by Rachel May
Hilton entreats his brother to consider opening a grocery with him, as their father has done back in Providence; with their connections in the North, they could run a “snug store” with their “Father’s judgment purchasing goods.” He’ll take advantage of his family’s experience and connections between north and south to help make his living. As he thinks about his future, he worries that he’s getting too old to be on the brink of indecision for too long.
There is one thing to be considered and that is that I am getting old, and that it is quite time I was settled in some permanent business, for changes you know are bad, and I am now of an age to be permanently settled, but I am not as well situated now as when I was 20 years old then I was doing a large business, now I am doing but little.
Franklin, the grandnephew making notes on this collection in the 1950s, writes that at this point, poor harried Hilton is twenty-four. He hardly seems old through my twenty-first-century eyes—after all, millennials often live at home into their late twenties and thirties and can remain on their parents’ health insurance until they’re twenty-six. But, of course, in the 1830s, Hilton’s peers have been in established careers for several years, embarking on new marriages, and bearing children. He’s four years older than his now-married sister Susan. Maybe he is experiencing what we’d call today a “quarter-life crisis.”
Hilton is the more conservative, and, says Franklin, gentler, of the brothers. Winthrop is wilder, a ladies’ man, always on the lookout for “female acquaintances.” He breaks the heart of a girl named Phrania, one of Susan’s friends in Providence. Susan writes that he had treated her poorly. Phrania seemed to expect a proposal from Winthrop, and he didn’t offer one. This wasn’t just a matter of the heart. If Phrania spent a great deal of time with Winthrop, if she took risks in spending time with him, her reputation might have suffered, affecting her future marriage prospects. For a woman of her time and class, marriage was her only potential livelihood; a middle-class woman like Susan and her sisters and friends could not have gone to work in the factories.
This division between the classes in the factories persists even into my own lifetime; when I asked a family member if my grandmother’s lung disease might have been from working in one of the textile factories in Salem, Massachusetts, she said our grandmother wasn’t of that class. My father and aunt, who grew up in nearby Lawrence, another industrial town, tell me stories of their summers spent working in factories—one that made lockers and another that made sneakers. My aunt spent a summer lacing shoes, and my father worked with the sheet metal that became those sorts of lockers we’d slam open and closed in our high-school hallways.
Winthrop and Hilton emphasize over and over the value of education when writing to Susan. The girls were to become educated in case they needed to support themselves, but the education—piano, sewing, languages—would also help them become ladies, find a good husband, and keep house once they were settled.
While Hilton seems to agonize over each of his decisions, Winthrop is a bit reckless, and not just with his female acquaintances. Once, while out shooting pheasants, he shoots himself in the hand, and his brother teases that it was because he was upset about a lady. Winthrop’s sense of daring, however, comes to “pay off” in business, as he’s more willing to take risks and made large profits by taking advantage of enslaved people’s labor.
Meanwhile, young Hasell is also trying to find his way back in his hometown as he finishes his medical degree. He and Susan are newly married and living with Hilton and his brother, Charles, and Charles’s family, until they can “go to housekeeping” on their own, after medical school. Hilton writes:
You wish to know of Hasell’s going in the country and ask what will become of his school and his profession. Charles [Hasell’s brother] has taken the school on his own account and for the present gives Hasell a certain sum to assist him. He took it before Hasell thought of going to the country that H. might have an opportunity of getting his profession. He will take his medical degree one year from this time. One reason for his going in the country is that he may have a place to practice for you know he can be a Planter and practice his profession at the same time. He is now waiting to hear from the person who owns it, and he will probably know in a week if he can get it or not. I think it will be a very good move as the place is said to be very healthy one, and should he not have practice, he will have his plantation to support him. But if he settles in this city he would stand a chance to starve the first five years, for the place is now literally crowded with young doctors and it would take him at least five years to get any practice.
Hasell is worried about “getting practice” in the city, but he doesn’t end up buying the plantation. Instead, he and Susan settle on Sullivan’s Island for the summer months, when diseases ran rampant in the city. This is a good solution to the problem of competition from other doctors in Charleston, as well. Since the professionalization of medical practice after the Revolutionary War, and the founding of the medical college in Charleston, many men had decided that this was the career for them. On the island, Hasell has less competition and, as the island was only for the wealthy, more clients who are able to pay; in addition, the family is safe from mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria, yellow fever, and what they called “bilious fever,” which was any fever they didn’t know how to categorize otherwise. They knew that the breezier, cooler island wasn’t susceptible to diseases, but they didn’t know why—that it was mosquitoes that carried yellow fever and malaria. They only knew that the “close” city quarters in the summer months spread disease, and that they were safe to return after the first frost. Of course, we know now that the frost is what killed the mosquitoes.
