Jacobs continued her relief work with refugees and freedmen following Robert E. Lee’s surrender in 1865. A common theme emerged throughout her efforts during and after the Civil War, many of which her daughter Louisa joined: they insisted the formerly enslaved could and would lead their own battle for education, wage labor, and family autonomy, and rejected the disciplining hand of whites. But they, too, had to learn to trust Black autonomy. “These people, born and bred in slavery, had always been so accustomed to look upon the white race as their natural superiors and masters, that we had some doubts whether they could easily throw off the habit,” Jacobs wrote to Lydia Maria Child. But Jacobs and Louisa established the Jacobs School for emancipated slaves in Alexandria with the support of freedpeople. The pair were able to block the trustee-appointed white head teacher in favor of Louisa’s leadership, and the Jacobses took it as a sign that “even their brief possession of freedom had begun to inspire them with respect for the race.” Harriet and Louisa took a similar approach to fundraising, refusing to ask for cash from Northern antislavery societies, and instead requesting surplus rummage sale items, which they then sold, an act closer to mutual aid than to charity. The Jacobses used their positions of influence to teach freedpeople to join, in Jacobs’s words, “civilized life.”58
If some of Jacobs and Louisa’s rhetoric echoed the civilizing agenda of Stowe and her cohort of white women, their tactics did not. While assisting refugees in Savannah, Georgia, after the war, Louisa established another Black-led free school, and they both supported the elderly and orphaned while continuing to report back to the North. Louisa, meanwhile, began organizing in the suffrage campaign at the national level. Inspired by Frances E. W. Harper’s 1866 speech at the inaugural AERA convention, in which Harper instructed the audience, “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs,” Louisa began touring on the lecture circuit—just as her mother had hoped more than a decade prior when she first reached out to Stowe.59
Occasionally, Louisa was joined on the AERA platform by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the latter of whom praised Louisa as “good looking” and “everything proper & right in matter and manner—private and public.” But Louisa was ultimately more at home providing direct service to fellow former slaves than speaking twice a day with white feminists who painted Black freedmen, not white enslavers, as the true threat to women’s rights. By the time the AERA dissolved and Stanton and Anthony formed their white feminist organization in 1869, Louisa had been absent from the women’s suffrage movement for two years. Her work, like that of her mother, was among the freedpeople.60
While Louisa was on western New York stages alongside Stanton and Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin packed up their carpets, furniture, and extra china and boarded a ship south to Florida. Together with some friends, they had leased the state’s largest cotton plantation, Laurel Grove. The venture took them to the banks of the St. Johns River south of Jacksonville and aimed to provide the Stowe family with income as well as escape: for Stowe, from the Connecticut snowdrifts that accumulated well into April, and for their son Frederick, from the reckless alcoholism plaguing him even before shrapnel pierced his ear on the southern battlefield.61 It also would enable Stowe to undertake an experiment similar to that of her Uncle Tom’s Cabin character Miss Ophelia: she herself would attempt to civilize the formerly enslaved.
“My heart is with that poor people whose cause in words I have tried to plead,” Stowe explained to her brother Charles, “and who now, ignorant and docile, are just in that formative stage in which whoever seizes has them.” Stowe saw that capitalists were keen to exploit the newly emancipated workforce; she, by contrast, intended to wield her beneficent influence and establish “a Christian neighborhood.”62
Stowe’s missionary zeal was part of a larger white feminist movement after the war to save the so-called uncivilized from themselves. In the North, white women raised millions of dollars to support schools and hospitals, while an additional four thousand traveled south to teach newly freedpeople literacy, work habits, and Protestant faith. Much of this work brought desperately needed education to the formerly enslaved. But it emerged from within the civilizing paradigm to spread white women’s alleged moral authority and typically came with a host of conditions, such as that the only suitable instructors were white. These Reconstruction projects had echoes across the country. White women reformers established schools, homes, and social welfare organizations to elevate the so-called primitive in places like Mormon settlements in Utah, San Francisco’s Chinatown, and Indigenous lands across the West.63 Yet while white feminist activists were broadly eager to get their hands dirty in civilizing work, few went so far as to take charge of a massive Southern plantation.
