University of South Carolina Scholar Commons University South Caroliniana Society - Annual Report of Gifts South Caroliniana Library 5-16-1998 1998 Report of Gifts (119 pages) South Caroliniana Library--University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/scs_anpgm Part of the Library and Information Science Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation University South Caroliniana Society. (1998). "1998 Report of Gifts." Columbia, SC: The Society. This Newsletter is brought to you by the South Caroliniana Library at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in University South Caroliniana Society - Annual Report of Gifts by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1998 Report of Gifts to the South Caroliniana Library by Members of the Society Announced at the 62nd Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society (the Friends of the Library) Annual Program 16 May 1998 • Treasures of the South Caroliniana Library: The Letters of a Planter's Daughter ‐ 1997 Keynote Address by Carol K. Bleser • Gifts of Manuscript South Caroliniana • Gifts to Modern Political Collections • Gifts of Printed South Caroliniana • Gifts of Pictorial South Caroliniana South Caroliniana Library (Columbia, SC) A special collection documenting all periods of South Carolina history. http://library.sc.edu/socar University of South Carolina Contact - [email protected] 2 Treasures of the South Caroliniana Library: The Letters of a Planter's Daughter Keynote Address by Carol K. Bleser Presented, 17 May 1997, at the 61st Annual Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society Published in the 1998 Annual Program When I was a student at Converse College, I came to Columbia to do research for my senior honors paper in history at the South Caroliniana Library. Little did I realize that I was forming a lifetime attachment to this wonderful research library and that my second, third, and fifth books would be drawn from its holdings. It has not mattered that for a time I taught at Colgate University in the snowbelt of upstate New York and for an equal amount of time I have been in upstate South Carolina at Clemson University. My heart and mind belong to the South Caroliniana Library. I am therefore greatly honored to be the speaker at the sixty- first annual meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society. Actually, this is my second appearance: I spoke to the Society in the 1980s on the nineteenth-century marriage of Elizabeth and Benjamin F. Perry, which also was drawn from materials at the Caroliniana. Thus, I am doubly honored and doubly pleased to be with you today. So much of what we know about history, literature, and culture would be lost forever, if not for the passion and dedication of both collectors of books and original manuscripts who donate their holdings to institutions such as the South Caroliniana Library, and of the staffs of such repositories who carefully acquire and tend to such treasures for future generations of students, readers and scholars. Treasures they are, which are lovingly looked after by curators such as Allen Stokes-to whom hundreds upon hundreds of scholars are deeply indebted-as well as to his very able library staff. It is a wonderful and magnificent thing also that the South Caroliniana Library has the full support of the University of South Carolina and the members of the South Caroliniana Society, who are dedicated to the preservation of these valuable collections, some of which are extremely rare and 3 unusual. No less important, of course to protecting these records from annihilation is to know what items-books and manuscripts-to cull from the piles of accumulated debris of our hyperactive paper producing society. Thus, of great importance is the role of those who acquire the collections for such libraries as the South Caroliniana. As Michael Sadlier, a renowned British bibliophile, wrote in 1930, "In nature, the bird who gets up earliest catches the most worms, but in books [and manuscript collecting] the prizes fall to birds who know worms when they see them." We all owe a special debt of thanks to Allen Stokes and Tom Johnson, who do know worms when they see them. In the movie Jerry Maguire there is a line which has been done to death, "show me the money." At the annual meeting of the South Caroliniana Society, we are given each year a program that shows us the treasures of the South Caroliniana Library- the collections of family papers, the manuscript volumes, the modern political collections, the batches of old letters, rare books, pamphlets, as well as a group labeled Pictorial South Caroliniana-all of which have been acquired as gifts or purchased by members of the Society during the past year. This afternoon, my address is based on the letters of Maria Bryan, a planter's daughter. This correspondence, although acquired by the Caroliniana almost a quarter century ago, was also only published during this past year. I am here today to show you the treasure contained therein. At Clemson University I teach a graduate course in historical editing to a large group of enthusiastic students who intend to do their Master's theses on historical editing projects. There is so much to teach them, and one thing I especially alert them to is to become good detectives searching for clues and evidence in the most unexpected places. I cite as one example the remarkable and revealing letters of Maria Bryan of Mt. Zion, Georgia, in, of all places, the papers of James Henry Hammond, actually the Hammond-Bryan-Cumming papers, which are on deposit at the South Caroliniana Library. How did they get there? John Shaw Billings II was a gifted journalist who became the first managing editor of Life magazine in 1936 and the second-in-command of Henry Luce's Time-Life- Fortune empire in the 1950s. Yet, through all the late-breaking news, Billings 4 secluded himself, night after night, in the study of his Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment reading the beautifully written letters of Maria Bryan. On one occasion, he recorded in his private diary that he had been at work in his office on stories of Harry Truman and Chiang Kai-shek but had looked forward to getting home to read Maria Bryan's letters, "which were so much more interesting." Billings presumably fell under the spell of the exquisite Maria Bryan sometime after 1935, when he came into possession of his family's plantation home, Redcliffe, at Beech Island, South Carolina, where he had been born in 1898. Redcliffe had been built in the 1850s by James Henry Hammond, a pre-Civil War governor, a United States senator, and one of the richest planters in the antebellum South. Billings, although named for his distinguished paternal grandfather from New York City, took great pride in his mother's Southern heritage. John Billings, having been drawn to Redcliffe again and again over the years, recorded in his diary on March 21, 1935, how happy and excited he was at "having that wonderful old place" for his own. With the house had come several hundred acres of land, all that remained of the more than fourteen-thousand acre estate owned by his great-grandfather Hammond. Stored in the attic of the house among the jumble of old clothes and broken furniture were cartons of family correspondence, including the letters written by Maria Bryan to her sister Julia Bryan Cumming of Augusta, Georgia. Julia, Billings' great-grandmother, saved many of her sister's letters, and after Maria's unexpected death at the age of thirty-six in January 1844, she put them away in neat bundles, sentimental tokens of affection of her sister's brief life. When Julia Cumming died in 1879, her daughter Emily Cumming Hammond, the wife of Harry Hammond and the daughter-in-law of James Henry Hammond, came into possession of many of her mother's personal belongings, including her mother's private correspondence. Emily transferred Maria's letters along with other Cumming possessions to her home at Redcliffe, where they were stored in the attic and forgotten. Years later, Billings found them along with a voluminous collection of old correspondence spanning nearly two centuries of letter writing. After the restoration of Redcliffe, Billings began the systematic reading of these family letters, carrying boxes of them with him back to New York. He noted in his diary that "they were like a narcotic." In reading them he was "transported...into the 5 past." The letters he apparently found most addictive were those of his great-great- aunt Maria Bryan. He paid a secretary to type them out and then spent endless hours at night and on weekends seeking to understand the complex network of family and friends she described. He wrote of Maria's life, "[I] was crazy to know more." Even on the landmark date in his life, April 14, 1953, when Henry Luce made John Shaw Billings editor-in-chief of all Time-Life-Fortune publications, Billings hurried home from the office and immersed himself in Maria's letters. Why had John Shaw Billings become so fixated on the letters of a woman who had died more than a century before? On one level, Billings, as one of the most noted journalists of his age, recognized in Maria a good storyteller. In fact, he found her a lively correspondent and her life as told in her letters more fascinating and humorous than that of the fictional Scarlett O'Hara. On a much more personal level, Billings had confessed often enough in his diary to being in a rut.