Act One: London and New York

Fanny Kemble was born on 27 November 1809 in London to a family rooted in the English stage. Her father was the actor Charles Kemble; her uncle, John Philip Kemble; her aunt, the legendary Sarah Siddons; and her grandfather, the patriarch of the famous Kemble theatre family and an actor-manager himself, Roger Kemble. Frances Anne, or Fanny, was the eldest daughter of Charles and Maria Theresa Kemble and at the age of twelve was sent to Paris to attend boarding school. Kemble writes of her love and appreciation of her mother in her 1879 Records of a Girlhood. She recounts her parents and upbringing and pays special attention to the great gifts her mother possessed, including her physical grace, lovely French accent and strong voice, talent for expression, and her exquisite ability as a cook whose talents for the savory included the storeroom of sauces, gravies, and meat jellies she “laughingly called her boudoir.”Footnote ¹⁰ It is her mother to whom Kemble gives credit for her greatest talents:

Kemble's attribution of her best qualities to her mother counters the dominant narrative ascribed to her by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians focused on her last name and membership in a leading family of the English stage. This matrilineal ascription of personal value is rich, as it foregrounds the emerging agency Kemble found in her journeys on and off the transatlantic stage.

As an adolescent, Kemble studied art and music and was primarily educated in France.Footnote ¹² Writing about her girlhood, Kemble notes her headmistress and the school she attended:

Kemble's headmistress, Frances Rowden, became a teacher at a school in London that was popular among fashionable families of the early nineteenth century. Rowden was later headmistress at Hans Place and wrote her own book on botany in 1801, titled A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany. Botany, as scholars such as Ann B. Shteir have argued, was popular among the upper-middle classes of the nineteenth century. Following the spread of the Linnaean system of naming plants in England, botany became a widespread and acceptable science in the education and cultivation of English women as it fit well with traditional aesthetic associations of flowers and gardens with femininity. Rowden expressed her wishes for the publication of her work and the larger goal of the study of botany: “It is with great diffidence that the Author presents this elementary work to the public, which, she trusts, will give young minds such a general knowledge of the science, and such a taste for the beauties of Nature, that they will be able to pursue the study of it with pleasure and advantage.”Footnote ¹⁴ Rowden taught botany to young female students like Kemble and also accomplished a larger goal, one which Shteir articulates usefully: “While using science education as a vocabulary for teaching girls domestic and maternal ideologies, Frances Rowden also taught girls Linnaean botany.”Footnote ¹⁵ Linnaean botany, named for Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist Carl Linnaeus, is founded on a taxonomy for naming organisms called binomial nomenclature, or genus and species naming. While Kemble studied music and art, and was introduced to glimmers of the theatrical stage, she was also learning the naming system and knowledge of flora and fauna that would be essential to her life and writing as documented in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. Nature and theatre slowly intermingled for Kemble, from her education forward to the ways in which she wrote about and interacted with the landscape of her famous, short residence on the Butler plantations.

Kemble's early years were spent as she characterizes them, “Remote from the theatre, and all details of theatrical life.”Footnote ¹⁶ Later, as a teenager, she would become involved in the productions at her father and uncle's theatre. Interestingly, Kemble recounts that she believes she saw her first plays not at Covent Garden or performed by her famous family members, but on a portable theatre set up in a stately hall at a family home near Bath, where she watched the eldest son perform puppet plays on her summer walks through the English countryside. In a sense, the theatre was something Fanny Kemble inherited but did not choose. Rather, it was writing that she adored from a young age; in 1827 at 18 she wrote Francis the First, a five-act, historical drama set in France that she dedicated to her mother: “to my dear mother, this, my first publication, is affectionately inscribed.”Footnote ¹⁷ Kemble here subtly announces that this will not be her last publication and anticipates the writing life she would sustain over several decades. She would continue to write six pieces of memoir, totaling eleven volumes, chronicling her life from her teenage years through her seventies.Footnote ¹⁸

