Letters from a Planter's Daughter: Understanding Freedom and ...

Letters from a Planter’s Daughter:
Understanding Freedom and Independence
in the Life of Susanna Townsend
(1853-1869)
R. Isabela Morales *
Abstract
Wealthy Alabama cotton planter Samuel Townsend had
already fathered eight children by the time Susanna
Townsend was born in 1853—her mother, like all the
mothers of her half-brothers and sisters, was an enslaved
African-American woman on one of Samuel Townsend’s
large plantations. Samuel’s fourth daughter and youngest
child, Susanna was a vulnerable young girl born into
the turmoil and turbulence surrounding the probation and
execution of Samuel Townsend’s will when, to the shock
of his white relatives, Samuel left the bulk of his $200,000
estate to his nine enslaved children. Susanna, seven years
old when she and her extended family were emancipated,
may have remembered little of the courtroom drama that
ended in 1860, when the Probate Court of Madison County
declared Samuel’s will valid. But the nominally favorable
courtroom ruling did not mark the end of Susanna’s
liminal existence. Until her death, Susanna Townsend
lived in a borderland of race, class, and family status. A
reconstruction and examination of a life (1853-1869) that
straddled the Civil War provides insight into meanings of
freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency in the postemancipation
moment—as well as revealing interactions
of gender, race, and power in the creation of the archive.
* I would like to acknowledge the advice and guidance of Dr. Jenny Shaw, Assistant Professor
of History and my faculty mentor in the McNair Scholars Program. Her support and
suggestions were vital in the process of investigating Susanna Townsend’s life and the
world she lived in.
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Mr Cabaniss i write to you in haste, Susanna began in her letter of 4
June 1868. 1 There was a man in Cincinnati, the nicest young man i ever did
see, who wished to have her for a wife, and if Cabaniss could simply send
her some money for a dress and shoes (common enough apparel, for she
was very plain in dressing), and if he would pay their train fare to Kansas,
Susanna could marry the man within the month. She did not want a large
wedding—no church service at all, in fact—but would take her vows in
the mayor’s office and be off to her new life as fast and far as the train cars
could take her. If Alabama lawyer S.D. Cabaniss, executor of her father’s
estate, would only write her by the tenth of June, Susanna would be ready,
for her fiancé was in a hury to move. He was a gentleman, fifteen-year-old
Susanna Townsend assured her attorney, and also, she added almost as an
afterthought, he is a white man. 2
Susanna’s wishes were modest: a simple gown for a simple wedding
ceremony, a husband who says he will [do] his best for me as long as he
lives, a small sum of money out of her inheritance to visit her extended
family in Leavenworth County and buy a little house in Kansas if there is
no more than three rooms and an acre of grown [ground]. 3 The attorney
Cabaniss owed Susanna twelve thousand dollars out of her father Samuel
Townsend’s property—Samuel, a wealthy cotton planter from Madison
County, Alabama, had bequeathed his $200,000 estate to Susanna, her
eight elder siblings, and their mothers in 1856. 4 On paper, at least, Susanna
was a privileged young woman with every opportunity. In reality,
her future was far less certain.
1 Taking my cues from Martha Hodes’s treatment of Eunice Connolly’s quotes in The Sea
Captain’s Wife, I have displayed Susanna’s words in italics, “in an effort to integrate her
perspective more seamlessly into the story.” All other text taken from both primary and
secondary sources is indicated by quotation marks. Methodologically I was also influenced
by Natalie Zemon Davis’s Women on the Margins—both in terms of how she imagined
the women she studied would have reacted to her portrayals of them, and the role that this
speculation played in the narrative process. Susanna Townsend is far removed in both time
and space from the subjects of Davis’s book, but she too existed “on the margins” in the
sense that Susanna’s race and gender separated her from centers of power and authority in
her lifetime. This micro historical reconstruction of her experiences works to reveal what
was at stake not only for Susanna, but for other mixed-race women of her time.
2 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 4 June 1868. W.S. Hoole Special
Collections Library, University of Alabama.
3 Will of Samuel Townsend, dated 6 September 1856
4 Ibid.
146

Susanna Townsend was a former slave living and working in Reconstruction-era
urban Ohio, the daughter of the white planter Samuel and
the fourth of his seven enslaved African-American mistresses. The Civil
War had drastically devalued the Townsend property, and neither Susanna
nor any of her half-siblings would ever receive a quarter, if that, of their
inheritance in the following years. 5 She was mixed-race—perhaps, as a
Freedman’s Bureau agent later said of her half-sister Milcha, “the woman
is nearly white”—but whether or not her appearance could fool Cincinnati
society, her father’s attorney knew she was the daughter of an enslaved
woman. If S.D. Cabaniss replied to Susanna’s 4 June letter, the archive
holds no record; he certainly never sent money by the tenth of that month.
In five months, Susanna would give birth in her half-brother Wesley’s
home outside of the city—a hint at her urgency to marry and leave the
state. In another six, Susanna would be dead.
In her sixteen years, Susanna straddled slavery and freedom, the antebellum
South and the post-war Northwest, a life of in-between’s on the
borderlands of race and society. She had an uncertain place within the
extended Townsend family: as the youngest child with no living parents
and no full siblings, she could neither support herself independently nor
depend on her extended family supporting her indefinitely. She had an
uncertain inheritance: when the Civil War broke out, the new Confederate
government prohibited Cabaniss, living in Alabama, from sending any
money into the Union. For Susanna, this ban meant serious financial insecurity.
Finally, she had an uncertain racial status within the society at large.
Because she was a “white-looking” woman of some promised financial
means, Susanna upset categories of a social hierarchy that equated African
ancestry with powerlessness and inferiority. 6 Despite these potential
advantages, as a fifteen-year-old mixed-race girl, Susanna remained subject
to the machinations of the senior white lawyer. Occupying these inbetween
spaces meant a life of inherent instability—poignantly expressed
in her letter of 4 June, in which she explains her young man’s offer of
marriage and promise of security: He says I have been going around long
enough without anyone to take care of me.” 7 The liminality of her circumstances
drew Susanna Townsend to this seemingly desperate point in the
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5 Frances Cabaniss Roberts, An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama
Planter (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1940).
6 Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future
After Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
7 Susanna Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letter dated June 4, 1868.

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summer of 1868, when vistas of possibility for her future could be opened
or closed by a single stroke of her lawyer’s pen.
In fiction, all tragedy has meaning. But what meaning can be drawn
from the life and death of a teenage girl like Susanna Townsend? Her time
was short, a fleeting sixteen years easy to overlook in the contemporary
convulsions of war and the national drama of Reconstruction. Her biography
is not so extraordinary; she was neither the only child of sex across
the color line or the only mixed-race woman who would attempt to “pass”
across that line. Nine letters in her own words exist, both on fragile paper
in a university manuscript library and in high-quality pixels online, but
still she is elusive. Susanna’s letters reveal only pieces of her mind—the
pieces she deliberately crafted for the eyes of her father’s attorney. What
was Susanna truly thinking, hoping, and wishing for when she wrote to
Cabaniss on 4 June 1868? What is at stake when we speculate? And for
us of the twenty-first century, does it even matter? 8 The significance of
Susanna Townsend’s story lies in these very questions: this micro history
is as much about the problems and impossibilities of reconstructing Susanna’s
life as it is about Susanna herself. 9 This story fits into the existing historiography
in that it is a gendered analysis of her life in urban Ohio during
Reconstruction. Its specificities, however, raise new questions about
freedom in this particular socio-historical context. Her letters and words,
evasive as they may be, are a lens through which to draw inferences about
how the daughter and former slave of an Alabama cotton planter understood
her emancipation, pursued independence and self-sufficiency, and
exercised her freedom on the borderlands of society.
Reading Susanna Townsend
Susanna Townsend’s story possesses all the elements of melodrama—
youth, love, sex across the color line, and a certain amount of suspense.
8 Scholars who work on Native American history have of necessity needed to use imagination
in the writing of narrative history due to the dearth of sources that include introspective
elements. In The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America, John Demos
discusses this problem: “But what about its subject, the unredeemed captive herself? What
were her feelings—held tight, though they were, behind the ‘steel in her breast’? … we
can only speculate—only imagine—but that much, at least, we must try.” John Demos, The
Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1995), 108.
9 Wendy Warren, “‘The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,”
The Journal of American History (March 2007), 149.
148

