For the past week, I have been researching in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The collection that I'm visiting is the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society Papers. I originally thought that this collection was in Rochester at the Rush Rhees Library, where I have been for the greater part of the past month. The reason I was under this mistaken impression? Well, a biographer listed it as being there in a bibliography. Fortunately, another bibliography in another book cleared that all up, and here I am.
Much of my research these days has not turned up much meat. Most of the letters to or from Douglass have been published. Many of the letters about Douglass are fairly well known. Most of the current work has more to do with finding more clues to more clues, but also filling out the stories of the women beyond their interaction with Douglass, placing them within a community and thereby opening up the context of Douglass's story. I'm trying to say more in this book than simply, "Douglass did this -- and these were the women there -- and Douglass did that -- and these were the women there." That's boring. That's note taking. I want to expand this story about the gender interactions within the abolitionist movement both in public and in private. Or something like that. It will sound more eloquent in the book.
Which reminds me: The scholarship around the public/private division of "separate spheres" has been slowly erasing that line, showing how that was not the way most women lived their lives. I think the divide was much more a male experience, if any one experienced it at all. In what I am studying, Anna Murray Douglass (the first Mrs. Douglass) was probably the most exemplary of a fully private life, with several caveats, of course. Douglass seemed to prefer as public a life as possible. Much of what he did, he did for an audience, and when he was at home, he tried to keep that locked up tightly. At least, that's what the documentation seems to say at this point. As usual, I have much more secondary work to do.
To get back to this collection, I wasn't entirely certain of what I expected it to contain, but I didn't expect it to be this interesting. The majority of this past week, Box 1, full of correspondence, occupied my attention, and gave me an idea of the way that these women conceived of their antislavery work and some of the ways that the work extended into Reconstruction.
A fascinating series of letters came from Julia A. Wilbur, a woman -- I can't say "young" or not, but she identifies herself as a "spinster" -- who took on the task of going down to Washington, D.C., to aid the "Contraband," in 1863. Eventually, Harriet Jacobs joined her, and the two of them fought government bureaucrats, Union officers, a military governor, and ordained ministers to make sure that the "contraband" had decent living conditions, education and medical attention. The narrative of the letters is itself fascinating; but more interesting is the way that she starts out calling the freed people "contraband" and "poor creatures" and attempting to impose her ideas of "civilization" on them, to calling them "the people" and listening to their needs as articulated by "the people" themselves and both responding to and advocating for them.
Box 1 also includes some notes about aiding fugitives. I use the term "notes" because clearly someone at Douglass's office carried them to the sender. In once case, the writer, William Watkins, identified the messenger as Douglass's oldest son, Lewis. These letters show just how "upper ground" the Underground Railroad actually was in western New York. They all clearly identify the sender, the recipient, and that the fugitives with the sender need money. The sender is generally in the Frederick Douglass' Paper office, and the recipient is usually Maria G. Porter (who I mentioned in the posts on the Porter family graves), treasurer of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.
I finished Box 1 on Thursday, and moved on to Box 2, thinking that there would not be much in it, and that I might be able to move this show on down to Oberlin to look up Rosetta Douglass in their archives. After all, how much can you find in an account book?
Clearly I forgot Watergate Deep Throat's dictum, "follow the money." One of the aspects of the antislavery movement that often gets lost in the ideology and action is the importance of money. There were only so many antislavery dollars out there to go around, and there seems to have been huge competition for them, which became tangled in the ideology and action. Much of what the women in the movement did, too, involved raising funds. Speakers needed salaries and expenses paid, lectures required advertisements, fugitives needed aid, rendition cases has court costs, Beecher's Bibles were not cheap, and every newspaper published struggled. Activism is not cheap!
All of this is to say that I found an amazing amount of data in this second box, which contains the Society's annual reports and account book. I'm in the account book, which, incidentally, required me to figure out how account books work (if you know me in the physical world, then you know that I am famed for my inability to understand numbers). The account book shows speakers' fees, the cost of renting a hall for the speakers, the amounts taken in at fairs both from foreign and from domestic goods (which will figure in with my analysis of Julia Griffiths, if I can round it all out with the same from the American Anti-Slavery Society), and the amounts given to fugitives or to bury fugitives who died.
Between the account book and the correspondence, however, you can see that these women saw their primary task as aiding not Frederick Douglass but enslaved -- or formerly enslaved - people themselves. They deployed the same networks and methods as emancipation advanced, sending an agent into the South, as they had when they provided railroad tickets, clothing and funerals to those running North. I have to dive back into the secondary literature -- fast becoming my greatest weakness -- in order to see how this fits into the larger pattern of women in the antislavery movement, and the ways that they differed or modeled themselves on other women.
