Scholars of southern culture usually define an antebellum plantation as an agricultural estate comprising several thousand acres where large numbers of enslaved African Americans labored to produce a single commodity—corn, rice, tobacco, sugar, hemp—for export. By 1860, when close to four million African Americans were held as slaves across the southeastern United States, about two-thirds of them were living on plantations. If we use ownership of at least twenty slaves as the benchmark of plantation status, we find that in 1860 there were over forty-six thousand plantations spread across the southern countryside from Maryland to Texas.