counter-narrative

rich in the same details that are given in the standard plantation tours, which are always rich in the

owners’ families personalities. In several instances, she is able to trace the enslaved families past the

point of their freedom. This connection to the free African-American community in Baltimore in the

past shows potential to engage the African-American community of the present. But Moyer also goes to

great pains to reveal the labor in the spaces of the plantation: the cache of ritual artifacts in the kitchen

floor,  pointing  to  African-American  spiritual  practice;  the  construction  of  buildings  by  enslaved

laborers; and even the maintenance of the ornamental gardens as the result of African-American labor.

In these discussions of spaces, the potential for an application to the current tour seems the greatest. As

Moyer subtly shows, the tragedy of the modern plantation tour is the creation of a false dichotomy of

white and black spaces that simple did not exist in the past. The enslaved African-American community

existed in all spaces on the plantation through their labor and the alienation of that labor only serves to

broaden the painful racial divide within America. Modern Baltimore, with its poverty and economic

segregation, is a testament to this continued trend.

Moyer teases the reader with what must be an interesting account of the politics of her historical

research, explaining how several historical institutions denied her access to their materials for research,



materials to which other researchers had been allowed access. Though she touches on the connections

to the modern world and racial politics, her focus on the historic record does not allow her to linger on

these subjects as extensively as the reader might like. However, the parallels between the segregation of

research and the segregation of race in the modern plantation museum are not lost on the reader.

Race is still a problem in the United States. Though the racial practices have changed, masked

by quotidian structures, recent events have helped to expose these structures to national audiences. In

light  of  this,  Teresa  Moyer’s  book  serves  as  an  important  bridge  between  the  work  of  history,

archaeology and modern activism: it gives a structure of how to begin to change the telling of the past.

References Cited

Delle, James A. 

1998. An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica's Blue Mountains.

Edited by C. E. Orser, Contributions to Global Hisorical Archaeology. New York: Plenum Press.

Eichstedt, Jennifer L, and Stephen Small. 

2002. Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums. Washington,

D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

ElBoghdady, Dina. 

2008. Baltimore Sues Subprime Lender Over Race. Washington Post, January 9, 2008, D04, January

9.

Moyer, Teresa. 

2015. Ancestors of Worthy Life: Plantation Slavery and Black Heritage at Mount Clare. Edited by P.

A. Shackel, Cultural Heritage Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Singleton, Theresa A. 

2001. Slavery and Spatial Dialectics on Cuban coffee plantations. World Archaeology 33 (1):98-114.

Catherine LaVoy is a historical archaeology graduate candidate in Syrcause University’s Department

of Anthropology. Her dissertation is on the changing landscape of a sugar plantation in Pernambuco,

Brazil from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century and explores issues of slavery,

historic preservation and tourism.

© 2015 Catherine E. LaVoy