What I am seeing is that there is a distinct difference in the way that they conceive of their activism and the way that Douglass sees his activism, and that, sometimes, the women believe that their work is, in fact, morally superior to his. Furthermore, the more that Douglass becomes famous and moves into party politics, the less feminine his world becomes. For Douglass -- and this is just a hypothesis at this moment -- the abolition movement was much more female or, at the very least, integrated by gender. The Civil War took him into a world in which men and masculine citizenship and political action dominated his work. He was a connection and a wedge for the women and their work, and, at the moment, the number of women working with him in reform seems to decrease or their activism and organizations seem separate from him in some way that made their relationship different than before the Civil War.
Here, too, I must sort out politics, activism, and reform.
After Michigan, I'm back to Syracuse, then off to D.C. to close shop there. Then, off to Ireland until May.
Showing posts with label Porter family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Porter family. Show all posts
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Return to Mount Hope
I was wrong. It's definitely not the first time. Sadly, it will not be the last.
Today I went to the Rochester Museum and Science Center library to look in the Howard W. Coles collection. Coles was a resident fellow at the Museum before his death in 1996, so his extensive papers relating to his research into Rochester's African American history was donated to its library by his daughter and granddaughter in 1998. It's an interesting collection, and includes a few items related to Frederick Douglass.
That, however, is not the point, nor what I was wrong about. You see, while I was waiting for the librarian to retrieve the papers, I started reviewing some of my notes and came across those that I took about the interments in Mount Hope Cemetery. Suddenly, some of the bits that I had transcribed without really thinking about them at the time, all came together and made sense.
Remember the Porter mausoleum? Wrong Porters. The Porters mouldering within the mausoleum were not the Porters in which I was interested and, most likely, did not keep the bones of little Annie Douglass company.
Here's a map:
I hope you can embiggen it. Down there at the bottom to the right you can find the Douglass graves. The Porter mausoleum stands out prominently in the section next to it. If you are looking for the Douglass graves, and you know that Annie Douglass had been buried with the Porters, then naturally, you assume that the Porter mausoleum is the place. The lack of names other than "Porter" does not disabuse you of that assumption.
That section, however, is Section S. In the interment records, the Porters whose letters I had been reading and who figure most prominently in the Douglass story are actually buried in Section G -- or so I discovered upon my browse through my notes. Section G sits on a hill, high above a gunky green pond. So, I drove up there and started to wander about. Their graves are in spaces 65-70, not exactly helpful information when there are no clearly visible numbers on most of the plots. Nevertheless, I soldiered on because I simply had to see the right graves. As Digger told me, you can learn a lot from the graves, if you know how to read them. Not that I know, but even the wholly ignorant can pick up something from the stones and arrangement of the graves. Just wait until I get down to writing about the Douglass gravestones.
Fortunately, I didn't have to wander too far before I saw this:
The name "Farley" stood out on the tall monument. The Porters and the Farleys were intermarried in one generation (not as oddly as the Posts, however, but that's another story), so I knew I was close. Sure enough, the graves on the far side of the monument are the Porters:
His second (or was it his third?) wife was Isabella Porter. She and Samuel's daughter, Almira, ran a girls' school in Rochester:
Samuel's son was Samuel D. Porter, to whom Douglass gravitated as he became more invested in the use of party politics to end slavery. Porter was also one of the people who has actual documentation recording his assistance to fugitive slaves. In 1851, when three men appeared at Douglass's doorstep fleeing the law after the Christiana Riot, Douglass turned to Porter for help in getting them safe passage to Canada on the actual railroad. Five years later, Samuel May and Jermain Loguen turned to Porter, asking him to provide a better stop than their own in Syracuse.
His wife, however, was one of the two women who will probably become prominent in the book. Susan Farley Porter was president of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society of which Julia Griffiths was the secretary. The RLASS asked Frederick Douglass to deliver his "Fourth of July" speech to one of their meetings. When I go to Michigan to see their papers, I will have a better idea of their activities (I hope!) and their relationship with Douglass.
Maria G. Porter, Samuel D. Porter's sister, was a governess and a boarding house keeper (as best as I can tell). She was also the treasurer of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. She may have been the person who provided Julia Griffiths with a "respectable" place to live when Griffiths was accused of causing "trouble" in the Douglass household, although I'm not yet certain. I have to track down a primary source on that one. In any case, here lies Maria G. Porter:
From what I understand -- again, I need a primary source on this -- Annie Douglass was interred in the Porter family plot. A 2003 issue of the Mount Hope newsletter, the Epitaph, says she is buried with the Douglasses, but the cemetery researchers told me in answer to a reference e-mail request that she was buried with the Porters. Since Douglass and Samuel D. Porter were such close associates, since Susan and Maria were also closely allied with Douglass, and since the Porters in the mausoleum are not among the abolitionist Porters, then Annie was probably buried here.
