Westfall Slave to King Cotton by Bonnie Stanard

"No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king… Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme?" –James Henry Hammond, Speech Before the United States Senate, March 4, 1858. Westfall Plantation, a gray-eyed home of destiny, was dual to the core. It was yoked with the extremes of luxury and poverty. Typical of other plantations on St. Helena Island, its big house was a showcase of symmetry and elegance. By contrast, the slave cabins were clapboard hovels with stick and mud chimneys. Beset with moral contradictions, both owner and chattel were slaves to the crop that produced fortune and depravity—Sea Island Cotton. Westfall Slave to King Cotton, while fiction, is historically based and strays far from Old South nostalgia by giving us a multi-dimensional picture of life on a plantation.