Diary and Letters from the Sea Islands During Reconstruction, 1862-1884

These excerpts are from a series of letters written by Laura M. Towne. She was an abolitionist schoolteacher from Pittsburgh who arrived in the Sea Islands of South Carolina in 1862, shortly after it had fallen to the Union army.

April 17, 1862

. . . Besides soldiers the streets are full of the oddest negro children -- dirty and ragged, but about the same as so many Irish in intelligence. . . . I think a rather too cautious spirit prevails--anti-slavery is to be kept in the background for fear of exciting the animosity of the army, and we are only here by military sufferance. But we have the odium of out-and-out abolitionists, why not take the credit?. . . I wish they would all say out loud quietly, respectfully, firmly, ``We have come to do anti-slavery work, and we think it noble work and we mean to do it honestly.''. . .

April 18, 1862

. . . There has been a little rebellion upon Mr. Philbrick's1 plantation. . . . Two men, one upon each estate, refuse to work the four hours a day they are required to give to the cotton, but insist upon cultivating their own cornpatch only. They threaten, if unprovided with food, to break into the cornhouse. One man drew his knife upon his driver, but crouched as soon as Mr. Philbrick laid his hand upon his shoulder. . . .

April 21, 1862

. . . The number of little darkies tumbling around at all hours is marvelous. They swarm on the front porch and in the front hall. If a carriage stops it is instantly surrounded by a dozen or more wooly heads. They are all very civil, but full of mischief and fun. . . . The hands on the place are all obliged to work. All who can be are kept busy with the cotton, but there are some women and young girls unfit for the field, and they are made to do their share in housework and washing, so they may draw pay like the others. . . .

April 24, 1862

. . . The negroes take it hard that they must work at cotton again this year, especially as it must be to the neglect of their corn, upon which they have the sense to feel that their next winter's food depends. . . .

April 27, 1862

. . . Tonight I have been to a ``shout'', which seems to me certainly the remains of some old idol worship. The negroes sing a kind of chorus -- three standing apart to lead and clap --and then all the others go shuffling around in a circle following one another with not much regularity, turning round occasionally and bending the knees, and stamping so that the whole floor swings. I never saw anything so savage. They call it a religious ceremony, but it seems like a regular frolic to me, and instead of attending the shout, the better persons go to the ``Praise House.'' This is always the cabin of the oldest person in the little village of negro houses, and they meet there to read and pray. . . .

May 1, 1862

. . . Our young men say they have to decide suddenly upon such weighty questions that they are kept anxious and overworked. They have learned to settle questions in an offhand way. Mr. Pierce, in talking with the negroes, has to alter many a half-considered thing. It is very picturesque to see him in a negro village with such unclad and oddly clad groups around him, talking, reasoning, and getting such shrewd answers too. . . .

May 13, 1862

. . . This is a sad time here. On Sunday afternoon Captain Stevens . . . who commands here . . . came here with a peremptory order from General Hunter for every able-bodied negro man of age for a soldier to be sent at once to Hilton Head. This piece of tyranny carried dismay into this household, and we were in great indignation to think of the alarm and grief this would cause the poor negroes on this place. We have got to calling them our people and loving them really--not so much individually as the collective whole--the people and our people. . . .

July 20, 1862

This morning there was no white preacher. After church Father Tom and his bench of elders examined candidates for baptism and asked Ellen to record their names. We stayed. Each candidate, clothed in the oldest possible clothes and with a handkerchief made into a band and tied around the forehead, stood humbly before the bench. Father Tom, looking like Jupiter himself, grave, powerful, and awfully dignified, put the most posing questions, to which the candidates replied meekly and promptly. He asked the satisfactory candidates at last, ``How do you pray?'' Then the soft musical voices made the coaxing, entreating kind of prayer they use so much. A nod dismissed the applicant and another was called up. There were sixty or seventy to examine . . .

January 1, 1863 [The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on this date.]

We rejoiced at midnight with great pride and joy to think our country is at last free.

February 24, 1863

Hurrah! Jubilee! Lands are to be set apart for the people so that they cannot be oppressed, or driven to work for speculators, or ejected from their homesteads . .

January 7, 1864

We have no milk, and at times no wood. There is nobody, not a single hand--not one man up and well enough to get these things. All the boys are getting sick also. It is a tight time. I am nearly ill too. Every morning I fold powders and every afternoon I take to the street and stop at every house, giving medicine at the door, but lately not going in as I used to, for they keep their rooms so dark I cannot see the patients, and if I order a window opened, I find it nailed up the next time I come. . . .