So, what does this all tell me? I don't know. This is all a footnote of a footnote, which is what this blog is for.
Today I went to the Rochester Museum and Science Center library to look in the Howard W. Coles collection. Coles was a resident fellow at the Museum before his death in 1996, so his extensive papers relating to his research into Rochester's African American history was donated to its library by his daughter and granddaughter in 1998. It's an interesting collection, and includes a few items related to Frederick Douglass.
That, however, is not the point, nor what I was wrong about. You see, while I was waiting for the librarian to retrieve the papers, I started reviewing some of my notes and came across those that I took about the interments in Mount Hope Cemetery. Suddenly, some of the bits that I had transcribed without really thinking about them at the time, all came together and made sense.
Remember the Porter mausoleum? Wrong Porters. The Porters mouldering within the mausoleum were not the Porters in which I was interested and, most likely, did not keep the bones of little Annie Douglass company.
Here's a map:
That section, however, is Section S. In the interment records, the Porters whose letters I had been reading and who figure most prominently in the Douglass story are actually buried in Section G -- or so I discovered upon my browse through my notes. Section G sits on a hill, high above a gunky green pond. So, I drove up there and started to wander about. Their graves are in spaces 65-70, not exactly helpful information when there are no clearly visible numbers on most of the plots. Nevertheless, I soldiered on because I simply had to see the right graves. As Digger told me, you can learn a lot from the graves, if you know how to read them. Not that I know, but even the wholly ignorant can pick up something from the stones and arrangement of the graves. Just wait until I get down to writing about the Douglass gravestones.
Fortunately, I didn't have to wander too far before I saw this:
Samuel Porter was the oldest of this clan. He lived into his nineties, and the interment record says that he died of "old age."
From what I understand -- again, I need a primary source on this -- Annie Douglass was interred in the Porter family plot. A 2003 issue of the Mount Hope newsletter, the Epitaph, says she is buried with the Douglasses, but the cemetery researchers told me in answer to a reference e-mail request that she was buried with the Porters. Since Douglass and Samuel D. Porter were such close associates, since Susan and Maria were also closely allied with Douglass, and since the Porters in the mausoleum are not among the abolitionist Porters, then Annie was probably buried here.
So, what does this all tell me? I don't know. This is all a footnote of a footnote, which is what this blog is for.
Monday, June 20, 2011
The Porters
Last week I spent most of my time in the Porter Family Papers in the Special Collections of the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester. Much like the Garrison Family Papers at the Sophia Smith Collection, when the title is "Family Papers" they do mean "family," as in "no matter what else the family was involved in, all you are going to get out of these papers is family news." They tell you when babies are born, when babies died, who got married, who visits who, who wants who to visit, what the travel plans for visiting are, who is sick and all of the specific symptoms (there is a particularly grisly description of an operation on Samuel D. Porter's arm in one letter), putting up preserves and pickles, and the details of how various people died. Great stuff for everything but my purposes. You would never guess that this was a family at the center of anti-slavery activity in Rochester or that two of the women were officers in the Rochester Ladies' Anti-slavery Society. That is, perhaps, telling unto itself.
After spending all of my week crawling through their private lives, I thought I should honor them by paying my respects to their bones in Mount Hope Cemetery. Saturday was a lovely day for traipsing about amongst dead people; and since my sojourn in the Rochester Public Library had reached a crossroads, and the crossroads indicated that I would have to delve into the type of research that would lead to a whole other project, and since the hour was late in the afternoon, and since I was cold and hungry, I decided to take the research into the field (or graveyard). Often, you can find interesting information in the graveyard...or so I told myself in order to not feel quite so guilty for leaving the library before it closed.
The Porter mausoleum lies not too far from the Douglass family plot, where Frederick, Anna, and Helen are all buried. I've got some interesting information on Anna's burial, but that will have to wait for another post since this one is on the Porters. Meanwhile, this is the Porter mausoleum:
It resembles the sort of mausoleum that you find in Louisiana along the lower Mississippi in places like New Orleans. I, in fact, have ancestors and relatives buried in such structures. This type here differs in a few respects. The Louisiana sort resembles a beehive with each body sliding into a discrete compartment. When you inter a person, you open only the space for that person's coffin and slide it in. The design of the structure acts like a giant oven, especially in the Louisiana heat, and speeds decomposition. After a period of time -- a year and a day, at one point in history -- you can reuse the space by opening it up, pushing the remains of the previous occupant to the back, and sliding in another body. Modern mortuary practices and coffin construction have interfered with this process, and have created a much messier process of reusing a space, especially in the decomposition of the bodies and disposal of the coffin.
