The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier


Book Description

The private and public writings in this volume reveal the early relationship between renowned Civil War diarist Sarah Morgan (1842-1909) and her future husband, Francis Warrington Dawson (1840-1889). Gathered here is a selection of their letters along with various articles that Morgan wrote anonymously for the Charleston News and Courier, which Dawson owned and edited. In January 1873 Morgan met Frank Dawson, an English expatriate, Confederate veteran, and newspaperman. By then Morgan had left her native Louisiana and was living near Columbia, South Carolina, with her younger brother, James Morris Morgan. When Sarah Morgan and Frank Dawson met, he was mourning the recent death of his first wife. She, in turn, was still grieving over her family’s many wartime losses. The couple’s relationship came to encompass both the personal and the professional. To free Morgan from an unhappy dependence on her brother, Dawson urged her to write professionally for his paper. During 1873 Morgan wrote more than seventy pieces on such topics as French and Spanish politics, race relations, the insanity plea, funerals, and fashion gossip---editorials that caused a sensation in Charleston. Only after attaining financial independence through her secret newspaper career did Morgan marry Frank Dawson, in 1874. Morgan’s commentary gives us a candid portrayal of the way one southern woman viewed her postwar world---even as she struggled to find her place in it.




South Carolina Women


Book Description

Volume One: This volume, which spans the long period from the sixteenth century through the Civil War era, is remarkable for the religious, racial, ethnic, and class diversity of the women it features. Essays on plantation mistresses, overseers' wives, nonslaveholding women from the upcountry, slave women, and free black women in antebellum Charleston are certain to challenge notions about the slave South and about the significance of women to the state's economy. South Carolina's unusual history of religious tolerance is explored through the experiences of women of various faiths, and accounts of women from Europe, the West Indies, and other colonies reflect the diverse origins of the state's immigrants.




Belles and Poets


Book Description

In Belles and Poets, Julia Nitz analyzes the Civil War diary writing of eight white women from the U.S. South, focusing specifically on how they made sense of the world around them through references to literary texts. Nitz finds that many diarists incorporated allusions to poems, plays, and novels, especially works by Shakespeare and the British Romantic poets, in moments of uncertainty and crisis. While previous studies have overlooked or neglected such literary allusions in personal writings, regarding them as mere embellishments or signs of elite social status, Nitz reveals that these references functioned as codes through which women diarists contemplated their roles in society and addressed topics related to slavery, Confederate politics, gender, and personal identity. Nitz’s innovative study of identity construction and literary intertextuality focuses on diaries written by the following women: Eliza Frances (Fanny) Andrews of Georgia (1840–1931), Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut of South Carolina (1823–1886), Malvina Sara Black Gist of South Carolina (1842–1930), Sarah Ida Fowler Morgan of Louisiana (1842–1909), Cornelia Peake McDonald of Virginia (1822–1909), Judith White Brockenbrough McGuire of Virginia (1813–1897), Sarah Katherine (Kate) Stone of Louisiana (1841–1907), and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas of Georgia (1843–1907). These women’s diaries circulated in postwar commemoration associations, and several saw publication. The public acclaim they received helped shape the collective memory of the war and, according to Nitz, further legitimized notions of racial supremacy and segregation. Comparing and contrasting their own lives to literary precedents and fictional role models allowed the diarists to process the privations of war, the loss of family members, and the looming defeat of the Confederacy. Belles and Poets establishes the extent to which literature offered a means of exploring ideas and convictions about class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the Civil War–era South. Nitz’s work shows that literary allusions in wartime diaries expose the ways in which some white southern women coped with the war and its potential threats to their way of life.