Stowe and her friends arrived at the dilapidated planters’ house at nightfall, where the women were told to wait on the broad veranda while the men of their party assisted the servants in hauling up the household goods from their boat’s landing. Stowe was spooked by the unfamiliar plantation sights around her, especially as the light slipped away, and even more so by the workers returning from the fields. “As one and another passed by,” she reported, “they seemed blacker, stranger, and more dismal, than any thing we had ever seen. The women wore men’s hats and boots, and had the gait and stride of men.”64 In Stowe’s mind, she had not only journeyed south—she had also traveled back to the primitive past, a world in which womanhood had not yet evolved.
At dawn, the February sunshine streaming through the cottage’s broken windows reawakened Stowe to her Florida dream. Her view of the plantation’s workers was akin to her view of the single-story house, ramshackle after four years of war: relics of the crude past that she would develop into supports for refined white life, for their good as well as her own. She sought to impose order upon house and worker alike. “As the first white ladies upon the ground, Mrs. F and myself had the task of organizing this barbaric household,” Stowe recalled, “and of bringing it into the forms of civilized life. We commenced with the washing.”65
Civilizing, as Stowe and her sister Catharine Beecher explained to middle-class readers of their immensely popular housekeeping manuals published before and after the war, required white women to assume “the duties of missionaries” and “supply the place of parents” to an immature, “undeveloped” servant class. Servants were not autonomous people but “raw, untrained” material that “must be made, by patience and training,” into a household asset. Their maternal language of sympathetic benevolence barely masked the economy of extraction lying beneath, in which they instructed white women to provide servants with comfortable rooms, teach them how to maintain their wardrobes, present them with small gifts of spelling books and other useful items, and, above all, shed sympathetic tears, in order to win their obedience. By subduing their servants—in Stowe’s case, the formerly enslaved—with the weapon of sympathy, white women could simultaneously build their own power, authority, and capital. Housewives embraced their message enthusiastically: Stowe and Beecher’s jointly authored New Housekeeper’s Manual was printed over twenty-five times in twenty-five years, making it one of the most important domestic advice books of the era.66
Stowe nonetheless felt begrudging respect for one female servant, Minnah, who refused to be disciplined. “Democracy,” Stowe opined, “never assumes a more rampant form than in some of these old negresses” whose wildness prohibited them from swallowing the insults of their enslavers. Minnah’s back bore the traces of the galling abuse she received in return, such as being stretched on a log and staked in by her hands and feet while her enslaver scored her flesh. “For all that, Minnah was neither broken nor humbled: she still asserted her rights as a human being,” Stowe noted approvingly. Minnah’s resistance extended all the way to Stowe’s civilizing agenda. As the only female worker with some experience in domestic tasks, she was assigned the role of house servant. But Minnah was often “argumentative,” and she found housework “disgusting,�
� vastly inferior to working outside. Soon Minnah had her way: Stowe was forced to admit that the fields suited her better, and Stowe hired a housekeeper from Jacksonville.67
The Civil War had laid the Laurel Grove plantation, along with much of Florida, to waste. While Laurel Grove once boasted nine thousand acres, Stowe and partners could afford to plant only two hundred acres of cotton, from which they nonetheless estimated a sizable $10,000 profit. Nature, however, had its own designs. When the crop budded and bolled in white, an invasion of army worms chewed through all two hundred acres in two days flat. Their financial investment had gone to seed. Stowe declared it a victory nonetheless: “Our hands were all duly paid,” she wrote to the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine she had helped found, “in many cases with the first money they ever earned, and it gave them a start in life.”68 All along, Stowe’s chosen crop was the workers themselves.
