University of South Carolina Scholar Commons University South Caroliniana Society - Annual South Caroliniana Library Report of Gifts 5-19-2001 2001 Report of Gifts (133 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 Publication Info 2001. University South Caroliniana Society. (2001). "2001 Report of Gifts." Columbia, SC: The ocS iety. 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 yb an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The The South Carolina South Caroliniana College Library Library 1840 1940 THE UNIVERSITY SOUTH CAROLINIANA SOCIETY SIXTY-FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Saturday, May 19, 2001 Dr. Allen H. Stokes, Jr., Secretary-Treasurer, Presiding Reception and Exhibit . .. 11 :00 a.m. South Caroliniana Library Luncheon 1:00 p.m. Clarion Townhouse Hotel Business Meeting Welcome Reports of the Executive Council and Secretary-Treasurer Address . Genevieve Chandler Peterkin 2001 Report of Gifts to the Library by Members of the Society Announced at the 65th Annual Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society (the Friends of the Library) Annual Program 19 May 2001 South Carolina's Pivotal Decision for Disunion: Popular Mandate or Manipulated Verdict? – 2000 Keynote Address by William W. Freehling Gifts of Manuscript South Caroliniana Gifts to Modern Political Collections Gifts of Pictorial South Caroliniana Gifts of Printed 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 South Carolina's Pivotal Decision for Disunion: Popular Mandate or Manipulated Verdict? Keynote address by William W. Freehling Presented, 13 May 2000, at the 64th Annual Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society Published in 2001 Program Let me explain why I have eagerly anticipated the opportunity to speak to you today. The South Caroliniana Library was more my alma mater than Harvard College or the University of California, Berkeley, graduate school. Here I learned my two biggest lessons in how to be an historian. True, I'd learned lots of abstract lessons about theories of history at those Yankee schools-you know how we Yankees love theories. But no abstruse lesson proved much of a guide through the complex avalanche of letters, diaries, and pamphlets I found at this very southern (meaning richly specific) place. There was nothing to do in that Fall of 1961 but dive into the complexities, soak in the specifics, read until I could read no more. After months of the hardest study I had ever experienced, specific people started emerging, specific incidents, specific houses, specific lordly titans, specific lowly slaves. At this juncture, I heard my first South Caroliniana annual lecture, given by one of the leading historians of that era, Avery Craven, a Southerner who taught at the University of Chicago. Perhaps some of you also heard that memorable lecture. Professor Craven dwelled on what he called friends he had met at the South Caroliniana, meaning long-dead characters who came alive as you read their letters on their wonderfully thick nineteenth-century paper. His favorite friend, he said, was Thomas Bennett, South Carolina's governor in 1822, the time of Denmark Vesey's slave conspiracy in Charleston. Governor Bennett destroyed his political career by trying to halt a white men's witch hunt which for a moment threatened to hang hundreds of innocent blacks, including his own slaves. The previous month, I had made a friend of the ultrabrave Thomas Bennett too. Out of such friendships, I was slowly learning, one might write a much more richly complicated history than my simplistic Yankee theory envisioned. Denmark Vesey, the greatest slave conspirator in nineteenth-century South Carolina history, did not just produce that simplicity, a monolithic wave of terror and 3 reprisals from outraged, fearful South Carolina whites. Vesey's threatened revolution against whites also produced a courageous governor, standing up against a frightful counter-revolution. Thomas Bennett defined the first mission I had learned at the South Caroliniana: find the complexity beyond the theory, and do justice to all the diverse protagonists. Southern compatriots here helped me learn how to move past the northern simplicities. I think of my contemporaries, also on the learning trail, each in their own way now grown into giants akin to Avery Craven, at their respective South Carolina institutions: Selden Smith, Charles Joyner, Dan Carter. I think of their remarkable professors and mine too, including William Foran, who never wrote much but taught gorgeously about his favorite friends, the folk he called "pragmatists in wonderland." He meant Carolina's upcountry leaders of the 1850s, especially James L. Orr, who tried to make anti-pragmatic, anti-Yankee Carolinians more like pragmatic Yankees. These Yankee-like Carolina pragmatists did not altogether carry their anti-Yankee wonderland, but they too added to the complexity, conditioned my Yankee abstractions about South Carolina's differences from the North. How fine that their tale, William Foran's tale, continues to be emphasized here by your brilliant Professor Lacy Ford. Professor Foran's colleagues back in the 1960s included Dan Hollis, who had published a decade earlier his superb study of this university in Thomas Cooper's era, and Bob Ochs, who gave me, a stranger, my first job, teaching fine students from Fort Jackson in night school. And I think of the archivists who helped so much, Clara Mae Jacobs and Les Inabinett here and the incomparable Charles Lee over at the Archives. Let me say a word more about Les Inabinett, beyond the words we are all thinking today, the words of prayer for swift recovery from his late surgery. Les had a terrible problem for an archivist. As director of the South Caroliniana, he was custodian of a sensational document, the James Henry Hammond secret diary. The Hammond family, the diary's donors, wanted to keep the diary secret, lest their ancestor's dirty linen be washed in public. But Les knew that the Hammond secret diary had value far beyond its sexual sensationalism, for understanding South Carolina's political culture. So when serious scholars, including Yankee strangers, asked to see the priceless source of information, he felt compelled to find a way to whisper "yes," despite the Hammond family's shouts of "no way!" 4 Les' way was to allow me to see the document but to take no notes on it, and to promise to publish no information on its sexual revelations. The document became for me a critical source of strictly political revelations, and I have often silently thanked Les for finding the middle way. Then later on, as the family's sensitivity lessened, Les equally skillfully presided over a change in the rules for reading the secret diary, ending with Carol Bleser's fine publication of the marvelous document. The secret diary is secret no more! How times have changed in forty years, and how well Les served as custodian of progress. With Les Inabinett at the center of the professors and students growing wiser at the South Caroliniana during the early 1960s, what a golden time that was to learn how to learn. Now you have invited this slow learner to stand for at least a few minutes where Avery Craven once stood. Nothing could mean more to me. Those reminiscences aside, I want to talk to you today about what one can learn about historical complexities, and what one can't learn, at libraries such as this place. One can learn all kinds of astonishing facts about hitherto unknown historical complexities. But one can't learn whether the complexities yielded a different result - whether history would have come out the same way if the complexities had never existed and if the past had been as simple as one once imagined. But that formulation is too theoretical, too Yankee. Let's get down to southern specifics. Next February, the Oxford University Press will publish my new book, entitled The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War. During thousands of hours at libraries such as this one, I uncovered the story of hundreds of thousands of Southerners, black and white, who opposed the Confederacy or cared not whether it lived or died. Four hundred fifty thousand anti-Confederate Southerners, black and white, fought in the Union armed forces, meaning that one Southerner wore Yankee blue for every two that wore rebel gray. Thus a Southerner replaced every Northerner killed in the Union army, with enough southern anti-Confederate soldiers left over to outnumber Robert E. Lee's main army. These anti-Confederate Southerners included some seven hundred thousand blacks who ran away from their masters and supplied one hundred fifty thousand troops to the Union army. Meanwhile, white anti-Confederates kept the Border South states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, and Delaware in the Union. Thus almost one slaveholding state rejected disunion for every two that embraced it. The states that rejected the Confederacy contained over half the slave states' factories. 5 They handed the Union a third of southern terrain, at the cost of but a few Yankee lives. What an enormously more interesting Civil War thus emerges than the simplistic notion of "the North" versus "the South." The richly complex reality becomes more like half the Southerners against the Northerners plus the other half of the Southerners.