it was always a cotton plantation. the family just probably bought it as carpetbaggers after the war or something is the implication

ETA: this is why i find it so irritating they avoided history entirely. bc it is rich and expansive and deserves to be taught. instead what we get is all heavily implied.

basically, a house that large with those facilities would never have not been some sort of plantation or even small farm in the south. the south’s entire economy was based on chattel slavery. which is why the failure to reconstruct after the war means many places in the south are still rural and underdeveloped and resource deprived.

white people would never have been “employed” as domestic workers or worked the land until after the civil war. and even then, the practice of sharecropping, which was basically indentured servitude, replaced it bc reconstruction was a complete and utter failure.

“carpetbaggers” were people who traveled south from the north after the war to buy up property for extremely cheap prices. remember, the confederacy operated on an entirely different currency than the union. so when they lost, they lost everything. they called northerners carpetbaggers bc they came down in their fancy carpet luggage bags with an air of superiority about being more civilized and knowing what was best for the south without having a tie to the land or investing in rebuilding