If there would be informative materials/media that would accompany the tour, then yes, I could imagine going on a tour like that.
I’m all for teaching/informing children, and adults, about history.
Be they dark, or less so.
Some of the WWII concentration camps are open for the public too, for, amongst other, that specific reason.

Comfortable? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be comfortable taking a tour of a former concentration camp, either. But I’d do it if I had the chance. Some things have to be remembered.

It would bother me, though, to be charged a fee for it (although I understand that the places need to be maintained), because it feels wrong for someone to exhibit those sites like a theme park and make a profit off them.

@rebbel Well, yes but that’s my concern. How it’s presented. There is a plantation in the book I referenced that focuses completely on the lives of the slaves. I would go there. I believe that Monticello is getting better at incorporating Jefferson’s slave-owning than it was. But I worry that some will still be pushing the magnolia and moonlights story.

I’ve been to a concentration camp; discomfort is not my concern. It’s falseness.

@janbb I totally get where you are coming from.
If I would get the slightest idea, or better, proof, that the undertaking was insincere, or there to make a profit, I would stay away from it (too).

There has been a whole industry of weddings being held on former plantations. I think that is changing somewhat.

It really would be interesting if they presented it in a real light.

Sure, why not? One of them is the birthplace of my husband’s paternal ancestors and within limited hours, open to the public for a fee.

I think going there to see the remnants of this past may begin to help one understand what parts of the stories told are being downplayed or played up. I don’t think that there is much truth being told from any source you choose to find when it comes to history and slavery.

@Blackwater_Park Perhaps, although a place may be misrepresenting the past as much as a source might.

I would go on the tour. I think it would be a fabulous experience and I would like to see these wonderful plantation houses for myself. The houses and their grounds are what is left but I would find it impossible to forget the men and women who lived and died in slavery and who saw their children born into the same miserable fate. It wouldn’t be a comfortable thought.

I would be a little suspicious of anyone who talks about “the complex history” of the plantations. It sounds like it might be an attempt to gloss over the horrible reality.

@janbb Oh I’m well aware of that and I’m sure they do. However, seeing things first hand has a way of letting a little more reality come to the surface.

This is some interesting information about primary sources from a website about touring South Carolina plantations:

“Of course the best way to learn more about slavery is to read accounts by former slaves. One large source of narratives comes from the interviews from the Slave Narrative Project that were collected by writers from hundreds of former slaves by the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1938.

The Slave Narrative Collection includes about 2,000 interviews, 274 of these from South Carolina. You can find many of the transcripts online for free, or can buy them as a printed book online (some plantation gift shops also sell copies).”

https://independenttravelcats.com/charleston-plantations-guide-south-carolina/

Yes.

I’ve been on plantations in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina . . . .also Native American reservations in four states. It is history and terrible what non-white people had to endure.

Yes I’d love to. I feel that it increases your empathy and humanizes history in tangible form.

No. I have no feelings of nastalgia for the Old South. I would like to see Jamestown Plantation one day, but they was est. 1607, prior to them becoming slave driving scum.

Yes. I want to learn more about history. And as someone who is interested in history, I have come to realize that history is full of uncomfortableness, it’s inevitable. No matter how much we want to avoid it, it’s something that happened and we can’t deny it. If you are to learn about history, you have to embrace the good with the bad, in order not to repeat the same mistakes our ancestors had done.

That said, if it turns out that the tour is another glorified myth, then that’s not history, that’s a lie. I won’t consider that “history” at all, and that won’t worth my time.

But now that you talk about slavery, it reminds me of this hilarious video of someone showing people how history should be done. If the tour is another attempt at sanitizing history, then I might pull out the same trick as those guys :P

I’ve been to historic homes that had slaves’ quarters. It’s part of history. I go for the architecture, the grounds, and learning about the way of life. I don’t think I’d be interested in a week of visiting places like that though. It is not “comfortable” knowing people were slaves or that anyone lived a very difficult or abusive life.

When I was in Germany I turned down touring a concentration camp. My entire life I’ve known and heard stories about the camps, some stories were first hand accounts, and I’ve seen photos and I feel like other people need to see it in real life, not me. Although, many people say it’s good to go.

I think it’s important these places are preserved and that the history is not forgotten. Hopefully, the history tour is good with accuracy and not glazed over.

