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

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Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
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.