The Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, 1827–1835: A Substitute for Social Intercourse

By Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins and Ruth Smith Truss

Astonishing, tragic, and remarkable, the journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, wife of early Alabama governor John Gayle, is among the most widely studied and seminal accounts of antebellum life in the American South. This is the first complete edition of the journal in print.
  Bereft of the companionship of her often-absent husband, Sarah considered her journal “a substitute for social intercourse” during the period from 1827 to 1835. It became the social and intellectual companion to which she confided stories that reflected her personal life and the world of early Alabama. Sarah speaks directly to us of her loneliness, the challenges of child rearing, her fear of and frustration with the management of slaves, and the difficulty of balancing the responsibilities of a socially prominent woman with her family’s slender finances.
The poor condition of the journal and its transcripts, sometimes disintegrated or reassembled in the wrong order, has led historians to misinterpret Gayle’s words. Gayle’s descendants, Alabama’s famed Gorgases, deliberately obscured or defaced many passages. Using archival techniques to recover the text and restore the correct order, Sarah Wiggins and Ruth Truss reveal the unknown story of Sarah’s economic hardships, the question of her husband’s “temperance,” and her opium use.
The only reliable and unexpurgated edition of Sarah Gayle’s journal, now enhanced with a fascinating introduction and inset notes, The Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, 1827–1835, is a robust and gripping account and will be of inestimable value to our understanding of antebellum society, religion, intellectual culture, and slavery.
Published in cooperation with the University Libraries, The University of Alabama, with further financial support from the Library Leadership Board, the University Libraries, The University of Alabama.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780817387167

Book preview

Introduction

Sarah Haynsworth Gayle's Alabama in 1810 was frontier country in the Old Southwest. The Haynsworth family was part of the westward migration of farmers from the Piedmont of South Carolina who became the pioneer planters of Alabama. They left the exhausted fields of the seaboard Piedmont for the fertile Black Belt of the Mississippi Territory, seeing the southwest as a land of opportunity.

The Haynsworths moved in March 1810, although settlers usually moved westward in the fall when trails were dry and hard and swamps more passable. The Federal Road that they traveled was little more than a horse path four feet wide hacked from forests and swamps with split logs five feet long laid for a roadbed. With the Spanish lurking in West Florida, memories of the Burr conspiracy still fresh, and war with England on the horizon, the federal government built the road for military communication southwest across the Mississippi Territory between Washington and New Orleans. Ambitiously intended to handle supply wagons, cannon, men on foot and horseback, the road alarmed the Creek Indian Nation, who foresaw a white invasion that would overwhelm them. Along the road white settlers created what they called forts for their safety. Actually, these forts were no more than a cabin with a surrounding stockade located on an elevation at a river junction.¹

Born on January 18, 1804, near Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah was six years old when the family migrated west. The trip was a lark to this only child, as she perched on the wheel of a cannon and enjoyed the soldiers’ attentions. The family settled west of the junction of the Tombigbee and the Alabama Rivers near Fort Stoddert (Mount Vernon today) near St. Stephens, north of Mobile, land recently ceded by the Choctaws. The outlet to the sea for the Tombigbee and Alabama Rivers was the port of Mobile that Americans would seize during the War of 1812 and retain thereafter. For the developing cotton planters in central Alabama such access would be essential for success in the world of commercial agriculture. After the Creek Indian War, 1813–14, the Creeks ceded the land east of the Alabama River, and only then did the Haynsworth family move across the river to what became Claiborne in Monroe County in the Alabama Black Belt. Claiborne sat at the head of schooner navigation on the Alabama River and became the center of a cotton-planting community. It was the only white settlement in the midst of Indian tribes. For most of the first twenty years of her life Sarah lived in a world where Indians were always nearby and where white settlers were always armed for their safety, often sleeping with a pistol.²

Such a raw wilderness offered little opportunity for education or culture for a little girl. Although her only formal education was attendance at nearby St. Stephens Academy, she did not grow into an uneducated adult, despite her feeling mortified by the deficiencies of her formal education. She possessed an insatiable intellectual curiosity that she fed by continual voracious reading throughout her life. When, as an adult, Sarah anticipated a move to Tuskaloosa, the prospect of living where there was a book store excited her. Unfortunately, she had no opportunity to widen her horizons by travel, and as an adult she admitted that the only towns that she had seen were Greensboro and Tuskaloosa.³

Sarah Haynsworth married John Gayle at Sheldon, her family's plantation near Claiborne on November 14, 1819, the year when Alabama attained statehood. Sarah was not yet sixteen and John was twenty-seven. No portrait or drawing of Sarah has been found, although she was reputed to be a great beauty with dark hair and eyes. Little more than a child herself, she quickly found herself the mother of baby after baby almost every other year. Her life now revolved around the lives of her husband and her children.

