Madison County Genealogical Society

Minutes of the Meeting - August 10, 2017

The August 2017 meeting of the Madison County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on Thursday, August 10, at 7:00 pm.

President, Robert Ridenour, called the meeting to order.

The following is the Treasurer's report for the month of June:

The following is the Treasurer's report for the month of July:

GIFT MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE

Do you have a family member that is interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership in the Madison County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful gift. A gift card will be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.

The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $25.00
Patron Annual Membership $35.00
Life Membership $300.00

Contact our Secretary, Petie Hunter, at [email protected], about a gift membership.

August Meeting

On August 10, 2017, Dr. Kelly Obernuefemann, Professor of History and the Coordinator of History, Political Science, and Geography at Lewis and Clark Community College, presented Family Connections: Women of Antebellum Charleston. This program was about how women interacted across class and race lines even though many families considered it distasteful. Specifically, this presentation examined family dynamics when a sibling marries someone of a different class or has children with someone of a different race.

 

The program Dr. Kelly Oberenuefemann presented showed what you can do when you look through wills and city directories. She said, “All these things are online now and it is so easy. It is amazing how many things I have discovered available on Ancestry.com. In the old days you had had to go search through a book. A lot of my information came from letters, city directories, and wills. There is great stuff to be found in peoples’ wills.” She talked about women being forced to deal with women of a different class or race.

 

The relationship between shop owner and client, benevolent lady and poor petitioner, missionary and convert, and teacher and student are temporary, but for some women, social interaction across class or race lines became permanent, as they were linked through fathers, brothers, or sons who sometimes formed intimate relationships with women regardless of class or race differences. Until recent decades, the subject of miscegenation in the antebellum south was taboo — no one wanted to talk about it. And marriage across class lines was too infrequent to even talk about it. But the idea that the elite white southerners never formed intimate relationships with white lower class or black women is ridiculous.

 

Edward Ball wrote a book, Slaves in the Family, published in 1998. It would likely never have been accepted by a publisher prior to the 1970s, unless it had been a part of the abolitionist movement, but even then white southerners and northerners did not want to admit that black men and women could become part of their family. Studies of the elite white southerners dwell on the exclusiveness of their dynastic world and rarely mention that occasionally a white man or woman “married well” and joined one of the elite families. When such marriages are mentioned, the person who married into the upper class was almost always someone from the mercantile or professional class, which is not very far removed from the elite class, especially in the early decades of the 1800s, when most planters had only recently acquired a large measure of wealth from the cotton boom.

 

But at least one of Charleston’s elite families was forced to welcome a woman who had no apparent social position. Even something as simple as age could become a subject of family debate when a marriage seemed imminent. Although it did not seem to matter much how much older the bridegroom was than the bride, the bride’s age was certainly a topic for family debate or community gossip. When widower, Henry Izzard, married older woman Claudia Smith, his family had to find a way to justify the marriage to themselves. His mother, Alice, wrote ‘I am persuaded that it was the interest of his children which made him think of marrying a person older than himself.’ Anne Clough’s father wrote to her of her brother’s newly announced engagement to Jane Brock, the widowed sister of the British Consul in Charleston. ‘Your brother knew that Jane had no independent fortune of her own to help out, it was exceedingly imprudent of him, therefore, under such circumstances, to form any engagement. I could not, of course, object to our fair friend in any way, as her character is unexceptional, and I think she is not ill suited to him in disposition and manners. Her family connections also are, as far as I know, highly reputable. But she is far too old for him, though I do not exactly know her age. It is the wrong side of 30, I presume, and he only just 27. The difference being double what it may be by reason of being on the wrong side.’

 

James Clough and his son Charles ran a cotton exporting business and the family fortunes were suffering due to a bad year for cotton. James Clough obviously would have preferred a younger, wealthy bride for his son. Marriages for business reasons were a common occurrence. Diane Summerford argued in her 1973 thesis that, “The declining economy forced families of the white elite to intermarry in the 1850s to keep valuable land concentrated in the hands of a finite number of southern planters. It is certainly true that the daughters of the elite white families married sons of other elite white families. In fact, the elite Charleston families are so intermarried that the same surnames can be found on many family trees, different branches. Matamoras Grimble chronicled the lineages of her acquaintances in great detail in her journal and all of her friends were connected through marriage. One of the main reasons for the intermarriage of elite families is obvious. Who are the only single white men with whom the single white women came into contact? Her cousins. The close contact between cousins naturally led to many marriages. Marriages between cousins had the added benefit of keeping family land within the family. Such marriages solved one problem, but usually did not solve the chronic problem for white southern families of being land rich, but cash poor. Thus daughters and sons of white landed families often felt the pressure of having to choose a spouse who would increase the family’s financial resources. Grimble noted in her journal the marriage of a woman with $40,000 and she remarked that the bride was a sensible woman, quite accustomed to society and will manage Charles and take care of his money and make him very happy.”