Foreswearing cotton, that spring Stowe and her husband bought land across the St. Johns River that included a grove producing seventy-five thousand oranges per year and a house tucked under eighty-foot-tall live oaks festooned with hanging mosses. She and Calvin spent the next eighteen winters at their Mandarin, Florida, plantation, and they built out the small house into a gabled cottage encircling a magnificent oak. She lent key support to building a school and an Episcopalian church for local African Americans, generally rehabilitating the South in the way she knew how: by raising the Black worker out of their “barren, confined, undeveloped nature” and into the service of civilization.69
Harriet Beecher Stowe and family on the veranda of their Florida plantation home. (Courtesy of the State Archive of Florida)
This agenda reflected Stowe’s own education since she released Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which famously ends with every Black character either dead or having fled the United States. Her novel found no place for freed African Americans within the country’s borders, a plot detail Black abolitionists like Delany roundly critiqued. Stowe learned from her mistake and followed up the novel with another, Dred (1856), featuring a dark-skinned protagonist who self-emancipates and encourages broad slave insurrection. Her Florida project was another venture to imagine a national future that had a place for the Black worker.
Yet this is precisely how Stowe conceived of her task: as finding, and assigning, Black workers a place in the transforming capitalist economy of the South. Their role was as the naturally suited wage laborers of tropical climes. “Only those black men, with sinews of steel and nerves of wire,—men who grow stronger and more vigorous under those burning suns that wither the white men,—are competent to the task” of fieldwork in Florida, she insisted. White men grew “sickly” under the Florida sun, whereas Black workers “ran and shouted and jabbered” in delight. If whites living in Southern heat continued to disdain Black communities, rather than adopt their duty “to educate a docile race who both can and will bear it for them,” Stowe warned, they would imperil the fate of Southern capitalism.70
Stowe maintained confidence that Northern investment would rehabilitate both the economy and the formerly enslaved people of the South. She sold $1,500 worth of citrus a year packaged in crates with her own label boasting “Oranges from Harriet Beecher Stowe—Mandarin, Fla”; from her stately home she made oil paintings of white blossoms and golden fruits clustered against a blue sky.71 Her choice crop may have been cultivating the workers, but the products of their labor were hers to reap.
One December day six years after the end of the Civil War, the two writers at last met face to face. Jacobs had been working as a clerk at the New England Women’s Club in Boston, and in a few months she and Louisa would open a boarding house in Cambridge—their first home in twenty-five years. Stowe, not yet gone south to Florida, came to Cambridge to visit her stepsister, who likely arranged the meeting. Stowe gifted Jacobs with a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which she had written “Mrs. Harriet Jacobs from H.B. Stowe, Christmas, 1871.” The honorific “Mrs.” may have pleased Jacobs—despite her unmarried status, she had adopted the title during her refugee relief work in Washington and was widely addressed as such by fellow abolitionists. Stowe, in this small gesture, finally acknowledged a measure of Jacobs’s self-determination. The volume remained a treasured item in the Jacobs family for the next century.72
Meanwhile, at home in Hartford, Connecticut, Stowe had a treasured volume of her own, or rather, twenty-six of them. The half million signatures affirming the Stafford House appeal, all addressed to Stowe, were displayed prominently on oaken shelves.73 The petition, like the golden slave shackle bracelet she received the same day, reminded Stowe of her place in history: she was a writer who taught white women the power of their sympathy.
CHAPTER THREE
SETTLER MOTHERS AND NATIVE ORPHANS
Alice C. Fletcher and Zitkala-Ša
[By aiding] the Vicious and Dependent classes… woman is fast becoming recognized as a human being.