Despite Kemble's literary ambitions and reluctance to act in the theatre, her parents, aunts, and uncles all pushed her toward the stage. Kemble's acting debut served to drive ticket sales and ameliorate the deteriorating financial reality of her father and uncle's theatre, what she called the “irretrievable embarrassment” from the “tide of ill-success and losing fortune.”Footnote ¹⁹ In October 1829 at the age of twenty, Kemble debuted on the stage playing Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden, the same nearly bankrupt London theatre her father, Charles, managed. Through her letters and journals, Deirdre David uncovers Kemble's stage fright and ambivalent relationship to the stage: “Terrified by the weight of the Kemble heritage and the brevity of her three weeks’ training for the occasion, she had to be pushed from the wings to answer Lady Capulet's call for Juliet.”Footnote ²⁰ Like the flowers she had studied while in boarding school, Kemble had been cultivated herself for this moment. She stepped onto the stage fulfilling both her role as a daughter and her familial duty, which she may have empathetically shared with the character of Juliet, who asks upon entering: “How now! Who calls? . . . Madam, I am here. What is your will?”Footnote ²¹ Playing one of Shakespeare's youngest tragic heroines, Kemble's debut was apt, given the financial pressure and expectations of her as a cultivated daughter of the English stage.

Kemble was not only compared to her immediate family in terms of acting ability, but also through appraisals of her well-known aunt, Sarah Siddons, against whose renowned beauty Kemble was judged. The cultivation of Kemble for the English stage and the hierarchical nature of female beauty itself ascribed status to her dependent on her physical beauty. Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix has examined the complex view of Kemble's gender and beauty from her stage fans to contemporaries such as author Herman Melville, who characterized her as “unfemininely masculine” in an 1849 letter to a friend.Footnote ²² Even as she was evaluated against her family's fame and criticized for her looks at twenty years old, Kemble was a stunning success with her performances, increasing ticket sales and helping to save her father and the Covent Garden from financial ruin.Footnote ²³

After nearly three years acting at Covent Garden, Kemble embarked on her first acting tour, traveling with her father to New York in 1832 to perform in American theatres. It was journaling that provided comfort and a writing outlet for Kemble to document her travels and emotionally process significant moments in her personal life, and her writing is characterized by a marked intermingling of her own emotional landscape with that of the natural world around her. Mapping her internal state onto the external world is achieved through Kemble's journals and through the actions she took to engage the land and people of her new, temporary home in the United States. During the evening of Wednesday, 1 August 1832, a twenty-three-year-old Kemble wrote of leaving England on her first tour in a journal she would later publish in 1835 as Journal of a Residence in America:

Kemble's love of her “glorious little England,” the land and nation where she was born, is entangled in her writing with imagery from the natural world. Her slightly ominous documentation of the flowers she “snatched” from home that will wither, the cold wind, the sky that clouded, the rain, and her inability to see the moon are tied in a romanticist vein to her emotional state, including her repeated tears: “I cried almost the whole of dinner-time.”Footnote ²⁵

Writing was a calming activity for Kemble, as evidenced by journal entries that include the boredom, frustration, seasickness, and new friendships made during the thirty-five days on board. To pass the time during the long voyage, Kemble wrote and returned to her other love, reading writers who were popular with romantics, including Dante and Byron. Kemble was an admirer of Byron's poetry, which she described as having the thrilling and unhealthy effect of stirring “my whole being with a tempest of excitement that left me in a state of mental perturbation impossible to describe.”Footnote ²⁶ She believed Byron to be a genius of his time, though reading his poetry was a habit she intentionally gave up as a young woman due to the “injurious effect” it had upon her.Footnote ²⁷ The influence of romanticism and even Gothic literary preoccupations with mystery, dread, exotic and dark landscapes, and an intensely emotional atmosphere echoed by the natural world itself runs throughout the journal Kemble kept during her time living in the odd new world of the Southern plantation. On their travels near Darien, Georgia, to reach the island plantations, Kemble wrote:

Kemble's characterizations of the plants, flowers, and trees she encountered in the Southern landscape are informed by her outsider status; she writes as if looking in on a strange and fearful greenhouse, infused with distrust and a melancholy sense of mortality in nature. Both curiosity and repulsion are at work in her response to the uncultivated wild landscape of the coastal forest, and she struggles to classify the “parasitical” thick gray moss hanging from the trees. Unlike the other “creepers” such as English ivy that will “twine” a tree in an aesthetically pleasing way as it slowly kills it, Kemble's long description of the “melancholy” moss captures her struggle to understand the “funereal spectacle” of Southern nature, including its plants and its people. The December timing of her description is another reminder that Kemble was encountering a landscape “thick and luxuriant” even in winter and in a month that would have been very different in her cold, native England. This winter South with its “monstrous cobwebs” of wreathed moss captures Kemble's symbolic linkage of human emotion and the natural world.