I went on a southern plantation tour and it was boring.

There was an article in the NY Times magazine a year or two ago about how now, many plantations are presenting plantations from the view of the enslaved people, and talking about how the plantation’s very existence was only due to the free labor from the enslaved people.

I would definitely go on a plantation tour, and I have been to a few already, in Louisiana, where my maternal grandfather was from.

Here’s the article – it was from the Travel section, not the Magazine:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/travel/house-tours-charleston-savannah.html

In googling to find the link, I see Boston Globe also did a similar article, if anybody wants to google and read it.

I’ve toured many. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Madison’s Montpelier, Shirley Plantation and possibly others that I’m forgetting. These were mostly school field trips. I think there’s value in learning from the past, especially when you can walk through the buildings, smell the old wood, and notice details not practical to publish in textbooks.

@gorillapaws Do you remember how the issue of slavery was dealt with at any of the plantations you visited? I’m interested in the nuances of the legacy.

I went on tours of Jefferson’s plantation, which included attention to the slave quarters.
As long as it is honest and unglossed, I would do it.

I couldn’t do it. I already have a negative view of mankind and purposely visiting it doesn’t make me feel better. There are two places I have visited and both have turned my stomach because I’m very sensitive to other people’s anguish. Be it present or past. I saw went to Pearl Harbor. Saw videos of the attack, though I don’t remember now if they were real or just simulated. But I heard the stories of young military people trapped on sunken ships. I could relate as a mother to the pain and suffering of their family. I could feel their fear and anguish and deep despair. I saw where they carved the names of the hundreds that died that day. Some are not even out of their bunks.

Then another was National Museum of American History. Where I felt even the worst of our history was glorified or glossed over. And my anger grows at the idea that many died for the selfish. Before you think it’s just about our nation, I believe all Nations have a horrible history. All should be ashamed and slavery, concentrations camps, wars, and murder are nothing to celebrate. Do I think it’s sometimes necessary? Yes. Do I think history needs to be preserved and shared? Yes, when it’s not glossed over or celebrated. But I can’t look at it without noticing the often unnecessary pain it caused the innocent and without it making me despise mankind more than I already do.

So for me, it’s like asking me to visit someone’s intestines. All I will find is crap. No matter how glossy, it’s just crap.

I just went to a local historical house that has a current exhibit of enslavement in my county and state. This is in New Jersey. It was very well done and enlightening; lots I didn’t know. And no romancing.

Touring a southern plantation would be extremely educational in a lot of ways. You could see how things were 150 years ago. You could see what the living conditions for the slaves which would be a stark reminder of one aspect of slavery that was so horrible.

I find it entirely idiotic to try erasing the horror that was slavery. And that seems to be exactly what this society wants to do. All that means is that in a couple generations, it will be a no-never-mind and we will eventually end up with slavery again. Already we have a situation where the Uyghurs are modern day slaves in China and everyone wants to turn a blind eye to it. Apparently slavery is only bad if it happens in this country and if it is black people that are enslaved. That is the message that is being sent.

A few years ago I wasin New Orleans on business and had an opportunity to go on a plantatiuon tour. I thought it would be intersting but read a review before I signed up. One reviewer said, “they don’t try to whitewash it and ignore slavery, but show how the slave families all contributed to the success of the whole plantation”.

IN other wrods, “happy singing dancing slaves smiling.” I skipped the tour.

@zenvelo: If you read the NY Times article I linked above, it discusses how plantation tours now explicitly detail how the plantation exists solely due to the free labor from the enslaved people. They’re aren’t painting it as happy slaves smiling, but they are, like the review that you read stated, showing how the slaves contributed to the success of the plantation.

The slaves were the only reason they were successful.

Yes, yes, I would be totally comfortable taking this tour as it is a part of the history of our great nation. The history you will learn will be wonderful and amazing. It will help you understand and appreciate what we now have. I don’t agree with calling them prisons. Why not learn about our history and the culture of that part of the county?? It is so beautiful, and I assure you that you won’t be touring prisons. My family was from the Deep South.it is now so beautiful and the food is out of this world. I would suggest that you not go in the summer as the heat, humidity and flying little critters will make your trip less enjoyable.

So beautiful that they sold the children of slaves and the husbands away from their children and wives. So touching.