John Bachman


Book Description

John Bachman (1790-1874) was an internationally renowned naturalist and a prominent Lutheran minister. This is the first collection of his writings, containing selections from his three major books, his letters, and his articles on plants and animals, education, religion, agriculture, and the human species. Bachman was the leading authority on North American mammals. He was responsible for the descriptions of the 147 mammal species included in Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a massive work produced in collaboration with John James Audubon. Bachman relied entirely on scientific evidence in his work and was exceptional among his fellow naturalists for studying the whole of natural history. Bachman also relied on scientific evidence in his Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race. He showed that human beings constitute a single species that developed as varieties equivalent to the varieties of domesticated animals. In this work, perhaps his most significant accomplishment, Bachman stood nearly alone in challenging the polygenetic views of Louis Agassiz and others that white and black people descended from different progenitors. Bachman was also an important figure in the establishment of Lutheranism in the Southeast. He wrote the first American monograph on the doctrines of Martin Luther and the history of the Reformation. Bachman served for fifty-six years as minister of St. John's Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and was one of the founders of Newberry College.




Mary Telfair to Mary Few


Book Description

This volume gathers nearly half of some 300 letters written by Mary Telfair of Savannah to her best friend, Mary Few of New York. Telfair was born in 1790 to a wealthy, prominent, slaveholding Savannah family. Few, born in 1790 into equally affluent circumstances, moved with her family from Savannah to New York in 1799. Self-exiled because of their strong antislavery views, the Fews never returned to Georgia, yet they remained close to the Telfairs. The close friendship between Telfair and Few ended only with their deaths in the 1870s. Regular travelers, they met on many occasions. Chiefly, however, they kept in touch through frequent correspondence (Few's letters to Telfair remain undiscovered, and may not have not survived). Wherever Telfair happened to be--in Savannah, the northern states, or Europe--she wrote to her friend at least two or three times a month. Telfair's letters offer unique insights into the daily life of her family and the changes wrought by the deaths of so many of its members. The letters also reveal the shared interests and imperatives at the base of her various relationships with elite women, but especially with Mary Few, whom Telfair memorably described as her "Siamese Twin." The two women, neither of whom ever wed, nonetheless discussed the rights and obligations of marriage as well as their own state of "single blessedness." They also conversed about shared intellectual interests--literature, lecture topics, women's education--as well as the foibles of common acquaintances. Here is a fascinating, unfamiliar world as revealed in what editor Betty Wood calls "one of the most remarkable literary exchanges between women of high social rank in the early national and antebellum United States."




Southern Women in the Progressive Era


Book Description

“Stories of personal tragedy, economic hardship, and personal conviction . . . a valuable addition to both southern and women’s history.” —Journal of Southern History From the 1890s to the end of World War I, the reformers who called themselves progressives helped transform the United States, and many women filled their ranks. Through solo efforts and voluntary associations both national and regional, women agitated for change, addressing issues such as poverty, suffrage, urban overcrowding, and public health. Southern Women in the Progressive Era presents the stories of a diverse group of southern women—African Americans, working-class women, teachers, nurses, and activists—in their own words, casting a fresh light on one of the most dynamic eras in US history. These women hailed from Virginia to Florida and from South Carolina to Texas and wrote in a variety of genres, from correspondence and speeches to bureaucratic reports, autobiographies, and editorials. Included in this volume, among many others, are the previously unpublished memoir of civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded a school for black children; the correspondence of a textile worker, Anthelia Holt, whose musings to a friend reveal the day-to-day joys and hardships of mill-town life; the letters of the educator and agricultural field agent Henrietta Aiken Kelly, who attempted to introduce silk culture to southern farmers; and the speeches of the popular novelist Mary Johnson, who fought for women’s voting rights. Always illuminating and often inspiring, each story highlights the part that regional identity—particularly race—played in health and education reform, suffrage campaigns, and women’s club work. Together these women’s voices reveal the promise of the Progressive Era, as well as its limitations, as women sought to redefine their role as workers and citizens of the United States.




In Black and White


Book Description

“Our problem is not racial, but human and economic. . . . We hold the Negro racially responsible for conditions common to all races on his economic plane.” The writings of reformer Lily Hardy Hammond (1859-1925) are filled with such forthright criticisms of southern white attitudes toward African Americans--enough so that her stature as a southern progressive thinker would seem assured. Yet Hammond, who once stood at the intellectual center of the southern women’s social gospel movement and was in her time the South’s most prolific female writer on the “race question,” has been marginalized. This volume reprintsIn Black and White, the most important of Hammond’s ten books, along with a sampling of the dozens of articles she published. Elna C. Green’s biographical introduction tells of Hammond’s marriage to a prominent Methodist minister and educator. It also traces Hammond’s career within the context of prevailing gender and racial attitudes in the Jim Crow South. Hammond, who had roots in Methodist home mission work, was also active in such secular and ecumenical organizations as the Southern Sociological Congress, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hammond worked alongside blacks to promote education, improve living conditions, and stop lynching. As a suffragist and temperance advocate, she urged the leaders of those largely white women’s movements to partner with African Americans. Historians of religion, social science, and race relations will welcome the reintroduction of this remarkable but virtually forgotten figure.