The pathos of her 4 June 1868 letter emanates from the page, even when
transcribed in just pieces of phrases. But a researcher gifted with such a
wealth of personal material—and what could seem better insight into the
private life of the mind than a first-person narrative in letters?—runs the
risk of believing, falsely, that she can truly know her subject. Susanna
Townsend lived and wrote within a matrix of race, gender, and class-related
power dynamics. Reference to Susanna’s 4 June missive to Cabaniss
as her “last letter” appeals to an idea of her life as a tragedy, all the more
poignant for its brevity. Calling the 4 June letter her “last,” however, signifies
only that it is the letter with the latest date in the S. D. Cabaniss papers
collection. Certainly Susanna would not have called the 4 June letter her
“last”; we imbue it with pathos because we know how the story ends. Perhaps—probably—she
wrote others to her extended family in Kansas before
she died; perhaps she simply stopped writing to the attorney because
she believed he would no longer advance her interests. Thus the content
of Susanna’s letters is both a rich source of information about life in 1866
Cincinnati for a young woman of color and a case study in the complicated
construction of sources, archives, and narratives.
Sources such as Susanna’s letters both reveal and obscure information
about the past, even as later researchers parse her words for details that
become “facts.” 10 Susanna, a subject in our past but an actor in her present,
wrote with the attorney S. D. Cabaniss, not posterity, in mind. Her audience
was an adult white man, the executor of her father’s estate, and the
ultimate authority to which appeals of financial need or distress could be
made. In their relationship, vectors of race, gender, and social status converged;
these dynamics influenced what Susanna was willing to include
in, and omit from, her letters. Deconstructing the play of power within
the sources thus becomes a major methodological concern in reconstructing
her life and experiences. 11 But hidden power dynamics continued to
influence the writing of her history beyond the point of source creation, in
the construction of the archive. 12 Septimus Cabaniss himself was an actor
within a specific historical context; like Susanna, he becomes a subject of
modern research through the papers that bear his signature. The “last letter”
of Susanna Townsend may simply be the last letter he kept, the last he
considered important enough to preserve for his own future reference. The
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Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
10 Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston,
Mass.: Beacon Press 1995), 26.
11 Ibid., 27
12 Ibid., 26

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power he had as the architect of his personal archive determines what stories
can be told about the young woman who wrote to him so desperately.
The particular archive under scrutiny here is the S. D. Cabaniss papers
collection, a body of legal files and correspondence belonging to
the Townsend family’s Huntsville attorney. The University of Alabama’s
W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library acquired his papers in the early
1940s—a gift from Cabaniss’s granddaughter Frances Cabaniss Roberts,
whose Master’s thesis relied on the story told by the Townsend children’s
letters. 13 Her thesis sketches a fairly accurate timeline of the Townsend
children’s lives post-manumission. She frames her argument, however,
with the tone almost of an apology for slavery. The ultimate conclusion
a reader draws from Roberts’s work is that the Townsend children were
happier and better cared for as slaves—admittedly a not-uncommon supposition
on the part of white 1930s scholars, but problematic for researchers
seeking insight into how the Townsends understood and exercised
their freedom. 14 Also troubling is the fact that some documents cited in
Roberts’s thesis have disappeared—most notably the deposition of a man
named Elias Wellborne, which Roberts alludes to as an important piece of
courtroom testimony in establishing the parentage of Samuel Townsend’s
children. 15 If the deposition has simply been misplaced or escaped cataloguing,
it remains well hidden. But if Frances Roberts’s personal ideology
is any indication, she may have intentionally chosen to exclude the deposition
from the collection she donated to the library. Roberts’s citations suggest
that Elias Wellborne spoke frankly about the late Samuel Townsend’s
sexual history. Considering that white relatives were challenging the will
on the grounds that Samuel was being unduly influenced by enslaved mistresses
and their children, a white landowner and friend of Cabaniss would
have had some authority if he spoke directly about the less palatable aspects
of the case: that the nine children were, indeed, Samuel’s, and that it
had always been his intention to make them his heirs. Roberts may have
believed a document which allowed a glimpse at the darkest underside of
intimacy under slavery would better serve the memory of the antebellum
South by disappearing—or perhaps she wished to ensure that her version
of the story became the authoritative telling, an example of the deliberate
entrance of silences into the archive.
13 Roberts, An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter.
14 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
15 Roberts, An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter.
150

Even what the archive reveals, rather than what it hides, can tempt
researchers to exert power over historical subjects. 16 The personal distress
Susanna’s 4 June letter expresses may move a scholar to wish she could
write melodrama. 17 The significance the researcher herself attributes to a
source, or a fact within a source, can make it a fiction—a drama, a tragedy.
Retroactively, the narrator makes an historical individual a player on
a stage of her own construction. Susanna Townsend was, in her present,
an actor in the sense of an historical agent, not an actor in an historical
script written for her over a century later. When the curtain falls on Susanna
Townsend’s life, a brief enumeration of facts could all too easily turn
her into the heroine of a painful romance, perhaps the “tragic mulatta” of
nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. 18 We could write her as an orphan,
born of illicit intimacy between a white master and his slave, young and
fair and beautiful. We could emphasize her own relationship with a white
man, her unexpected pregnancy, her untimely death. We could belabor
her youth and sexual vulnerability in a plot as muddled and melodramatic
as her family history—and in all these ways turn a woman who lived and
breathed into a textual trope. In the nineteenth-century, antislavery writers
used the “tragic mulatta” to point to the evils of plantation slavery, both
in terms of sexual exploitation of women and the dangers of “miscegenation.”
Such stories contemplated what freedom and independence meant
for mixed-race women and men, characters who were “the fictional symbol
of marginality”—the very questions I wish to explore in the life of
Susanna Townsend. 19 The line between writing an historical narrative and
a romance is clearly thin, and fiction can all too often prove both easier to
execute and far more “seductive.” 20
But the attempted reconstruction of a life requires empathy, and how
can we understand or share the feelings of another person without the
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16 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26.
17 Saidiya Hartman grappled eloquently with the limitations of the archive: “History pledges
to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are
produced by terror. I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history,”
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, Vol. 26, (June 2008), 9.
18 Eva Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-
Century Antislavery Fiction. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
2004), 5.
19 Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta,” 5.
20 Marisa J. Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled
Archive. Gender & History, Vol. 22 (November 2010), 574.

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imaginative sympathy of speculation? 21 The opacity of sources, the silences
embedded within them, and the complicated construction of the archive
combine to create gaps in any story; but these are holes that must be respected
if, in this case, Susanna Townsend is not to be turned into a trope.
No scholar can ever truly give Susanna back her voice, nor ignore the fact
that the voice in her letters may not be that of her innermost thoughts. Nevertheless,
with a deliberate disclaimer that the fullness of a reconstruction
requires restraint, this is a story of possibilities in the life of a girl named
Susanna Townsend. 22
Proscenium (1853-1860)
Sometime in the early 1800s, Virginian brothers Parks, Edmund, and
Samuel Townsend decided to pull up stakes and move nearly six hundred
miles to northern Alabama. The three men brought a small number
of slaves and large dreams of agricultural empire to the Madison County
area. Attracted by the sparsely-settled land, the brothers quickly began to
purchase land for cotton cultivation. 23 By 1830, Edmund Townsend had
already established himself as a landowner in the county, and in 1850,
the national census recorded how his estate had expanded to include 144
slaves and real estate valued at $60,000. 24 Fortune favored Parks, too; by
1840 the eldest brother was married with four children, three of them sons
who would maintain their father’s plantations and oversee the work of his
sixty-seven slaves after Parks’s death. 25 Only Samuel Townsend trailed behind.
Though he made his first land purchase in 1829, Samuel’s net worth
totaled only $25,000 in 1850—a considerable sum at the time, it was still
less than half the value of his brother Edmund’s property.
But Samuel Townsend profited from family tragedy. Samuel and Edmund
likely inherited either land or money after Parks Townsend’s death
in the 1840s, as only three years after the 1850 census Edmund’s net worth
had jumped to $500,000. 26 And when Edmund died in 1853, nearly half of
21 Wendy Anne Warren writes of the “compelling and human reasons” that drive a researcher
to engage in the impossible process of reconstruction—a woman’s life that “deserves”
telling “simply because too many factors have conspired to make that reconstruction
impossible,” “‘The Cause of Her Grief,’”1033.
22 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.
23 Roberts, An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter.
24 Joseph C. Kiger, Some Social and Economic Factors Relative to the Antebellum Alabama
Large Planter. (Ph.D. Thesis, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1947).
25 Ibid.
26 Roberts, An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter.
152