 

Often, a lucrative marriage was considered to be a happy marriage. Emily Morton Sinclair likely referred to economic circumstances when she described the engagement of a local man in an 1855 letter… “The fiancée is neither pretty nor particularly young, but they say is clever and cultivated. The fact is, there are some singular attendant circumstances to the engagement, which are too long for a letter. I do not think it was a love match at first with him, though he is trying very hard to get up to the point and writes very happily on his prospects. Both his family and hers are delighted with the match.” The happiness of the families involved often superseded that of the couple.

 

Sometimes the need for an influx of cash into the family coffers led to marriage between the white elite and the professional class. A daughter or son from an affluent merchant family could elevate their social status by “marrying up.” Of course, the family in question had to be very respectable or the match would not even be considered. After all, from another perspective, the match could be seen as “marrying down” to the member of an elite family.

 

A series of good marriages and a clever name change led to the ascendance of Adele Pettigrew to the upper echelon of Charleston society. The Pettigrew family of Charleston came from humble up-country beginnings, but eldest brother, James, changed the family’s social status forever. After leaving home to become a lawyer, James changed the spelling of his surname from Pettigrew (the Scottish way) to Pettigru (the French way) to indicate French ancestry, since French Huguenots were among the elite of white South Carolina society. This is a clever ploy several families utilized upon moving to cities with a French influence, such as Charleston and New Orleans. You might see Scottish names suddenly becoming French. You may have this type of thing in your family tree — the spelling changes to make it look good.

 

James cemented his newfound social status in 1816 with marriage to Jane Amelia Postle, the daughter of a local planter, who two years earlier had spurned him — now he is a lawyer and making some money. After opening a law practice in Charleston in 1819, James became the city’s Attorney General in 1822, thanks to a powerful mentor, Daniel Eugee. By the time his sisters joined him just outside of Charleston in 1827 after their mother’s death, the Pettigru name was well known in the Charleston area.

 

The Pettigru women should have been grateful to sister-in-law Jane for the benefit of her family connections, if not for the fact that Jane opened her home to her husband’s unmarried sisters.  However, personality conflicts between Jane and the Pettigru sisters caused constant tension. Jane’s emotional security was precarious, especially after the death of her young son Albert. And she had troubles coping with the four additions to her household (the four sisters-in-law). The problems between Jane and her sisters-in-law: Jane, Louise, Adele, and Harriett continued after their marriages. The correspondence between the married Pettigru sisters often contained references to “the woman their brother insisted they call sister.” They did not like having to do that.

 

In 1850, in spite of her awareness of the hurt that her negative comments could cause, Louise wrote to sister Adele: “Sister Jane’s extreme narrow mindedness is a great trouble in having any near intercourse with her; and I fear her children have her faults without her good qualities. I write very poorly, Dear, and pray never let my letters by any chance fall into other hands. The best security is to burn them.” Obviously, Adele did not comply with her sister’s wishes.

 

The sisters were equally critical of their brother Thomas’ wife, Marianne Lebruss Pettigru. In 1832, Louise Pettigru Forchet wrote to Jane Pettigru North, “I have heard nothing of Mrs. T. P., though she promised to write and send me yeast cakes and sundries. It looks as if she has taken offense at what I know not or care not for I was not wanting in kindness or warmer of attention when she was at Keyfield. If she was expecting to be adored, I suppose she was disappointed and ever will be, I hope. I shall always treat her with civility as brother’s wife, and think she ought to be amply satisfied with that. I have not heard she was offended, but as she does not forget, I suppose I may.”

 

In spite of the family tensions, the marriage between James and Jane Pettigru, combined with James’ very successful law career, made the Pettigru sisters some of Charleston’s most eligible single women. The women capitalized on their new found social status by marrying into some of Charleston’s prominent professional families, who also owned small plantations: the North’s, the Forchet’s, and the LeSanne’s.

 

Sister Adele went one step further and married into one of South Carolina’s wealthiest families – the Alston’s. When Adele married future governor, Robert F. W. Alston, in 1832, she married into a very wealthy family of rice planters and factors. By 1850, her husband owned 750 slaves. This marriage was the crowning of the Pettigru social rise. They were now tied to Charleston’s most elite class. Despite her family’s humble beginning, Adele was welcomed into the Alston family, and Robert’s aunt, Elizabeth Wyeth, taught Adele everything she needed to know to adapt to her new environment.