This passage on the coastal inlet, and many others in her journal, demonstrate the extent to which Kemble's love of romanticism informed her stylistic choices and her notions of what was natural and unnatural in human life and nature. Kemble's most famous journal reads like the reflections of a romantic pseudobotanist as she does much more than name and catalog the new plants she encounters, affectively endowing the larger plantation landscape with her own emotions. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement of romanticism stressed notions of personal emotion, imaginative freedom, the preeminence of the individual, and the importance of nature. It is significant to note that scholars such as Jerome McGann trouble the notion of a unified definition of romanticism, pointing out that “definitions of Romanticism are legion because none exhaust the various elements which learned commentators have shown to be characteristic of the subject.”Footnote ²⁹ Following McGann, Timothy Morton calls attention to a central idea in romanticism and to the seismic shift it rendered in human thought, “[i]n particular, the literature of the Romantic period, commonly seen as crucially about nature . . . since it still influences the ways in which the ecological imaginary works.”Footnote ³⁰ How human beings view nature is shaped by ideological constructs; nature writing thus reveals as much about political arguments and complex views on human life as it does about plant and animal life.Footnote ³¹ After the Enlightenment, in which “nature became a way of establishing racial and sexual identity, and science became the privileged way of demonstrating it,” writing about nature, including the genres of travel and nature writing, shifted, revealing what Morton argues: “Nature, achieved obliquely through turning metonymy into metaphor, becomes an oblique way of talking about politics.”Footnote ³² Morton, as a scholar among many whose critical reappraisals reconsider romantic ideology, forwards an argument for a radical shift in human thinking on nature toward an honest assessment of ecology as human survival, responsibility, and reality, to recognize “that our ideas of ecology are social constructions.”Footnote ³³ Ironically, romantic writers who may presume to write about nature from an outside, separate position become immersed, fully rendering themselves inseparable from their narrative.Footnote ³⁴

Although romanticism cannot be categorized as maintaining a uniform set of preoccupations, such as melancholic meditations on mortality, the sublime, or of Gothic views of the terrifying and terrific natural world, nor can romantic writers including Byron, Keats, and Shelley be characterized as sharing the same set of stylistic tendencies or subject matter, Kemble's writing nevertheless reflects the extent to which her reading shaped how she encountered and ordered the world around her. As Kemble journeyed deeper into the coastal plantation space, her writing came to reveal interconnections among ideological constructs such as beauty, right and wrong, and nature. To trace Kemble's writing on nature in her famous Journal is not simply to view nature as a social construct, but to see her views on nature's entanglement with human life as a guiding thread across her life on and off the stage. Kemble's writing reveals her embedded status in the same environment she found so peculiar as she writes herself into the role of central protagonist, moving within what she characterized thus:

During her time in the United States and as visiting plantation mistress, the “wildness” of the new land Kemble visited, the “savage-looking woods,” and the affectionate yet unfamiliar “poor people” of the Southern coast affected her powerfully. The shock, curiosity, and repulsion Kemble experienced during her American travels would inspire much of her writing.

