Gender, race and family in nineteenth century America: from northern woman to plantation mistress

Born to a privileged middle-class family in 1830s New York State, Sarah Hicks' decision to marry Benjamin Williams, a physician and slaveholder from Greene County, North Carolina, in 1853, was met with slight amazement by her parents, siblings and friends, not least her brother-in-law, James Monroe Brown, a committed anti-slavery campaigner from Ohio.

This book traces Sarah's journey as she relocates to Clifton Grove, the Williams' slaveholding plantation, presenting her with complex dilemmas as she reconciled the everyday realities of plantation mistress to the gender script which she had been raised with in the North.

She also faced familial divisions and disharmony with her northern kin and new southern in-laws, and the recognition that her whiteness and class accorded her special privileges in the context of mid-nineteenth century America.