An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  Eliza, Minerva, and Juba, would have been well aware that enslaved women more often died in childbirth than white women, and that enslaved babies died at higher rates than free brown and white babies. They would have known ample suffering, too, and, if they were friends with one another in those years in which they were together in the Crouch house (they might have been more likely to be friends, even perhaps family, if they’d been together for years in North Carolina), they would have shared their grief and held each other up through sorrow.

  Susan’s sister Eliza Williams, to whom Susan and Hilton and Winthrop wrote, back in Providence, was nine years older than Susan but had the “freedom” of mobility—traveling to keep house with Susan, if she so chose or if her parents decided they couldn’t support her—because she was single, a widow living back home with her parents. It wasn’t entirely freedom, since she was reliant on her parents or a married sibling to take her in and support her; a woman’s fate was almost always reliant upon a man’s, but of course, she wasn’t under anything like the constraints that Eliza, Minerva, and Juba faced. After watching her older sister Abby and younger sister Susan marry and move away, Eliza Williams must have been resigned to living with her parents and helping tend to their boarders. She’d have worked hard in the house, alongside her mother, washing sheets and preparing meals for the people who came through their house. But then, in 1834, at the quite elderly age of thirty, she, too was married, and set off on what might have been a hopeful new life with her husband. It isn’t clear whether she was happy with the match or not, as there aren’t any letters between her and her sisters from this time, and none of her letters to her siblings down South have been preserved (or at least, I haven’t found them yet). However, she was considered lucky to be married at that age, as everyone seemed to have given up hope of her prospects by that time.

  After all that waiting, and all that hope for her new life, Eliza Williams’ marriage ended within weeks, with the tragedy of sickness.

  Eliza has been married and with short space of two months from the day she left here, she returned a widow. Her prospects have suddenly been blighted, it is a dreadful shock to her. I have not seen her since she returned. She does not feel like seeing any but the family. Her husband had the smallpox, was in a most shocking situation before he died. I should leave for Winthrop to tell you about them.

  Smallpox was a painful, ugly disease that caused a high fever and covered its victims in erupting pustules. The “most shocking situation” her husband was in “before he died” was the result of the fast course the disease took. Eliza Williams must have cared for him, watched him become disfigured and riling in pain and the delusions of a high fever—alternately shivering and sweating—until he passed away. She was lucky not to have caught it herself, since it was highly contagious. She returned home with her “prospects blighted,” meaning that at this old age, the rare luck of marriage would surely not come again.

  Now, a year later, Susan hopes Eliza Williams will come visit her in Charleston but understands that she has to stay home to help Emily prepare for her wedding. How bittersweet that must have been for Eliza Williams, who had, just a year earlier, prepared for her own wedding. Her younger sister Emily probably helped dress her and do her hair that day. She’d part her hair in the middle and braid it into two long plaits that she wound up at the sides of her head: “The hind hair is dressed very low, the front platted on each side, and the ends brought under a gold enamelled comb at the back of the head,” an article in a lady's monthly described the ’do of the day that accompanied a model evening gown of 1834. Eliza and Emily Williams weren’t wealthy, but their middle-class status allowed them access to the cloth, shoes, and hats that their father bought for them, as well as monthly magazines like Godey’s, on which all white middle- and upper-class women then relied for the latest in fashion advice, food preparation, and housekeeping (both of which were gaining more respect with the Victorian era), quilt patterns, marriage, and the day’s fiction. Eliza Williams, Susan, and Emily kept up with the day’s fashions. In the same letter in which she wishes her sisters Eliza or Emily could visit Charleston, Susan writes:

  I am much obliged to you for having my silk dress cut for me as it will help me a good deal but I do not like to have you pay for the whole of it. I shall not need it this winter as I have a good black silk which I shall wear whenever I go out. I think they will dress here very much as with you this winter. Calicos will be worn very much and plaid silks.

