When we think about the importance of architecture we tend to think about buildings constructed on a grand scale - Versailles, Buckingham Palace, the White House. But it is the ordinary, the everyday constructed spaces of individual homes that are tell us more about the values of a time and place, for our homes encode the values of our civilization and - in time - also come to reinforce them. This paper examines the architecture of typical plantation homes and the ways in which these buildings served as visual emblems of larger social hierarchies and the respective places of masters and slaves. As one architectural historian who examines slave residences notes: "Architecture confines and defines how people live and interact with each other".
In general, plantation architecture was designed both to hide slaves and the work of slaves from the owners of the plantation and their guests as well as to control them. This was something of a balancing act, for any time one isolates a group of people one also liberates them to some extent. Anyone who has worked in an office where the boss cannot see one at all times understands this. Thus the desire to have slaves and slave labor hidden in at least some measure from the white members of the household was arguably psychologically (and culturally) highly important if slave-owners were willing to cede even a small measure of their power over slaves.
This desire to hide the work of slaves from the view of the residents of the main plantation home might suggest to us, looking backward as we are from the 21st century, that the slaveholders were ashamed of the fact that their households functioned by virtue of the work of people who were not paid for their labor, but this is unlikely to have been the case. Rather, in creating passageways and rooms dedicated to the domestic work and those who performed it plantation architects were simply following in a long tradition (seen in both European and A...