This dissertation examines a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

plantation site, L’Hermitage, which is located in Frederick, Maryland, on what is now

Monocacy National Battlefield. It considers how the interactions among and between

the plantation owners, the Vincendière family, and their enslaved workers, in order to

investigate how negotiations of power and supremacy can be read through spatial

organization, material culture, and interpersonal relations. I refer to Denis Byrne’s

(2003) use of the phrase “nervous landscape” to explore how a landscape and its

occupants can be literally and figuratively nervous when absolute power fails and a

heterogeneity and multiplicity of power and identities are introduced. That is, the

disruption of homogeneity and hegemony breeds nervousness. Byrne uses this

concept to explore racial tension; however, this project recognizes that anxiety can

emerge from uneasiness around other structural factors. This research relies on

multiple sources, including historical documents, artifacts, and archaeological

features in order to explore how race, gender, class, religion, and nationality

interacted on the plantation landscape. This work applies particular attention to how

the power dynamics around these hierarchies played out within the nervous frame,

mitigating or contributing to a nervous landscape. The dissertation also uses this

framework to explore nervousness in the literal sense; how anxiety was a fundamental

element of the colonial experience, and more broadly how emotion is an important

aspect of the human experience that should be considered in archaeological

interpretations of the past.

This research is intended to contribute to the National Park Service’s goal of

enhancing its interpretation of the larger context of the Civil War. Monocacy National

Battlefield (MNB) is primarily valued for the battle that took place in 1864, and this

is reflected in much of its current interpretation. However, MNB is committed to

expanding this interpretation to situate the Civil War battle in its historical, social,

political, economic, and geographical context. Research on plantation life, including

topics such as agriculture, slavery, and racism, will contribute toward this goal.

Furthermore, the results of my study can be useful in framing the way Monocacy

discusses power dynamics and identity in the context of L’Hermitage.