  Susan wants to be part of the circle of society women in Charleston. She said, in 1833, when she wrote for her friend Sarah to make something from one of Winthrop’s shirts from her wedding, that this is what women in Charleston do to commemorate the occasion, and that “these things are made such secrets of,” more so than in Rhode Island. She’s making a hexagon quilt that was commonly made by Charleston ladies in 1835, and she slips into the ownership of enslaved people. Already a part of the master class, she longs to be accepted by Charleston women. She was probably ostracized by them, a Charleston woman tells me when I talk about this project. The community is closed, and hard to understand unless you grow up in it; it was nothing like Providence. When I tell this woman about my attempts to contact the living white family members in Charleston, to try to find those missing letters, she says, “Of course they didn’t want to talk to you! You’re an outsider. And you sound like—” I interrupted her, knowing what she was about to say, “—like a Yankee,” I say, laughing. “I know.”

  The divisions remain.

  To help Susan in her mission to acclimate, to find acceptance, she requests things that are fashionable, using her connections in the industrial North to get those things that would be more expensive in agrarian Charleston, where finished products were shipped in from England or New England. This was a source of tension that led to conflicts between the North and South, and prompted the secessionism that was avoided until the 1860s. Winthrop would write home about his frustration with the North as the political conflict unfolded.

  This is one of the dresses Susan likely wore in the 1830s. She was a talented sewer and a small woman; another of her dresses is approximately 26 inches at the bust and 22 inches at the waist. This dress was donated without its sleeves and has since been restored; we surmise that Franklin cut off the sleeves to include the fabric in one of the notebooks. The same fabric is also included in the quilt tops.

  Susan makes sure to get her cloak fitted just right, measured just a bit shorter than what her sister would require, as she must be a bit shorter than her. A woman she knows near their home in Providence will cut the pattern for her, but Susan is careful to note that she’d like her to come to the house to cut and sew the cloak, rather than taking it to her own house to work on it—presumably because her sisters can better oversee the production of it in their house.

  I am sorry to trouble you to get as many things for me as you have so much to do. We have written for a carpet and several other things. Eliza, if you come do not leave your woolen stockings at home as you will find them comfortable. The winters here are much colder than they formerly were. I should like a couple pairs of merino or worsted stockings but I am almost afraid to write for them as we have written for so many things. But woolen stockings are much dearer here than with you. I do not want you to trouble yourselves to make any preserves for me as we can do with out them and you have so much to do. I do wish you could give up keeping boarders. It is such a laborious way of getting a living. You do not take any comfort of your lives. I shall feel very glad to hear that you can live otherwise.

  Susan’s very concerned about that cloak, as it comes up again in another letter, with more instructions to her sisters on how to have it made, and then at last in December 1835, she writes to say it’s arrived.

  My cloak came safe without the least injury. I think it very handsome, very cheap, It fits me very well indeed. I could not have got it here under thirty dollars. I am very well satisfied with it. I think it a beautifu
l color.

  She also thanks her family for the preserves and apples they sent down; they often sent apples to Winthrop and Hilton, too, since there weren’t any to be found that they thought were as good as those in New England. These were the benefits of their family connections in the North.

  The marmalade and jelly were in good order but the quince had fermented a little. We are much obliged for all the preserves. I was sorry you had sent so much as I know you all have so much to do. I think the juice makes as good a preserve as there is. I think the marmalade is as good as any I have ever eaten. I shall be very choice of it as it keeps so well. The apples are very good . . . I picked them over and did not get a half a peck that were specked. We have enjoyed eating them very much. I found a few sweet apples among them which I cooked for tea. They reminded us of home. For the old clothes I am much indebted to you. They will be of service to me. I am astonished to perceive that Sarah has grown so much. I made a nice frock for Hasell out of the plaid dress and have got enough to make another which I shall do as soon as I have time.

  Susan often requests things of her family and says she’ll send money home, or that she’ll send figs, cordial, and other goods to them in exchange. Here, she’s gotten her sister’s outgrown clothes to make clothes for Little Hasell; she used Sarah’s dress to make a “frock” for Little Hasell, and the clothes give her a sense of her sister’s growth—another connection to home across the thousand miles that are bridged only with the newspapers and these letters and other goods that take days or weeks to arrive.

