The Sweetness of Life
Southern Planters at Home

This book examines the domestic lives and leisure pursuits of planters in the antebellum American South.

Eugene D. Genovese (Author), Douglas Ambrose (Edited by)

9781107138056, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 October 2017

308 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

'In this subtly provocative work, Genovese pulls back the curtain on the lives of leisure planters made on the backs of black labor. A fitting coda to a corpus of immeasurable impact, The Sweetness of Life offers crucial insight into the mind of the Old South's master class.' Kathleen Hilliard, Iowa State University

This book examines the home and leisure life of planters in the antebellum American South. Based on a lifetime of research by the late Eugene Genovese (1930–2012), with an introduction and epilogue by Douglas Ambrose, The Sweetness of Life presents a penetrating study of slaveholders and their families in both intimate and domestic settings: at home; attending the theatre; going on vacations to spas and springs; throwing parties; hunting; gambling; drinking and entertaining guests, completing a comprehensive portrait of the slaveholders and the world that they built with slaves. Genovese subtly but powerfully demonstrates how much politics, economics, and religion shaped, informed, and made possible these leisure activities. A fascinating investigation of a little-studied aspect of planter life, The Sweetness of Life broadens our understanding of the world that the slaveholders and their slaves made; a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.

Introduction
1. A gracious people
2. Dining room, parlor, and lawn
3. Horses and hounds
4. Vignettes: sundry pleasures
5. Vignettes: charms of high life
6. Home away from home
7. Matters not so sweet
Editor's epilogue.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]