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

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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