  Susan is thrifty—middle class, not elite—but she says when they move into the city house that it was the dirtiest she’s ever seen and “had it cleaned from top to bottom,” meaning, this was the work she assigned to Minerva, Eliza, and Juba and their children. At the same time, she’s trying to save money by getting this used cloth from her family; maybe the scraps from her sister’s clothes that remained after she finished Little Hasell’s clothes became part of the quilt. She mentions in this letter that they’re burning coal instead of wood, which is “very high” this winter, and she fears they’ll have a “sorry” Christmas because food (butter and eggs) are so expensive (for Thanksgiving, they ate some of the goods her parents sent down). She didn’t have to make butter like her mother and grandmother did in the colonial era, as now they have the means to buy it. She asks her family to send a firkin of sweet butter if they can get some for less than twenty-two cents; it’s thirty-seven and a half in Charleston. And always, she emphasizes how much she misses the family, and longs to hear from them more frequently—and, even more, for them to visit her. One letter arrived in December, though it was dated September; Susan writes that she doesn’t know where it was in the interim. She misses home.

  I wish you could see how comfortably we are situated Eliza if you went to Andover you must have had a cold journey as I see by the papers that it is very cold at the north. It has not been very cold here. A fortnight ago Sunday I went to Church and wore a muslin dress and thin cape on my neck and I found a fan very comfortable. Mrs. Carpenter mentioned that the same day they had a snowstorm in New York. Mrs. Carpenter called to see me last week. She left town the next morning for Columbia. I was very glad to see her indeed. I was glad to hear from her that Emily is growing so fleshy and how I wish I could see you all. I tried to persuade Mrs. Carpenter to stay and spend the day with me but she said she could not. I intended to call and see her in the evening but it rained.

  The Carpenters are from Providence, and always bring news of the North with them. Mrs. Carpenter must have been good company for Susan, because she wishes she’d stay longer. In these letters, there’s news of the family, and, of course, always a bit of gossip, too—who’s married to whom back in Providence, who’s had a child, what’s wrong with so-and-so’s child rearing or ugly husband. In this December letter, she writes that Mrs. Thorne, who has been living with the Crouches, has just lost her husband. Apparently, it was no great loss, because they’d already been separated and as Susan says, “I do not think there was a person that was sorry he was dead. It was a great relief to Mrs. Thorne. I am glad on her account and the children for he was a great mortification to them.” He didn’t drink but was doing something that embarrassed his family, and died of a sudden “fit” in the street. In May of the following year, Hilton writes that Mrs. Thorne will be traveling to New England and will meet his family: “Mrs. Thorne intends visiting the North. She will leave for the North the first of June and will visit Providence in the course of the summer. You will be much pleased with her and I hope you will make her visit pleasant and agreeable to her.” Hilton and Mrs. Thorne would soon marry, and he’d take charge of her two children, one of whom, it would become apparent, had epilepsy.

  At other times, Susan is critical of her brother-in-law, Charles, and his wife, Eliza Crouch. Here, she talks about their daughter Harriet and the new baby.

  [Little Hasell] has had very few clothes in comparison with Harriet Crouch. I do think she is the crossest child I ever saw in my life. The baby does not cry half as much it is a very quiet child but they are spoiling it with indulgence. They walk about with it all the time. I never saw people humor children more than they do.

  Hasell is no trouble at all. He takes care of himself. He goes to bed by sunset. He lays down and goes to sleep without any trouble. He does not drink tea, just takes a piece of bread. Do write soon as I am anxious to hear from you.

  Eliza Crouch carries the baby, Harriet, around too much, “indulging her,” and thinks she’s a very cross baby. She and Winthrop don’t like Hasell’s brother; Winthrop once called Charles and Eliza Crouch “the most disagreeable couple I ever saw.” They don’t get along, and Winthrop would later call them lazy. Susan notes that Eliza and Charles call the baby by different names for several months because they can’t agree on one.