this wealth—including two productive cotton plantations—fell to Samuel.
27 Due more to luck and family ties than business savvy, at the time of
his own death Samuel Townsend owned eight plantations in Madison and
adjacent Jackson County, along with nearly 200 slaves. When copywriters
drafted obituaries and death notices to run in Huntsville newspapers in
November 1856, they could justifiably call Samuel Townsend one of the
wealthiest planters in Alabama, his estate worth roughly $200,000. 28
Alike in their ambitions of ruling a cotton kingdom in Madison County,
Edmund and Samuel—bachelors unto death—seem also to have shared
a desire for human conquest the institution of slavery engendered. Both
men engaged in serial sexual relationships with enslaved women on their
plantations. 29 In 1832, Edmund Townsend fathered a son, Woodson, born
to one of his slaves, and by 1838, Edmund had taken up with a local free
woman of color who bore him two daughters—Elizabeth and Virginia, or
Lizzie and Jinny to their siblings. 30 Edmund’s three children soon had a
large number of cousins from the man they called “Uncle Sam”: Samuel
Townsend’s seven sexual partners, all enslaved, gave birth to nine children
between 1831 and 1853. 31
Though sex across the color line could be tolerated as an open secret in
the antebellum South, Edmund and Samuel Townsend shocked their white
relatives by attempting to legitimate the children of interracial relation-
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Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
27 Even Samuel’s inheritance from Edmund was the result of tragedy for Edmund’s two
enslaved daughters Lizzie and Jinny. Edmund did not intend for any of his white relatives
to inherit, but his nephews successfully voided his will, which would have left the entire
estate to the two teenage girls. Although Samuel was not among the Townsends to challenge
Edmund’s will, he benefited when the court overturned it.
28 Classifying a large landowner as a planter with a real estate value of over $25,000, in
1850 there were 43 large landowners in Madison County—two of which were Edmund
and Samuel Townsend. In the entire state, there were 1,156 such men, making up less than
0.3 percent of the total Alabama population, Kiger, Some Social and Economic Factors
Relative to the Antebellum Alabama Large Planter.
29 The relative number of white masters who engaged in sexual relationships with enslaved
women is difficult to determine, but Joshua D. Rothman’s Notorious in the Neighborhood
and Bernie Jones’s Fathers of Conscience both examine the idea that sex across the color
line was both prevalent and well-known in local communities. Such relationships were
brought into wider public discourse most often in inheritance cases, in which the sexual
history of a white man made its way into official legal documents. Anecdotal evidence and
social gossip of the period also hint at the frequency of these incidents as well.
30 Woodson Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letter dated February 16, 1866.
31 S. D. Cabaniss and Samuel C. Townsend to F. L. Hammond and Madison County, AL,
Probate Court, “Inventory and Appraisement” of Samuel Townsend Estate dated February
6, 1858 and 1860.

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ships in the courtroom. 32 In his will, Edmund endeavored to leave the bulk
of his $500,000 fortune to his two daughters. The children of a woman the
girls described as a “free mulatto,” Lizzie and Jinny argued that they were
legally free themselves, and as such able to inherit under Alabama law. 33
But Edmund’s white nieces and nephews—the children of his living sister
Henrietta, deceased sister Jinny, and deceased brother Parks—thought
otherwise, petitioning the will on the grounds that the teenage girls were
in fact slaves. Elizabeth’s and Virginia’s mother seems to have either died
or left Madison County, as the girls could not prove their free status in
court. 34 Neither could the late Edmund Townsend, in no position to speak
for him, testify on their behalf.
The failure of Edmund Townsend’s daughters to inherit sparked his
brother Samuel into action to protect his own children after his death.
When Samuel Townsend began to draft his first will in September 1853,
he confided to S. D. Cabaniss that he “had no doubt that some of his kin
would try to break his will and that he expected that John E. Townsend
would lead in it.” 35 Testifying before the Probate Court in 1860, S. D.
Cabaniss recalled that first conversation with Samuel Townsend: “He did
manifest much unsurety about his will,” Cabaniss remarked, “mainly by
the absence of sympathy on the part of many of his heirs towards said
Edmund’s mulatto children … [Samuel] had a great dread of his children
becoming the slaves of some of his relations.” 36 “The dominating aspect of
his will,” Cabaniss testified, “was to emancipate twelve slaves mentioned
in his will … to give them the bulk of his estate, [and] to guard as well as
he could against their being fooled out of it before they could be taught to
manage and take care of it.” 37 Cabaniss further explained that while Samuel
Townsend had never told him directly that any of those twelve were
32 Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color
Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina
Press 2003).
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 S. D. Cabaniss to F. L. Hammond and Madison County, AL, Probate Court, Deposition
of S. D. Cabaniss regarding the Samuel Townsend Estate, undated.
36 Samuel Townsend never intended for his children, their mothers, and their siblings
to remain on the Home Place or his other plantations in Madison County. His will left
instructions for S. D. Cabaniss to sell all of his property and use the money to set the
children up on a farm in a Northern state—after he decided not to move them to Liberia,
that is.
37 S. D. Cabaniss to F. L. Hammond and Madison County, AL, Probate Court, Deposition
of S. D. Cabaniss regarding the Samuel Townsend Estate, undated.
154

his children, it was apparent from “the tenor of his conversation and the
manner in which he spoke of them that he believed nine of the twelve to be
his children” 38 —the remaining three being Edmund’s daughters, Elizabeth
and Virginia, and Samuel’s final mistress, Elvira. Samuel Townsend, who
used and discarded seven women so casually over the years, nevertheless
seems to have cared for his children—perhaps even loved them. He
certainly took great pains to ensure they inherited his now much-enlarged
estate. And maybe out of a sense of loyalty to his dead brother Edmund,
Samuel instructed Cabaniss to purchase Elizabeth and Virginia away from
John E. Townsend—who had inherited them as part of his half of Edmund
Townsend’s estate. Even before he had the two girls living with their cousins
in 1856, Samuel Townsend wrote them tentatively into his first two
wills as equal heirs beside his own children. 39
As Samuel Townsend had predicted, after his death in 1856 his white
relatives petitioned the validity of the will. The challenge to Samuel
Townsend’s promise of freedom, money, and legitimacy would have come
as no surprise to the enslaved Townsend women. Elizabeth and Virginia
would well remember the anxiety of the controversy surrounding their own
father’s will—as well as the heartbreak following the court’s judgment
that they were, despite a life of acknowledgment by their father as “free
mulattos,” slaves after all. Perhaps Lizzie and Jinny were the cynics of the
Townsend household—unwilling to raise their hopes again and shaking
their heads at the naiveté of the cousins who trusted in S. D. Cabaniss.
Their brother Woodson may have ranted his frustration over dashed hopes
and personal disenfranchisement to his wife Caroline—or more likely, his
lover Elvira. Elvira was plausibly the central source of information for
the rest of the potential Townsend heirs. She may have learned about the
workings of the legal system during her three years as Samuel Townsend’s
mistress from 1853 to 1856; and the petitioners against his will singled
her out as more than a passive witness to the legal process, painting her as
a powerful temptress even as she remained a vulnerable enslaved young
woman. 40
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Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
38 Ibid.
39 Samuel Townsend, will dated November, 1854.
39 Bernie D. Jones, Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South
(Studies in the Legal History of the South, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009).
40 Bernie D. Jones, Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum
South (Studies in the Legal History of the South, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,
2009).

