In 1823, Richard James Arnold, descendant of a Quaker family involved in the movement to abolish slavery in Rhode Island, married Louisa Gindrat of Bryan County, Georgia, and acquired a plantation called White Hall—thirteen hundred acres of rice and cotton land and sixty-eight slaves. Over the next fifty years, Arnold led two distinct, if never entirely separate lives, building through successive Georgia winters a profitable southern "paradise" rooted in human bondage, then returning each spring to his business interests and extended family in Rhode Island.

Organized around a surviving plantation journal kept during two winters and one spring, North by South encompasses Arnold's career as a rice and cotton planter as it uncovers the increasingly difficult social and moral disguises that enabled him to move freely through two worlds.