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WE HAVE RAISED ALL OF YOU: MOTHERHOOD IN THE SOUTH, 1750-1835 Katy Simpson Smith A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: Kathleen DuVal Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Theda Perdue John Wood Sweet Heather Andrea Williams ©2011 Katy Simpson Smith ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT KATY SIMPSON SMITH: We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750- 1835 (Under the direction of Kathleen DuVal and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall) Motherhood in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South was comprised of multiple roles that white, black, and Indian women constructed, interpreted, and defended. I focus on women in Virginia and the Carolinas to prove that these roles, from nurse and teacher to economic provider, shaped holistic maternal identities that offered women of all backgrounds a sense of power, control and self-worth within the pervasive hierarchies of the South. An examination of women’s maternal experiences reveals that the dictates of Revolutionary-Era prescriptive literature regarding “Republican Motherhood” – the belief that women had an obligation to raise the next generation of virtuous male citizens – had little concrete effect on the ways women performed their duties as mothers. On the contrary, motherhood as an institution driven by women exhibited continuities that spanned the Revolution and encompassed roles and responsibilities that were dependent on a woman’s race, class, and region. I argue that mothers enjoyed expansive female networks of communication and support, creatively used every available tool to educate their children, and almost universally perceived their maternal roles to be sources of meaning, personal worth, and communal consequence. This study of motherhood examines practices rather than prescriptions in order to reveal the ways in which a diverse group of women struggled to create ennobling definitions of motherhood in the early American South. iii For the continuity of my mothers: Elise Lawton Smith (1953- ) Elise Nicholson Lawton (1924-1992) Elise Bates Nicholson (1890-1972) iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There is something about the study of long-dead individuals that makes one all the more grateful for the aid of living women and men. My dissertation committee deserves special praise for helping midwife this often unwieldy project: Kathleen DuVal, who was a friend as much as a mentor, who caught every mixed metaphor I threw at her, and whose dedication as an advisor should serve as a universal model; Jacquelyn Hall, whose unwavering enthusiasm for the project sustained me through periods of doubt; Theda Perdue, who cheerfully redirected my missteps; and Heather Williams and John Sweet, who not only offered advice, but helped guide me through the shoals of my first year of graduate school. For their generous funding for various stages of research and writing, I want to thank the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, the UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program, the UNC Graduate School, the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies at the Newberry Library, the Virginia Historical Society, the North Caroliniana Society, Mount Holyoke College, and the Coordinating Council for Women in History. This project also may not have been finished without timely escapes from Chapel Hill; I want to thank Duncan Riddell in Chicago, Elisa Wirkala in Seattle, and Jen and Joseph Strickland in Austin for sharing their homes and cities with me while I explored both my sources and the world around me. Historians without archivists are just wanderers in the wilderness. For their guidance and support in the archives, I want to thank Laura Clark Brown at the Southern Historical v Collection; Brent Burgin at the University of South Carolina at Lancaster; Graham Duncan and Brian Cuthrell at the South Caroliniana Library; Mary Jo Fairchild at the South Carolina Historical Society; Katherine Wilkins, Nelson Lankford, Frances Pollard, and Lee Shepard at the Virginia Historical Society; Jim Grossman, Scott Stevens, John Aubrey, Danny Greene, and Jenny Schwartzberg at the Newberry Library; and the staffs of the Library of Virginia, the Swem Library Special Collections at the College of William and Mary; the North Carolina State Archives; and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. The women’s history community is remarkable for its collegiality and generosity. I sent out chapters like alms-seeking children, and I received invaluable advice and encouragement from Emily Bingham, Anya Jabour, Lynn Kennedy, Catherine Kerrison, and Thavolia Glymph. For their comments and suggestions on conference papers and presentations, I want to thank Emily Bingham, Fitz Brundage, James Taylor Carson, Thavolia Glymph, Laura Gowing, Elizabeth McRae, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Susan Pennybacker, Diana Williams, the UNC-Duke Working Group in Feminism and History, the Triangle Early American