Sherry Chandler

The cruelties of women

Since I am on this sad subject, I had marked this passage to share with you from Rebecca Smith Lee’s Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (University of Texas Press, 1962).

After Horace Holley’s death in 1827, Mary decided in 1829 to return to the Louisiana sugar plantation La Bonne Espérence, where the owners, the LaBranche family, had offered her a position as governess to their small daughters and where she could also teach her young son. Thus she experienced New Year’s Day on the plantation and “finishing the sugar.”

The weather was perfect for merrymaking, soft and bright and warm. After the slaves had feasted on fresh beef and casks of wine, they donned their best blackcoats and deresses, the women wearing colored kerchiefs round their heads and the men waving bright scarves as flags. Then they paraded in the dusk to the door of the big house shouting “Bonne Ann&ecute;e pour vous!” and making their bows to the master and mistress, to the noisy accompaniment of violins and kettle drums and tambourines.

There was one ceremonial Congo dance, done in the old, old manner. The most elderly of the men approached the master, bending first on one knee and then on the other, singing all the while in a weird minor key. It was an ancient ritual of homage from a faraway homeland, and the sight of the rapt black faces moved Mary Holley profoundly and in a curious way. She felt that Mr. Hermogene [LaBranche, the plantation owner] and the dancers were actors in a strange and primitive drama, controlled by inexorable forces, a drama in which she herself was not personally involved. By thus detaching herself from the tragic implications of the scene, she arrived at the mixed attitude toward slavery held by most of the people she knew in Kentucky. As she closed the letter to her daughter she could still hear the throbbing of the drums in the quarters half a mile away and she commented that the “rigors of slavery seem softened since I have seen these poor wretches in their gala time and witnessed so much benevolence in their master and mistress.” [p. 202]

This was, of course, the fairytale all the white plantation class told itself.

I’m not exactly sure where Lee stands on this. This book was written when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was just beginning to heat up. But it is intended as a flattering biography of one of the Texas Austins. So it walks a thin sort of line that looks barbaric to our 21st century eye.

Compare it to this short passage from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

When Mary was nineteen, her father was on the jury during the trial of an abusive mistress, Caroline Turner, who, among other depravities had thrown one of her slaves out a window. Her husband accused her of murdering half a dozen of their African-American charges—his tales were another catalogue of horrors, signs of slavery’s brutal effects. [pp. 22-23]

Helen Deiss Irvin shows us a somewhat less reverential side of the slave/mistress relationship in stories of Sophia Ward, a slave born in Clay County in 1837:

The mistress had an old parrott and one day I was in the kitchen making cookies, and I decided I wanted some of them, so I took out some and put them on a chair; and when I did this the mistress entered the door. I pick up the cushion and throw over the pile of cookies on the chair, amd Mistress came near the chair and the old parrot cries out, “Mistress burn, Mistress burn.” Then the mistress looks under the cushion, and she had me whipped, but the next day I killed the parrot, and she often wondered who or what killed the bird. [p. 51]

Or there was Sarah in Bourbon County:

Sarah is the biggest devil that ever lived, having poisoned a stud horse and set a stable on fire, also burnt Gen. R. Williams stable and stack yard with seven horses and other property to value of $1500. She was handcuffed and got away at Ruddles Mill on her way down the river, which is the fifth time she escaped when about to be sent out of the country. [pp. 51-52]

In spite of the gracious surface of life in antebellum Kentucky, there was always an undertone of fear. Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, wrote, in a letter to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, favoring a gradual freeing of the slaves. She feared that abolitionists would incite an uprising like that in Santo Domingo.

Slavery is the worm at the heart of the rose of U.S. democracy. Or maybe I should say it is one of the worms, the genocide of the indigenous nations being the other. It puts a taint on the very real achievements of these 19th century women.

On the other hand, humanity produces very few saints and those it does produce are not always nice folk.

Slave state

Some snippets from Helen Deiss Irvin on slavery:

In the Kentucky social hierarchy, most powerless were black women. Subject to all of the abuses of slavery, they were vulnerable to additional ones as women. It was widely known, for example, that the slave trader Lewis Robards of Lexington sold black women into prostitution—a practice in which no one intervened—and other traders operated breeding farms for southern markets. Moreover, the exploitation of black women by their owners was not unusual, as evidenced by numbers of nearly white slave children.