Yes, @Dutchess_III, that’s the point – the slaves were the only reason the plantations were even existing.

Here is the article, for those that can’t view it:

A few years ago, people touring the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters in Savannah, Ga., would have heard a lot about George Owens, the lawyer, farmer and Congressional representative who lived in the massive neoclassical home in 1833. And about banker and slave trader Richard Richardson, for whom the house was built in 1816. They might have heard Emma Katin’s name, but not about how the enslaved black woman spent most of her nights sleeping on the wooden floors of the house, so that she could be available at all hours to the infants in the Owens family.

They wouldn’t have heard about the 14 other enslaved people who lived there. And there’s a good chance that guests would not have heard about the 400 other slaves the Owenses had on their other nearby properties.

“Those pieces of the story would have been missing because she would have been treated as an accessory to the Owens’ lives,” said Shannon Browning-Mullis, a curator of history and decorative arts for Telfair Museums, which owns the house and has been in charge of rethinking the way its history is told.

In cities including Savannah and Charleston, S.C., where Confederate statues, elegant mansions and plantation weddings are common, tourism has often taken the form of nostalgia for the antebellum South, Southern charm and Southern hospitality. For years, tours of historic homes would focus on their architecture and fine furniture, but not on how the wealth so clearly displayed depended on enslaved labor.

There is a growing consensus among the interpreters who guide people through historic properties that by excluding stories of the enslaved, institutions like historical societies, museums and tour companies have sent the message that power and wealth were not directly connected to slavery, and racism, and erased the stories of the black people who built these cities.

Now that’s changing.

“When we come to see historic houses, often we are coming to see what it looked like to live in the past and a lot of us are sometimes just coming to see a pretty house,” said Lacey Wilson, a historic interpreter for Telfair Museums, to a group of tourists on a recent tour. “What we’re looking at is the political power of the people who lived here. All the beautiful decorative objects throughout the house — the money coming for all these things came primarily from the enslaving of other human beings.”

During Ms. Wilson’s tours, visitors hear that 26 people could sit at the Owenses formal dining room table when it was extended; that the crown molding that runs just below the room’s ceiling was rare at the time it was created; that the rooms were fully carpeted to show off to guests that the family was well-off.

Lacey Owens gives tours of the Owens-Thomas House in Savannah, Ga., which recently added “and Slave Quarters” to its name. Credit…Hunter McRae for The New York Times
But Ms. Wilson doesn’t stop there. She explains, in detail, that the presentation of wealth wasn’t possible without the enslaved people on the property. The meals served on that elaborate table were prepared by a black butler named Peter; the crown molding was dusted multiple times a day; the carpet was taken apart at least twice weekly, beaten and spot-cleaned with boiling water by the enslaved people in the house, including the children.

“The first thought coming in is how beautiful this room is, and it absolutely is, but this is how the Owenses and Richardsons would have wanted you to see this space,” Ms. Wilson said in the house’s second dining room. “It’s more than likely that is not how the enslaved people would have seen the space.”

In November the house was renamed to include “and Slave Quarters” in its title.

Stories of urban slavery
The shift toward telling stories of slavery more accurately and fully has happened over the past few years and has been most visible on some plantations like Oak Alley and the Whitney plantation in Louisiana, at the McLeod Plantation in Charleston and at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation in Virginia. The shift has also been visible in museums around the country. The opening of the National Museum of African-American History in Washington and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama have forced institutions to reckon with how they tell the stories of the African-Americans who built so many of the buildings tourists come to see. Later this year, the International Museum of African-American History will open in Charleston.

Read more about visiting South Carolina and Georgia

When many Americans think of slavery, they have the misconception that it was strictly an agricultural institution, with black people forced to labor on farms, picking cotton, sugar and tobacco. But historians say that by 1860 slaves made up 20 percent of the population in major cities, and in Charleston black people outnumbered whites. Urban slaves, like Ms. Katin, were forced to work night and day for wealthy families. Many of the houses where they labored were home to prominent politicians of the day, and are both popular tourist and school field-trip destinations.

“The thing about historic houses is that they play a key role in educating America in who we are as a country,” said Elon Cook Lee, a historic house consultant and the president of the Black Interpreter’s Guild. “Elementary, middle and high school students come year after year and in many cases this is their first time learning about slavery.”