The sort of crypt like the Porters' is an open room. When a person dies, you open the door, bring in the deceased, and lay the body on a shelf, a bit like in Romeo and Juliet, but nastier and probably smellier to our modern sensibilities. You continue to do that, moving older remains to make room for newer ones. At one point in history, bodies were not placed in coffins, by lain down in shrouds, unembalmed as if the person were asleep.
Douglass, incidentally, would have been embalmed since his body travelled from D.C. to Rochester and was present at funerals in both places. What the Porters did I do not know.
I do know that you don't see this on many mausoleums in Louisiana:
Yes, you see cracks about the edges of the wood. What you don't see are the big, fat, buzzing flies swarming about those cracks; and the combination of the cracks and flies made me curious as to what was inside. "I wonder if I could peep in around the cracks and see anything," I thought. Then, I thought, "Of course, I don't wonder enough to actually go try to peep around the cracks and see anything." The second I had that last thought, I actually did wonder enough to go try to peep around the cracks, but I stopped myself. I stopped myself not because the wood might pop off and I would be accused of desecrating a grave, nor because the groundskeeper was nearby, nor because of any health or legal or even ethical hazard. No, I stopped myself because, if I did see something, I could never ever un-see it. I wasn't prepared to not un-see something.
You may well wonder who the Porters were and whose remains lie within that crypt? The Porters, intermarried with the Farleys and along with the Posts, were at the center of abolitionism in Rochester and supported Douglass as he broke away from the abolitionist circle in Boston. Samuel D. Porter was a businessman, a Liberty Party man, and aided fugitive slaves (I'm investigating just how, since the Douglass biographies seem to attempt to marry myth with the actual evidence). His wife, Susan Farley Porter, was the president of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society; and his sister, Maria G. Porter was the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society treasurer. Their activities in the society included rasing funds that they used to help fugitives, as well. I have to go to the Clements Library in Michigan to read those papers (a certain historian mis-cited them as being in Rochester, thus I must alter my summer plans, which will also allow me to drop into Oberlin en route to see what I can learn about Rosetta Douglass's time there).
Little Annie Douglass, who died at the age of ten while her father was in England, was also interred in the Porter mausoleum. When she died at her home only a few blocks from the cemetery, the Douglasses had not yet purchased their own burial plot, so she was placed here in the Porters'. As far as the research staff at Mount Hope knows, she was never moved, although the Douglass family monument includes her name and dates.
But, I did not begin this post in order to indulge my ghoulish tendencies. I intended to write about the dry well of my research and what that means. Since this is only a blog, and blog posts by nature should be short, I shall save that for another post. Suffice to say for the moment is that many historians and Douglass biographers have cited the Porter Family Papers, and a single digit number of letters in particular, as containing a wealth of information about their involvement in aiding fugitive slaves. I'm not saying that the Porters did not aid fugitives. That is clearly there in the evidence. I am saying that the generalizations extrapolated from that single digit number of letters do not necessarily reflect the actual evidence in those letters, or at least represent only a cursory reading of those letters.
I think those questionable -- not wrong, just questionable -- generalizations have something to do with the way that people attempt to make "common knowledge" and evidence fit together, or to use scraps of evidence to support that "common knowledge" without questioning the creation of that "common knowledge." I'm referring specifically to such things as aid to fugitives or the Underground Railroad myths, but it can extend to a whole host of information about social history, women's history, Native American history, and African American history. In fact, I've discovered that the most important question I ask myself is, "how do we know what we think we know?" In research, that may be the only real question, or the one that guides all others.
After spending all of my week crawling through their private lives, I thought I should honor them by paying my respects to their bones in Mount Hope Cemetery. Saturday was a lovely day for traipsing about amongst dead people; and since my sojourn in the Rochester Public Library had reached a crossroads, and the crossroads indicated that I would have to delve into the type of research that would lead to a whole other project, and since the hour was late in the afternoon, and since I was cold and hungry, I decided to take the research into the field (or graveyard). Often, you can find interesting information in the graveyard...or so I told myself in order to not feel quite so guilty for leaving the library before it closed.
