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

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Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
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.