History Seminar, and the Triangle African American History Colloquium. I was fortunate enough to receive advice on my work from a range of other scholars, and the critiques of Kirsten Fischer, Chris Grasso, and Karin Wulf have been particularly helpful. I also have more personal debts. I offer sincere gratitude to Joseph Ellis, who did everything an undergraduate advisor could to get his students enthralled by early American history and whose writing provided me with a model for history-as-storytelling; Christina Snyder, who served as my big sister and Virgil through the underworld of grad school; Crystal Feimster, who shared her energy and her family with me; Ayse Erginer and Dave vi Shaw, who demanded that I follow my dreams, however subversive, and whose office was invariably filled with more mirth than seemed legal; CarolAnne Selway, whose study of seventeenth-century English motherhood formed a perfect partner to my own research; Felicity Turner, my guide to all things infanticide-related; Mikaëla Adams, Jonathan Hancock, and Julie Reed, my colleagues in American Indian history, who were at various points my sounding boards, my bunkmates, and my baseball companions; Randy Browne, who was both an honest critic and a staunch defender; Catherine Conner, who inspired me with both her passion and her pies; and Rob Ferguson, my best friend, who brightened my days and held my hand through the very darkest of nights. I would not have made it through graduate school without him. In most acknowledgments, families tend to earn the final accolade, and this is as it should be. They push us not only academically, but personally. They endure lengthy descriptions of arcane topics and departmental dramas, but they also remind us of a saner, larger world, a world which – in the end – cares not if you’ve read the latest monograph, but only that you’re a kind, loving, and decent human being. This detail can get lost in the cloisters of academia, but it’s never lost to your parents. I want to thank Elise and Steve Smith for inducting me into the mysteries of professordom, discussing the details of my evolving argument, reminiscing about how easy grad school seemed in the ‘70s, and providing a safe space away from the dissertation when I needed it; my grandfather Bob for believing in the value of education; my brother Matthew for reading a draft of my dissertation just because he saw it sitting on the kitchen table and charting the course that I always wanted to follow; my sister-in-law Kelly, who began the intimate journey of vii motherhood just as I was beginning my abstract investigations; and my nephew Simon, whose infectious laughter taught me perspective. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations . .xi Introduction . .1 I. They Sprung from a Woman: Indian Mothers . .24 1. Indian Farmers . 32 2. Indian Providers . 50 3. Indian Spiritual Guides . .74 4. Indian Teachers . .91 5. Indian Politicians . 110 6. Indian Sufferers . .131 II. Sowing Good Seeds: White Mothers . .144 7. White Nurses . .152 8. White Readers . .190 9. White Teachers . .229 10. White Sages . 272 11. White Judges . .295 12. White Sufferers . .324 III. She Was with Me in the Night: Black Mothers . .354 13. Black Providers . .362 14. Black Teachers . 389 ix 15. Black Spiritual Guides . 409 16. Black Protectors . 441 17. Black Aunts . .469 18. Black Sufferers . 491 Conclusion . 535 Bibliography . .546 x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS LOV Library of Virginia NCSA North Carolina State Archives SCDAH South Carolina Department of Archives and History SCHS South Carolina Historical Society SCL South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina SHC Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill VHS Virginia Historical Society WM Swem Library Special Collections, College of William and Mary xi INTRODUCTION “Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sandbox of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground.”1 Motherhood has a way of shaping a woman’s identity: the way she conceives of herself and the way that self-conception affects her interactions with the world around her. The identities that motherhood creates are innumerable, splintered, self-aggrandizing, self- effacing, and fraught with doubt. (Am I a good mother? Am I leading my children to a brighter future?) No two mothers experience parenthood in the same way. In the 1820s, Charleston resident Catherine Read wrote her niece, “I am often tempted to exclaim how much Judgement & good Sense is necessary in the education of Children! How much more than I am Mistress of!”2 We can almost see her throwing her hands up in despair. In the same decade, Sojourner Truth fought for her enslaved son in the courts of New York, and the verdict she received, which would have been a foreign one to black mothers in the South, would have confirmed their understanding of motherhood: “the boy [should] be delivered into the hands of the mother – having no other master, no other controller, no other 1 Lloyd DeMause, The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 1.