The Porter mausoleum lies not too far from the Douglass family plot, where Frederick, Anna, and Helen are all buried. I've got some interesting information on Anna's burial, but that will have to wait for another post since this one is on the Porters. Meanwhile, this is the Porter mausoleum:
It resembles the sort of mausoleum that you find in Louisiana along the lower Mississippi in places like New Orleans. I, in fact, have ancestors and relatives buried in such structures. This type here differs in a few respects. The Louisiana sort resembles a beehive with each body sliding into a discrete compartment. When you inter a person, you open only the space for that person's coffin and slide it in. The design of the structure acts like a giant oven, especially in the Louisiana heat, and speeds decomposition. After a period of time -- a year and a day, at one point in history -- you can reuse the space by opening it up, pushing the remains of the previous occupant to the back, and sliding in another body. Modern mortuary practices and coffin construction have interfered with this process, and have created a much messier process of reusing a space, especially in the decomposition of the bodies and disposal of the coffin.
The sort of crypt like the Porters' is an open room. When a person dies, you open the door, bring in the deceased, and lay the body on a shelf, a bit like in Romeo and Juliet, but nastier and probably smellier to our modern sensibilities. You continue to do that, moving older remains to make room for newer ones. At one point in history, bodies were not placed in coffins, by lain down in shrouds, unembalmed as if the person were asleep.
Douglass, incidentally, would have been embalmed since his body travelled from D.C. to Rochester and was present at funerals in both places. What the Porters did I do not know.
I do know that you don't see this on many mausoleums in Louisiana:
Windows. Given that there is no visible evidence of hinges to suggest a hatch or door, I'm going to guess that this was a window, probably stained glass. Whatever was there, however, has since disappeared and left an opening that the groundskeepers have covered with plywood. Any kid who has build a clubhouse out of plywood in their back yard knows what happens to plywood when exposed to the elements of sun, rain, and, in some climates, snow. It buckles:
Yes, you see cracks about the edges of the wood. What you don't see are the big, fat, buzzing flies swarming about those cracks; and the combination of the cracks and flies made me curious as to what was inside. "I wonder if I could peep in around the cracks and see anything," I thought. Then, I thought, "Of course, I don't wonder enough to actually go try to peep around the cracks and see anything." The second I had that last thought, I actually did wonder enough to go try to peep around the cracks, but I stopped myself. I stopped myself not because the wood might pop off and I would be accused of desecrating a grave, nor because the groundskeeper was nearby, nor because of any health or legal or even ethical hazard. No, I stopped myself because, if I did see something, I could never ever un-see it. I wasn't prepared to not un-see something.
You may well wonder who the Porters were and whose remains lie within that crypt? The Porters, intermarried with the Farleys and along with the Posts, were at the center of abolitionism in Rochester and supported Douglass as he broke away from the abolitionist circle in Boston. Samuel D. Porter was a businessman, a Liberty Party man, and aided fugitive slaves (I'm investigating just how, since the Douglass biographies seem to attempt to marry myth with the actual evidence). His wife, Susan Farley Porter, was the president of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society; and his sister, Maria G. Porter was the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society treasurer. Their activities in the society included rasing funds that they used to help fugitives, as well. I have to go to the Clements Library in Michigan to read those papers (a certain historian mis-cited them as being in Rochester, thus I must alter my summer plans, which will also allow me to drop into Oberlin en route to see what I can learn about Rosetta Douglass's time there).
Little Annie Douglass, who died at the age of ten while her father was in England, was also interred in the Porter mausoleum. When she died at her home only a few blocks from the cemetery, the Douglasses had not yet purchased their own burial plot, so she was placed here in the Porters'. As far as the research staff at Mount Hope knows, she was never moved, although the Douglass family monument includes her name and dates.
But, I did not begin this post in order to indulge my ghoulish tendencies. I intended to write about the dry well of my research and what that means. Since this is only a blog, and blog posts by nature should be short, I shall save that for another post. Suffice to say for the moment is that many historians and Douglass biographers have cited the Porter Family Papers, and a single digit number of letters in particular, as containing a wealth of information about their involvement in aiding fugitive slaves. I'm not saying that the Porters did not aid fugitives. That is clearly there in the evidence. I am saying that the generalizations extrapolated from that single digit number of letters do not necessarily reflect the actual evidence in those letters, or at least represent only a cursory reading of those letters.
I think those questionable -- not wrong, just questionable -- generalizations have something to do with the way that people attempt to make "common knowledge" and evidence fit together, or to use scraps of evidence to support that "common knowledge" without questioning the creation of that "common knowledge." I'm referring specifically to such things as aid to fugitives or the Underground Railroad myths, but it can extend to a whole host of information about social history, women's history, Native American history, and African American history. In fact, I've discovered that the most important question I ask myself is, "how do we know what we think we know?" In research, that may be the only real question, or the one that guides all others.
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