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“A GRIM MEMORIAL OF ITS THOROUGH WORK OF DEVASTATION AND DESOLATION”: RACE AND MEMORY IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE 1893 SEA ISLAND STORM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2018

Robert D. Bland
Robert D. Bland*
Affiliation:
St. John's University
*
email: [email protected]
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Abstract

“‘A Grim Memorial of Its Thorough Work of Devastation and Desolation’: Race and Memory in the Aftermath of the 1893 Sea Island Storm” explores the political struggle that ensued in the aftermath of the August 1893 hurricane. The storm, which decimated the predominantly African American South Carolina Sea Islands, required a nine-month relief effort to assist the region's citizens in their time of need. Led by the American Red Cross, the relief effort became a new proxy for a long-standing debate over the legacy of Reconstruction and the meaning of black citizenship. This battle, waged by leaders in South Carolina's Democratic Party, Red Cross officials, writers in the national press, former abolitionists, and African Americans living in the South Carolina Sea Islands, exposed growing fissures in how Americans understood notions of charity and self-help. More than a battleground for still-nascent ideas of disaster relief, the political turmoil that followed the 1893 Sea Island Storm played a critical role in redefining the racial boundaries of the United States on the eve of the Jim Crow era.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 297 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 On fatality estimates for the 1893 Sea Island Storm, see “The Deadliest Atlantic Tropical Cyclones, 1492–1996,” National Hurricane Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdeadlyapp1.shtml. On the 1893 Sea Island Storm and the subsequent relief effort, see Dauber, Michele Landis, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 268–71Google Scholar; Davies, Gareth, “The Emergence of a National Politics of Disaster, 1865–1900,” Journal of Policy History 26 (Fall 2014): 305–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 315 and 317; Fraser, Walter J. Jr., Lowcountry Hurricanes: Three Centuries of Storms at Sea and Ashore (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 164–84Google Scholar; Jones, Marian Moser, “Race, Class, and Gender Disparities in Clara Barton's Late Nineteenth-Century Disaster Relief,” Environment and History 17 (Spring 2011): 107–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bill and Marscher, Fran, The Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 (Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Mett, Craig, The Great Sea Islands Hurricane and Tidal Wave: A Storm of Politics and Charity during the Jim Crow Era (Columbia, SC.: Catmoon Media, 2012)Google Scholar; Wise, Stephen R. and Rowland, Lawrence S., Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past and Present: 1893–2006, Vol. 3 of The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016)Google Scholar, chap. 1. For their generosity and support in the creation of this essay, the author would like to thank Leslie Rowland, Clare Lyons, Kidada Williams, and Thadious Davis; the librarians and archivists at the National Archives II, the Library of Congress, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and the Beaufort District Collection of the Beaufort County Library; and the anonymous reviewers at JGAPE.

2 On the rise of the American Red Cross, see Irwin, Julia F., Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation's Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Marian Moser, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

3 On the South Carolina Sea Islands during the Civil War and Reconstruction, see Foner, Eric, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1982)Google Scholar, chap. 3; Holt, Thomas, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar, chaps. 5–8; Kelly, Brian, “Black Laborers, the Republican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction in Lowcountry South Carolina,” Journal of International Social History 51 (Dec. 2006): 375–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, Willie Lee, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Saville, Julie, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina (New York: Cambridge University, 1996)Google Scholar; Schwalm, Leslie A., A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar, chaps. 6–7; Wise, Stephen R. and Rowland, Lawrence S., Rebellion, Reconstruction, Redemption, 1869–1893, Vol. 2 of The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

4 Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press), xxi–xxii; Remes, Jacob, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 5–6Google Scholar.

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6 The late nineteenth century saw a seismic shift in the way Americans conceptualized poor relief. Whereas charity was once tied to gendered ideas of moral uplift delivered through private organizations, the postbellum era saw the rise of more impersonal forms of welfare that used the tools of social science and gradually moved under the auspices of the state. On charitable giving and poor relief, see Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Geisberg, Judith, Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 3–52Google Scholar; Ginzberg, Lori D., Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986)Google Scholar.

7 “Edgefield Exodus,” Charleston News and Courier, Jan. 2, 1882.

8 Journalist quoted in Charleston News and Courier, May 3, 1879. For the migration figure, see Appleton's Annual Cyclopaedia 4 (1879): 813, cited in Tindall, George B., South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 74Google Scholar.

9 Schweninger, Loren, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 162–63Google Scholar.

10 “The Sea Islands: The Progress of the Population,” Washington, DC, People's Advocate, Aug. 21, 1880.

11 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, “Some War Scenes Revisited,” Atlantic Monthly 42 (July 1878): 1–9Google Scholar.