Susan and Hasell spend the summers of 1834, ’35, and ’36 on “the Island,” as they call it. Winthrop, who has decided that Columbia is too quiet a city socially, joins his family in Charleston in 1834. He writes:
We have been upon the Island ever since we landed until the day before yesterday when we moved up here to a house in the center of [Charleston]. Hasell has been very much plagued to get [rent] a house [in the city]. He came up to the city 5 or 6 times before he found the one we now occupy. I will give you an idea what sort of a house it is—a wodden [sic] 3 story house—2 rooms in front, making 6 good upright ones and 2 garretts, besides a kitchen and several rooms attached to it for sleeping rooms for the slaves, a stable and a small yard. The rent is $250 per annum.
Charles and his wife, Mrs. Thorne and her children, Hilton and myself board with Hasell. Hasell nor Charles were able to find a small house to suit them so they concluded to come under the present arrangement [of sharing]. There were several small houses that they looked at but not of them were less than $300 per annum, therefore they think themselves fortunate in obtaining the house we occupy. To be sure it would have been much pleasanter if we had been able to live separate, but as it is for economy’s sake we must try to put up with it.
Susan and Hasell were very much disappointed in not seeing one of you here with us. The baby has grown very much since he left Providence, he is now a great boy. He begins to walk. I do wish you could see him, he is one of the best boys I ever saw.
Hasell has 2 girls, an old woman who cooks, a boy about 6 years old, and a girl about 3 years old to do the work. We breakfast about 8 o’clock, dine at 2, and have tea about 6 ½ o’clock. Things go on more regularly than they used to when Charles kept house.
The baby is little Hasell. “He is now a great boy. He begins to walk. . . . he is one of the best boys I ever saw.”
The family continues to delight in their first nearby nephew; Abby, Susan’s sister, has children already but lives far away in New York. Meanwhile, Winthrop agrees with Susan that Charles and his wife are inferior housekeepers, noting that with Susan and Hasell in charge, things “go on more smoothly.” Of course, this is thanks to Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and their children, who keep the place running for the family. “2 girls, an old woman who cooks, a boy about 6 years
old, and a girl about 3 years old to do the work.” What sort of work could a six-year-old and a three-year-old do? I try to imagine my friend’s three-year-old daughter, her wild energy, her inability to sit still. What kind of work could she do?
Enslaved children followed their mothers throughout the day, so were taught to do the work their mothers knew—if cooking, the children learned to cook, if sewing, the child learned to sew, if basket-weaving, the child would have begun to weave as a toddler. They’d have carried dishes, stirred pots on a hot fire, swept the floors, cut vegetables, and stuffed quilts with cotton batting. On the plantations, children were taught to shoo flies from their napping owners, help with chores like sweeping, and pick cotton alongside their parents. Surely you’ve seen those photographs of toddlers trailing cotton bags behind them in the fields, their tiny hands grasping a boll that they’d plucked from that prickly plant. “The slave narratives indicate that few slaves escaped work in childhood: 48 percent of those who discussed the subject began working before age seven, 84 percent before age eleven, and only seven percent reported that no work occurred before age fourteen.” Scholar Cynthia M. Kennedy argues that enslaved mothers really had three jobs: the work of taking care of the masters, the work of taking care of her children, and the work of teaching her children the work of being a slave.
Juba would have been cutting the vegetables and hauling water for the soups and stews and buying meat from the butcher. Minerva would have made the beds, stripping them on wash days, scrubbed the stairs of the dust that constantly blew in from the dirt road, dressed and undressed Susan. Minerva’s daughter Cecilia would have followed her around the house, learning what her mother did, becoming indoctrinated in the world of enslaved labor, much to the pleasure of the Crouches, certainly, who knew that teaching the little girl would only increase her value. But she was also learning the ways that her mother resisted and declared her autonomy, in the subtlest motions of her head, the way she feigned illness when she no longer wanted to mop up Hasell’s mess or clean his medical equipment, the scraps of fabric she slipped into her pockets to save for her own quilts, working on them in those rooms off the kitchen at night.
The machines clack louder and louder and the New England mill girls—in the beginning, they were local women, white women, from the farms—move their hands quickly to slip the spindles onto the machines, thread the shuttles, clear a tangle. All the while, they’re dreaming of dinnertime at the boardinghouse with their friends, of their now-faraway home on the farm—a mother, a father, brothers and sisters who worked all day in the fields while now she works in the factory. This is her chance at a good living, a job of her own with wages paid in her name alone. She sends most of it home, of course, but it is hers to reap.
She learns to let the sound of the machines wash over her, to let it become a drone like the swarms of flies that bother the cows in the milking shed in the summertime. She remembers kneeling beside their udders, pulling at each teat, as she now reloads a spindle, checks to see the warp threads haven’t broken on her machine. She knows all of the machine’s parts and functions. She takes pride in this new knowledge. The drive belts run from the ceiling to the machine, powering it with the river’s water rushing beside the mill, a miracle of diversion.
A loom in the American Textile History Museum and a 500 lb. bale of cotton as seen at Slater Mill in Rhode Island.
This is the mill where the cloth in the quilt is spun, from those great bales of cotton—about three hundred and seventy pounds—that are bound down South. They’re picked by enslaved people on plantations around Charleston, then loaded onto wagons that bring them to that port, where Winthrop buys them and loads them—forces the enslaved people to load them—onto the ships that will take them north, to Slater Mill, in his and Susan’s hometown, or to the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts.