On 4 September 1832 Kemble arrived in New York, which was shrouded in fog and rain—reminiscent of the English weather the British actress had left behind. Contrasting the weather and her long voyage and frequent homesickness for England, Kemble's rising-star status flourished on her first American tour. Kemble historian Catherine Clinton has documented the Fanny fandom that led to Americans donning Fanny hats, young girls styling their hair to emulate the curls of their favorite actress, and even Kemble's likeness being preserved via the material remains of nineteenth-century celebrity, including saucers and Staffordshire porcelain figurines.Footnote ³⁶ Kemble's theatrical persona as a nineteenth-century English actress was cultivated through the work she performed on the theatrical stage, the performative gestures of her fans and the objects, wood carvings, and aquatinted images of her in full costume playing classical heroines, including Juliet.Footnote ³⁷ Her body and hair became the material means through which Kemble, much like a hothouse flower herself, was carefully and demonstrably cultivated as a young white woman of the English stage. Joseph Roach argues that “social hair is performance.”Footnote ³⁸ In one example, Roach examines how hair was central for generations of the English court and theatrical stage who used hair and wigs to signal rank, affiliation to certain ideals of beauty, and, borrowing from commedia dell'arte stock characters, lines of business that positioned them in the theatrical and social world.Footnote ³⁹ Young female fans in the United States, both in homage to the famous British actress and in corporeal performance of their adoration, styled their hair into the silky ringlets dubbed “Fanny Kemble curls.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Like the use of flowers, braided plaits, and rolled hair of other nineteenth-century hairstyles, these curls were carefully styled to signal a kind of natural feminine beauty despite the work involved in their creation.Footnote ⁴¹

The deeper cultural codes of refinement and ladylike status ascribed to Kemble in the nineteenth century crossed the Atlantic as they were imbricated in racialized notions of white womanhood. Kemble's position as a white actress further embedded her within nationalized ideas of cultural value and a perceived Anglo-theatrical heritage—one esteemed by white middle-class American audiences. The fact that her ringlet curls had been a visual trademark for Kemble since she was a little girl served as both a bodily bridge between her girlhood and young womanhood and a reminder of the sweetness long ascribed to Kemble as girl. Her curls can be seen as an aesthetic code signaling both her personal cultivation as a young lady and herself as a cultivating force—educated in botany, well-read, and bringing forward the innocence of her girlhood hair to womanhood. As Robin Bernstein has argued, the construction of white womanhood in the nineteenth century began in childhood via racialized notions of innocence.Footnote ⁴² Bernstein writes about the coalescence of race, childhood, and virtue, something amplified further when gender is considered for white girlhood: “In the second half of the nineteenth century, while childhood, and especially white girlhood, became laminated to the idea of innocence; to invoke white childhood was to invoke innocence itself.”Footnote ⁴³ While Bernstein's foundational work is centered on American constructions of white and Black childhood, England and the United States had similar notions of white womanhood and girlhood—matrices of ideas shaped strongly by each country's use of enslaved Africans for the economic and social scaffolding of their nations.

Given the social construction and embedded expectations of white girlhood, it benefited Kemble's image to have it molded by perceptions of her national identity, young age, gender, and race as a white, British girl. The image of Fanny Kemble as a little girl with dark, thickly fringed eyes, glossy brown ringlets, and a soft smile depicts a sense of white English girlhood that continues through later portraits of Kemble, such as Richard James Lane's 1829 oft-printed lithograph of Fanny Kemble as a young woman with her body corseted, hair curled atop her head, and neck slightly angled so her face is turned in a subtly coy yet contemplative manner.Footnote ⁴⁴ A later daguerreotype of Kemble in the 1840s captures the same large, dark eyes re-created through paintings, drawings, and etchings throughout her life.Footnote ⁴⁵ Reading Kemble's writing and the images preserved of her, from daguerreotype to etchings of her in full costume, yield a strong sense that Kemble crafted her own performance as cultivated lady. Her writing is a performance of her beliefs, and her words are an intertextual means to reinvent her reality from reluctant, young actress to star, to emerging activist. Kemble's self-making writing of the land and people she met while living on the coastal plantation is the process to which I turn next.

Act Two: Philadelphia and St. Simons

Through her 1832 tour stop in Philadelphia, Fanny Kemble's life would change dramatically after meeting her future husband, Pierce Butler. Understanding the Butler family's history of crop cultivation and the central importance of costal plantations to their wealth is critical in grasping how Kemble's marriage would introduce her to American slavery. Over a century before Kemble met Pierce Butler, Pierce's grandfather, Major Butler, purchased large tracts of fertile land near the Altamaha River off the coast of Georgia. Major Butler was one of the first Georgia planters to cultivate the lucrative strand of the aptly named Sea Island cotton that enabled the family plantations to own nearly seven hundred slaves in all at the height of cash-crop productivity. Sea Island cotton was cultivated on the southeastern islands and coastal plantations of Georgia and South Carolina because it yielded a silkier, longer fiber crop, as well as a higher price. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 near Savannah forever changed the financial futures of the white plantocracy, including the Butlers and those enslaved to work the sweltering, coastal plantations.