12 King, Edward, The Great South: A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1875), 427–29Google Scholar.

13 Pinckney lecture quoted in Niels Christensen, “The Sea Islands and Negro Supremacy,” n.d., Christensen Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library.

14 “Sea Islands Overwhelmed: Steadily the List of Cyclone Victims Grows,” Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 3, 1893.

15 Beardslee quoted in Barton, Clara, The Red Cross in Peace and War (Washington, DC: American Historical Press, 1898), 200Google Scholar; Archer cited in Mather, Rachel, The Storm Swept Coast of South Carolina (Woonsocket, RI: C. E. Cook, 1894), 32Google Scholar.

16 Father quoted in Mather, Storm Swept Coast, 16; Susan Hazel Rice Diary, Aug. 30, 1893.

17 Wilkins and Archer quoted in Mather, Storm Swept Coast, 18; “Brave Negro Life-Savers,” Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 19, 1893; “Seeing Is Believing,” Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 1, 1893; “The Storm on the Coast,” New York Times, Sept. 3, 1893.

18 Rules for the Government of the Sea Island Relief Committee, n.d., Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; “Appeal of the Sea Island Relief Committee,” Sept. 1, 1893, Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, LC.

19 “Appeal of the Sea Island Relief Committee,”

20 “The Island Sufferers,” Savannah Tribune, Nov. 25, 1893. For examples of “Back Home News,” see Savannah Tribune. On the politics of the black press following the destruction of slavery, see Brown, Elsa Barkley, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 “There is Everything Right in the Methods” Beaufort New South, Oct. 5, 1893.

22 “Let Us Not Sacrifice Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage,” Beaufort New South, Oct. 19, 1893.

23 On the role of the politics of respectability in shaping gendered notions of citizenship in the black community during the late nineteenth century, see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Mitchell, Michele, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

24 On the Panic of 1893 and its aftermath, see Nelson, Scott Reynolds, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters (New York: Knopf, 2012)Google Scholar, chaps. 9–10.

25 On the impact of Social Darwinism on the Republican Party, see Richardson, Heather Cox, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, chap 6. On the shift in philanthropic organizations during the late nineteenth century, see Goldberg., Chad Alan Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Irwin, Making the World Safe; Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986)Google Scholar.

26 Quoted in Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 223; “Sea Island Relief inventory book,” [Oct. 1893], Red Cross Papers, RG 200, box LF2, NA II.

27 Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 223, 225. On the Freedmen's Bureau, see Cimbala, Paul A. and Miller, Randall M., eds., The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Farmer-Kaiser, Mary, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldberg., Chad Alan Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Hahn, Steven, Miller, Steven F., O'Donovan, Susan E., Rodrigue, John C., and Rowland, Leslie S., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Ser. 3, Vol. 1, Land and Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Hayden, René, Kaye, Anthony E., Masur, Kate, Miller, Steven F., O'Donovan, Susan E., Rowland, Leslie S., and West, Stephen A, eds., Freedom, a Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Ser. 3, Vol. 2, Land and Labor, 1866–1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

28 On disparity between the 1889 Jonestown Flood relief effort and the 1893 Sea Island Storm relief effort, see Jones, “Race, Class, and Gender Disparities in Clara Barton's Late Nineteenth-Century Disaster Relief.”

29 George Washington Murray's proposed bill cited in The State (Columbia, SC), Sept. 8, 1893

30 Clipping from Nov. 2, 1893 Congressional Record of Senator Hoar, speaking on Sea Island Relief Bill in Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.

31 Clipping from Nov. 2, 1893 Congressional Record; Clara Barton to Abbie Holmes Christensen, Dec. 14, 1893, Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, LC.

32 “Letter from Frederick Douglass,” Brooklyn Eagle, Sept. 9, 1893, clipping in Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, LC. On Douglass and the deployment of African American counter-memory of the Civil War, see Blight, Race and Reunion.

33 Robert Smalls to Frederick Douglass, Sept. 7, 1893, Frederick Douglass Papers, Manuscripts Division, LC.

34 Letter of William Channing Gannett in Unity, Nov. 16, 1893, 163–64; Edward E. Poor, “The People of the Sea Islands,” Friends’ Intelligencer, Sept. 23, 1893.

35 Writers of local-color literature hoped to market this otherness in the same way that travel writers on the Middle East, Asia, and Africa emphasized the “orientalist” aspects of non-white and non-western cultures. These writings offered a more “authentic” alternative to the emerging Anglo-Saxon middle-class mainstream of the United States. Joel Chandler Harris's publications were a critical component of this movement. On Joel Chandler Harris's role in the popularization of southern color writing after Reconstruction see, Prince, Stories of the South, chap 4. On local color and southern travel literature more broadly, and the consumption of southern stories in the northern press, see The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Vol. 9: Literature, ed., M. Thomas Inge (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), svv. “Regionalism and Local Color,” “Travel Writing.” On broader implications of creating the “other” through travel writing, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), intro.