 

Adele and her sisters knew what it was like to fit in with a new circle of people, and they tried to be accommodating when meeting sister-in-law Tempe for the first time, but they were not prepared for the new family member. Brother Jack, the second oldest Pettigru sibling, had left the family behind for life in the west. When he returned to South Carolina in 1854, he brought wife Tempe, who shocked the now elite class sisters. Before they had even met, unmarried sister Mary was preparing for the worst. She wrote to Adele: “We expect brother soon, but have not heard from him to say when he will come. I suppose he has had every annoyance and trouble with his unfortunate wife and other cares.” After the women had met, Adele received another letter: “They arrived on Monday the 18th, and a truly forlorn couple are they. She is a poor dowdy, but we must take what care we can of him and they are one. She seems humble and grateful.”

 

Jane Pettigru North’s sons apparently were told they could call Tempe, ‘Mrs. Pettigru,’ rather than aunt. Despite their reservations, Mary and Jane, who was now a widow, allowed Jack and his wife to live at the North Plantation, while oldest brother James had a small house built for them nearby. Brother Tom had not been as welcoming and had forbidden them the use of his home. Jane and Mary even supplied Tempe with clothing while Jack displayed the physical and mental deterioration of an alcoholic. And the sisters continued to care for them until their deaths in the late 1860s. The sisters felt fortunate that Jack and Tempe did not want to live in Charleston and meet the family’s upper class friends.

 

In the years before radios, telephones, television, WiFi, email, internet, gossip was not only a form of communication but also a form of entertainment. And alcoholic Jack and his marriage to a woman with no known social connections would have provided a wealth of gossip. It is probable that even without entering the Charleston community, Jack Pettigru’s return was cause for speculation. Adele Alston’s friends and acquaintances would have felt the same way about Tempe, as Adele felt toward Edward Milton’s wife, who apparently caused a scandal in the white elite community. Adele wrote in her journal: “It is a horrible affair. She was evidently a bad woman from the first, so much for a foreign wife – a stranger.” Tempe certainly would have been considered a stranger also.

 

The Pettigru sisters would not have voiced their disapproval of their brothers’ choice of wives publicly, their own social status could be at stake. You do not want to slam your own family in public. But in instances where a questionable marriage was not within their family circle, southern women had no qualms about voicing their opinions to each other.

 

A very famous case, Floride Calhoun’s obvious disapproval of an acquaintance’s marriage even had political ramifications. Floride, a Charlestonian, was married to cousin South Carolina statesman, John C. Calhoun, and joined him in Washington when he served as Andrew Jackson’s Vice President. Margaret “Peggy” Eaton was married to the Secretary of War, but Floride could not overlook the fact that Eaton was the daughter of innkeeper. Knowing that other women would follow her example, she refused to return a call paid to her by Eaton in light of rumors circulating in Washington about the woman’s questionable character and hasty marriage to the Secretary of War.

 

When she refused to call on Peggy Eaton, the sleight angered President Jackson, which led to tension between Jackson and Calhoun, who was held accountable for his wife’s action. If you know anything about Jackson’s administration, he and Calhoun were bitter enemies.

 

Closer to home, another marriage across lines was considered questionable. Arthur Haynes, the son of Governor and Senator Robert Haynes, married actress Julia Dean in 1855. Julia was such a successful actress she had little card printed with her picture on them, but that does not mean she was acceptable as a wife. Louise Forchet called their courtship a nine-days wonder, even though Dean was one of the most popular actresses to grace the Charleston stage, the acting profession had a stigma to it. Sue Pettigru King considered it downright indecent that Haynes should not only marry the actress, but also allow her to continue to perform. It came as no surprise when Dean divorced Haynes after eleven years of marriage.

 

Harriet Orrie Rutledge thought she had prevented such gossip about her son John when she refused to allow him to marry the daughter of a pharmacist. The Rutledges were Founding Fathers, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, and were major plantation owners. There was no way Harriet Rutledge was going to let her son marry the daughter of a pharmacist, but the consequences of her refusal had greater ramifications. Her son became depressed and shot himself in his room at Hampton Plantation. Ten year old Mary Esther Euger wrote of his suicide in a letter: “her cousin John Rutledge who killed himself because a druggist refused to let him marry his pretty daughter as Mrs. Rutledge had told him ‘however good his child might be, it would be impossible to receive her into her family which he probably expected and thought right.’” Social lines were more strong then.