The man that she married was born in the Sumter District of South Carolina on September 11, 1792. After graduating from South Carolina College in 1813, he joined his parents in Alabama in August of that year, a few weeks after the Fort Mims massacre; his parents had emigrated from South Carolina two years earlier and now lived near Fort Stoddert. John Gayle read law with Judge Abner Smith Lipscomb in St. Stephens, was licensed to practice in 1818, and opened a law office in Claiborne in Monroe County. The Gayles and the Haynsworths had emigrated from the same region of South Carolina and claimed many mutual friends.⁴

By the time Sarah and John were married, he had already begun a political career. When the Alabama Territory was created in 1817, he became a member of the legislature, which elected him in 1818 to be the solicitor (criminal prosecutor) of the First Judicial Circuit in what is now southwest Alabama. By 1820 his thriving legal practice in Claiborne led him to resign as solicitor. In 1822 he was elected to represent Monroe County in the Alabama House of Representatives for two years. In 1823 he became judge of the Third Judicial Circuit and ex officio judge of the Alabama Supreme Court. Around 1825 the Gayles moved from Claiborne to Greensboro, then located in Greene County. He resigned from the court in 1828 and in 1829 was elected again to the Alabama House of Representatives, this time representing Greene County. He was chosen speaker of the house in 1829. As a strong pro-Jackson and antinullification candidate, he was elected as Alabama's governor in 1831 and reelected without opposition in 1833, leaving office in 1835.⁵

John Gayle was the patriarchal authority of the Gayle household, the principal governor of the family, and its representative to the world outside the family. By 1827, when Sarah began her journal, John Gayle was intensely pursuing his judicial and political interests, more often absent than at home. Three children had been born in Claiborne: Matt in 1820, Sarah Ann in 1824, and a boy, stillborn, probably in 1822. Then Amelia was born in 1826 in Greensboro. Sarah Gayle now found herself increasingly alone, a fairly new resident of Greensboro (which she described as a despicable village).⁶ She was twenty-four years old, the only child of deceased parents with no relatives of her own in Alabama. The frequent and extended absences of her husband meant that it was she who was left to discipline the children, to teach them important lessons, and to impress proper values, particularly moral ones, on their hearts and minds. She termed her situation my sort of widowhood as she assessed her husband's endless wanderings on political and legal business.⁷

Desperately lonely but foregoing self-pity, Sarah Gayle dealt with her emotional needs herself. First, she built a network of women relatives and friends around her, and then she began a journal. She was conscious that living alone with children in what recently had been the frontier was precarious with the constant peril of disease, death, and economic ruin. Family was all important to her, and she realized that kinship was more than a collection of personal relationships, that family was the major unit of the southern world around her. In moving to the frontier the Haynsworths had separated themselves from their collateral relatives who remained in the seaboard states. Without access to her own relatives, she made John Gayle's cousins and siblings her family, creating a web of close friendships with those women and with her women neighbors.

Sarah Gayle developed and maintained this web of relationships through the ritual of visiting. What may seem to be an idle ritual among these women was actually an important emotional connection for a woman with an absent husband. Visiting was an important part of social life, not a mere formality. Sarah depended on these women for entertainment, companionship, advice, comfort, support, and safety, accepting that her dependency was a woman's fate in a male-dominated world. The key assumption was to return in kind the assistance received. They taught and aided each other in the details of bearing and rearing children, nursing the sick, preparing food, sewing, managing servants and households, and coping with illness and death; they exchanged support, time, and physical resources, demonstrating the strength of intragenerational kinship ties. Sarah Gayle instinctively understood that to have great friends she must be a great friend and risk rebuff in reaching out to others; she became the frequent comforter of the pregnant, the ill, the abused, the troubled, the dying, the old, the young. She unconsciously knew the difference between making friends and what today we call networking. Subconsciously, John Gayle, too, probably realized the importance of the bonds of kinship, as he demonstrated extraordinary patience with his maddeningly improvident brother, Levin, who constantly turned to John for financial rescue.⁸ Levin's wife was one of Sarah's closest friends. For both Sarah and John it was as if the ties of kinship were too important to be severed unless over the most serious conflicts.⁹

