Nikki Berg Burin will present the Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies' February colloquium on Friday, Feb. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Memorial Union Hidatsa room.
Titled “In Search of Profit and Companionship: Spousal Collaboration in the Cotton Business of the Old South,” Berg Burin explores the ways in which the cotton plantation operated as a family enterprise, as well as the impact of such familial firms on marriages of slaveholding men and women. The cotton plantation was one of the antebellum South’s largest and most successful businesses.
In 1834, 16-year-old Ann Barnes married Richard Thompson Archer, a successful Mississippi cotton planter 21 years her senior. During the course of their 32-year marriage, the Archers not only raised 10 children, but also owned or managed at least eight plantations and enslaved more than 500 black laborers.
According to Burg Burin, administering an enterprise of this magnitude was an enormous challenge that virtually all of the South’s elite slaveholding families faced. Some responded in the same fashion as the Archers. Richard took care of all distant business interests, while Ann attended to their local affairs in his absence. Thus in addition to bearing their children and managing their household, Ann administered the family’s two home plantations, as well as the labor of numerous overseers and hundreds of slaves.
Berg Burin earned a doctorate in history from the University of Minnesota in 2007. She is currently an instructor in the history departments at Concordia College and the University of North Dakota. Berg Burin has presented her research on female plantation managers at various regional and national conferences and contributed an article to the book, "Family Values in the Old South," published by the University Press of Florida in 2009. She is in the process of turning her dissertation, “A Regency of Women: Female Plantation Management in the Old South,” into a manuscript.
For more information, contact Dennis Cooley at 1-7038 or dennis.cooley@ndsu.edu.