 

The suicide of John Rutledge is an extreme example of social classism that prevented some men and women from marrying across class lines. But such marriages did happen. A much more rare occurrence is a marriage across race lines. Although, unlike other southern states, South Carolina had no state law or city ordinance officially forbidding interracial marriage. Judges and preachers were prevented from committing interracial marriages by community pressure. No one could prevent common law marriage and sexual affairs. One of the double standards that existed in the paternalistic south was the double standard of interracial relationship.

 

Women such as Sarah Jones, mistress of Joe Rogers, a free man of color and a slave owner, were very rare in the south. But we know a lot about them because of Joe’s three-page will, which stipulates that he is leaving property to his children with Sarah Jones and his daughter with Nelly Jackson. With Sarah Jones, a white woman who has a white husband, he had three children who were listed in the census as mulatto. When it comes to the kids, a few generations down, they will pass as white. With a free woman of color, Nelly Jackson, he had a daughter. Apparently, the kids knew about each other, were in contact with each other, and mentioned each other in their wills.

 

In his 1830 will, Rogers left his estate to Sarah and their mulatto children: Jacob, Josiah, and Sylvia. Along with his house, Rogers left Sarah a stipend and “the services of my wench named Dinah and her four children, for so long a period as the said Sarah Jones shall remain single and unmarried, but no longer.” Rogers also left provisions for his daughter Joanna he had with free woman of color Nelly Jackson. Joanna Rogers, however, was certainly not a primary benefactress of her father’s will. Interestingly, although Joe had not been married to Sarah Jones, who had been married to a white man, he did not want his grandchildren to be born out of wedlock. In fact, the children of Jacob, Josiah, and Sylvia were only to be able to inherit if they were born in lawful wedlock, according to the will.

 

The dynamics of this interracial family are very interesting. Not only did the white Sarah have children with the free man of color Joe, she also inherited the slaves of Joe, a black slaveholder. Furthermore, Sarah’s children seemed to have been in contact with their half-sister Joanna, since Jacob recognized her in his will. He left everything he owned to his mother Sarah Jones in 1841, with the exception of $200, which he bequeathed to half-sister, Joanna Jackson. Further complicating the family connections is the fact that, with the exception of Jacob, the descendants of Sarah Jones passed as white. Perhaps Jacob, who acknowledged his black sister Joanna in his will, was the only one who truly accepted the family’s biracial heritage.

 

The Rogers-Jones family would never have been accepted in Charleston’s elite white society. Any white woman even rumored to be intimately involved with a black man would be forever ostracized from white southern society. But intimate relations both consensual and forced between white men and black women were simply ignored since white men dominated antebellum society. However, no matter how much women tried to ignore miscegenation, it was obvious to everyone that light-skinned children of black women were the result of a sexual relationship with a white man. Mary Boykin Chestnut’s now-famous statement shows that women were very much aware of such relationships: “Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”

 

Occasionally, white men acknowledged their mulatto children in their will, often much to the consternation of their surviving family. Henry Grimke’s two sisters went to Philadelphia and became involved with the Quakers and became famous abolitionists. They were then banned from South Carolina. Meanwhile, their brother had two children with a slave mistress, Nancy Weston, and a son with his white wife. When Henry died in 1852, Nancy and their mulatto sons, Archibald and Francis, were inherited by his white son, Montague, who employed Nancy to work for wages as the family laundress. Montague and his aunt, Eliza, also recommended Nancy to other potential employers. But Montague’s new white bride had no sympathy for Nancy and her boys. The new Mrs. Grimke quickly established her control over the household and its slaves. In 1860, with encouragement from his Alabama bride, Montague had Nancy thrown into the Charleston jail when she objected to his decision to use her sons, his brothers, as his houseboys, against his father’s dying wishes. Nancy stayed in jail, starving, for a week and would have died if the official physician not ordered Montague to consent to her release. Nancy and her sons did not get their independence until Emancipation.

 

Years later, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who had been estranged from their family for decades, for being abolitionists, found out about their nephews’ existence and cultivated a relationship with them. After Emancipation, Archibald and Francis moved north, and that is where Sarah and Angelina tracked them down and said, “We are your aunts, we did not know about you. We want to have a relationship with you.” The radically different reactions of Mrs. Montague Grimke and the Grimke aunts show the varied, sometimes conflicting, emotions of white southern women when confronted with the all too frequent results of racial slavery mixed with white male dominance, biracial illegitimate children. White women could not allow their position of authority in the household to be questioned by light-skinned slaves whose paternity was known by the white family and slave community, even if they were not acknowledged. In the case of the Grimke aunts, however, they had left their family and slave owning behind them in order to lobby for the abolition of slavery. Their acceptance of Africans and Afro-Americans as people rather than as slaves allowed them to embrace their mulatto relatives. Archibald’s daughter, Angelina, is a famous journalist and poet who was part of the Harlem Renaissance.