Beautiful prisons
At the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, questions of how enslaved carriage drivers, cooks, butlers, gardeners, laundresses, nursemaids, carpenters and seamstresses would have seen the home where they toiled are now central to tours of the property.

Audioguides at the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, S.C., now include information on how the white family and the enslaved interacted.
Audioguides at the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, S.C., now include information on how the white family and the enslaved interacted. Credit…Hunter McRae for The New York Times

In that home, tours focus on where the enslaved worked and slept, not where the white families socialized. The tours begin in a basement and visitors are taken through the servants’ hall, the kitchen, the ancillary kitchen and the slave quarters. In those quarters, they see where Ann and Tom Greggs and their children Phoebe and Henry slept; where Dorcas and Sambo Richardson, and their children Charles, Rachael, Victoria, Elizabeth and Julia slept; and where Betsy Crutchfield and her children Thomas, Jane and William slept.

A few miles away, at the Nathaniel Russell House, there is an effort to make storytelling about urban slavery more inclusive of the experiences of the enslaved. Two years ago, artifacts were found in the space where the enslaved would have lived from around the 1830s to the 1860s. The house belonged to the slave trader Nathaniel Russell in 1808 and was later home to a governor, Robert Alston.

When Lauren Northup, director of museums for the Historic Charleston Foundation, leads a tour or when visitors listen to the self-guided audio tour of the house, they hear how the enslaved people in the house and the white family would have interacted in almost every room. The differences between the spaces where the white family lived and socialized compared to where the enslaved toiled are stark. Tourists also hear, again and again, about how every aspect of the house, which was built by a wealthy merchant, was designed to let the owners see and control the enslaved.

Most guests at the Nathaniel Russel House remark on the beauty of the mansion and its décor, Ms. Northup said, adding that she reminds them that the house was built with the purpose of “keeping people in, keeping people from seeing each other, from socializing, from talking,” she said. “It was a prison. That is what I’m trying to make people understand — you are in a beautiful prison.”

Galvanized by church shooting
Ms. Northup said that her organization has been actively working to change its storytelling since the mid-1990s. But in 2017, when she, with the help of art conservator Susan Buck, discovered that much of the original fabric of the slave quarters were intact, with artifacts, there was an urgency to study, preserve and open the space to the public.

They were also galvanized by the 2015 killing of eight black parishioners and their pastor at Emanuel AME church, by Dylann Roof, a man who professed white supremacy.

In the wake of the shooting, the church became a tourist destination and a symbol of resilience and community, but also of what can happen when communities don’t confront racism or tell their histories honestly.

“If there was any good to come out of the tragedy that happened at Emanuel, it was that it showed people that we still have a racial problem in Charleston, in America and we have to talk about it,” said the Rev. Joseph Darby, vice president of the Charleston N.A.A.C.P. “The history in tours, the history of the Civil War, still affects criminal justice today.”(The reverend, like many African-Americans, prefers the Gullah Geechee tours in Charleston, which tell the stories of the descendants of West Africans who were brought to America’s southeastern coast more than two centuries ago.)

Of the 400,000 enslaved people who were brought to the United States, 40 percent arrived in Charleston before going anywhere else; the city was the wealthiest in the colonial era, in large part because of the labor of slaves. A 2017 College of Charleston study found that the wealth gap between white and black families in the city is as large as it was half a century ago.

After the Emanuel shooting, “things changed in Charleston,” Ms. Northup said. “That was such a watershed time for Charleston because of Emanuel. The community fundamentally and irrevocably changed.”

Increasingly, the people going on house tours are looking for more history and are trying to satisfy “a hunger” for history and truth, Ms. Browning-Mullis in Savannah and Ms. Northup in Charleston said.

A search for more factually accurate information about slavery and African-American history in Georgia is what led Jason Lumpkin, a pastor in Atlanta, to the Owens-Thomas House with his wife and two daughters in March. Mr. Lumpkin was surprised with how well the experiences of the enslaved were explained, and he appreciated that he did not have to specifically request information about black people as if it were supplementary.

“A few years ago, we did a tour where slavery was just glossed over and I had to ask about it to hear about it,” he said. “I don’t feel like that was the case at the Owens-Thomas House. They were intentional to talk about slavery and the issues associated with it and address them head on. I appreciated the fact that as bad as it was they were honest and in-depth.”