Much later, in an attempt to settle his mounting financial debts, Pierce Butler would devise one of the largest slave sales in US history. It took place in March 1859 at Ten Broeck Race Course outside Savannah, and lasted two days. This sale separated couples, families, parents from their children, and included the sale of thirty babies; by its end, 436 enslaved persons from the Butler plantations near Darien had been sold, yielding Pierce Butler a total of $303,850. This sale came to be known in the Georgia low country and by historians as “the Weeping Time.”

Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson characterizes the horrific impact of this event:

In addition to the personal destruction caused by slave sales, the mortality rates of enslaved peoples on coastal plantations was devastatingly high. The Georgia low country and its coastal plantations, including those belonging to the Butler family, were cultivated through the physical labor of the enslaved. As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues in New World Drama, “slave labor is required to produce the wealth that will fund the rising and politically empowered” plantocracy of the coastal South, labor that is inherited and violently maintained by slave overseers and masters within families such as the Butlers.Footnote ⁴⁷ Fanny Kemble became entwined with what DeGraft-Hanson calls this “place of heartbreak” when she married Butler and lived on, and wrote about the life and land of, the plantation.

When Fanny Kemble first met Pierce Butler in Philadelphia during her 1832 American tour, she encountered a man positioned to inherit his family's plantation wealth built from generations of slave labor. Over a century of accumulated white wealth positioned Pierce Butler as one of the most eligible bachelors of Philadelphia society. Butler, along with his elder brother John, stood to inherit their grandfather's prosperous rice and cotton plantations and hundreds of slaves who worked the two plantations located just off Georgia's coast, almost eight hundred miles to the south of Philadelphia. Pierce Butler's family had owned the cotton-producing Hampton Plantation on St. Simons Island and the rice and occasional sugar-cane-producing “Butler Island,” or what is now known as Little St. Simons, since the 1790s. Gleaning observations from Kemble's Journal of a Residence in America, Kemble biographer Margaret Armstrong describes Kemble and Butler's meeting: “At first they seemed merely an agreeable group of attentive young men; then one, Mr. Pierce Butler, emerged as more agreeable and more attentive than the others; he was good-looking, musical and literary, and rode well.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In addition to whatever personal qualities Butler possessed and his growing devotion to Kemble as he followed her on her tour, he was fantastically wealthy, and his marriage proposal offered Kemble the chance to shift away from the financial strains of her theatrical family, including her father's monetary woes tied to the near-bankruptcy of Covent Garden. Reminiscent of her early reluctance to act, Kemble expressed in her journals and letters to contemporaries a growing dissatisfaction and frustration with her work as a professional actress. Marriage offered her financial stability, a socially sanctioned means by which to exit the stage even as a famous actress of the nineteenth century and member of the Kemble theatrical family. In June of 1834 she married Pierce Butler.

After her departure from the stage and two years into her marriage, in 1836, Kemble's husband and her brother-in-law assumed ownership of their family's coastal plantations. A year and a half before marrying Pierce Butler and entering the plantocracy of the American South, Kemble had already asserted her growing shock and outrage at the institution of slavery in her Journal of a Residence in America, writing on 7 December 1832:

Interspersed with recordings of mundane, daily activities and social engagements, Kemble writes herself into the role of passionate observer, aligning herself not with the ruling class to which she and her husband belong, but with the enslaved man who endures “brutal barbarity.” In addition to her sympathetic observer position and poetic writing, she condemns the “wrong so long endured” of the system of American slavery, epitomizing her writerly evolution from documentation and observation to condemnation and abolitionist advocate.