Nice word: exploitation. But to continue:

. . . The sales in Lexington of Eliza, only one sixty-fourth black, and of two sisters who were graduates of Oberlin College—all three the daughters of their white masters—were causes célèbres, as J. Winston Coleman, Jr., relates in Slavery Times in Kentucky. But black women, children, and men were sold every court-day, and no one turned a head. It was whiteness, the obvious kinship with the white ruling class, that distressed onlookers. [pp. 48-49]

Coincidentally, NPR recently ran a story about a study showing that people who approve of Barack Obama perceive his skin tone to be lighter than it is while those who disapprove see it as darker. Obviously we have not got beyond this prejudice for the white.

With African-American slaves as with Native Americans, there was a great fear of miscegenation that did not apply to white men. Here is a key paragraph from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

From the earliest years of settlement, the rising birthrate of mixed-race children induced authorities to attempt to resolve “miscegenations” with a stroke of the pen: In 1662, the Virginia assemply passed legislation declaring that slave offspring inherited the status of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem) This law provided white males with an incentive to prefer slave women as illicit sexual partners—as they could not be charged with bastardy. [p. 23]

Clinton tells the story of Richard M. Johnson, a friend of Mary Lincoln’s father, John Robert Todd, and an exception to the rule of “exploitation,” the one that said these sexual liaisons would be politely ignored. Johnson would serve as vice president under Martin Van Buren but before achieving that high estate, he created a scandal in Lexington not only by acknowledging his two mixed-race daughters, offspring of his long liaison with his “housekeeper,” but also by trying to arrange advantageous marriages for them with white men. He accomplished this in part by settling lands and money on them, thereby adding fuel to the fire (see “bribed” below).

Like the sisters sold at auction, Johnson’s daughters were well educated. When Lafayette stayed with Jonson on his visit to Lexington in 1825, Clinton quotes a neighbor as reporting the event thus:

Evry thing that was necsary for the occasion was prepared in fine order. Johnson’s Two Daughters they Played on the piano fine. They Ware Dressed as fine as money Could Dress them & to one that Did not no they ware as white as anny of the Laydes thare & thare ware a good many. [p. 24]

I daresay the daughters, Imogene and Adaline, could probably spell better than the reporter, too.

Lexington Society might have tolerate such socializing from a wealthy powerful war hero, but with their marriages, Johnson had gone too far. George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal, explained the situation thus in 1835:

The author of the Declaration of Independence had his faults, but he was at least careful never to insult the feelings of the community with an ostentatious exhibition of them. He never lived in open intercourse with an “odoriferous wench”; He never bribed “his white fellow citizens” to “make such beasts of themselves” before the open eyes of the world as to stand up in the church, grasp the sable paws of negresses and pronounce the sacred vows of wedlock. [p. 25]

Prentice was a Unionist, an ardent Henry Clay supporter, and a member of the Know-Nothing Party but his writing style was broadly satiric and the liberal peppering of quotation marks in this passage leads me to wonder just where his barbs were falling.

Clinton reports that Adaline died of a “broken heart” in February 1836 because of all her father suffered on his daughters’ account [p. 25].

Horace and Mary Austin Holley were instrumental in bringing Lafayette to Lexington, by the way. Mary Holley would, no doubt, have been one of those white women present at Johnson’s plantation, Blue Springs in 1825. In 1818, when Mary Holley first came to Lexington with her husband, who was to be president of Transylvania University, she was uneasy about having slaves as servants. She soon adjusted, however, and when the Holleys were preparing to leave Kentucky in 1827, Rebecca Smith Lee records that:

[Horace Holley] reckoned up his own financial condition carefully . . . and wrote to Orville that he was leaving Kentucky worth at least six thousand dollars, counting his books, furniture, land, and two slaves. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Univ Texas Press, 1962), p. 172]

Unfortunately, when the Holleys left Lexington, they fell on hard times. They went to Louisiana where events did not work out the way Horace Holley thought they would. Ill and humiliated, he decided he had to flee the cursed south:

“One breath of air,” he cried out as Mary begged him to lie back on the couch by the window and let her fan his brow, “one breath of air from the Northern shore of freedom, though borne upon the eastern gale, were worth all the boasted luxuries of the ever-smiling scented South, alluring but to destroy!” [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, pp. 181-182]

But in order to book their passage, the Holleys had to have money:

He hastened to book passage for himself and wife and son on the Louisiana two weeks hence, and spent his scanty strength making preparations to leave. Most of his ready cash had gone toward equipment for the house and school, and a few days before sailing he was compelled to sell their excellent colored woman named Susanna for the sum of four hundred and fifty dollars, with Mr. Martin Duralde as witness to the transaction. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, p. 182]

Horace Holley never made it to the Northern shore of freedom. He died of yellow fever on the voyage. After his death, Mary Austin Holley returned to Louisiana to serve as governess on the LaBranche plantation.

