William Francis Allen - A yankee scholar in coastal South Carolina : William Francis Allens Civil War journals

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A Yankee Scholar in
Coastal South Carolina

A Yankee Scholar in
Coastal South Carolina

William Francis Allens Civil War Journals

Edited by James Robert Hester

2015 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-61117-496-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-497-7 (ebook)

Front cover illustration courtesy of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives

Contents

Illustrations

Map of the South Carolina Sea Islands

Port Royal Map and Key

Professor William Allen, University of Wisconsin

William Allen and Family at Home

Preface

At 9:45 A.M., November 5, 1863, aboard the steamer Arago somewhere off Marylands eastern shore, New Englander William Francis Allen set pen to paper, beginning the first of three journals that would cover his time in the South. Allen, his wife, Mary, and her cousin Caty Noyes were en route to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, to teach 150 contraband slaves from three plantations. These freedmen were part of approximately ten thousand who had been left behind on the Sea Islands after their masters fled in the wake of the Battle of Port Royal two years before. Allen, who was from the Boston area, spent eight months (November 1863July 1864) as a teacher on St. Helena, and, after the Civil War, he spent three months (AprilJuly 1865) as acting superintendent of schools in Charleston. Between those assignments, he served five months (September 1864February 1865) at Helena, Arkansas, as an agent of the Red Cross-like Western Sanitary Commission and superintendent of the freedmens and refugees schools.

Allen is best known today as the lead editor of the 1867 anthology Slave Songs of the United States. During the course of my research, I accumulated Allens southern journals, his 186467 diaries, and a number of personal letters he wrote to family members in 186567. I was fortunate to have Dr. Lee Ann Caldwell, director of the Center for the Study of Georgia History at Georgia Regents University, as principal reader of my research paper. Dr. Caldwell continued to provide advice and encouragement as I prepared transcriptions of Allens journals and diaries, which eventually led to this book.

Allens writings from the South have attracted relatively little notice by scholars. The musicologist Dena Epstein cited musical examples from all three of his journals in Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, and the historian Willie Lee Rose drew on his St. Helena journal in discussing the 1864 land sale crisis in Rehearsal

This book provides annotated transcriptions of Allens St. Helena and Charleston journals, of which the most interesting aspect is his description of people he encountered. He named and described 188 former slaves of all ages who he came to know on St. Helena. He described a host of Northerners he met at both St. Helena and Charleston, ranging from fellow teachers to missionaries and abolitionists and military menprivates to generalsas well as officials of all stripes, including plantation superintendents and tax commissioners.

Allens Charleston journal also recounted interviews with native Southerners, such as the Reverend Anthony Toomer Porter, an Episcopal cleric and ardent secessionist; Roswell T. Logan, associate editor of the Charleston Daily News; First Lieutenant Edmund Mazyck of the Confederate Army; and George Alfred Trenholm, the Confederacys treasury secretary. In each case, Allen probed these mens thoughts about secession and slavery and their views about the Souths prospects for rejoining the Union.

Some of what Allen wrote in his journals was mundane. He described the flora of St. Helena, and he wrote about gardening and repairs he made to the Captain John Big House, where he lived. But he was a trained historian, able to understand the changes going on around him, and he brought that training to bear in discussing the attitudes and habits of the freedmen and their potential for education and employment in a free labor economy. He wrote about military and government policies and their effects, positive and negative. He was especially interested in labor arrangements and the distribution of confiscated lands. And he recorded firsthand evaluations of the Souths prospects for Reconstruction.

Above all, Allen was a scholar. His scholarly qualities were clearly displayed in a series of essays he wrote over the course of the war for the Christian Examiner and in a series of letters he wrote at wars end for the newly inaugurated magazine the Nation. These essays and letters demonstrate the reach of his scholarship. He often buttressed his arguments with examples from classical history and observations from his journals. His treatment of these materials shows that his journals were more than quaint travelogues.

Possibly because of his tight, academic reasoning, Allens published writings have a modern feel. He had biases. He was a New Englander, and he had a New Englanders faith in the Yankee work ethic and the virtues of free labor. He was a moderate in his stances on black suffrage and reconstruction. These perspectives undoubtedly colored his writings, just as the perspectives of modern historians color theirs. He had the disadvantage of living the events he Allens forecasts fare well.

Allens life was briefly summarized in an entry in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

ALLEN, WILLIAM FRANCIS (18301889), American classical scholar, was born at Northborough, Massachusetts, on the 5th of September 1830. He graduated at Harvard College in 1851 and subsequently devoted himself almost entirely to literary work and teaching. In 1867 he became professor of ancient languages and history (afterwards Latin language and Roman history) in the University of Wisconsin. He died in December 1889. His contributions to classical literature chiefly consist of schoolbooks published in the Allen (his brother) and Greenough series. The Collection of Slave Songs (1867), of which he was joint-editor, was the first work of the kind ever published.

The scholarly bent of mind that Allen brought to his work in South Carolina is the focus here. The pursuit of knowledge characterized his life from the time, as a boy, he began to explore history books in his fathers library through his tenure as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. He was an unpretentious man who wrote out his thoughts in an unpresuming, scholarly way. Even his informal journals evidence humane thoughtfulness. A marble tablet in Allens honor at the First Unitarian Church of Madison, Wisconsin, portrays his spirit:

A man of varied, exact, and broad scholarship.

A teacher of creative power and original methods.

A wise, sincere, and generous friend.

A citizen, active and efficient in all movements for

Education, Reform, and Philanthropy.

A Lover of Flowers, Poetry, and Music.

A Note on the
Transcriptions and Sources

The Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) holds many of William Allens writings in a collection titled William F. Allen Family Papers. The interest here is Allens writings during two stays in South Carolina: on St. Helena Island and in Charleston. The St. Helena writings consist of a typescript journal and his 1864 manuscript diary. (It is likely that Allens daughter or his wife typed his journal.) The Charleston writings consist of a manuscript journal and his 1865 manuscript diary.

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