Beschreibung:

(African American, 1838) Letter from Maine newly-weds who moved to northern Tennessee to open a school, writing home describing their culture shock at life in the slave South Author: Whitman, Angelia Smith and Edwin Whitman Place Published: Clarksville, Tennessee Date Published: Oct. 28, 1838 Description: Autograph Letter Signed. 4 pp. including stampless address leaf. To Miss Hannah Smith, Portsmouth, New Hampshire [Portland, Maine]. Over 3,000 closely written words some cross-hatched, and others written between the lines of another page turned upside down. Angelia realized immediately that “prudence and politeness dictate that I should…. remain silent” about her critical impressions of life in Clarksville, especially on the subject of slavery. She met only one man “whose sentiments” on slavery, perfectly accord with those of a Northerner. He had been a slaveholder for many and is now a resident of [slave-free] Illinois. He said that he had a life of far less care and anxiety now than when he had servants, and if he had never owned slaves he should now be a happy man, but the reflection on what he had done rendered him unhappy now and would continue to do so until his death. He warned her husband “in the most solemn manner, never to stain his hands with this great sin…” Angelia, a well-educated young woman, accustomed to concerts and scientific lectures, was reduced to living in a town devoid of “intelligent and refined society”, where the only stimulation was gossip about “an elopement, a runaway marriage, or horse race, a negro sale, a fight and death by a bowie knife.” Other young women wore silk frocks “cut unusually low about the neck”, ornamented with gold chains and expensive rich jewelry, being “showy and extravagant, but without that general appearance of neatness and gentility observable in your New England lasses.” When she proposed teaching “fancy needle work” to young ladies at their school, their wealthy mothers called it “cursed drudgery, fit only for the negroes to perform… their daughters were not made to work and money could procure them all they wished for. This indolence and a train of servants appears by some to be made equivalent to real happiness.” Angelia gives a vivid account of a travelling theater that passed through the town, staying just long enough for a musician in the company, though married to a stage actress, to “elope with a young lady of fortune and respectability” … They were seen to leave town on horseback at late twilight… in a few hours a large party of equestrians” (that is, a vigilante posse) “had started in pursuit of the runaway lovers. The next morning, they returned bringing with them the unfortunate girl, and suffering the disappointed villain to expedite his escape… The young lady refused to return home but took lodgings at the hotel, where she raved like one insane and… bewailed her disappointment”. When her mother sent a carriage and servants to fetch her, “nothing short of physical force obliged her to…return” to her family home. This event was not as disturbing as the murder of a married “teacher of young ladies”, who had “a trifling dispute” with another gentleman “of high respectability… as the dispute was waxing warmer one of them drew a bowie knife and thrust it into the side of the other, who was unarmed, with such violence that he survived only a few hours. This too at midday in one of our most public streets, surrounded by spectators, and the inhuman murderer suffered to go unpunished and even unarrested… such occurrences are not rare in this section of the country.” Angelia’s husband declared that “were it not for the hope of future pecuniary prosperity I would not remain here a day…” They opened their school in “a great barn of a thing , a sort of a Methodist-meeting- house-without- any-pews looking place… a sizeable room… large enough to accommodate 200 scholars…”, but Edwin Whitman grew seriously ill and it was not long before they happily returned north. Condit