Four years into her marriage, and after imploring her husband to allow her to go with him to visit the Georgia plantations he now owned, Kemble visited the Georgia coast from December of 1838 through April 1839 with her husband, two daughters, Sally and Fan, and the family's nursemaid, Margery O'Brien. It took Kemble and her family nine days by train and boat to arrive in Darien, a coastal community on the mouth of Altamaha River. From Darien the family traveled to Pierce Butler's plantation. True to Kemble's close and constant relationship to the journals that document her life, she began recording her impressions of the landscape and the enslaved people she met, as well as her evolving antislavery sentiments, with one half of the journal devoted to her time on Butler Island and the other half to her residence on St. Simons. The journal is part epistolary documentation, part personal diary, and part textual staging of the plantation and its characters. Both Kemble's theatrical consciousness as a performer and her romantic tendencies, rooted in her early love of Byron and Shelley, come through in her vivid prose as she alternately documents her emotional response to the land and natural world, and to the people enslaved to work the plantation. In describing the “Negro incapacity” to speak clearly, Kemble draws comparisons to Shakespeare's Caliban:

Through her writing of the land, labor, and living conditions on the plantation, Kemble connects her deepening antislavery position to those texts that informed her youth and to early reading of writers popular among romantics, including references to Caliban, Othello, and “Dante's ‘Hell of Horrors’” (RGP, 121–2). Kemble both catalogs and comments on the land and people she meets during her time living on the Georgia coast.

Kemble had grown up steeped in Rowden's lessons in English horticulture and her experiences in English gardens and the countryside of Bath, with its “green meadows,” where she frequently walked while a student at her aunt's school for girls.Footnote ⁵¹ Kemble spent “summer afternoon[s]” walking from Mrs. Twiss's school for girls to a nearby family home, Claverton Park, where she watched the puppet plays with “enchanted eyes.”Footnote ⁵² Thus the wild, overgrown, and uncontrolled landscape of the plantation coast would have been a wholly new sensorial experience for her. Kemble's writing bears both her conscious writerly voice, through her use of extended metaphor, and lush descriptions that feel almost photographic in their documentation of her surroundings and emotional responses. The journal gives the impression of hearing her true, personal feelings toward her subjects. The influence of romantic writers such as Byron and the powerful emotion she imbues within her descriptions of the land, trees, and water of the coast are captured in her letters of 28 February–2 March 1839, included in her published journal in a chapter titled “Women in Slavery.” Kemble writes:

The simultaneous attraction, curiosity, and sadness Kemble expresses toward the natural world of the plantation mirrors her relationship to the people of the plantation. Although she stated that she felt unwell and thought, “I should die if I had to live here,” Kemble did not remain inside the large house on Butler Island but strove to interact and understand her new home and those enslaved to maintain it (RGP, 218). In addition to providing clothes, food, and the construction of an island infirmary for sick and wounded slaves, Kemble recorded often rare information about the unfree individuals she met and conversed with in much greater volume and personal detail than what can be found in the brutally sparse slave-sale ledgers of the Butler plantations.

Kemble's journal documents her slow transformation from feeling shock in a strange new setting to feeling a desire to experience her new environment for herself and in close proximity to the people, plants, and trees that survived life on the plantation. She did not merely admire the coastal landscape, including the “savage-looking woods,” from a distance, but moved freely and frequently throughout the plantation space (RGP, 48). It is revealing to note the repeated excursions on horseback, boat, and on foot in which Kemble engaged while living on the plantation. Her free movement and ability to enter any space, including slave quarters to instruct them on cleanliness, or to amble through the woods admiring the flora and fauna, throw into stark relief the corporeal subjugation of Black bodies. Kemble interweaves the connection between life and the natural world throughout her journal as she negotiates the land and the people living there, and her own changing self-image as a cultivated object of the transatlantic stage in association to each. Kemble's relationship with the plantation landscape is marked also by her conscious restaging of the land by, for example, paying slaves to dig up and move trees, transplant flowers, and cut walking paths into the thick woods of the island. Through this work of conscious cultivation, she subverts both the “natural” undergrowth and thick vegetation of the island to force paths through the terrain and the enslaved labor structure that as she herself noted, “might be considered dangerously suggestive of the rightful relation between work and wages” (RGP, 217). Whether consciously or not, Kemble notices previous failed attempts to cultivate the land by white owners, and her writing bears hints of romantic and later Southern literary tropes, which depict the land refusing to produce in the violent and unnatural environment of the plantation. She writes:

The echoes of an abandoned orchard are linked to Kemble's own desires to shape the land as well as her awareness of her race and class status. Beneath her expression of pity for the lost opportunity to cultivate the land is an implicit awareness of her own ability to do so. Cultivation, both of self and of the natural world, was important to Kemble, and her journal contains at least fourteen forms of the word “cultivate.”