With several of these women Sarah Gayle developed particularly close, long-lasting associations. Her friendship with Elizabeth Swepstone Gayle (Swep), a cousin of John Gayle, suffered misunderstandings and disruptions and reunions over many years. Devotion to a close friend did not end with that friend's death. For years Sarah mourned the death of her dear friend Amelia Ross and named a daughter in her memory. Earlier, Amelia Ross had named her daughter for Sarah Gayle, and Sarah repeatedly demonstrated a poignant concern for the development of her namesake. All six Gayle children were named for a family member or friend. That the Gayles honored kin and friends in naming their children reflects the importance to them of the kinship network.

In addition to building intense friendships with women friends and family to ease her loneliness, Sarah began a journal with which she talked, pouring her feelings and her soul into it, as if it were a living confidant, saying my heart is revealed in these loose sheets.¹⁰ She continued this practice from 1827 until she died of lockjaw on July 31, 1835, six months shy of her thirty-first birthday. She left a five-month-old infant and five older children. Sometimes, she described her state of mind as depression of spirits,¹¹ and her tortured handwriting in these periods reflects her mental condition. When John Gayle returned home, she said that she had no need to write. Her journal presents a portrait of a self-analyst; she viewed herself objectively as she sought to know herself. Her journal became her catharsis.

Sarah Gayle addressed her journal to her daughters, Sarah and Amelia, dispensing advice to them in the event that she might not live to see them reach maturity. She quietly observed contemporary patterns of courtship and marriage, her own and those around her. With insight and maturity beyond her years, she noted the ironic change that she often saw in young men after marriage. Eager to charm and please the lady before marriage, the jaded husband all too often thereafter abused his wife. Especially, she opposed the practice of marriage of teenage girls so common among her contemporaries, having been there herself. She worried that her daughters could not know themselves at so young an age.

This journal is much more than a chronicle of Sarah Gayle's inward journeys; it is a detailed commentary on the daily world of early nineteenth-century Alabama. In her married life she was not an example of the stereotypical pampered southern belle turned pampered southern wife; she combined routine and seasonable housework with equally demanding maternal responsibilities as the number of her children grew. Despite the constant presence of servants, she nursed sick children and slaves, sewed family clothing, and kept house. For the last year and a half of her life she lived with her husband and five children in a few cramped rooms in a tavern near the Alabama state capitol. Privacy was nonexistent, and she was pregnant for the eighth time.¹²

The violence and rawness of the nearby frontier always lurked just below the surface of Sarah Gayle's world. Her journal vividly recounts episodes of murders, challenges to duels, pistol-packing attorneys in courtrooms. Her stay in Tuskaloosa saw university students attack each other and their professors with bowie knives and pistols, break into the president's study, and damage and scatter his papers. She understood that the discipline and restrictions of university life were intolerable to young men accustomed to the freedom of life in the Old Southwest.¹³

Death was omnipresent in early nineteenth-century Alabama. Throughout her journal Sarah Gayle possessed an extraordinarily strong premonition of her early death—sadly a correct one—a prescient not unreasonable given the number of deaths of young mothers and their children who were her neighbors. As an only child and a very young mother with no immediate family, with a husband absent for extended periods, it is no wonder that she mourned for the presence of her beloved deceased mother to provide advice and comfort in her loneliness. Her preoccupation with death has troubled some historians, and that fact is understandable; it is difficult for one who has no children to appreciate parental concern about dying and leaving the fate of their children to the hands of strangers.¹⁴