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In 1858 the Madison County Probate Court ruled that the last will and
testament of Samuel Townsend, deceased, was indeed valid and legitimate.
In doing so, the case served to confuse the strict divisions of gendered and
racial power in antebellum Southern society. Samuel Townsend’s heirs had
been powerless under the law of their master’s desires during his life, and
under Alabama law after his death—but their existence was tolerated by
the white community so long as they occupied socially acceptable roles.
Public acknowledgment of enslaved mistresses and mixed-race children
through the court system struck fear into the white branch of the Townsend
family tree—not only because white relatives such as John E. Townsend
stood to lose a fortune in land and human property, but because the public
acknowledgment of enslaved mistresses and mixed-race children through
the court system challenged the antebellum social hierarchy. The emancipation
and inheritance of the Townsend children upset the strict division
between slave and free, black and white: a child like Susanna, free, mixedrace,
and property-owning, could not be placed neatly on either side of the
color line.
Expectations
Susanna won her freedom, in a legal sense, in January 1860, when
S.D. Cabaniss arranged for her and her extended family to be moved from
the “Home Place” to a new home in southeastern Ohio. Wesley—Samuel
Townsend’s eldest son, who had been emancipated in 1858—already resided
in the small city of Xenia, working as a blacksmith. 41 Expecting twentynine-year-old
Wesley to superintend his half-siblings, their mothers, and
their mothers’ other children, Cabaniss placed control over disbursements
from the will into Wesley’s hands. 42 Samuel’s underage children—Willis,
Thomas, Osborne, Parthenia, Milcha, Bradford, and Susanna—were
to board at Wilberforce University under the care of its president R.S.
Rust. 43 Wesley, Caroline, and Elvira would meet the rest of the family in
Kansas. Sibling rivalry, dissatisfaction with Wesley as ad hoc patriarch,
and continuing trouble with the will would shortly turn this rosy picture
dark. But in the moment of their emancipation, a few brief sentences from
Cabaniss’s agent in Ohio and Kansas suggest that the Townsends felt a
sense of optimism and hope for their futures.
41 Letter from Wesley Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, dated 18 January 1860.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
156

157
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Cabaniss hired D.L. Lakin to travel with the Townsends to freedom
and settle them in their new homes, but Lakin made no secret of his doubts
about Samuel Townsend’s last wishes. “The negroes all Seem to be doing
very well, though very uneasy,” he wrote from his cabin on a Mississippi
River steamer in February 1860; “If they could realise, as clearly
as I do, how much more happy they would be on an Alabama plantation,
than in any free condition they can be placed in, they would certainly
be sad enough.” 44 The Townsends, then, were not sad. When Lakin described
them as “uneasy,” he may have meant the word in its original
sense: disturbed in the mind. Certainly, in the mind of the southern agent,
they would have to be disturbed to believe what they did about their new
life. As he continued: “I have no doubt—though I have not Spoken to
them on the Subject—that they have happy dreams of liberty, but I am
sorry to say it is my first conviction that, to many of them, their freedom
papers will only be a pass to want & misery.” 45 And indeed, the Townsends
would experience sickness, poverty, and want in the coming years. Newly
freed, leaving the states they had spent their entire lives in—Alabama, and
enslavement—the Townsends very likely felt fear as well as hope. But
Lakin’s letter hints that the latter was more potent. He did not deign to
speak with them, but he felt it nonetheless. Perhaps he saw it in their faces;
perhaps they could not help but smile as they left the “Home Place” behind
forever.
Notably, Lakin commented that the Townsend women were the ones
with whom he had “the greatest trouble” on their journey north. “I … have
been forced Several times to Speak to them in tones of unmistakeable
command,” he wrote. 46 One wonders precisely what the women—and who
among them in particular—did to provoke Lakin’s anger. This reference
to “trouble” may connect to Lakin’s statements about the Townsends’ supposedly
misguided excitement and optimism. The women had an especial
reason to rejoice in their emancipation: freedom meant a release from
the sexual vulnerability and bondage that went hand in hand with legal
enslavement and plantation life. 47 The women traveling with Lakin were
Samuel’s former mistresses Rainey, Winney, Hannah, and Lucy; perhaps
they were already making known that they would not be dominated by a
44 Letter from D.L. Lakin to S.D. Cabaniss, dated 29 February 1860.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women
of the Old South (Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
white man again. 48 Lakin may have adopted the persona of a plantation
master with his “tone of unmistakable command,” but these troublesome
women knew the difference.
Lakin would have been quite aware of Samuel Townsend’s sexual
history, and the Townsends’ mixed-race heritage forms the subtext of his
correspondence with Cabaniss. Lakin may have thought of the children
and their mothers as no more than the products of vile miscegenation; he
absolutely did not think them capable of exercising their freedom without
falling into “want and misery.” And though he declared that their plight
made him “sad enough,” a more honest feeling may have been contempt:
“I think you have more hope for them than their capacities warrant, & I
fear you will be disappointed,” he added. 49
The specific words D.L. Lakin chose to emphasize in his letter point
to his own interpretation of the meaning of freedom for mixed-race former
slaves. He vigorously underlined the words “free,” “liberty,” and, interestingly,
“pass.” 50 When Lakin wrote of a “pass to want and misery,” he referred
literally to the papers the newly freed men and women would carry
to prove their emancipated status. An alternate interpretation, however,
could be that Lakin alluded to the lighter skin color of Samuel Townsend’s
children. Freedom and liberty could be synonymous, but why highlight the
word “pass” at all? Lakin may have believed the manumission of these individuals
to be distinctly different from that of slaves with a less scandalous
family history: the Townsend children would blur racial categories. 51
Did Lakin predict they might try to “pass” into white society? Was this
what made him so uneasy? If other white men Susanna came into contact
with shared Lakin’s apprehensions, Susanna may have felt from a young
age the tenuous nature of her place in society. But perhaps she contemplated
the benefits, in addition to the limitations, of her uncertain role.
Influences
Seven years old in 1860, and under the care and control of D.L. Lakin
and the adults of her own extended family, Susanna Townsend would have
been affected by their ideas about what emancipation meant for her future.
48 Two of Samuel’s other sexual partners, Emily and Susanna’s mother Celia, died in 1853
and 1856, respectively. Elvira, Samuel’s seventh and final mistress, was emancipated in
January with Samuel’s children.
49 Letter from D.L. Lakin to S.D. Cabaniss, dated 29 February 1860.
50 Ibid.
51 Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 56.
158

Susanna’s mother Celia was gone—she died in childbirth—along with an
infant boy who may have been Samuel Townsend’s son, between 1856
and 1858. 52 Susanna may not have remembered her, but family history
would have been no secret, and the women who raised her were very probably
Celia’s successors and predecessors—others of Samuel’s mistresses.
Susanna may have found their joy in freedom from sexual enslavement
infectious; and she may have kept in the back of her mind a knowledge of
how even in bondage Elvira exerted what little influence she had on the
writing of Samuel’s will.
One of the experiences that most shaped the early years of her freedom,
however, would have been her two years at Wilberforce University.
Susanna and the six half-siblings who came with her to Wilberforce would
have been some of the earliest students to study at the university, though
not unusual in their history—the student body overwhelmingly comprised
the biological children of southern white planters and enslaved women. 53
Education of students only effectively started in 1858, with the appointment
of Richard S. Rust, who administered Wilberforce through 1863.
Rust was assisted by one James K. Parker, director of the “Normal and
Preparatory Department”—and both of these men would have regular interaction
with the Townsend children, Susanna in particular, for the next
decade. 54
Wilberforce “University” provided elementary-level education for
the Townsends, and what information we have about their sojourn there
comes from the letters of Samuel’s second-eldest son, Willis. By March of
1860, twenty-year-old Willis wrote that “we three Large ones”—meaning
himself, nineteen-year-old Thomas, and seventeen-year-old Osborne—
could already read the Bible well; “the Girls,” however, were “not geting
on verry fast in there study.” 55 Parthenia had been sick for months—a valid
excuse for distraction from academics—but Willis’s letter would indicate
that Susanna and Milcha were simply slower than the others. 56 Possibly,
Willis simply did not pay much attention to the younger girls. Susanna
was, after all, more than thirteen years his junior. Parthenia may merit a
mention in Willis’s letters because she was his full sister, and regular up-
52 Will of Samuel Townsend, dated 6 September 1856.
53 David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line 1860-1915 (Urbana, Illinois: University
of Illinois Press, 1976), 19.
54 Ibid, 35.
55 Letter from Willis Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, dated 12 March 1860.
56 Ibid.
159
Letters from a Planter’s Daughter