As Kemble endeavored to create a more pleasant physical space, she was forced to confront the long history of white and Black interaction that manifested itself in the enslaved people she met. Kemble writes on 18 February 1839:

Kemble's reference to the imbricated experiences of slaves with their white masters reminds her readers of the forced entanglement of Black and white lives within the plantation space. The collision of land and human life emerges in Kemble's writing as she slowly shifts from documenting her travels to acknowledging the unnatural system of human slavery. Perhaps Kemble's move from stage to political actor would not have occurred without her time on the plantation. It is her relationship to the land as much as her relationship to the people of the plantation space that frames her emerging political stance via abolitionist thought. Reflecting on a horseback excursion in March 1839, Kemble observes:

Timothy Morton is useful again for considering the ways in which Kemble's notion of what was natural or unnatural may have been directly initiated from romantic thought: “Nature, practically a synonym for evil in the Middle Ages, was considered the basis of social good by the Romantic period.”Footnote ⁵³ Kemble may have considered nature and the natural world to be free from human corruption, as Jerome McGann argues in his reconsideration of romantic poetry as texts that “continually present for reader consumption . . . that they are innocent of moral or doctrinal commitments.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Kemble's nature diary writing juxtaposes the wild, beautiful land with the horrors of human slavery, and reflects her own inability to reconcile two fundamental aspects: the unnatural state of human bondage on the same beautiful, wild, “sandy Southern soils” of the island plantation (RGP, 244).

The people Butler owned affected Kemble deeply. She writes of her interactions with enslaved women who begged her to talk to Butler about improving the brutal daily existence they faced on the plantation, and of her position with her husband as a kind of outsider turned surrogate voice for them:

Kemble writes that her husband refused to listen to any more pleas from his slaves through his wife's reports, and the peculiar position Kemble chose was one in which she benefited greatly from the labor of enslaved individuals while detesting the system of slavery. For relief, she moved again toward nature:

From her walks as a girl in the English countryside to venturing out on horseback through the plantation for which she was reluctant mistress, being outside and moving through the land offered Kemble a precious amount of free movement that was increasingly disallowed in her marriage.

Kemble's theatrical point of reference as a stage actress is present in her developing abolitionist position. In a letter from January 1839 she writes of the more powerful recognition for American audiences if a linguistic choice was made in acting Othello:

From the fictional Othello of Shakespeare and the English imaginary of North Africans, Kemble brings her theatrical perspective to the very real lived existences of enslaved Africans on the Butler plantation.

After her four-month stay on their coastal plantations, the embattled couple returned to Philadelphia. Butler and Kemble continued to fight, and after he prevented her from seeing her children, she gave up attempts at reconciliation, returned to England, and began performing readings of Shakespeare again. Pierce Butler alleged that she had abandoned him, and filed for divorce in 1848. The contentious nature of the divorce case was chronicled in a New York Herald article from 28 November 1848:

In the span of fourteen years, Kemble had pivoted from a popular, touring actress of the English and American stage, to a wife facing divorce for having returned to England and the stage after the slow implosion of her marriage. Whether Butler consented to Kemble's return to England and the stage is not clear, but after a long and bitter court proceeding the Butler–Kemble divorce was granted in September 1849. The terms of the divorce settlement were particularly harsh in that Kemble was to be allowed to see her daughters only for two months each summer until they each turned eighteen years of age. Butler was to raise their two daughters and pay Kemble $1,500 a year in alimony. Kemble was heartbroken over not being allowed to see her daughters, and her ex-husband's fierce fight to block her from her children, coupled with the gendered imperative in the nineteenth century that children ought to be with their mothers, only added to the stigma facing Kemble as a newly divorced woman.