Religion was second only to kinship in importance to Sarah Gayle. Although she never formally affiliated with any church or denomination, she regularly attended religious services. Her journal reflects curiosity and ambivalence on the issue of faith in the divine and belief in the hereafter. She possessed an intense need to believe in a future that would reunite her with her beloved parents, beloved women friends, and beloved stillborn infants. Yet, always there seemed a touch of skepticism, of wonder at the mysteries associated with deep faith in an afterlife. The violent emotionalism of evangelical preachers and services offended her but did not deter her from attending the next religious meeting available. In an era when little else existed for intellectual stimulation or entertainment, she sampled every type of religious gathering from wild Baptist camp meetings to sedate Episcopal ceremonies. She did not hesitate to analyze and evaluate in her journal the grace (or the lack of it) of the delivery of ministers from the pulpit, the substance of their sermons, or the behavior of their congregations. Recognizing that many ministers were better educated than she, she lamented that ministers and other educated men would not discuss serious subjects with her because she was a woman.

Suffering loneliness and depression, Sarah Gayle, like many antebellum upper-and middle-class southern white women, sought comfort in opium, which then was considered harmless. She closed one letter to her absent husband saying that a large pile of opium has taken me to the seventh Heaven.¹⁵ Frequently, Sarah complained of ill health: dental discomfort, vision problems, dizziness, extreme nervousness, exhaustion, loss of appetite, lassitude, depression, bloating—conditions that could have been side effects of opium use. At the same time the frustrations of life in the male-dominated world in which she lived and of domestic responsibilities with sullen children and unruly servants may have manifested themselves in some of these physical symptoms.

In the nineteenth century opium was as much a part of southern society as drinking alcohol or sniffing snuff, and most people used these three drugs for the same reason—to elevate their mood. Opium was then easily available, especially in a liquid form dispensed by local pharmacists as what might be considered tonic. It was often dispensed to women to relieve nervous or gynecological disorders, especially dysmenorrhea. It is impossible to know how dependent Sarah was on the drug; addicts hide their dependency. None of her other surviving letters or her journal mention her use of opiates by name. However, many pages, paragraphs, and lines in her journal have been carefully sliced out, as if cut with a knife. These pages have disappeared, and the information contained there cannot be known and may or may not have mentioned opium use. The best evidence of her addiction may be the long-term effects on her health. She suffered with advanced tooth decay, loss of appetite, vision difficulties (probably constricted pupils of her eyes), inflammation of her mouth and throat, depression, nausea, listlessness, exhaustion, constipation—all consequences of opium addiction.¹⁶ In judging Sarah Gayle on this matter it is important to view her actions in the context of her own time when the use of opiates was socially acceptable and neither scandalous nor illegal.

William Garrett, a contemporary of the Gayles, questioned John Gayle's temperance in print, saying that he possessed an infirmity which it would be uncandid to conceal,…The social nature of Gov. Gayle, and the common usages of his day, betrayed him into intemperance,… Although neither the Gayle family correspondence nor journal mention this issue, Sarah's daughter, Amelia, challenged Garrett's comments. She wrote in the margin of copies of Garrett's book in the University of Alabama Library that the author had apologized to her for this accusation. Years later a South Carolina newspaper reported that John once had been in the downward path of intemperance. But, in 1848 he signed a temperance pledge and became president of a temperance society while representing Alabama in the U.S. Congress.¹⁷ Unfortunately, it is impossible to judge the accuracy of Garrett's intemperance accusation, or to know if this matter was addressed in the journal pages that have been removed.

Although the Gayles enjoyed a steady income from John's judicial and political offices and from his successful law practice, they were constantly pressed financially. John regularly covered the obligations of his brother, Levin, who held no regular employment and who frequently needed thousands of dollars. In 1828 alone Levin was sued seven times for nonperformance of certain promises and ordered to pay the original judgments and damages, plus 10 percent, plus court costs for both circuit and supreme courts. John Gayle also inherited financial obligations from his father, Matthew Gayle, who in 1811 had borrowed $1100 from a man in South Carolina, using fifteen slaves as collateral. Matthew Gayle then moved to Alabama that same year and died in 1820, leaving the debt unpaid.¹⁸ This debt was regularly presented to his son for payment. Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, he sold some slaves that Sarah had inherited and others that he had purchased from her father, although Sarah was especially attached to them. That John sold slaves that Sarah had inherited may explain her eagerness to hear the senate debates in 1829 about the Lady's Bill, as she termed it. The bill proposed to protect property that a wife had inherited from being sold by a husband to pay debts—in the Gayle case, debts of her husband's family members. The 1830 census recorded that John Gayle owned ten slaves; how many had been Haynsworth slaves cannot be determined.¹⁹ When still more funds were needed, John sold the family carriage and his own horse.

