By this point in my own travels, I was becoming numb to the extravagant wealth on show at plantations like those lining the River Road. Andrew wasn’t overawed, either. The oak alleys and white-columned mansions conformed to his film image of the Old South—as did the whips and chains we saw at Whitney. But he confessed to being stunned by the brute scale and systemization of the slave regime. “I somehow hadn’t grasped that these were gulags,” he said as we passed the estate of a planter who had amassed one hundred thousand acres of cane, four sugar mills, and more than 750 slaves. “Stalin would
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Yes the old South was a police state with millions toiling in forced labor camps. Like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.