February 7, 1864

. . . We are getting very much interested in the villagers, particularly in the minister, a certain black or brown man who is certain to make his mark in the world. He is very eloquent and ambitious and makes a great stir in the department by his public speaking. He lives near us and his sister teaches in the school here. He often comes in of an evening, and the other day he found out to his intense horror that I was a Unitarian. But, though he says he expected better things of me, and various other things like that, he is really wonderfully liberal, and, as he will probably fall in with the right kind of people by reason of his eloquence and genius, he will one day perhaps be a Unitarian himself. . . .

Christmas, 1864

. . . Miss Lynch and a colored teacher from the North, Mr. Freeman, dined here and seemed well satisfied. They have just gone. I suppose it would seem strange to you to sit down with two colored people, but to us it is the most natural thing in the world. I actually forget these people are black, and it is only when I see them at a distance and cannot recognize their features that I remember it. The conversation at dinner flowed just as naturally as if we were Northern whites. . . .

[The following letter is on the death of Abraham Lincoln.]

April 29, 1865

. . . It was a frightful blow at first. The people have refused to believe he was dead. Last Sunday the black minister of Frogmore said that if they knew the President were dead they would mourn for him, but they could not think that was the truth, and they would wait and see. We are going tomorrow to hear what further they say. One man came for clothing and seemed very indifferent about them -- different from most of the people. I expressed some surprise. ``Oh'' he said, ``I have lost a friend. I don't care much now about anything.'' ``What friend,'' I asked, not really thinking for a moment. ``They call him Sam,'' he said; ``Uncle Sam, the best friend I ever had.'' Another asked me in a whisper if it were true that the ``Government was dead.'' Rina says she can't sleep for thinking how sorry she is to lose ``Pa Linkum.'' You know they call their elders in church--or the particular one who converted and received them in--their spiritual father, and he has the most absolute power over them. These fathers are addressed with fear and awe as ``Pa Marcus,'' ``Pa Demas,'' etc. One man said to me, ``Lincoln died for we, Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.''. . .

June 13, 1865

. . . Our school does splendidly, though I say it. The children have read through a history of the United States and an easy physiology, and they know all the parts of speech, and can make sentences, being told to use a predicate, verb, and adverb, for instance. Ellen's class is writing compositions. We are going to have a grand school exhibition before we close, with dialogues, exercises in mathematics, in grammar, geography, spelling, reading, etc., etc. We are cramming for it. Young Gabriel Capus [a white former plantation owner] has come back to his place, which was one reserved for the people. He warns them to buy no more of his land, as he shall soon have possession of it again! He went to his people, told them he had no money and nothing to eat, and begged them to let him stay with them. Old Rina took him in, and he lives in her house, but he begins already to show airs. Hastings and Rina are greatly exercised upon this question of the return of the old masters. . . .

February 23, 1866

. . . [The agents appointed by the Northern military] are often more pro-slavery than the rebels themselves, and only care to make the blacks work -- being quite unconcerned about making the employers pay. Doing justice seems to mean, to them, seeing that the blacks don't break a contract and compelling them to submit cheerfully if the whites do. .

March 3, 1867

. . . To-day the white folks of the island who, under General Bennett's influence, are getting too uppish (most of them being low sutlers and camp-followers) to associate with blacks, even in church, have determined to have a white church of their own. We received an invitation to attend this afternoon, and went, We had a good sermon from a Beaufort minister--Northern--and a great turnout of the beauty and fashion of the island--such as whiskey-selling Mr. S. and his wife, etc., etc. There were some nice people there, and altogether I did not know there were so many white folks on the island. Two Southern teachers were there, and I only fraternized enough to speak to them--or but one person besides myself that I know of. They were tawdrily dressed--one of them in a pink silk--and were in the war undoubted rebels. Indeed we hear that they whip the children in their school and make them call them ``massa'' and ``missus,'' as in the old time. . . . I think this whole church plan a snobbish affair, and that there will probably be more rigid exclusion of blacks from equality and civility than in the most snobbish of Northern or Southern churches, for there is no hater of the negro like these speculating planters, but I am going to attend for a while and watch matters. Perhaps this snap judgment is not a just one. We shall go to the black church in the morning, where, of all the white people here, the Ruggles, Murrays, and I are the only attendants, and to this white place in the afternoon. . . .

May 12, 1867

We have had to take our holiday--Saturday--for a mass meeting of Republican citizens!. . . The speakers were all black men, except for Mr. Hunn [one of the original superintendents]. The white men did not attend -- they are going to have a white party, they say. One black man said he wanted no white men on their platform, but he was taken to task by all the other speakers, who disclaimed all such feelings. It was funny to hear the arguments from the other side--such as--

``What difference does skin make, my bredren. I would stand side by side a white man if he acted right. We musn't be prejudices against their color.''