Like many other southerners, Sarah Gayle mentioned slavery infrequently in her accounts of her daily routine, although she lived in a world where it surrounded her every day.²⁰ For much of her life she seemed oblivious to the fact that slaves relieved her of many routine household chores, permitting her the opportunity to maintain her journal or to involve herself with her children and her friends.

Sarah experienced continual difficulty managing her household servants. Young and inexperienced with her husband constantly absent, she found herself a white mother with infants and toddlers living among a sea of black faces. Their numbers and her loneliness created in her a dread of living alone, and she was easily out maneuvered or intimidated.²¹ On more than one occasion Sarah recorded unsettling episodes where slave behavior suggested that a rebellious spirit seethed just below the surface of what appeared to be a tranquil world of slaves and owners. One day when John was away, leaving only one horse for Sarah's use, a slave bluntly told her that he intended to ride the horse to his work. When Sarah said that she wanted to use the horse to send to the country for butter, he answered that he wanted him too. She described another slave as insolent with a contrary disposition. He treated her with the utmost contempt and often laughed in her face when given instructions. One young slave did not pretend to attend to more of her commands than were perfectly agreable.²² Such conduct caused her to strike out in frustration and anger in her journal and in her correspondence, calling them ungrateful and insensible wretches.²³ While she freely admitted her inability to manage servants, she still possessed a dreamy, idealized, unrealistic view of the institution of slavery as she imagined a time when all of the Haynsworth slaves would be reunited under her supervision on a snug farm somewhere where everyone would be happy.²⁴ Yet, despite all her problems with servants, she recognized the humanity of slaves, unlike so many of her contemporaries in the Old Southwest, who did not. Still, although devoted to some of her servants, she never overcame her belief that they were inferior beings.

The most poignant episode in Sarah's journal relates to the institution of slavery. Rose, the children's nurse, developed tetanus from a splinter in her foot. Sarah nursed Rose more like a child than a servant and brought white doctors to her bedside until Rose died in Sarah's arms, with Sarah praying that they would meet in happiness in another world. Her love for Rose was genuine.²⁵

Sarah Gayle was ambivalent on the subject of slavery. In 1831 she briefly mentioned Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in her journal, expressing horror at the gory details and strong disapproval when a friend commented that had she been a slave, she would have rebelled as Turner had done. Yet, as a slaveholder alarmed by Nat Turner's actions, her intellectual curiosity led her to read the works of a violently outspoken abolitionist, William Wilberforce, the leader of the British antislavery movement. Sarah's attitude toward slavery ran the entire gamut of emotions: paternal, sympathetic, patronizing, devoted, disgusted, impatient, angry.

Despite the friction between Gayle slaves and owners some good feeling lingered long after emancipation. Decades after the deaths of John and Sarah Gayle, one of their grandsons penned a memoir that recounted a scene that reflected an unusual bond between owner and slave. Annually, on All Saints Day a florist decorated graves in the Gayle lot in Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile. Every year he found flowers placed at the obelisk marking the burial place of John Gayle and his two wives. One year the florist arrived at the lot to see an elderly black lady placing flowers. She said that she was a former Gayle slave and that she had placed flowers there every year for decades after the death of John Gayle.²⁶