36 Harris, Joel Chandler, “The Sea Island Storm: The Devastation,” Scribner's Monthly 15 (February 1894): 231–35Google Scholar; “Leading Articles of the Month: To the Rescue of the Sea Islanders,” Review of Reviews 9 (Mar. 1894): 257Google Scholar.

37 Harris, “The Sea Island Storm: The Relief,” Scribner's Monthly (Mar. 1894): 277; Harris, “The Sea Island Storm: The Storm,” 258.

38 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, July 12, 1893. On questions of racecraft and national boundaries during the 1890s, see Fields, Karen E. and Fields, Barbara J., Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012)Google Scholar, chap. 5; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000)Google Scholar; Kramer, Paul A., The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Sehat, David, “The Civilizing Mission of Booker T. Washington,” Journal of Southern History 73 (Summer 2007): 323–62Google Scholar.

39 Stephen Kantrowitz has argued that white supremacy as a “populist” political strategy, as practiced by Tillman and others, did not appear whole cloth during the violent overthrow of Reconstruction but rather had to be adapted and reinvented to withstand the Populist challenge of the late nineteenth century. On Benjamin Tillman's appropriation of populist rhetoric, see Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman, chap 4.

40 “No Need of Federal Aid,” Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 11, 1893.

41 On the explicit demonization of Reconstruction by Tillman and other South Carolina Democrats during the 1880s and 1890s, see Baker, What Reconstruction Meant, chap. 2.

42 Thomas Martin to editors of Charleston News and Courier, Nov. 17, 1893, clipping in Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, LC.

43 Eugene Gregorie to William Elliott, Mar. 29, 1894, Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, LC.

44 On the precarious balance between capital and labor in South Carolina, see Kelly, “Black Laborers, the Republican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction in Lowcountry South Carolina”; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, chap. 3.

45 John MacDonald to J. C. Hemphill, Dec. 3, 1893, Clara Barton Papers, LC.

46 Mather, The Storm Swept Coast of South Carolina, 50–53. On the prospect of achieving biracial unity within the Populist movement, see Postel, Charles, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press 2009)Google Scholar, chap. 6.

47 “Cursing the Red Cross! Bitter Feeling against It in Beaufort County,” Columbia Daily Register, May 25, 1894.

48 John MacDonald to P. V. DeGrew, June 3, 1894, Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, LC.

49 Ibid.

50 David Blight notes that the first Decoration Day, which took place in the spring of 1865, was organized by former slaves to recognize Union soldiers who had died in a makeshift prison in Charleston, South Carolina. In the years that followed, the Lowcountry, and especially the town of Beaufort, was the site of the largest and most extravagant Decoration Day celebrations in the nation. Later, the holiday would become Memorial Day. On Decoration Day, see Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 64–70; Janney, Caroline, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 214–22Google Scholar.

51 “Decoration Day,” Red Cross memo, [June 1894], Red Cross Papers, box LF3, folder 1, Record Group 200, National Archives II.

52 Ibid. On Barton's wartime service in the Lowcountry, see Barton, Clara, A Story of the Red Cross: Glimpses of Field Work (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1928), 79–80Google Scholar.

53 “Decoration Day,” Red Cross Papers, NA II.

54 Coclanis, Peter, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Caroline Lowcountry, 1680–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; McKinley, Shepherd, Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Kiser, Clyde V., Sea Islands to City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and other Urban Centers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 230Google Scholar.

56 Niels Christensen, Jr., “The Negroes of Beaufort County, South Carolina,” Southern Workman 32 (Oct. 1903): 482.

57 On the impact of natural disasters in black communities during the Progressive Era, see Horowitz, Andy, “The Complete Story of the Galveston Horror: Trauma, History, and the Great Storm of 1900,” Historical Reflections 41 (Winter 2015): 95–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mizelle, Richard M., Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neely, Wayne, The Great Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928: The Story of the Second Deadliest Hurricane in Bahamian History (Bloomington: iUniverse Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Steinberg, Acts of God, chaps. 2–3.

58 The current scholarship on African American history and natural disaster is deeply indebted to the work of historians working to understand the long history of Hurricane Katrina. These histories written in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina not only highlight the role structural racism played in the government's response but also demonstrate how black communities have understood long-standing proximity to natural and human-made calamity. On the burgeoning Hurricane Katrina historiography, see “Through the Eye of Katrina,” Special Issue of Journal of American History 94 (Winter 2007); Steinberg, Acts of God, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University, 2006)Google Scholar, chap. 9; Woods, Clyde, ed., “In the Wake of Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions,” Special Issue of American Quarterly 61 (Fall 2009)Google Scholar.