``If dere skins is white, they may have principle.''

``Come my friends, we musn't judge a man according to his color, , but according to his acts,'' etc., etc. . . .

June 1, 1867

The people are just now in a great state of excitement over their right to vote, and are busy forming a Republican Party on the island..Today in church Mr. Hunn announced another meeting next Saturday. ``The females must stay at home?'' asked Demas from the pulpit? ``The females can come or go as they choose,'' said Mr. Hunn, ``but the meeting is for men voters.'' Demas immediately announced that ``the womens will stay at home and cut grass,'' that is, hoe the corn and cotton fields--clear them of grass. It is too funny to see how much more jealous the men are of one kind of liberty they have achieved than of the other! Political freedom they are rather shy and ignorant of; but domestic freedom--the right, just found, to have their own way in their families and rule their wives--that is an inestimable privilege. . . .

May 29, 1870

. . . We have taken in a little child to live with us--perhaps to bring up. She is Miss Puss--about the worst little monkey that ever was. Topsy is nothing to her. . . That poor child has been undergoing all sorts of ill treatment all winter from her father. She is a dwarf already, and he starved and beat her every day. She is one of the best scholars in my class; as bright as a dollar; always noticed by strangers for here intelligence, good reading, etc. . . . She often ran away to escape a beating, and almost lived in the woods. . . . Ellen and I concluded to take her for poultry minder at half a dollar a month and food, but not clothing. The father did not feel willing to let her come, but the mother would have it, so the next day as we went to school and saw her in a field eating blackberries, we hailed her and told her she was to come to Frogmore to live. You never saw such a delighted little creature. So far she is good as gold, but the time will come when we will have our trials. She has been my scholar for years. . . .

October 28, 1877

. . . Our school is a delight. It rained one day last week, but through the pelting showers came nearly every blessed child. Some of them walk six miles and back, besides doing their task of cotton picking. Their steady eagerness to learn is just something amazing. To be deprived of a lesson is a severe punishment. ``I got no reading today,'' or no writing, or no sums, is cause for bitter tears. This race is going to rise. It is biding its time.

October 29, 1878

. . . Political times are simply frightful. Men are shot at, hounded down, trapped, and held till certain meetings are over, and intimidated in every possible way. It gets worse and worse as election approaches. . . .

November 6, 1878

On Saturday I went to a Republican meeting at the church. Robert Smalls [an African American state senator] told of his mobbing at Gillisonville. . .Men and women were coming up the street to attend the meeting when eight hundred red-shirt men [white political terrorists], led by colonels, generals, and many leading men of the state, came dashing into town, giving the real ``rebel yell,'' the newspaper said. Robert Smalls called it ``whooping like Indians.'' They drew up, and as a body stood still, but every few minutes a squad of three or four would scour down street on their horses, and reaching out would ``lick off the hats'' of the colored men or slap the faces of the colored women coming to the meeting, whooping and yelling and scattering the people on all sides. This made the colored men so mad that they wanted to pitch right into a fight with the eight hundred, but Robert Smalls restrained them, telling them what folly it was. . . . He [Smalls] withdrew into the store with his forty men and drew them up all around it behind the counters. They had guns. He told them to aim at the door, and stand with finger on trigger, but on no account to shoot until the red-shirts broke in. Meantime . . .the outsiders began to try to break down the door. They called Smalls and told him they would set fire to the house and burn him up in it. They fired repeatedly through the windows and walls. . . . He would not come out, and the leaders led off part of the red-shirts and began to make speeches, leaving the store surrounded, however, for fear Smalls should escape.

The people who had come to the meeting meanwhile ran to raise the alarm in every direction, and in an incredible short time the most distant parts of the county heard that their truly beloved leader was trapped in a house surrounded by red-shirts, and that his life was in danger. Every colored man and women seized whatever was at hand--guns, axes, hoes, etc., and ran to the rescue. By six o'clock afternoon a thousand negroes were approaching the town, and the red-shirts thought it best to gallop away. . .Smalls thinks this attack was caused by Hampton [Wade Hampton, Democratic governor of South Carolina] saying there was but one man now he thought ought to be got out of the way, and that man was Robert Smalls. . . .

July 9, 1884

. . . I had a very pleasant trip down, in the long freight train, which was just as fast as the passenger train, and two hours earlier. . . . That old plague, the North Penn conductor, came and talked to me a long time at Yemassee. He says the Reading has bought the Newtown, and is going to make a connection between Fern Rock and Bethaires which will cut off nine miles of the distance to New York. He said the whole race of niggers ought to be swept away, and I told him my business was with that race and that they would never be swept away, so he was disgusted and went away, leaving me to read in peace.