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
dates about Thomas and Osborne indicate that the three elder boys stuck
close in their unfamiliar environment. Susanna’s only full brother, Bradford,
probably formed a close friendship with Milcha, the half-sister with
whom he shared a birth year—when Milcha wrote to Cabaniss after the
war, it was usually to ask exclusively if he had heard from Bradford. 57 Perhaps
Susanna had no close bonds with any of the other children. In their
letters, at least, none of them mentioned her by name.
We cannot know, then, to what extent Susanna was influenced by the
more thorough grounding in the ideology of racial uplift Wilberforce provided
her siblings. In May of 1860, Willis’s letters adopted the vocabulary
and tenor of a young man committed to moral improvement: “I look upon
myself as a man in want of mental and moral culture and I desire and not
only desire but I intend by divine assistance to become such as to command
the admiration of the good as a man of morality, mental excellence,
and decisive integrity,” he wrote Cabaniss. 58 Possibly, this particular letter
was the work of a teacher or schoolmate—it is not written in Willis’s hand,
and he may not even have dictated the words. Willis may have asked for
help phrasing the letter in a way he believed would best move Cabaniss to
send him money, the ultimate goal of the letter. Whatever the case, it is significant
that Willis believed this was the language the executor wanted to
hear. Later, in her own letters, Susanna mimicked some of this language:
when you send for me to go to school i will be ready and i hope that it will
be soon for now is the time i ought to be at school to improve my time,
she wrote in April 1866, emphasizing her desire for self-improvement and
cultivation.
Willis and Susanna may have used these tactics pragmatically, but
when Thomas wrote similar lines—in his own hand, and years later—he
almost certainly believed it. In all of his extant letters, Thomas Townsend
never asked Cabaniss for money; he simply did not need it. After Wilberforce,
Thomas worked as a teacher, founded schools in Kansas for African-American
children after the Civil War, and, ultimately, bought back
one of Samuel Townsend’s plantations during Reconstruction, as one of
Huntsville’s first two African-American city aldermen. 59 He was the very
model of the “black bourgeoisie,” increasingly admired by his siblings
as Wesley fell in their esteem. 60 Wesley’s own daughter would effusively
57 Letter from Milcha Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, dated 3 December 1865.
58 Letter from Willis Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, dated 8 May 1860.
59 Letters from Thomas Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss.
60 Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After
the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 178.
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write her Uncle Thomas in 1890 saying how “mama speaks of you so often,”
and “mama sends her love to you,” and “mama have told me so much
about you,” and “mama says you named me”—and that if he would like to
send a gift to her, she would be pleased with anything “so long as you send
me something.” 61 Thomas was to the next generation what Cabaniss was
to his: a benefactor and moral authority whose influence extended from
Huntsville to the Kansas and Ohio Townsends.
In this interpretation, Thomas Townsend embodied the ideology that
R.S. Rust’s Wilberforce administration emphasized: the creation of a
chaste, sober, disciplined class of “elite blacks.” 62 The Townsends had a
certain cachet in a cultural context that popularly held that mixed-race African-Americans
possessed greater intellect than “pure” Africans. 63 Mixing
mattered, even as miscegenation was abhorred. Education and literacy
only helped to raise the Townsend children’s status—so long as they, as
Thomas seems to have, adopted the ethos of a white, Protestant middleclass
that drew a strict divide between “decent” and “indecent” behavior. 64
It is unclear whether Susanna bought into this brand of racial uplift; hers
may have been a more individualistic interpretation of freedom.
For the duration of the war, Parthenia and Susanna experienced freedom
as independence—but an independence fraught with insecurity. Wilberforce
University closed after the outbreak of war in 1861, turning out its
students and throwing the Townsend children to their separate fates. Willis
worked as a waiter on a steamboat running up and down the Ohio River;
Osborne joined a Union army heavy artillery regiment; Bradford remained
in Xenia waiting for the campus to reopen, but died before 1863; Milcha
rejoined “the Kansasees,” as did Thomas. Only Susanna and Parthenia
remained in Ohio and moved in with Wesley and his second wife, who
were at the time living just outside Cincinnati. 65 Most likely, the girls had
no other options. By this time, Wesley was almost universally mistrusted
by his family—after leaving his wife Jane for an Ohio woman named Adelaide,
Wesley fled Kansas for Cincinnati, taking with him Jane’s and his
mother’s inheritance from the Samuel Townsend estate. But when Wesley
61 Carrie Leontee Townsend to Thomas Townsend, letter dated 19 August 1890.
62 Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, 178.
63 Martha Hodes, “Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890,” Haunted
by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Ann Laura Stoler ed.
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006), 247.
64 Ibid, 166.
65 Letter from Wesley Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, dated 13 October 1865.

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
the blacksmith was conscripted to shoe mules for the Union army in Nashville,
Tennessee, in 1853, Susanna and Parthenia were left alone with only
Wesley’s two young children and his wife Adelaide, the only adult in the
household. Living near Cincinnati, the nexus of trade and culture between
North, South, and West, the girls found themselves straddling the Union
and Confederacy. The Townsend children had only just begun to receive
inheritance payments in 1860; now, Huntsville attorney Cabaniss was
forced to cut off disbursements entirely. Isolated even amidst an extended
family after her mother and only brother died, Susanna at ten years old was
tasked with helping to support a household of women and children.
Susanna’s earliest extant letters are dated 1866, but information about
the Townsends’ experiences during the war years can be gleaned from
letters written by Willis, Thomas, and Milcha—letters which mention not
Susanna, but her older half-sister Parthenia. A young teenaged girl alone
and independent in the biggest city she had ever seen, Parthenia shamed
her strait-laced brothers by “cutting up and running with bad girls.” 66 We
can imagine Parthenia, fourteen years old, entering a raucous public dance
hall in Cincinnati. Parthenia, like Susanna, probably worked as a domestic
servant—her long days tiring and tedious. “Dancing and carousing
the night away,” Parthenia could reject the discipline of her days’ drudge
work and empower herself in the freedom of unrestrained physical movement.
67 Susanna, not yet twelve, would have been too young to follow her
half-sister to the dance hall; Parthenia would have, however, been one of
Susanna’s primary female role models, influencing her ideas about what
freedom meant in a leisure and labor context.
By the time Wesley returned from Nashville in 1865, Willis had removed
Parthenia from the city and sent her to Kansas. 68 There, she was
placed under the watchful eye of her brother Thomas, who, though only a
few years older than she, exercised authority over the family in Kansas by
merit of his sex and financial self-sufficiency. Thomas described her actions
extensively in January 1866: “Parthenia Townsend is so completely
recless and destitute of consistency, that she has gone with strangers (probably
to have a better access to her malicious designs) rather than remain
with her Aunt Rainey. All these dark actions of course cast gloomy reflection
upon her Relatives,” he concluded.” 69 Finally, and astonishingly,
Thomas issued orders to Cabaniss as to what must be done: to pay Parthe-
66 Wesley Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 13 October 1865.
67 Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, 180.
68 Ibid.
69 Thomas Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 20 January 1866.
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nia her inheritance only a little at a time, and to put her under a “proper
jurisdiction”—presumably his. The archive’s silence regarding Susanna’s
actions during the war may say something after all; perhaps it means that
she caused no trouble. Or perhaps it signals that she simply did not fit in a
pre-established role, for in Thomas’s letters, we see the parts of good girl
and bad girl playing out in the Townsend family drama. Parthenia is the
wanton sister who shames her brothers; Milcha is the virtuous one, “to the
effect that she is married to a very industrious carpenter, destitute of bad
habits, in short a respectable citizen and is a step above poverty.” 70 Susanna
was certainly hard-working and determined, and between 1866 and 1869,
Susanna attempted to carve out a role for herself apart from those of her
brothers and sisters. These letters, and others in the archive, recorded—if
imperfectly—her own evolving sense of what freedom meant for her future.
Her elder half-sisters Parthenia and Milcha provided Susanna with
two examples of womanhood, leaving the younger girl to decide which
path to follow, or whether to forge a new one altogether.
Susanna grew up quickly. At war’s end, at which time she began her
correspondence with her father’s attorney, she believed she was fully capable
of fending for herself. Susanna’s persistence in lobbying Cabaniss
for her own interests materializes in the words and silences of these sources,
the echoes of a girl forcefully imprinting her character on the archive.
By 1866, she was literate and wrote as fluidly as any of her half-siblings
and cousins, excepting Thomas. Education was, for Susanna, not only a
priority but an immediate concern—from 1863 to 1866 she had worked
her way through school as a domestic in the private home of a white man
in Cincinnati, all the while thinking that if i dont get my learning now
while i am young when i get old it will be to late. 71 Susanna was also adept
at handling money—probably a lesson learned during the hard times of the
war—and persuaded Cabaniss to send her payments out of the will to her
employers rather than through Wesley, insisting that i will not spend one
sent of it foolishly and i am capable of taking cair of that much money my
self for i am large enough to not let any body cheat me out of it. 72 Susanna
was thirteen years old.
70 Thomas Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 21 February 1866.
71 Susanna Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letter dated August 8, 1866.
72 Susanna Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letter dated January 1, 1866.

