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

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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Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
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.