“First Lady of Controversy”

A Springfield, Massachusetts, journal complained that Mary was a “dreadful woman” who forced “her repugnant Individuality before the world.”(Mrs. Lincoln, p. 275

I have always felt a little protective of Mary Todd Lincoln, as though by my tenderness I could somehow change the outcome of her story or at least find a reason to argue against the bad reputation she has carried down through history.

I’m not sure why this should be so. Maybe I identify with her a bit, as a woman from a border state, culturally of the South yet alienated from it.

Mary felt scapegoated by both South and North and, no doubt, she was. She received horrible press, as reference the quotation above, from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln. A Life (Harper-Collins, 2009), in reaction to the so-called Old Clothes Scandal, in which She tried to sell off some of her White House wardrobe. She always felt cash strapped, though she was not ever as poor as legend has it. Such shenanigans so embarrassed her sole surviving son that he has been accused of conspiring to have her institutionalized to save his own political career.

(Robert Todd Lincoln served as Secretary of War under James Garfield and was, rather poignantly, an eyewitness to Garfield’s assassination.)

This particular fiasco fed into accusations, á la the Clintons, that Mary Lincoln had sacked the White House. It’s true that she left D.C. with an astounding number of trunks — think of the weight of clothing Victorian women wore — but Clinton puts most of the actual damage to the Executive Mansion down to the hundreds of mourners who came through to view Lincoln’s body and left carrying a small souvenir.
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The 19th century housewife

Even that most notorious of Southern Belles, that most notoriously pampered of wives, Mary Todd Lincoln, had a heavy (literally) work load. This was especially true for Mary while she was wife of that poor rising lawyer in Springfield. Here is Catherine Clinton’s description of a 19th century middle class urban housewife’s duties, from Mrs. Lincoln. A Life (Harper-Collings, 2009, pages 70-71):

Even a woman with servants [Mary Lincoln's were Irish for the most part] had a long list of chores to perform. Someone was expected to check the mattresses for fleas and bedbugs. While servants might make beds, empty chamber pots, dust and polish, swab and sweep, most housekeepers prepared their own family meals.

Lincoln was notorious for missing his and Mary often had to send one of the children to fetch him. Wives of men of genius seldom have it all that easy. Lincoln loved to hang out and talk and politic and lose all track of time. Clinton tells a story of how he was once pulling the baby along the street in a wagon. When the baby fell out and lay crying in the street, Lincoln didn’t noticed, but walked on, deep in thought, pulling the empty wagon.

Monday was one of the most challenging of weekdays, as it was traditionally laundry day. The household laundry was an onerous task, and women were expected to not only use starch and bleach, but to hang clothes to dry and press most of the washing with hot irons, as well. Thus the “Monday blues” had an additional meaning for most housewives, alluding to the compounds used to counteract the yellowing of white fabrics.

Monday washdays like this were still a fact of life when I was a child, though my mother had a wringer washer with an electric motor that, no doubt, made her life somewhat easier than Mary Lincoln’s. Though, on the other hand, my mother had no servants of any kind to do the heavy lifting. Anyway, I remember the washer and two rinse tubs on a raised frame. The wringer would swing on its axis so you could wring clothes from washer to first rinse and then from first rinse to second, and finally into the basket for hanging. The second rinse always had blueing in it to whiten the sheets.

I’m not sure my mother starched sheets.

Food preparation was a constant daily and seasonal burden. Yes, the woman in town, unlike her rural sister, did not have to slaughter or pluck, plunge her arms up to the elbow in brine, or grind her own flour. But many kept chickens to collect the eggs, and cows to ensure unadulterated milk. The Lincolns kept both a cow and a horse (for Lincoln’s travel) housed in one of the outbuildings on the property.

My mother did a fair amount of slaughtering and plucking. See my poem “How to Dress a Chicken.”

There’s a lot more, some of which sounds very similar to the way life was lived in mid-twentieth century rural Kentucky. Some interesting facts from the Clinton book: the Mason jar was introduced in 1850; the metal eggbeater was also a 19th century innovation. And the Lincoln children were given a Saturday night bath.