The cotton is carded—brushed, essentially, with tough-toothed combs so that all the fibers run in the same direction, to be more smoothly spun into thread. The thread is wound onto spools or bobbins. The loom is warped with yarns that will go up and down while the shuttles are loaded with weft yarns, back and forth. The warp threads are pulled apart by harnesses, creating a sort of tunnel, or shed, through which the shuttle passes, making the weft.
You probably made weavings like this as a child, on a very small loom. You might have used fat, colorful yarn, or stretchy cords, or even elastic loops. It was fun then, remember, to make a pot holder? I was given one of these by a friend’s child. It hangs on my stove in orange and yellow, too small to really use, though I tried. She was proud of her weaving. She was nine when she made it. In 1835, in the years to come, girls her age would take over at these looms; she’d be useful for her small fingers, which could get into the machine’s innards more easily, and her small body, which could duck under the looms to free a thread too far away for an adult woman to reach.
For all the dangers and risks inherent in the new textile factory jobs, they were still a privilege granted only to whites. Christy Clark-Pujara notes that this was a freedom to which people of color weren’t granted access because “white [textile factory] employers preferred to hire whites and white workers often refused to work alongside black people.” While osnaburg, or “negro-cloth” factories in South County, Rhode Island, and elsewhere in New England, “help[ed] perpetuate slavery in the south,” free people of color were being discriminated against as they sought work in the Industrial Revolution that allowed all whites, even the lower classes, to profit. “In the North, industrial work was the purview of whites; it was associated with free labor, and even though most blacks in the antebellum North were free their race marked them as slavelike.” People of color were supposedly “free,” Clark-Pujara writes, but they weren’t granted rights and citizenship, and were thus conscripted to a life of poverty and “disenfranchisement.”
In 1835, the Crouches go to the island in May and don’t return to the city until November 7, having waited for the first frost. Susan writes that by the time they departed, the island was deserted, with the houses boarded up for winter. She leaves Juba and her children behind there, perhaps to finish packing up the house and preparing it for the off-season. Susan writes:
Young girls and boys worked at the mills alongside the women.
We are staying at Charles’ as the house we intend to occupy is not vacant yet and we were obliged to come up as lectures commence next Monday. We left all our furniture on the Island, only brought our bedding and clothes. We have not had a frost yet and the planters are afraid to move into the country. But the house will be ready for us frost or not in about 10 days or less. We left Juba and her two children on the island and brought Jimmy up with us. I should rather have staid [sic] on the island until the house was ready if I had had any one to stay with me.
Jimmy was the old man who was “let,” or rented, “with the house” on Sullivan’s Island. Like many enslaved people in Charleston, he was rented out by his owners so they could continue to profit from their “investments.” In explaining this to me, someone likens it to buying blue-chip stocks today; they’re a reliable investment that will keep yielding dividends. It’s an apt and sickening comparison.
By this time, 1835, Hasell is a busy practicing physician whose plan to summer on the island has worked—he now has so much business that Susan is often left alone, to her displeasure. She becomes lonely and constantly tries to persuade her sister Eliza to come down to Charleston to stay with her, promising that the island is very “pleasant” and that it will improve her health; she should see how well Hilton looks now, she writes. “Eliza [sister-in-law] spent last week with me. It is so much cooler [on the Island] than the city that they enjoy a week on the Island very much. I think it is pleasanter here of anything at the North. Every day we have a delightful sea breeze . . . I think of you all very often and wish I could go home as easily as Abby can.” Three months later, further along in her pregnancy with her second baby and anticipating even more isolation with her last t
rimester confinement back in the city, she writes: “I shall feel the want of someone this winter very much, as I expect to be confined about the first of February and I shall be quite lonely. Hasell cannot be at home much as he is Demonstrator at the Medical College and therefore if one of you can come I shall feel much better satisfied.” Hasell will now teach at the college where he earned his degree. Susan hopes that either Emily or Eliza Williams will come stay with her when she’s alone.
Their sister Abby, married and living in rural upstate New York, was lonely as well. Susan’s friend wrote: “Abby complained feeling very lonesome, and well she may for R. boarded very near to her and they were almost inseparable. In her last letter she says, ‘I may imagine her in a land of mostly strangers to her, and with only one female friend with whom to be intimate and have that one taken away.’ I may then know how lonesome she is.” Abby was ten years older than Susan, and married Elita Stickland Elles, a printer, in 1828, when she was twenty-five (incidentally, Elita would go into business making “cambric” cases, cotton-covered books, among other things, tying him into the family cotton connection). Together, they had six children who survived and several more who did not. She suffered with the loss of her children and often wrote to Susan about it, often but not always reflecting the stoicism that women of her day were trained to portray in the face of sorrow: “Women of the master class did not merely discuss and correspond about their ongoing tragedies, they also cultivated a stoic, religious resignation to suffering. . . . They shared their sufferings, confessed the depths of their disquiet and grief, looked to each other for strength . . . and lauded one another for properly resigning themselves to a loved one’s death.”