A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina

Description

New Englander William Allen (1830-1889) is mostly known today as the lead editor of the 1867 anthology Slave Songs of the United States, the earliest published collection of Negro spirituals, and as a distinguished history professor at the University of Wisconsin. During the Civil War, he served from late 1863 through mid-1864 as a member of the "Gideonite band" of businessmen, missionaries, and teachers who migrated to the South Carolina Sea Islands as part of the Port Royal Experiment. After the war, he served as assistant superintendent of schools in Charleston from April through July 1865. Allen kept journals during his assignments in South Carolina in which he recorded events and impressions of about several hundred people, especially ex-slaves, along with fellow Gideonites, Union soldiers and officials, and ex-Confederates.

In A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina, editor James Robert Hester has transcribed Allen's journals and fully annotated them to create a significant documentary source of information on Civil War South Carolina. Hester notes that Allen's journals are more than travelogues, as he often analyzed the people, events, and ideas he encountered. In addition to being a competent amateur musician, Allen was a Harvard-trained historian and philologist and brought his impressive skills to his writing. Later in his life he became an eminent professor of history at the University of Wisconsin.

Hester's introductory chapter summarizes Allen's life from his early childhood in Northborough, Massachusetts, through his education at Harvard, his duties as associate principal of the West Newton (Massachusetts) English and Classical School, and his engagement in the Port Royal Experiment. The introduction also surveys Allen's essays on the South published in the Christian Examiner during the Civil War and his articles written for The Nation at the war's end. Two chapters cover Allen's St. Helena and Charleston journals, respectively, and the book closes with a short epilogue. The work is generously annotated, containing almost 600 endnotes, which amplify Allen's narrative and complement Allen's vivid glimpses of coastal South Carolina during the Civil War.

Sujets

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Social History
• Civil War Period
• Ethnic
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Asedio de Charleston
• MUSIC
• Palmetto Leaves
• Charleston Harbor
• Port Royal Experiment
• Multiple signal classification
• His Family
• American Missionary Association
• Ashley River
• Freedmen's Aid Society
• Siege of Charleston
• 40 acres and a mule
• On the Beach (novel)
• Nathaniel P. Banks
• Ethnic group
• A Short History of the Confederate States of America
• History of the Americas
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Baptists
• Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands
• United States
• William Lloyd Garrison
• Nathaniel Prentice Banks
• Robert Gould Shaw

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611174977
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina
A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina

William Francis Allen s Civil War Journals
Edited by James Robert Hester
2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-496-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-497-7 (ebook)
Front cover illustration courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
A Note on the Transcriptions and Sources
Abbreviations
Introduction
St. Helena Journal
Charleston Journal
Epilogue
Appendix A: Freedmen s Aid Organizations
Appendix B: Black St. Helena Residents
Appendix C: St. Helena Outsiders
Appendix D: William Allen s St. Helena Reading List
Appendix E: Charleston Contacts
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Map of the South Carolina Sea Islands
Port Royal Map and Key
Professor William Allen, University of Wisconsin
William Allen and Family at Home
Preface
At 9:45 A.M ., November 5, 1863, aboard the steamer Arago somewhere off Maryland s eastern shore, New Englander William Francis Allen set pen to paper, beginning the first of three journals that would cover his time in the South. Allen, his wife, Mary, and her cousin Caty Noyes were en route to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, to teach 150 contraband slaves from three plantations. These freedmen were part of approximately ten thousand who had been left behind on the Sea Islands after their masters fled in the wake of the Battle of Port Royal two years before. 1 Allen, who was from the Boston area, spent eight months (November 1863-July 1864) as a teacher on St. Helena, and, after the Civil War, he spent three months (April-July 1865) as acting superintendent of schools in Charleston. Between those assignments, he served five months (September 1864-February 1865) at Helena, Arkansas, as an agent of the Red Cross-like Western Sanitary Commission and superintendent of the freedmen s and refugees schools.
Allen is best known today as the lead editor of the 1867 anthology Slave Songs of the United States . 2 He contributed about 30 of the 136 songs in the collection, and he wrote the introduction, which is largely devoted to a discussion of the music and language of the former slaves he encountered on St. Helena. My interest in Allen s writings began in the fall of 2009, when I began research on the origin of six songs in Slave Songs attributed to Augusta, Georgia, for which he was credited. 3 During the course of my research, I accumulated Allen s southern journals, his 1864-67 diaries, and a number of personal letters he wrote to family members in 1865-67. I was fortunate to have Dr. Lee Ann Caldwell, director of the Center for the Study of Georgia History at Georgia Regents University, as principal reader of my research paper. Dr. Caldwell continued to provide advice and encouragement as I prepared transcriptions of Allen s journals and diaries, which eventually led to this book.
Allen s writings from the South have attracted relatively little notice by scholars. The musicologist Dena Epstein cited musical examples from all three of his journals in Sinful Tunes and Spirituals , and the historian Willie Lee Rose drew on his St. Helena journal in discussing the 1864 land sale crisis in Rehearsal for Reconstruction . In addition, the education historian Gerald Robbins wrote a short 1965 article in the History of Education Quarterly chronicling Allen s experiences as a teacher on St. Helena. 4
This book provides annotated transcriptions of Allen s St. Helena and Charleston journals, of which the most interesting aspect is his description of people he encountered. He named and described 188 former slaves of all ages who he came to know on St. Helena. He described a host of Northerners he met at both St. Helena and Charleston, ranging from fellow teachers to missionaries and abolitionists and military men-privates to generals-as well as officials of all stripes, including plantation superintendents and tax commissioners.
Allen s Charleston journal also recounted interviews with native Southerners, such as the Reverend Anthony Toomer Porter, an Episcopal cleric and ardent secessionist; Roswell T. Logan, associate editor of the Charleston Daily News ; First Lieutenant Edmund Mazyck of the Confederate Army; and George Alfred Trenholm, the Confederacy s treasury secretary. In each case, Allen probed these men s thoughts about secession and slavery and their views about the South s prospects for rejoining the Union.
Some of what Allen wrote in his journals was mundane. He described the flora of St. Helena, and he wrote about gardening and repairs he made to the Captain John Big House, where he lived. But he was a trained historian, able to understand the changes going on around him, and he brought that training to bear in discussing the attitudes and habits of the freedmen and their potential for education and employment in a free labor economy. He wrote about military and government policies and their effects, positive and negative. He was especially interested in labor arrangements and the distribution of confiscated lands. And he recorded firsthand evaluations of the South s prospects for Reconstruction.
Above all, Allen was a scholar. His scholarly qualities were clearly displayed in a series of essays he wrote over the course of the war for the Christian Examiner and in a series of letters he wrote at war s end for the newly inaugurated magazine the Nation . These essays and letters demonstrate the reach of his scholarship. He often buttressed his arguments with examples from classical history and observations from his journals. His treatment of these materials shows that his journals were more than quaint travelogues.
Possibly because of his tight, academic reasoning, Allen s published writings have a modern feel. He had biases. He was a New Englander, and he had a New Englander s faith in the Yankee work ethic and the virtues of free labor. He was a moderate in his stances on black suffrage and reconstruction. These perspectives undoubtedly colored his writings, just as the perspectives of modern historians color theirs. He had the disadvantage of living the events he chronicled, without the advantage of hindsight. Still, one senses that his reasoning came off well, even when he projected the outcome of complex events, such as the struggle for equal rights for blacks. When compared with present-day conclusions, such as those of Eric Foner s Reconstruction , 5 Allen s forecasts fare well.
Allen s life was briefly summarized in an entry in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica :
ALLEN, WILLIAM FRANCIS (1830-1889), American classical scholar, was born at Northborough, Massachusetts, on the 5 th of September 1830. He graduated at Harvard College in 1851 and subsequently devoted himself almost entirely to literary work and teaching. In 1867 he became professor of ancient languages and history (afterwards Latin language and Roman history) in the University of Wisconsin. He died in December 1889. His contributions to classical literature chiefly consist of schoolbooks published in the Allen (his brother) and Greenough series. The Collection of Slave Songs (1867), of which he was joint-editor, was the first work of the kind ever published.
The scholarly bent of mind that Allen brought to his work in South Carolina is the focus here. The pursuit of knowledge characterized his life from the time, as a boy, he began to explore history books in his father s library through his tenure as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. 6 He was an unpretentious man who wrote out his thoughts in an unpresuming, scholarly way. Even his informal journals evidence humane thoughtfulness. A marble tablet in Allen s honor at the First Unitarian Church of Madison, Wisconsin, portrays his spirit:
A man of varied, exact, and broad scholarship.
A teacher of creative power and original methods.
A wise, sincere, and generous friend.
A citizen, active and efficient in all movements for
Education, Reform, and Philanthropy.
A Lover of Flowers, Poetry, and Music.
A Note on the Transcriptions and Sources
The Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) holds many of William Allen s writings in a collection titled William F. Allen Family Papers. The interest here is Allen s writings during two stays in South Carolina: on St. Helena Island and in Charleston. The St. Helena writings consist of a typescript journal and his 1864 manuscript diary. (It is likely that Allen s daughter or his wife typed his journal.) The Charleston writings consist of a manuscript journal and his 1865 manuscript diary. 1
Allen wrote his journals, a few sheets at a time, as letters to be circulated among family and friends. They consist of descriptions of people, places, and events, which he mailed home to West Newton, Massachusetts. His 1864 and 1865 diaries were written in pocket-size books having 3 - by 5 -inch leaves. Each page contained three dated blocks in which he jotted down items of interest, including the weather, where he went, whom he saw, letters he sent and received, and incidental reminders. Frequently he made note of things he read.
Allen s St. Helena journal begins on November 5, 1863, the day after he departed New York Harbor for the Sea Islands. It concludes on July 15, 1864, when he recorded his landing in New York the previous day. The typescript consists of 8 - by 11-inch sheets. The first page is unnumbered, and subsequent pages are numbered 2 through 231, with a partial page numbered 62a, a page numbered 94A, and two pages numbered 155, making 234 pages total. The double-spaced text has the appearance of having been produced on a vintage typewriter. Sheets up to page 1