When I say that the Baskers had money, I mean to say that they used to have money. A few years before I became ingratiated with the family, there were a few changes in the labor laws that seriously damaged their bottom line. To put it simply, Richard Basker was a slaver. He didn’t sell slaves or transport slaves, but he used slaves. He used them and he profited off them.
He wasn’t the only one, not by a longshot. There was only one way to get wealthy in Johnston’s Ridge: being a slaver. There were more than a dozen plantations in the area before the war, but only one of them managed to come out intact. That was the Basker Plantation. It was the largest plantation in the county, and one of the largest ones in the whole state.
The Baskers may have lost their money, but they did not lose th