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
Actions
When Wilberforce University closed in 1862, its directors J. K. Parker
and R. S. Rust were out of a job. The two men worked together to establish
Clermont Academy, a school for African-Americans in the Cincinnati
area, Parker on-site and Rust the absentee partner. On 5 January 1865, J.
K. Parker sent a panicked letter to “Brother Rust,” fulsomely apologizing
and making excuses for the “blunder” he had committed in regard to one
of his students. 73 The story, as Parker told it, was thus: The week before,
Parker had visited the home of Wesley and Adelaide Townsend to speak
to Susanna, who had recently begun attending Clermont Academy. 74 The
price was too steep for Susanna to board by the week, but she walked two
and one-half miles each way each day and was at the time in need of shoes,
stockings, and other clothing. Previously, Rust had told Parker to obtain a
list from Susanna and purchase the items himself—but when he arrived,
somehow, he was persuaded to leave the matter entirely in the girl’s hands.
“I know your request was that I should procure the things needed,” Parker
wrote, “but on seeing the parties they said they could do so themselves
very well, and that they had always been accustomed to doing so, with the
money sent by Mr Cabanis.” 75 And besides, he had been feeling sick that
day. 76
Wesley did not return from Nashville until October 1865, Adelaide
had an infant and a toddler to keep her busy, and Parthenia had already
been banished to Kansas—meaning that “the parties” who so easily convinced
J. K. Parker to ignore Rust’s instructions were probably a party of
one, twelve-year-old Susanna. 77 Indeed, after two pages of excuses and
apologies, Parker signs off with reference to the enclosed document, “Susanna’s
receipt.” 78 His letter gives us a fascinating glimpse into Susanna
Townsend’s character. She was smart, resourceful, and apparently quite a
convincing liar—S. D. Cabaniss had never sent money directly to Susanna
or the other children at Wilberforce; all disbursements from the will had
gone through Wesley or R. S. Rust. 79 Ignored in her brothers’ letters to
Cabaniss, Susanna emerges in Parker’s as a vivid figure in her own right:
73 J.K. Parker to R.S. Rust, letter dated 5 January 1865.
74 Ibid.
75 J.K. Parker to R.S. Rust, letter dated 5 January 1865.
76 Ibid.
77 Wesley Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 13 October 1865.
78 J.K. Parker to R.S. Rust, letter dated 5 January 1865.
79 Willis Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 8 February 1860.
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a shrewd, determined girl standing in the doorway of Wesley’s rented little
house, babies squalling in the background, Susanna smiling or scowling
at her teacher until the man acquiesced. It was the same fierceness with
which she wrote Cabaniss in the next year, saying i am capable of taking
cair of that much money my self for i am large enough to not let any body
cheat me out of it. 80 Like as not, she would cheat them right back.
Despite all the hardships of the early 1860s, Susanna Townsend remained
committed to continuing her education—a goal integral to her
hopes for future independence and self-sufficiency. 81 Her tone, at times,
is desperate: Mr Cabaniss i am still in hopes that i will get to go to school
next month by you aiding assistance … if i dont get my learning now while
i am young when i get old it will be to late … mr cabaniss i dont want
to grow up ignorant without and education or a trade. 82 Susanna clearly
believed that education was the key to building an independent future for
herself, away from an unbearable home life with Wesley, who quarrels
with me like i was a dog. 83 Wesley’s rheumatism periodically kept him
from working, and Adelaide was no longer teaching—making Susanna,
at times, the sole income in a household of five. And she, too, was sick;
in 1866 Susanna began to complain of scrofula—a form of tuberculosis—
which plagued her until her death. 84 Susanna’s education did not rank high
on the list of immediate priorities, but the young woman, hardly more than
a girl, was tenacious. 85
For Susanna, the desire to be educated ran deeper than a belief that
knowledge and literacy could improve her living circumstances—although
this certainly was a factor. When Susanna wrote that she did not wish to
grow up ignorant, she hinted at both desire and fear. She did not write that
she feared to grow up poor; her anxiety came from a vision of a future self
she could not bear to imagine. Susanna had tied the pursuit of knowledge
80 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 1 January 1866.
81 Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom
in South Carolina. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 152.
82 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 8 August 1866.
83 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 28 March 1866.
84 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 1 January 1866.
85 It would be anachronistic to place Susanna within either the political movement of Booker
T. Washington or his ideology of improving the black community through assimilation of
white norms, or W.E.B. DuBois’s ideas of civil rights. However, Susanna’s desire for selfimprovement
as well as resistance to discrimination hints at the developing black political
ideologies of the time, as well as their absorption by ordinary individuals such as Susanna
and her half-siblings. Thomas Townsend, in particular, represents a Washington-esque
strain of thought.