However outraged Kemble seems in her journal at the “spectacle[s] of filthy disorder” and human degradation she witnessed firsthand, it would take almost twenty-five years for her to decide finally to publish the account of her four-month coastal residence (RGP, 100). Perhaps fearing abandonment or divorce, Kemble had known her antislavery views and writing were in direct conflict with her planter-class husband and, therefore, had struggled with how to express her views, even as her marriage disintegrated. Writing to her lifelong friend Harriet St. Leger before the May 1863 English publication of her journal, Kemble expressed the responsibility she felt as an eyewitness: “I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution” (RGP, xliv). Two months later, Kemble's journal was printed in the United States by Harper and Brothers, with a second edition appearing in 1864.

Though it is difficult to track the original reception or popularity of Kemble's account, due to the lack of circulation statistics from either the US or English publishing houses that released the journal, the impact of her fiery condemnation of absentee plantation ownership and slavery itself is imprinted today on the land she visited. The Georgia state historical marker on Little St. Simons still reads, “During a visit here with her husband in 1839 to 1840, Pierce Butler's wife, the brilliant English actress, Fannie [sic] Kemble, wrote her ‘Journal of a Residence On A Georgia Plantation,’ which is said to have influenced England against the Confederacy.” The marker incorrectly states the years of Kemble's visit, but ascribes to her a white savior power of influence to sway her entire native country of Britain against the Confederacy during the Civil War. Whether Kemble's writings turned England against the South is uncertain, however; as Margaret Davis Cate demonstrates, Kemble's journal has been viewed both as a compassionate renunciation of slavery and as an outsider's incorrect disavowal of a system she did not understand.Footnote ⁵⁶

Even with its repeated denunciation of human bondage, Kemble's text is not an innocent document: it bears the echoes of a racial hierarchy that positioned the white Kemble at its apex, a position that afforded her a downward view on the “poor creatures” around her (RGP, 60). Captured in Kemble's journal writing is an intertwining of the coastal plantation land with the enslaved individuals forced to work and survive on the Butler plantations. Kemble projects a strange, dark, and exotic quality both to her temporary coastal home and to the slaves she and her husband now own. She is drawn to and repulsed by the new landscape and the enslaved she meets in her interactions. Compassion and disgust are common in her writing, including an encounter in which Kemble allowed an “old Negress” named Dorcas to ride in her wood wagon, as she was too exhausted to “drag her poor old limbs” back to her slave settlement after having walked from the far end of the plantation to beg Kemble for some sugar. Kemble likened her experience of being near the elderly woman's “abominable dirt and foulness” in the wagon to that of “Trinculo's soliloquy over Caliban” (RGP, 302). Kemble acknowledged in her journal her unique position as both plantation mistress and quasi-advocate for the slaves she met and considered: “how it fares with slaves on plantations where there is no crazy Englishwoman to weep, and entreat, and implore, and upbraid for them, and no master willing to listen to such appeals” (RGP, 140). From a contemporary standpoint the inherent racism that runs throughout Kemble's journal is appalling; passages wherein she expresses horror over what she terms the “slave slobber” of the English language and her dismay over the changes to her young daughter's pronunciation after contact with enslaved men and women expose the deep roots of her own white supremacy (RGP, 252). It is possible to categorize Kemble's journal in the same vein as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.Footnote ⁵⁷ Kemble's journal can be viewed as another well-intentioned, yet racist, white woman's impression of Southern Blacks; and yet, the journal stands more than 173 years later as a document that records the histories of enslaved men, women, and children by treating them as individuals with families and personal histories—as people, not solely chattel property.

Kemble's move from stage actor to political agent is founded on cultural performances that facilitate her British identity as being both inside and outside the frame through which she views the plantation South. She can distance herself from the racial hierarchy that determines her positionality through her Anglophile status as a British Other to critique this Southern scene of colonial domination; and yet her role as plantation mistress is embedded in the racialized history of both her home and new nation. Reading Kemble's journal for the interconnection between land and life expands the ways it has been historically treated in scholarship on white witnessing and testimony against slavery. The grave ways in which the long history of slavery continues to manifest itself in the land and people that inhabit the American South is uncovered through the cultivation of landscape and the cultivation of Kemble herself—a process of self-making documented in her famous journal. Positioning Kemble's journal in the transformations of the land and lives of the Sea Islands, including her pivot from the theatrical to the transatlantic political stage, becomes a new means to contextualize and deepen our understanding of Fanny Kemble's historical roles as actress and abolitionist.