 

The Noisette Family, one of Charleston’s premiere brown elite families, were descended from Phillip Stanislaus Noisette, of France, and his housekeeper and slave, Celestine. His will very clearly stated his relationship with Celestine and her children: “I do hereby recognize and declare that the issue of my housekeeper and slave, Celestine, are my children, and I will order and direct that my said executors, or such person or persons as may qualify and act on this will, shall and do pay and defray the expenses of the transportation or conveyance of the said Celestine and her issue to such state, territory, or country as expressed form the funds of my estate.” This is my mistress and these are my kids — pay for them to go wherever they want. He divided his furniture among her and his children; his house was to be sold and the profits given to his children.

 

Slave women were manumitted more often than slave men, due in no small part to sexual relationships that produced mulatto children. Census records list many free women of color who were heads of households and young mulatto children. In 1850, Ida Timothy, age 30, a free mulatto woman was the head of her household. Living with her were Charlotte Pinkney, age 16, Sarah Ann Pinkney, age 12, William Henry Pinkney, age 9, and Mary Pinkney, age 8. All the children were listed as mulatto and had likely taken the surname of their father. That same year, Phoebe Mathews, age 22, was a black woman with a five-month old mulatto daughter, named Diana Frazier. The free women of color of the Naylor family all seemed to have had relationships with white men. Rebecca and Hannah Naylor, both listed as black in the census, live in households with two mulatto children. Diana Naylor was listed in the census as mulatto, but she had four children who were listed as white. These are only a few examples of the large number of free women of color in Charleston who had children with unnamed fathers.

 

Of course, not all white male, black female relationships were formed through master-slave relationships. James Thomas, age 50, was a mariner from Spain; and his wife, Nelly Thomas, age 45, was a black woman from South Carolina. South Carolina was the only southern state that did not have a law forbidding interracial marriage during the antebellum period. In fact, back in the Colonial Period, some whites positively and publicly defended interracial sex in the local newspaper, The Gazette. Thus Nelly Thomas was able to take her husband’s name and live as his legal wife. In 1850, they lived in Charleston, but by 1860, they had moved to the town of Bennetville. The move may have been prompted by James’ retirement from sea life or it may have due to community pressure. It was one thing for a woman of color to have the children of a white man but quite another for her to be his wife. Also in 1850, Robert Keane, a 43 year old mariner from England lived with Mary Martin, a 36 year old mulatto South Carolina native. Although she did not take his name, she and 18-year-old Elizabeth Martin were the only members of this household. It seems likely that Keane and Martin were common law husband and wife. Of course, the two examples, Thomas and Keane, were members of the sailing community, who were considered to be at the bottom of white society, unless they were wealthy ship owners. Sailors, after all, included white and black men who worked together. If anyone would have been expected to make a social faux pas like marrying a woman of color, it would have been a sailor, especially a sailor who had not been born in this country.

 

White southerners of the higher classes were very protective of their family positions and their daughters were raised in an environment that emphasized elite social status. Class and racial prejudice were ingrained in their upbringing and it took a very strong woman to go against her family. Women knew that if any of their elite peers disapproved of any of their actions, they would be ostracized from the community, just as Sarah and Angelina Grimke had been. They also knew it was their duty to make a good marriage that would be beneficial to their family. Women were even reminded of their obligation to find a husband in the local paper. The Daily Courier included the following message on the bottom of the front page, October 13, 1858: “It is a solemn thing to be married,” said Aunt Bethany. “Yes, but it is a deal more solemn not to be,” said her little niece.

 

Their protectiveness of the family is what led white southern women to overlook male indiscretions with slave women. To bring attention to such an indiscretion would make the entire family vulnerable to public ridicule.

 

The women profiled illustrated the class-consciousness of the antebellum south and showed that the permanent interaction that occurred as a result of marriage was not always comfortable. Although Elizabeth Wyeth welcomed Adele Alston to her family, Adele did not embrace her sisters-in-law as easily. And marriages to affluent men did not make Peggy Eaton and Julia Haynes welcome visitors to the homes of Charleston matrons. Women of the lower class were afforded more freedom of choice, but even they had to deal with the stares and comments of the various Charleston residents they encountered every day. Did the women of Charleston marry across class and race lines? Yes, but their decisions were not always met with acceptance.

 

This presentation was very well received and provoked many questions and comments.

 

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