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
to her self-identity. Was she thinking about the Townsend women in Kansas?
Caroline had not learned to write; Elvira was married, divorced, married
and divorced again; Parthenia was missing; Milcha had made a good
marriage, but she never went back to school after the war. Their mothers
were working as servants, or farming, essentially doing the same work
they had done in Alabama. Did Susanna believe that these women had not
striven for enough, not understood that their freedom might promise them
a different kind of life?
Susanna mentioned her desire to attend school, or return to school, or
pay for school in all but her last letter of 4 June 1868. But she explored
other avenues toward independence and self-sufficiency as well. With the
Townsend estate significantly devalued by the war, money was a struggle
for all of the Townsends—but living with Wesley, believed by the entire
family to be an unscrupulous thief, did not make the situation any easier. 86
Susanna attempted to sidestep the problem of the Ohio patriarch by convincing
Cabaniss to do what she had told J. K. Parker was already the
norm—send the payments out of her inheritance directly to herself, or at
least to someone she trusted. In her letter of 24 May 1866, Susanna put
forward her current employer, Mr. Joseph Lamb, as a possible middleman,
for uncle taks all of my money and spend it for his self; on the other
hand, Mr Joseph Lamb is rich and he wont take mony from me. 87 Wesley’s
desperate poverty made him untrustworthy in Susanna’s eyes—because
her employer did not need the money, he could be relied upon to give it to
her. In addition, Susanna may have used this tactic to appeal to Cabaniss’s
own racism by hinting that a white man like Mr. Lamb was innately more
trustworthy than a black man such as Wesley.
At this time, Susanna finally made good on her regular threat to leave
Wesley’s house. 88 The young woman may have believed that her independence
required a break from the other Townsends entirely—even if the
solution was placing herself in the dangerously vulnerable position of a
domestic servant in her employer’s home. But perhaps hazy memories of
her mother’s sexual exploitation were not far from her mind, as Susanna
added of Lamb that she would only stay with him until I can do betr. 89 And
it seems that Cabaniss followed Susanna’s instructions. In 1860, Cabaniss
testified before the Probate Court that Samuel Townsend had wished “to
guard as well as he could against their [his children] being fooled out of
86 Jane Townsend and Elvira Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 31 January 1860.
87 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 24 May 1866.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
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it [their inheritance] before they could be taught to manage and take care
of it.” 90 By 1866, the youngest daughter had apparently proven to Cabaniss
that she could. Susanna received two checks from her inheritance and
briefly returned to school before news of her conniving reached Wesley in
September and he once more intercepted her checks. Susanna, unfazed,
sent Cabaniss the address of another man, her new employer, to whom she
asked Cabaniss to mail her payments. 91
In spring of 1867, Susanna’s letters began to register a level of disillusionment.
Money, always an issue, had grown tight to the point that
Susanna could no longer walk to school—as she had stockings, but no
shoes. 92 Perhaps the humiliation in front of the other students, all of whom
paid to board overnight on weekdays, finally grew too great for Susanna.
For the first time, she tells Cabaniss that i do not want to go i would
rather go to some other place or go to Kansas or put me at some kind of
trade. 93 Susanna, forced by circumstances to give up her study, yet refused
to submit to life as a servant. It is not difficult to imagine the indomitable
young woman determined to pick up a hammer and take over Wesley’s
blacksmith trade herself. But the women of the Townsend family occupied
the two spheres of labor available to African-American women. Susanna,
like the great majority of urban African-American women in the Reconstruction-era,
went into domestic service; Kansas women such as Rainey
and Winney performed farm work, field labor they would have performed
while enslaved in Alabama. 94 Skilled labor would not have been an option
for Susanna.
When Willis, passing through Cincinnati, wrote Cabaniss in October
1867, Susanna had left school entirely, “working nursing child for a
lady.” 95 He disapproved, but there was nothing to do. Willis had lost everything
when the steamer he was working on took fire—he could hardly
support an additional person. Neither did Willis any longer have much
confidence in the Alabama executor. He did not try to hide his change of
heart either, writing that “it is hardly worth while to ask you to send any
90 S. D. Cabaniss to F. L. Hammond and Madison County, AL, Probate Court, Deposition
of S. D. Cabaniss regarding the Samuel Townsend Estate, undated.
91 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 12 September 1866.
92 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 27 March 1867.
93 Ibid.
94 Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black
Women, Work and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York, New York: Basic
Books, 2010).
95 Willis Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letter dated 1 October 1867.

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
money because if you was to do it you would do some thing you never did
do yet.” 96 So when Willis wrote, disapproving, that “she ought to be going
to school,” it was an empty scold. 97 Susanna’s hopes for an education or
different employment may as well have sunk to the bottom of the Ohio
River with Willis’s clothes.
A researcher wonders how much Susanna knew about what her halfbrothers
wrote Cabaniss regarding her future. After years of silences in
their letters, Susanna began to appear in the missives of other Townsends
in the late 1860s. Willis was not the only one to include her—Osborne
Townsend also wrote Cabaniss about Susanna’s education. In his letter of
May 1866, Osborne mentioned that he had not yet heard back from R.S.
Rust, to whom he wrote directly about finding a place for Susanna at Wilberforce
again, and he noted the same circumstances in August. 98 He gave
the lawyer an ultimatum: if Cabaniss would not pay, Osborne would drop
out of school himself in order to support Susanna. 99 Cabaniss, presumably,
failed to respond again, and Osborne could not in fact find the money himself.
Perhaps it was because she was the youngest sister, still half a child to
these grown men; or perhaps there was something special about Susanna
that her brothers could see, potential that they, like she, refused to give
up on. Her age may have also been a consideration; possibly, Willis and
Osborne believed that her youth dictated that she belonged in school, the
norm for, notably, white girls of her age. Whether one or none of these, it
seems that with Wesley, Adelaide, and their young children the only family
she saw with any regularity, Susanna may have felt more alone than she
truly was. By 1868, the best-laid plans of Susanna, Willis, and Osborne
had come to nothing. Continuing her education no longer appeared feasible,
and Susanna’s employment options were limited by her sex as well as
by race. Of course, her plight was hardly unique. Susanna, however, like
many women in Reconstruction-era African-American families, may have
yet placed a high value on the woman’s work within her own home—a
private sphere completely unavailable to enslaved women on the plantation.
100
The institution of slavery—and in particular, the sexual vulnerability
of women under slavery—was fundamentally destabilizing to the family.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 Osborne Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, 2 May 1866
99 Osborne Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, 6 August 1866.
100 Ibid. 52
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To those who in the 19th century held up the sanctity of marriage and the
family as the foundation of society, slavery represented a perversion of
the social order. 101 That great number of former slaves legitimated their
marriages after emancipation suggests one of two, or a mixture of both,
reasons: that the idea of a lasting, permanent union was as important to
slave families as the white middle class; or that white middle-class ideals
may have influenced the enslaved men and women who lived among
them. 102 In either case, maintaining the integrity of the family unit would
have been a concern for free African-American women—especially women
who, like the Townsends, knew firsthand how sexual abuse by a white
master affected a family. 103 To be a full-time wife and mother, the cultural
norm for middle- and upper-class white women, may have been desirable
precisely because it was an impossibility under slavery. 104
Until 1868, Susanna’s story contradicted the broad assertion that
freedom, for African-American women, had meaning almost exclusively
within a family context—Susanna, after all, sought independence from
her family both through education and direct control of her inheritance. 105
Care must also be taken not to assume that Susanna understood freedom
as the right to enter into the unfreedom of domestic patriarchy. 106 In Susanna’s
case, marriage provided an escape from the patriarchal authority
not of a husband, but her half-brother Wesley. And in June 1868, Susanna
had run short of options. She was panicked, hiding her pregnancy from
Wesley, Adelaide, the father of the child, and Cabaniss, but she grasped
also at a possible solution: marriage. She could see herself in a little house
in Kansas if there is no more than three rooms and an acre of grown—one
bedroom for husband and wife, a second room to cook and eat, and a third
room perhaps as a nursery for the baby no one knew was coming. 107 It
would not have been a fully independent life, but perhaps she would, at
101 Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the
Present (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 112.
102 Ibid. 116
103 Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2nd edition, 1999), 162.
104 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We.
105 Ibid.
106 Thavolia Glymph writes of the fallacy of “freedom for enslaved women [coming] to be
understood as the right to patriarchy and its kindred domestic norms,” Out of the House
of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 4.
107 Susanna Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 4 June 1866.