Sarah Gayle commented little on contemporary politics in Alabama, including a states’ rights crisis in 1833 involving her husband. Whites and Indians clashed over lands that the Creeks had ceded to the United States earlier. Although the land had not been fully surveyed, squatters rushed onto the land guaranteed to the Creeks as well as onto the newly opened land. When President Andrew Jackson ordered federal troops to remove whites from Indian lands, a white settler was killed, and the soldier responsible was indicted for murder. Governor Gayle championed the settlers’ rights, argued that federal protection of the Creeks violated state sovereignty, organized a militia, and insisted that the soldier surrender to state authorities. Jackson sent Francis Scott Key, U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., to Alabama to represent the federal government in resolving the crisis. Key hastily completed the land surveys, the accused soldier disappeared, and no trial occurred. Only settlers on lands reserved for the Creeks had to vacate, and title to lands occupied by whites could be purchased from the Indians. Subsequently, the state legislature adjourned without determining who was right or wrong in the quarrel. Key commented in a letter to Gayle that this was the way in which I always wished the business to terminate. Although Key represented Andrew Jackson and the federal government in a states’ rights quarrel with the governor of Alabama, Key developed a warm friendship with the Gayles; he later remembered his time there fondly, saying, Could I transport myself as easily as my thoughts, I should still be a frequent visitor.²⁷ Sarah mentioned him only briefly in her journal and unfortunately gave no insight into this important collision between state and federal governments that involved Key and her husband.

This states’ rights controversy occurred at the time that nullification was a heated national issue during Jackson's administration. Jackson now angrily interpreted John Gayle's stand favoring state sovereignty as disloyalty to an old friend. The Washington Globe, the administration's official organ, accused Gayle of having combined with the nullifiers, a charge that Gayle vehemently denied in a letter to Key. Gayle also stressed to Key that his opinion of Jackson's patriotism and great qualities continued unchanged, despite their differences in Alabama.²⁸

As a political figure John Gayle was involved in controversies throughout his career. His wife often expressed alarm in her journal about these quarrels, as she called them, without providing details about why she was so concerned. Sometimes her account of those events confused the true facts, while the controversies usually resolved themselves. However, none of the controversies degenerated into the physical confrontation that she seemed to fear. For example, while John Gayle was Speaker of the House of Representatives, his handling of a procedural matter infuriated one representative from Mobile. Gayle appointed a committee of house members to investigate the accusations of the representative and left the committee to resolve the issue quietly.²⁹ In another instance, Sarah fretted in her journal about John's difficulties with future governor Arthur Bagby. Then one day the two men suddenly appeared walking arm in arm along a Tuskaloosa street without any explanation.³⁰

Writing in a stream-of-consciousness fashion in her journal, Sarah Gayle often reminisced about her childhood or recounted events from earlier years or created imaginary scenes loaded with symbolism. Her journal contains frequent expressions of guilt when she dreamed of traveling to visit family or friends, a wish that would require leaving her children to the care of others. Perhaps it was a sense of guilt and a premonition that she had so much to teach her children but so little time to do so that led her rarely to leave them and trust them to someone else's care.

Despite Sarah's limited education her journal is beautifully written, reflecting her voracious reading. In books she found the intellectual stimulation and companionship missing from her daily life. She was familiar with such men as Voltaire and Richelieu, Boswell and Johnson as well as with such less well-known persons as Frances Wright, an abolitionist who advocated birth control and universal suffrage for women and blacks in the 1820s. Although she read the works expected of southerners—Sir Walter Scott and Washington Irving—she also read theology, Restoration comedy, political speeches, educational treatises, poetry, drama, travel accounts, ancient and contemporary history, and biography. How she gained access in Greensboro to works by such controversial authors as Wilberforce or Wright remains a mystery. Although her vocabulary was excellent for one her age in any period, her spelling was phonetic and atrocious. Still, she deserves our admiration as a highly literate young woman in the Old Southwest in the 1820s and 1830s.³¹

Scattered throughout the journal are poems that Sarah Gayle composed while she maintained her journal, as well as poems that she had written years earlier. Some poems were created for a specific purpose—a wedding gift to a friend or a recitation for her son Matt to present at school. Several were contributions to the albums of young girls, much as scribblings in so-called autograph books of schoolgirls in the 1950s. Most of the poems are wistful, romantic, sentimental pieces. Others are mournful expressions of her love for her deceased parents.³²

Sarah Gayle always referred to her husband as Mr. Gayle or the old man. Such references were practiced in the South even through the twentieth century. My grandfather always addressed his wife as Mrs. Woolfolk, and my aunt never addressed her husband in any fashion other than Mr. Campbell through her lifetime. My father always referred to his father as the old man. Such practices should not be interpreted as meaning aloofness or contempt; they should be accepted as how southerners addressed their wives or husbands or fathers for generations.