Mr. Lumpkin said that in addition to passing down stories about ancestors who were enslaved, he and his wife try to find different ways of teaching their daughters about their family history, and that history is incomplete without a discussion of slavery.

“I don’t trust the school system to tell them the true story of slavery,” Mr. Lumpkin said. “Knowing there are discrepancies out there in how that history is told, it’s even more important that as parents we be intentional in making sure our daughters understand and learn outside of school, and tours like this are a way to do it.”

A long way to go
Changes in the way history is presented aren’t universal, but changes made by a few houses may inspire others to follow suit. After all, the Nathaniel Russell House as well as a handful of others that are currently rethinking their tours all said they looked to the Owens-Thomas House for lessons in how to do better.

Ms. Cook Lee, of the Black Interpreters Guild, said that how stories of the enslaved are told matters because when black children hear about slaves as “window dressing” or accessories to the lives of white families, the children’s own perceptions of blackness can be negatively affected.

“Kids start to think, ‘my ancestors just stood in a back corner with no thoughts’ or ‘I wish I was white because white people do so many great things and are creative and smart,’” Ms. Cook Lee said.

Historically accurate tours can give black children in particular a link to their American identity instead of a perception that they aren’t as central to the American story as their white peers. “I’ve had ancestors fight in nearly every war and that makes me feel a connection to this country,” she said.

Tariro Mzezewa is a travel reporter at The New York Times. @tariro

I was responding to @Icandoit. She seemed to be suggesting it was a wonderful time in the south.

Time to watch Lee Daniels “The Butler” again @jca2.

I went on a tour of George Washington’s estate in Virginia 5–6 years ago and they definitely glossed over everything about slavery, making only brief, passing references. They weren’t glorifying it or rewriting history, but they spent as little time on it as possible.

As many of you know, I live in the deep South (Georgia) and have travelled all over this region. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, most of Tennessee, and both Carolinas.

The quick answer to @janbb ‘s question is that treatment of slavery and the Old South is very inconsistent. Some places do, in fact, gloss over the history of slavery and make it look like the plantations were recreation centers for black immigrants.

Others are more sensitive to history and handle the entire slavery / civil war / human rights issue much more evenly. A lot depends on where you are in the South. If you go up the River Road north of New Orleans towards Baton Rouge (which is a fascinating drive), for a lot of reasons, you will see restored plantations, a whole lot of decrepit and abandoned plantations, a number of museums, and so on. There isn’t one ‘rule’ for all plantations – it depends on who owns it and who does the restoration.

I see things a little differently from the other answerers. I can appreciate the restored beauty of the plantation and its grounds, and separate that from its history. I’m not ignoring the history of slavery, nor am I minimizing it. But just as slavery was part of the old South, so was southern wealth and excess. I am able to appreciate both histories. Odious or not, slaveowners lived here, and that’s part of history too.

@elbanditoroso I share your experience and opinion.

I toured Monticello years ago and really liked it. A jelly mentioned it above. Even 35 years ago I wouldn’t say it “romanced” slavery. The house was interesting, the heating system, the decor, and the grounds were beautiful.

I’ve toured a couple of houses in TN and GA and usually it was very matter of fact. They weren’t large plantations, but properties that had been preserved.

I don’t think you have to worry too much about the tours romancing the era of slavery. Most historians worth their salt know slavery was immoral and an abomination.

The decor and the grounds were preserved by slaves who could be killed, without inquiry, if they didn’t do it to the satisfaction of their “owners.”
God, it was a horrible institution.

That’s why I have always depsied the south, despite being a southerner myself.

@Dutchess_III Preserved for history or to make money through allowing tours. I’m not talking about the slaves who maintained the property during the time of slavery. That was 150 plus years ago. The houses would be falling down and the grounds would be overgrown if no one was preserving them, or the land might have a shopping mall on it rather than the original plantation.

I was talking about 150 years ago. Not present day @JLeslie.

^^Well, you commented right after me using the word preserved, which is the word I used, so I thought you might be referring to my comment, but I guess not. My mistake.

I wouldn’t spend $ to support an organization that wants to preserve and glorify white supremacy. They probably would want me there to give them judgmental glances, either.