Biographical
Sidebar:
Mary J. Jones
After her husband's death in 1863, Mary Jones, like other Southern white women of the era, found herself with new responsibilities. With her two sons serving in the Confederate army and then living far from home, she struggled on her own to operate the family's three plantations.
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In a series of letters written to her children (and published in 1972 in the acclaimed volume The Children of Pride), Jones described the difficulties of operating a plantation in early Reconstruction -- crop failures, black resistance to white supervision, constant disputes over labor contracts. She had considered her former slaves "friends," she wrote, but now they were "only laborers under contract, [with] only the law between us." |
At her childrens' urging but with great reluctance, Mary Jones moved to New Orleans to live with her married daughter at the end of 1867, renting her plantations to former slaves. She died there two years later.
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