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last, have some security. The nicest young man i ever did see had asked her
to marry him, and she said yes.
We cannot speculate whether Susanna was in love with the young
white man she described in her 4 June letter, whether she saw their marriage
as a pragmatic means of legitimating her unborn child and escaping
Wesley’s stifling household once and for all, whether she seduced him
specifically for this purpose. Did the idea dizzy her with déjà vu as she
considered that her mother Celia may have enacted just this plan to use
her sexual vulnerability to her advantage with Samuel Townsend? We can
wonder how she met this man, and why she lost her job caring for children
at an unnamed white woman’s home shortly after her pregnancy was revealed.
We can imagine the scene Susanna describes in her letter, how he
is a gentleman he has lent me money when i was sick and had no more nor
no friends and i paid him the money he would not take it he said but i made
him take it. 108 We can see how lonely she is and think that, in the most
tragic of sentimental fiction, he might be her employer’s son, engaged in a
forbidden romance.
But Susanna is not a character in a novel. It is especially dangerous,
too, to see Susanna’s agency only in terms of her sexuality. 109 We must recall,
then, that exercising her sexuality as a tool—if indeed that is what she
was doing—was Susanna’s option of last resort. For years she chose other
routes, and this June letter to S. D. Cabaniss represented a last attempt to
escape the limbo of her mixed birth and uncertain inheritance. Through
marriage to a white man, perhaps Susanna thought that she could achieve
the social standing and legitimacy that her mother, enslaved mistress of
Susanna’s white father, and the mothers of her siblings, never obtained.
And even if Susanna herself could not “pass” into white society, her unborn
child might. 110
Her persistence and determination in lobbying Cabaniss for her own
interests demonstrated Susanna’s strength of character, despite her young
age. Still, anxiety and overwork could not have helped her chronic tuberculosis,
and she found her home life unbearable. While Susanna mentioned
her dissatisfaction at life with Wesley in each of the nine letters she
108 Ibid.
109 Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,”
568.
110 A brief mention of Wesley Townsend’s son Wesley Jr. is called for here: in the 1910
national census, census takers listed Wesley Jr.’s race as “White”—a testament to the
reliance of determining “race” on perception alone, and the porous nature of what had, by
that time, become an ideologically impassable color line.
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wrote to Cabaniss between January 1866 and June 1868, the tone of her
4 June 1868 letter was the most desperate yet. In this missive, she strayed
from the formula of her earlier, and her siblings’ usual, correspondence:
pleasantries, inquiries of health, and carefully-worded requests for money.
Susanna began by noting that she wrote in haste and thereafter seemed to
compose on the spot, repeating herself multiple times and pleading with
heartrending emotion.
Informing him that she had been proposed to, Susanna begged Cabaniss
for money to go with her fiancé to Kansas where the other Townsends
lived. mr cabaniss i never would get done talking about it bother you
no more no no take me away from here, 111 she wrote. And again: please
write as soon as you read this and let me know i want to go i want to g—
Here Susanna ended mid-sentence, as though Wesley’s shadow had fallen
across the letter momentarily, compelling her to stop, to turn the paper
over and hide what she had written. On the next page, Susanna continued
her entreaty with desperation: uncle wesley treats me like i was a dog or
some kind of and animal Mr Cabaniss let me go let me go for my sake let
me go to Kansas. 112
Let me go let me go let me go—the way Susanna structured her letter
appears organic, but even so, this was a woman who knew her audience.
After the war, the Townsend children inundated Huntsville attorney S. D.
Cabaniss with complaints against Wesley: by 1868, Cabaniss had little
reason to doubt Susanna when she claimed ill treatment. 113 At the same
time, Susanna deliberately played on Cabaniss’s perception of himself—
a Southern businessman bound by duty and gentlemanly honor to protect
Samuel Townsend’s children. Calling him a friend when all others
have forsaken me Susanna wrote: mr cabaniss you have favored me like a
gentleman and i think you will this time once again. 114 The Huntsville attorney,
with the money from her father’s estate, could rescue a desperate
fifteen-year-old girl from the grip of unscrupulous relatives—by providing
her with the means to marry another hero, the twenty-year-old white
man who had proposed to her. Him too she described as a gentleman and
her protector. Her choices in the construction of this letter exemplify why
researchers must rigorously examine all sources, even a letter “in her own
words”; she must interrogate the writer’s motivation and audience.
111 Susanna Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letter dated June 4, 1868.
112 Ibid.
113 Elvira Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letters dated January 1860 to November 1866.
114 Susanna Townsend to S. D. Cabaniss, letter dated June 4, 1868.

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
But whether or not Susanna felt love or affection for the nicest young
man i ever did see, she certainly felt vulnerable. 115 Years of pursuing independence
and aspiring to self-sufficiency had left Susanna in a position of
complete dependence on S. D. Cabaniss taking pen in hand and replying,
on the 10 write with haste on the tenth i want and answer if you please. 116
She signed her letter in a large, scrawling hand that appears on no other
letter:
No more but remain yours with respect S Townsend
Susanna forever but not the Townsend 117
Here, Susanna’s fascinating closing highlights her intention to break
from—or even entirely disown—her extended family. On the most basic
level, Susanna may simply mean that the next time she writes she will
have a new name, that of her intended husband. But the break with her
family may extend deeper. She reasserts her personal, individual identity
with “Susanna forever”; but at the same time, the young woman disassociates
herself from the larger family by rejecting her surname, Townsend.
We know that Cabaniss did not send money on the tenth. For once, it
is harder to imagine what would have happened next. In July 1868, Wesley’s
wife Adelaide sent the Huntsville lawyer a letter dictated by Wesley,
updating him on Susanna’s condition. “Mr Cabaniss you wanted to know
something about Susanna. i will tell you the truth,” he began, indicating
that Cabaniss did write—only, this time, not directly to Susanna. 118 He
continued with the story: “she is now in a delicate situation by some man
and she will not tell the Father of the Child … and Susanna she is very
saucy to me and she wont mind me and i have to [endure] all her impudence
and keep her and do the best that i can to keep her from being expose
from world while she is in this condition.” 119 Wesley’s description of
the situation recalls Thomas’s criticisms of Parthenia, if put somewhat less
eloquently. Susanna brought shame on herself and the family, in Wesley’s
mind. Susanna had a role now, the bad girl—there was room enough in
the Townsend family for two. But there is compassion in the letter too,
a feeling Thomas never conveyed in his epistles to Cabaniss: “Susan has
grown up to be a woman and she has acted wrong,” Wesley and Adelaide
wrote. 120 Susanna was the baby of the family no longer. Ironically, it was
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Wesley Townsend to S.D. Cabaniss, letter dated 14 July 1868.
119 Ibid.
120 Ibid.
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in her most vulnerable and dependent state that her guardians recognized
that she was an independent adult, able to make her own choices in life.
Susanna did not escape Wesley’s household—nor could she escape
the uncertainty of her life as a mixed-race planter’s daughter by “passing”
across the color line. Knowing this, interpreting what freedom meant for a
woman such as Susanna grows more difficult—is freedom so narrowly defined
as to be emancipation from legal bondage, and nothing more? What
does it mean for a person to be “free” when class and racial status keep
her in a position of degradation? 121 Attempting to answer these questions
requires self-conscious analysis about how we use the archive to read a
life.
*
I cannot know what Susanna Townsend would think of someone who
never saw, spoke with, or knew her attempting to draw lessons and “meaning”
from her life. Perhaps she would be insulted—as though it were not
meaning enough that she lived it. If there is a grand theme to draw from
a narrative of her experiences, it comes too late for Susanna to benefit.
Still, the tragedy sits too heavy and we long for redemption—for us, or
her, or both. 122 Is it useful, then, to note that Susanna was back in school
when she died? That her “last” letter and her “last” hope were her last only
by chance before she succumbed to a long-term illness? That she did not
die because a purposeful narrative arc had closed, Susanna having run
out of hopes for an independent life? In fiction, Susanna’s choices would
symbolize something poignant and easily pinpointed. In history, Susanna
exercised her freedom while she lived because she lived, and perhaps the
lesson to draw from that is a methodological one—that the greater purpose
of telling stories such as Susanna’s may be nothing more than telling
them, reasserting through them the existence of a woman named Susanna
Townsend despite the problems of the archive.
A reconstruction and examination of this life (1853-1869) that spanned
the Civil War, slavery and freedom, as well as rural antebellum Alabama
and urban Reconstruction-era Ohio provides insight into meanings of
freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency in the post-emancipation mo-
121 Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,”
566.
122 Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, Vol. 26, (June 2008).

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ment—as well as revealing interactions of gender, race, and power in the
creation of the archive. Creating these narratives contributes to our wider
understanding of life for enslaved and free African-American women in
the mid-19th century, even those who have been hidden or ignored in the
archive. Susanna Townsend was one of those women. By analyzing her
letters and making them accessible to scholars, we bring her name, identity,
and voice back into the historical dialogue. In the process of broadening
that dialogue, we make room for new stories of women who existed on the
periphery of their own societies and also that of modern historiography.
174