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

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The University of Alabama McNair Journal 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 Letters from a Planter’s Daughter 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).
Page 1 and 2: Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
Page 3 and 4: Susanna Townsend was a former slave
Page 5 and 6: The pathos of her 4 June 1868 lette
Page 7 and 8: Even what the archive reveals, rath
Page 9 and 10: this wealth—including two product
Page 11: his children, it was apparent from
Page 15 and 16: Susanna’s mother Celia was gone
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