Bonds of Womanhood

Slavery and the Decline of a Kentucky Plantation

Susanna Delfino

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780813154855
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Class, race, and gender collide in this insightful examination of the life of Susanna (Susan) Preston Shelby Grigsby (1830–1891)—a white plantation mistress and slaveholder who struggled to participate in the economic modernization of antebellum Kentucky. Drawing on Grigsby's correspondence, author Susanna Delfino uses Grigsby's story to explore the complex cultural and social issues at play in the state's economy before, during, and after the Civil War.

Delfino demonstrates that Grigsby engaged in certain kinds of antislavery activism, such as hiring white servants as a way of conveying her support for free labor and avoiding ever selling a slave. Despite her beliefs, however, Grigsby failed to hold to her moral compass when faced with her husband's patriarchal authority or when she experienced serious economic trouble. This compelling study not only illuminates how white women participated in the South's nineteenth-century economy, but also offers new perspectives on their complicity in slavery.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Essential Genealogy of the Shelby and Hart Families
• Introduction
• 1. Kentucky: The Promise of America’s Future
• 2. Looking “Backward” to the Future
• 3. The Bittersweet Taste of Progress
• 4. Bonds of Womanhood
• 5. The World Turned Upside Down
• Coda. Susan P. Grigsby: From Aristocratic Lady to Middle-Class Woman
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index