“BURSTING TO SPEAK MY MIND”: HOW MATILDA FULTON CHALLENGED THE BOUNDARIES OF WOMANHOOD IN FRONTIER ARKANSAS by JESSICA PARKER MOORE Bachelor of Arts, 2004 Arkansas Tech University Russellville, Arkansas Master of Arts, 2006 Texas Woman’s University Denton, Texas Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 10, 2014 ii CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1. Introduction A Woman Facing West: Matilda Fulton’s Journey to Frontier Arkansas ......................................1 2. Outside Her Circle of Movement Matilda Fulton Takes on the Management of Rosewood ..............................................................35 3. Cornbread and China Crop Planning and Food Management at Rosewood .....................................................................75 4. “Arkansas is No Home for Angels” Family, Friendship, and Health on the Frontier ...........................................................................112 5. “Keeping All Hands Moving” Matilda Fulton’s Life as a Slave Mistress....................................................................................160 6. Conclusion Making the Hard Choices: Living through Loss and a War as a Widow ....................................198 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................201 iii TABLES Table Page 1. William and Matilda Fulton’s Time Spent Away from Home .................................................43 2. Births and Deaths of Fulton Children .....................................................................................129 3. Background Information and Duties of Slaves at Rosewood .................................................166 1 Chapter 1 A Woman Facing West: Matilda Fulton’s Journey to Frontier Arkansas Matilda Nowland Fulton’s journey reflects the westward movement of America during the nineteenth century. Born to a wealthy family, she began her life as part of elite society in Maryland and then spent the majority of her years in frontier Arkansas. In 1815, at the age of twelve, Matilda moved with her mother to Tennessee and then in 1822, at the age of nineteen, she and her family moved to Alabama.1 Matilda’s marriage to her cousin William Fulton in Alabama resulted in her moving to territorial Arkansas in 1829 upon his appointment as secretary of Arkansas Territory.2 Rarely intimidated by her circumstances, Matilda Fulton embraced the remote frontier environment of Arkansas and accepted the challenges of running Rosewood, the Fulton plantation, from 1839 to 1844 while her husband William Fulton was serving as a United States Senator. In her husband’s absence, Matilda cared for their children, plantation, and slaves, and after William’s death in 1844 she continued to manage Rosewood successfully until her death in 1879. Refusing to accept the narrow definition of what American society viewed as appropriate actions for a “lady” during her lifetime, Matilda Fulton serves as an example of nineteenth-century American women who did not accept the constricted societal view of women and instead created their own. Part of the Trans-Mississippi West, Arkansas served as a hybrid of the South and West; its residents and culture reflecting the culture and societal beliefs of both regions. Based on the identity of frontier Arkansas as a combination of the South and the West, a discussion of the 1 Peggy Jacoway, First Ladies of Arkansas (Kingsport, TN: Southern Publishers, 1941), 47; E. R. Wright, A Little Sketch of the Nowland and Fulton Families, 7, William Savin Fulton Papers, 1807-1909, Arkansas History Commission: Little Rock, Arkansas, hereafter WSFP. 2Andrew Jackson, “Commission of William S. Fulton as Secretary,” in The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 21, The Territory of Arkansas, 1828-1836, ed. Clarence E. Carter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1954), 13. 2 historiography of women in both areas is necessary. Matilda’s life reflects the lives of southern women as well as western women as Arkansas society expected her to live up to ideals of the proper southern lady while her daily life displayed the rusticity of the western frontier. Some of the major tenets of the field of women’s history can be seen in the effect of the separate spheres, “women’s culture,” and gender on Matilda’s life in nineteenth century Arkansas and her response to them. Women’s history has been a complicated field since its inception. Fighting for legitimacy, women’s historians sought to develop a field in a profession that had not reached a consensus on the validity of studying women on their own. As women’s history came to be accepted, the field became broader and more diverse. The ideologies of the separate spheres, a “women’s culture,” and gender became mainstays of women’s history. Historians interested in the American South quickly began to analyze how these ideas applied to antebellum southern society. Southern historians questioned the origins of these ideas in the South, and many argued that these ideas developed uniquely in the South and were not simply northern exports. The relationship between the system of slavery and the ideals of the private sphere and domesticity in southern society has been one of the major themes of these studies. These ideologies and their impact on antebellum southern society have been a huge part of the historiography of southern women. Up to the 1960s, the small number of works on women’s history fit into the mold of traditional historiography. These works rely on the traditional sources and historical methods popular in other historical fields of the time. Focus on prominent individuals, periodization, and a neglect of factors such as class and race limited the effectiveness of these works. Julia Cherry Spruill’s Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies was the first historical work dealing 3 solely with women in the South. Typically categorized as a recovery work, Spruill offers little analysis on the information in the book. The topics include women’s household chores, leisure activities, marriage, education, occupations, and women’s status under the law. While the fact that she looks at these aspects of women’s lives is revolutionary, Spruill does not look at class or race. She treats all of the women in her book as if they were white and of the same financial circumstances. Mentioned only in their roles as servants, black women and the impact of their presence in the household on the lives of both black and white women are left out of the discussion. While subject to criticism as essentialist, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies and its focus on women during this time period makes it remarkable.3 With the social history of the 1960s came a shift in the focus on the study of women and their places in society. Departing from the previous history’s focus on women in relation to larger political events, this new history looked at the private lives of women and the social aspects of their lives. The first major concept in women’s history was that of patriarchy, defined as “a system of interrelated social structures through which ‘men exploit women.’”4 Mary Beth Norton describes patriarchy in her 1996 book Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society: “hierarchy was necessary to the operations of the household; the proper director of the family’s activities was its husband/father/master; and the subordination of wife to husband was the foundation of the family unit and thus of society itself.”5 The concepts of the “true woman” and “separate spheres” were key aspects of the discussion of patriarchy.6 The theory of “separate spheres,” which gendered public and private 3 Julia Cherry Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1938): 64-84. 4 Sue Morgan, “Introduction,” in The Feminist History Reader, ed. Sue Morgan (London: Routledge, 2006), 6. 5 Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1996), 59. 6 Morgan, “Introduction,” The Feminist History Reader, 7. 4 spaces, was the dominant approach of historians from the 1960s to the 1980s when dealing with women’s lives under a patriarchal system.7 Historians used the “separate spheres” paradigm in a variety of ways to discuss the lives of women living in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her germinal 1966 article “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” Barbara Welter presents the key virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity as the defining characteristics of the cult of true womanhood and discussed their impact on women.8 This article set the standard for studying domesticity and the “separate spheres,” themes that continue to permeate women’s history. Welter goes on to emphasize that their husbands, neighbors, and even the publications they read constantly espoused these virtues to women.9 The initial negative approach of the 1960s to the concept of the private sphere was that it limited women and kept them prisoners in their homes. Nancy Cott focuses on the idea of a private sphere for women in her 1977 book The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780- 1835, describing the lives of women