—Anna Garlin Spencer
BEFORE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ZITKALA-ŠA HEARD ABOUT THE BIG RED APPLES IN THE EAST, she ran free over the prairie and rolling green hills of southeastern South Dakota. Once finished with her morning’s work sewing her own beaded designs on buckskin or helping her mother dry fruits or meat for winter, she bounded out into the slopes that ascended behind their canvas wigwam. She and a handful of playmates would dig for sweet roots, regale each other with heroic stories in earnest imitation of the tales their mothers and aunts told over evening campfires, and run through the hills chasing shapeshifting shadows as the wind sent their long black hair flowing like rivers behind them. Safely nestled in the “lap of the prairie” and “alive to the fire within,” Zitkala-Ša was sure that her “wild freedom and overflowing spirits” were her “mother’s pride.”1 One mid-winter day, however, that freewheeling spirit lured her eight hundred miles away to a boarding school that would transform her bond with her mother, and her tribe, for the rest of her life.
It was February in 1884 when two Quaker missionaries entered the Yankton Indian Reservation village where Zitkala-Ša, then known as Gertrude Simmons, lived with her mother, Reaches-for-the-Wind. Her father was gone; a white man, he had abandoned her mother and community soon after she became pregnant. Reaches-for-the-Wind gave her newborn daughter the surname of her much favored prior husband, who had passed away before Zitkala-Ša was born. She had seen much hardship. The Yankton Dakota were one of the seven Dakota-, Lakota-, and Nakota-speaking groups comprising the confederated Sioux tribe. Living along the grassy eastern banks of the muddy, but life-giving, Missouri River, their village had been home to the tribe for only thirty-five years, after an 1859 treaty stripped them of rights to 95 percent of their eleven-million-acre Minnesota homeland and forced them westward.2 To young Zitkala-Ša, however, the riverbank and hills were her Eden.
When the two missionaries and their white interpreter approached Reaches-for-the-Wind’s wigwam, young Zitkala-Ša jumped up and down in impatience, begging her mother to permit them entry. She had heard her friend Judéwin tell of beautiful lands full of red apple orchards where she was going to live with the missionaries. Zitkala-Ša had eaten fewer than a dozen red apples in her life and her desire was piqued. In the wake of the Sioux’s dramatic loss of power, her mother had allowed Zitkala-Ša’s older brother to attend boarding school in hopes he could learn to negotiate the settler society pressing ever closer upon them. This also gave her some familiarity with the trauma a young child endured when ripped from their community and housed in an institution.
“Don’t believe a word they say!” she cautioned her daughter. “Their words are sweet, but, my child, their deeds are bitter. You will cry for me, but they will not even soothe you.”
But eventually Reaches-for-the-Wind yielded to her eager child, permitting the Quaker visitors entry into her wigwam.
“Mother, ask them if little girls may have all the red apples they want, when they go East,” implored Zitkala-Ša.3
The interpreter knew just how to answer, and also promised the
child a ride on the iron horse. After a night of pleading and hot tears, Zitkala-Ša outran her mother’s objections with the force of her desire. Though Reaches-for-the-Wind worried that her daughter was too young, she also wished for Zitkala-Ša to attain an education.
Zitkala-Ša was one of the youngest members of a party of eight children the missionaries removed from the village, taking them eight hundred miles east to White’s Manual Labor Institute. The morning of departure, she, Judéwin, and her other friends proudly showed each other their new dresses, belts, and beaded moccasins. From the horse-drawn carriage carrying them toward the train station she watched her mother’s figure grow smaller and smaller in the distance. A sense of misgiving flooded her spirit, and the eight-year-old child buried her tears in the soft folds of her best blanket.
White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, couldn’t have been more aptly named. Like other boarding schools established in the early 1880s for Indigenous youth, it was designed to produce assimilated workers. It was also an apparatus of death, for boarding schools’ seemingly benevolent intentions to train Indigenous youth simultaneously destroyed tribal communities. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the first off-reservation boarding school, agreed in large part with General Philip Sheridan’s notorious edict that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” But Pratt’s approach was to grind up the Indian with the machinery of education. Boarding schools would “kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Pratt infamously pronounced.4 Institutionalizing children for at least three years was intended to break their attachment to their tribes and land.
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