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MARTHA SCHOFIELD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A WOMAN’S AUTONOMOUS LIFE: 1858-1870 by MELANIE ROSEANNE PAVICH (Under the Direction of Ronald E. Butchart) ABSTRACT Martha Schofield was a Quaker, a teacher, and a woman who came of age at the beginning of the Civil War. She began teaching in 1858 both to contribute to her family’s income and in answer to what she came to believe was her life’s calling. Along with abolitionism, women’s rights, and temperance were among the causes she and her family supported. In addition, her mother was a Quaker minister, often travelling from home to preach as well as to lecture. During the war Martha taught in a school for free blacks in Philadelphia and volunteered as a hospital worker and nurse. Her influences were many for women’s contributions in a reforming and expanded post-war world, including Lucretia Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Susan B. Anthony. At the same time, Martha hoped to become a wife and mother but that was not to be. Instead, with failing health she ventured south, first to coastal South Carolina and eventually to the town of Aiken, to dedicate her life to the uplift of former slaves. By 1871, she established what would become the Schofield Normal and Industrial School in Aiken, living and working there until her death in 1916. Through choice and circumstances, Martha Schofield became a freedmen’s teacher, established a school, and secured its success through her business and fundraising skills. For most of her adult life, she worked tirelessly for the rights of African Americans and women. Hers is a fascinating story of a nineteenth-century woman striving to change, some would say radically, the world in which she lived while struggling to find love and support outside the traditional roles most often associated with women of her time. Her attempt to find a balance between the expectations placed upon her by the culture at large and the reality of the life she ultimately came to lead, gives added insight into the range of American women’s experiences in the nineteenth century. INDEX WORDS: Freedmen’s teachers, Freedmen’s education, Teacher’s lives, Nineteenth- century northern women, Northern women in the post-bellum south, Nineteenth-century women’s diaries MARTHA SCHOFIELD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A WOMAN’S AUTONOMOUS LIFE: 1858-1870 by MELANIE ROSEANNE PAVICH B.A., Agnes Scott College, 1993 M.A., Clemson University, 1996 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2010 © 2010 Melanie Roseanne Pavich All Rights Reserved MARTHA SCHOFIELD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A WOMAN’S AUTONOMOUS LIFE: 1858-1870 by MELANIE ROSEANNE PAVICH Major Professor: Ronald E. Butchart Committee: Derrick P. Alridge Patricia Bell-Scott John C. Inscoe Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2010 iv DEDICATION For my mother and father Mildred Blitva Pavich and Milan Pavich v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the staff of the Friends Historical Collection at Swarthmore College for their kind assistance with my research on Martha Schofield. My students and colleagues at Mercer University have been, over the past two years, a great source of encouragement and support. In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Priscilla Danheiser, Dr. Tim Craker, Dr. Fred Bongiovanni, Dr. Karen Lacey, Dr. J. Colin Harris, Dr. Clinton Terry, Dr. Lynn Tankersley, and Mrs. Sharon Kaseric. I am indebted to many at the University of Georgia. I thank Ms. Stephanie Bales for her assistance in formatting this manuscript. I would also like to thank Dr. Stephen Berry for his critique of an early chapter. I am deeply grateful to my committee members Dr. Patricia Bell- Scott, Dr. John Inscoe, and Dr. Derrick Aldridge. Without their guidance this work would not have been possible. Dr. Louis Ruprecht at Georgia State University also served on my committee. His careful reading of the dissertation and our many conversations about Martha were invaluable to my writing. My dissertation chair, Dr. Ronald Butchart, has embodied the best any student could hope for in a teacher and mentor. Through his scholarship and direction I both found my topic and my way. I am ever thankful for the love and support of friends and family especially Elaine Friedman, Amy Rolleri, Charlotte and James Rosebrook, Bette Ellsworth, Bernadette Sweeney Carlton, Milan Pavich, Riki Schneyer, and Paul Pavich. However, it is to my mother, Mildred Pavich, and my niece, Kassia Pavich, that I owe my deepest thanks. Their love has sustained me. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 I HAVE LEFT THERE A TEACHER ..................................................................... 12 2 THE FIERY FURNACE OF AFFLICTION ............................................................ 41 3 LIFE’S GREAT MISSION ...................................................................................... 76 4 INTO THE PATHLESS DEEP .............................................................................. 127 5 MY HEART, MY WORK ..................................................................................... 198 EPILOGUE ............................................................................................................................. 265 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................... 276 1 INTRODUCTION On March 31, 1862, Martha Schofield wrote in her diary, “I can bear much when I feel that I am doing right, for that is the great end of, or rather the beginning of true life.”1 Her entry exemplifies the independence she had come to desire and the means by which to justify it. As long as she was convinced of the rightness of her actions, Martha would tolerate the disapproval or even censure of others. She was a young woman who pushed the boundaries of a woman’s place at a time when those boundaries were in flux and less clear than they had been in the past. The necessities of war brought new opportunities for work and service. However, when the war ended she did not return, as others did, to more traditional female roles. Instead, as a freedmen’s teacher, Martha Schofield joined the ranks of the more than eleven thousand women and men who chose to aid former slaves in their transition from bondage to freedom. 2 For twelve years, beginning on January 1, 1858, and ending on January 1, 1870, Martha wrote in her diary nearly every day. Yet, her ritual of writing came to serve as much more than an account of daily events or as an emotional outlet, though it served as both of these. It became a foundation from which to build a life of accomplishment and independence. In her diaries she narrated, and we can follow, the path she took in defining and then claiming a life of her own design – an autonomous life. Central to the unfolding of that life was the world of her emotions. 1 Martha Schofield Diary (Diary 3), 31 March 1862, 24, Martha Schofield Papers, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College [hereafter cited as Diary, with the date of entry]. 2 Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Free People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861- 1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). 2 Martha Fell Schofield was born on February 1, 1839, into a family of Hicksite Quakers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Oliver and Mary Jackson Schofield, were among the most radical reformers of the time, supporting abolition, temperance, and the expansion of the rights of women. Their circle of friends included Lucretia and James Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, and Susan B. Anthony, among other notable women and men. The Schofield children were, in birth order: twins, Sarah Jane (Sallie) and Lydia, born in 1835; Benjamin, born in 1837; Martha; and Eliza, born in 1840. They were, overall, a close-knit and affectionate family. Martha and her siblings seemed to especially relish their father’s open and easy temperament, and it was a particularly severe emotional blow when Oliver Schofield died in 1852. Moreover, Benjamin was, then, separated from the family, choosing to live with an aunt and uncle rather than leave the family farm with his mother and sisters.3 The Schofield children also grew up among a large extended family of Schofields and Jacksons, and within several Quaker communities. Martha received her education at home with a tutor, in public school, and, for a short time, at the Sharon Female Institute established by her uncle John Jackson. He was an educator and minister, as well as a scientist of some renown. Martha and her sisters all worked as teachers, though her youngest sister, Eliza, concentrated her efforts more steadily on her artistic talents. The only one of the four sisters to marry was Sallie. Lydia, her twin, often lived with Sallie and her husband to assist with housekeeping and, 3 The Hicksites were a progressive faction of Quakerism named after Elias Hicks who was a staunch abolitionist and whose preaching generated controversy as well as a large following. “The focal point of Hick’s doctrine was his emphasis on the Inner Light. The Light alone was sufficient for salvation. Nothing