  I wish you could see little Hasell. He is as full of mischief as he can live. Eliza’s baby is a much more quiet child than Harriet ever was. It appears to me that Harriet [their firstborn] is more troublesome than the baby. She cries more than the baby does. It appears that they have changed the baby’s name again. They call it Julia but I do not know that that is the child’s name. What pleases Eliza does not please Charles.

  In spite of her misgivings, Susan sounds grateful for Eliza Crouch’s company when she visits her on the island.

  Susan repeatedly wishes that her parents and sisters didn’t have to work so hard, saying in another letter that she feels badly that they have to work so hard while she has it so easy. She wishes her sisters could come live with her so that they, too, could benefit from the ease that enslaved people’s labor creates for her in the household. She asks her mother and sister Eliza to come during the winter of 1835, when she’s anticipating her pregnancy confinement as well as Hasell’s long hours as a “demonstrator” at the college. But when Winthrop chimes in on this issue, he agrees that their parents should quit taking in boarders and that Eliza Williams could relieve herself of the worry of being a burden on her parents by coming to live with Susan. However, he doesn’t agree with Susan that their mother should come south. He argues that she’d be dissatisfied with Juba’s cooking.

  You speak of breaking up the house and living by yourselves. I think it a very good plan, for I should think Father could get along with what he can earn and the house rent. You need not be any expense to him for Susan would be glad to have you with her.

  As to mother’s plan of coming out South, I know it would hardly be the thing for her. She never could eat after the negroes’ cooking and it would not answer to do otherwise. I despise such cooking as I see every day. I am astonished sometimes to see the boarders put up with it. Even the most simple things, for instance the potatoes are not half cooked; all the negroes care for is a good mess of cabbage and bacon the biggest and fattest they can get it is the height of their ambition. As for bread, there is nothing but corn bread that is fit to eat and that only at dinnertime, for when they make it for
breakfast they always shorten it too much with hogs’ lard, sometimes strong enough to cut your throat. I have told them several times to save some from dinner to last me at the rest of my meals but this is always forgotten.

  At this time, Winthrop is living in Columbia while working as a clerk in Mr. Ewart’s store and boarding with a woman in town. He’s being served by enslaved people who probably make his food, wash his clothes, and clean and stock the store. Mr. Ewart has shipped from the plantations bales of cotton that are bought from the plantation owners and then sold to traders in Charleston who ship them north, or to Liverpool, and sell them to the textile mills.

  This system was the result of what Sven Beckert describes as the “feverish rate of growth” of the “world’s mechanized cotton industry,” noting that “in 1810, there were 269 cotton establishments in the United States with a total of 87,000 spindles,” and just fifty years later, “in 1860, there would be 5 million spindles, making cotton textiles the United States’ most important manufacturing industry in terms of capital invested, workers employed, and net value of its product.” The founders of the mills in Lowell and Waltham, Massachusetts, had, “by 1823, . . . creat[ed] the largest integrated mills anywhere in the world.” Part of the work of those mills was to produce “negro cloth.” The owners were implicated in US enslavement not only in what they produced at the mills, but also in their trade; they “all had ties to the slave trade, the West Indian provision trade, and the trade in agricultural commodities grown by slaves. The ‘lords of the lash’ and the ‘lords of the loom’ were, yet again, tightly linked.” The “cotton industrialists” were connected to the trade in which Jason Williams, Susan’s father, as well as Winthrop and Hilton, were so intricately entangled, though, of course, the Crouch-Williams families’ investments and profits were much more modest than the cotton mill owners who had invested more than 400,000 dollars in the Waltham mills. Still, Jason Williams’ mercantile trade up and down the coast brought goods from the West Indies north and vice versa, and his last ship, destined for the West Indies, was seized in the US embargo of 1807 that propelled the US cotton industry forward as it blocked entry of British textiles to the States. Winthrop, like Hilton, had moved south to proft from the growing cotton trade and the chance to export raw goods north and abroad for production.