Shared Histories


Book Description

A mother writes to her faraway daughter: "I keep all your letters. Someday you might want to do something with them." Those words foretold Shared Histories, although neither woman would live to see the book. This is the first known published collection of letters to include correspondence between civilian family members on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II. Separated for most of their adult lives, Virginia Dickinson Reynolds and her daughter, Virginia Potter, wrote to each other for nearly forty years. This selection from their long exchange is filled with unguarded reflections on current events, fashion, food, travel, domestic life, leisure, and the upheaval of war. Readers will also encounter various prominent English people and members of the aristocracy, the American southern elite, and such familiar names as Martha Graham, Walt Disney, and Ellen Glasgow. Both women were born in Richmond, Virginia, and raised in privileged circumstances. Virginia Dickinson Reynolds was the child of a Confederate Army officer and was also a distant cousin of poet Emily Dickinson. Virginia Potter traveled widely until she married an English Army officer and settled in his country. The women's intensely close bond shines through Shared Histories as, from time to time, do their class-conscious, Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Sometimes poignant, sometimes bristling, always candid, these letters portray private worlds of tradition confronted with global change.




Princes of Cotton


Book Description

A rogue, a megalomaniac, a plodder, and a depressive: the men whose previously unpublished diaries are collected in this volume were four very different characters. But they had much in common too. All were from the Deep South. All were young, between seventeen and twenty-five. All had a connection to cotton and slaves. Most obviously, all were diarists, enduring night upon night of cramped hands and candle bugs to write out their lives. Down the furrows of their fathers' farms, through the thickets of their local woods, past the familiar haunts of their youth, Harry Dixon, Henry Hughes, John Coleman, and Henry Craft arrive at manhood via journeys they narrate themselves. All would be swept into the Confederate Army, and one would die in its service. But if their manhood was tested in the war, it was formed in the years before, when they emerged from their swimming holes, sopping with boyhood, determined to become princes among men. Few books exist about the inner lives of southern males, especially those in adolescence and early adulthood. Princes of Cotton begins to remedy this shortage. These diaries, along with Stephen Berry's introduction, address some of the central questions in the study of southern manhood: how masculine ideals in the Old South were constructed and maintained; how males of different ages and regions resisted, modified, or flouted those ideals; how those ideals could be expressed differently in public and private; and how the Civil War provoked a seismic shift in southern masculinity.




Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans


Book Description

Ashley Baggett uncovers the voices of abused women who utilized the legal system in New Orleans to address their grievances from the antebellum era to the end of the nineteenth century. Poring over 26,000 records, Baggett analyzes 421 criminal cases involving intimate partner violence—physical or emotional abuse of a partner in a romantic relationship—revealing a significant demand among women, the community, and the courts for reform in the postbellum decades. Before the Civil War, some challenges and limits to the male privilege of chastisement existed, but the gendered power structure and the veil of privacy for families in the courts largely shielded abusers from criminal prosecution. However, the war upended gender expectations and increased female autonomy, leading to the demand for and brief recognition of women's right to be free from violence. Baggett demonstrates how postbellum decades offered a fleeting opportunity for change before the gender and racial expectations hardened with the rise of Jim Crow. Her findings reveal previously unseen dimensions of women's lives both inside and outside legal marriage and women's attempts to renegotiate power in relationships. Highlighting the lived experiences of these women, Baggett tracks how gender, race, and location worked together to define and redefine gender expectations and legal rights. Moreover, she demonstrates recognition of women's legal personhood as well as differences between northern and southern states' trajectories in response to intimate partner violence during the nineteenth century.




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