Sarah Gayle's journal is unique as a woman's journal reflecting life in early nineteenth-century Alabama. Although many manuscript collections exist that detail the lives and activities of her contemporaries, her journal stands alone as a personal window into the Alabama world of a young mother between 1827 and 1835. Archival collections contain no other account written by an Alabama woman in this period. This journal is not one for hasty reading. Rather, it is one that will slowly immerse the reader into the antebellum world of a sensitive, perceptive young woman almost suffocating in her life in an Alabama village in the Old Southwest.

1827

There is indeed, in a woman's affection, a singleness, a fervor, a purity, that man's scarcely hath.

27 July 1827 I am pleased with Mr. [Thomas] Clinton's simple, earnest, frank and unaffected way of preaching. One at once perceives, he is a man regardless of self, having the honor of his Master, and the good of his auditors alone at heart. His language is free, at times almost polished; and I never heard any one use comparisons more apropos—often beautiful; but rarely allowing them to sink. I fear there is frequently an affectation of more humility than they really feel, amongst many of his Methodist brothers—of this he has none. I am glad of it, for otherwise, I should have no patience with him. It is no matter of regret that he did not have the advantages of a liberal education.

August 8 [1827] On saturday, the 3d. Nancy [Gayle, wife of John's nephew, Billups,] brought into the world a dead son. By no occurrence have I lately been so affected. The birth of her child, was an event to which she had been looking forward, with the utmost delight; and this sweet hope of soon holding in her arms, the pledge of her almost worshipping love to her husband, has been blighted by an unknown cause. Her sufferings were excruciating, but she bore them with an angel's fortitude. The slightest entreaty from Billups, for the exertion of patience, was enough to silence even her gentlest moaning. At last the physician announced its birth, and for a moment, I held my lips to her forehead in thankful, unmixed joy for her relief; but it grew less, while I witnessed the ineffectual efforts to restore animation to the little, blackened object before me. It is dead said Nancy, mildly and calmly. Unable to articulate a word, I shook my head, to intimate a hope to the contrary. It is,[] she again said, or it would make a noise. Poor little soul, she continued, it's far better off, and I thank God. I feel resignation to His will. We ought to congratulate ourselves that we are now the mothers of Angels in Heaven. May I look at it? Well, never mind, she said, as some one told her she had better not. I almost suffocated with my feelings, I left her a short time, and on returning, found them busy with the baby and imagining the color changed. []Bless its heart,[] I cried, []I hope it will live. []Bless your heart, answered Nancy, whom I thought asleep, but whose eyes were fixed on my face.

Earnestly, warmly, do I pray that this lover of children may yet cherish one of her own at her bosom, without again experiencing the agony of her first birth. I give my testimony chearfully, to the kind attentions shown by Mrs. [Catherine] Hunter and Mrs. [James A.] Weymes [Wemyss].

Last evening Miss Jane Fisher and Majr. [Samuel] Reed were married. The last year was spent at school, and now she has assumed the duties and responsibilities of a wife. How little may she be calculated to discharge them [with] patient attention, industry, firmness, uniformity, good nature, and love, love boundless for her husband.

Night [1827] Mr. Gayle and myself rode out on horseback in the afternoon, and finding time enough on my return, Harriet [Gayle, John's niece], Sarah Ross [, daughter of Sarah's close friend who had died,] Sarah [oldest daughter of Sarah Gayle] & myself call'd upon Mrs. [Maria M.] Lawson, & Mrs. [Mary] Caskaden and her sweet-looking daughter. The latter is a charming little miniature of a woman. Her Northern prejudices against southern customs & habits, are just at the stage of effervescence, and I hope for her own quiet, they will settle down to a temperate, milder point, than they have yet reached. She little dreams too, of the dangerous tendency the fostering of suspicion against the morality of the other sex, will have. She says, her motto, is to hate a man, untill she knows him. On the contrary, I, from policy, give a man credit for what I desire he should have, ’till circumstances compel me to know he has it not. In a laughing way, I combatted her assertions; but inwardly, I hoped she might escape the net she was weaving for herself—from a similar one the friendly counsel of an amiable woman released me; and now that I have passed it, I am sensible of the danger of my situation. I rather think, most women, some time, during the early years of their marriage, undergo a revolution in their opinions and feelings. This very fervency will produce