In 1860 one of the largest and most successful plantations in North Carolina was Somerset Place. In the course of becoming one of the state's most prosperous rice, corn, and wheat plantations, the plantation's owner, Josiah Collins, became one of the largest slaveholders in the state. Somerset Place covered as many as 100,000 acres and was home to more than three hundred enslaved men, women, and children of African descent. They worked in the fields, tending to the rice, corn, oats, wheat, beans, peas, and flax, in the sawmills that turned trees into lumber, and...