Andrew P. Calhoun, eldest son of John C. Calhoun, was President of the South Carolina Agricultural College and owner of large lands in Alabama and South Carolina. He took pride in raising everything consumed on his plantations. In the New York home of his son, Mr. Patrick Calhoun, three of his old servants live; his wife’s maid says proudly: “I have counted thirty things on my Miss’ dinner-table that were grown on the place.” Cotton and wool were grown on the place and carded, spun, dyed, woven into cloth by negro women; in great rooms, well lighted, well aired, well equipped, negro cutters, fitters and seamstresses fashioned neat and comfortable garments for a contented, well-cared-for laboring force. Mrs. Calhoun devoted as much time to this department of plantation work, which included the industrial and moral education of negro women, as Mr. Calhoun devoted to the general management of his lands and the industrial and moral uplift of negro men. The Polk and Calhoun plantations were types of thousands; and their owners types of thousands of planters who applied the same principles, if sometimes on lesser scale, to farming operations. No institutional work can take the place of work of this kind. It is like play to the real thing. Without decrying Hampton, Petersburg and Tuskegee, it can be said with truth that these institutions and many more in combination would be unable to do for a savage race what the old planters and the old plantation system of the South did for Africa’s barbarians. Employers of white labor might sit at the feet of those old planters and learn wisdom. Professor Morrison, of the Chair of History and Sociology at Clemson College, tells me that the instruction of students in their duty to their servants constituted a recognised department in some Southern colleges.
FRANCES DEVEREUX POLK
(Wife of General Leonidas Polk, the Warrior Bishop.)
She was the spiritual and industrial educator of many negroes,
and the mistress of a large sugar plantation.
Mammy Julia was my mother’s assistant superintendent, so to speak. “I could trust almost anything to her,” her mistress bore testimony, “for she appreciated responsibility and was faithfulness itself. I don’t know a negro of the new order who can hold a candle to her.” Mammy Julia and my mother had no rest night or day. Black folks were coming with troubles, wants, quarrels, ailments, births, marriages and deaths, from morning till night and night till morning again. “I was glad and thankful—on my own account—when slavery ended and I ceased to belong, body and soul, to my negroes.” As my mother, so said other Southern mistresses.
Perhaps the Southern matron’s point of view may be somewhat surprising to those who have thought that under ante-bellum conditions, slavery was all on the negro’s side and that all Southern people were fiercely bent on keeping him in bonds. Many did not believe in slavery and were trying to end it.
Mrs. Robert E. Lee’s father and uncle freed some five hundred slaves, with General Lee’s approval, thus alienating from her over $500,000 worth of property. The Hampton family, of South Carolina, sent to Liberia a great colony of freed slaves, who presently plead to be brought home. General Preston, Confederate, of Kentucky, freed his negroes; he would not sell, and could not afford to keep, them; they were “over-running and ruining his plantation, and clearing up forests for firewood; slavery is the curse of the South.”
Many families had arranged for a gradual emancipation, a fixed percentage of slaves being freed by each generation. By will and otherwise, they provided against division of families, an evil not peculiar to slavery, as immigrant ships of today, big foundling asylums, and train-loads of home-seeking children bear evidence.
But freedom as it came, was inversion, revolution. Whenever I pass “The House Upside Down” at a World’s Fair, I am reminded of the South after freedom. In “South Carolina Women in the Confederacy,”[12] Mrs. Harby tells how Mrs. Postell Geddings was in the kitchen getting Dr. Geddings’ supper, while her maid, in her best silk gown, sat in the parlour and entertained Yankee officers. Charleston ladies cooked, swept, scrubbed, split wood, fed horses, milked and watered the cattle; while filling their own places as feminine heads of the house, they were servants-of-all-work and man of the house. Mrs. Crittendon gives an anecdote matching Mrs. Geddings’. A Columbia lady saw in Sherman’s motley train an old negress arrayed in her mistress’ antiquated, ante-bellum finery, lolling on the cushions of her mistress’ carriage, and fanning (in winter) with a huge ostrich-feather fan. “Why, Aunt Sallie, where are you going?” she called out impulsively. “Law, honey! I’se gwine right back intuh de Union!” and on rode Aunt Sallie, feathers and flowers on her enormous poke-bonnet all a-flutter.