Southern Women in the Progressive Era: A Reader

By Giselle Roberts, Melissa Walker and Marjorie J. Spruill

“Stories of personal tragedy, economic hardship, and personal conviction . . . a valuable addition to both southern and women’s history.” —Journal of Southern History

From the 1890s to the end of World War I, the reformers who called themselves progressives helped transform the United States, and many women filled their ranks. Through solo efforts and voluntary associations both national and regional, women agitated for change, addressing issues such as poverty, suffrage, urban overcrowding, and public health. Southern Women in the Progressive Era presents the stories of a diverse group of southern women—African Americans, working-class women, teachers, nurses, and activists—in their own words, casting a fresh light on one of the most dynamic eras in US history.

These women hailed from Virginia to Florida and from South Carolina to Texas and wrote in a variety of genres, from correspondence and speeches to bureaucratic reports, autobiographies, and editorials. Included in this volume, among many others, are the previously unpublished memoir of civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded a school for black children; the correspondence of a textile worker, Anthelia Holt, whose musings to a friend reveal the day-to-day joys and hardships of mill-town life; the letters of the educator and agricultural field agent Henrietta Aiken Kelly, who attempted to introduce silk culture to southern farmers; and the speeches of the popular novelist Mary Johnson, who fought for women’s voting rights. Always illuminating and often inspiring, each story highlights the part that regional identity—particularly race—played in health and education reform, suffrage campaigns, and women’s club work.

Together these women’s voices reveal the promise of the Progressive Era, as well as its limitations, as women sought to redefine their role as workers and citizens of the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781611179262

Book preview

Introduction

GISELLE ROBERTS AND MELISSA WALKER

The documentary selections in this book feature the voices of southern women who lived in the Progressive Era. That time period stretched from the 1890s to the end of World War I, when the United States was transformed by politically active pressure groups who called for various kinds of reform. The reformers called themselves progressives, and the name has stuck. Progressives sought to address many of the social, economic, political, and cultural problems of an industrialized and urbanized world. They worked alone and through a host of voluntary associations, both regional and national, to agitate for change. Some progressives addressed poverty, urban overcrowding, and public health problems. They lived in settlement houses, campaigned for child labor laws, or joined the ranks of the National Consumers League, who boycotted the products of manufacturers who exploited workers. Others focused on popular control of the American political process. They fought for woman suffrage, direct primary elections, and effective municipal government.

Progressives were typically from the middle class. They approached problems by gathering relevant facts, analyzing them using the tools of the emerging social sciences, and proposing solutions based on principles of rationality and scientific management. They looked to the government to intervene in society and the economy to implement these solutions. In many cases their work was regionally specific, reflecting local needs and political realities. White southern progressives, for example, sought to commemorate the Lost Cause and to order race relations through segregation. White southern suffragists campaigned for the right to vote, but they did so with arguments about maintaining white supremacy, while black women saw the franchise as a tool for uplifting the entire race.

Middle-class women were at the heart of progressive reform. More women than ever before were attending college and sought to channel their energies and education into doing good. Many of these women chose to remain single and pursue careers in the paid or volunteer work force. While women’s opportunities continued to be limited by assumptions about gender and race, they were nonetheless expanding, particularly in the new fields of social work and home economics, because of the professionalization of education, nursing, and public health. The birth rate was also declining among married white and black women, as they took steps to limit the size of their families. Having fewer children gave them more time to participate in clubs and church groups. Clubs that had offered nineteenth-century women a means of self-study and intellectual improvement now turned their attention to benevolence and reform work. Many of these white women’s clubs were organized under the umbrella of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), a network of state and national clubs that pursued a reform agenda. By 1910 the GFWC represented more than a million women. Black women were also active in the club movement, establishing separate organizations. The National Association of Colored Women formed in 1896 and, with Mary Church Terrell as its president, adopted the slogan Lifting As We Climb to reflect its goal of improving life for the whole race. Other progressives became involved in church-based reform work, including home and foreign missionary societies. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union boasted 150,000 members by the 1890s and was particularly strong in the South.

The Progressive movement in the South also unfolded in the context of a strong tradition of New South boosterism that tried to entice northern capitalists to invest in southern economic development by promoting industrialization, urbanization, and modernized agriculture. Progressive reformers shared many of the assumptions and values about modernity that drove New South boosters. Yet they also supported many ideas that might not look so progressive to twenty-first-century citizens. Many embraced scientific racism, with its claims that science proved the inferiority of nonwhite racial groups. Others adopted progressive models that were rooted in eugenic fears that the so-called inferior races would rapidly outnumber the superior white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had long dominated American political, social, and economic life. This strand of the Progressive movement was especially appealing to white reformers in the South who believed in white supremacy and worked to maintain the racial status quo, including segregation and disfranchisement.

To be sure, not all Americans who lived during the first two decades of the twentieth century would have identified themselves as progressives. The middle class made up a minority of Americans; most of the population were factory workers, farmers, domestics, and laborers. Although some working-class Americans joined the union movement, most were not involved in organized reform work. Instead, the struggle to provide for themselves and their families came first. As historian William A. Link has pointed out, progressive reforms exposed profound conflicts in southern society. Many southerners, particularly those outside the educated urban middle class, clung to traditional values and rejected the advance of an increasingly interventionist state. But working-class Americans and working-class southerners also watched as modernity pushed old ways aside. The roles of women were redefined during this period, and working-class women found new opportunities in an expanding range of clerical, manufacturing, and retail sales jobs. Many of the women featured in this book were progressive reformers, engaged in one or more organized efforts to bring about social, economic, or cultural change. A few would not have considered themselves progressives at all, but their lives nonetheless reflect the changes that modernity brought to southern women’s lives.¹

The historiography on black and white southern women of the Progressive Era includes Marjorie J. Spruill’s foundational work on the suffrage movement, Joan Marie Johnson’s study on southern clubs, and Anastatia Sims’s research on women’s organizations in North Carolina. What has been missing is a documentary edition featuring the stories of these women, told in their own words. This book provides readers with a selection of extended documentary selections by African American women, working-class women, teachers, nurses, and activists. They hail from Virginia to Florida, from South Carolina to Texas. They wrote in a variety of genres, ranging from correspondence and speeches to bureaucratic reports, autobiographies, and editorials.²

The book is organized into three parts. Part one, Activists in the Making, features the stories of Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mary Lee Cagle. Breckinridge was a white woman, born and raised in Kentucky, who earned advanced degrees in economics, political science, and law. She established the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, the first school of social work affiliated with a major research university. Bethune, the daughter of former slaves, founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, the city’s first African American school for girls. She became a civil rights pioneer, serving as director of Negro affairs for the National Youth Administration and advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on minority affairs. Mary Lee Cagle was an evangelist and one of the first ordained women in the South. She articulated a different notion of womanhood, one grounded in service to God. This documentary selection, featuring chapters by Anya Jabour, Ann Short Chirhart, and Priscilla Pope-Levison, charts the coming-of-age stories of Breckinridge, Bethune, and Cagle, highlighting the influences and early challenges that shaped their work and their outlook as reformers.

Part two, A New Southern Workforce, shows how a changing economy transformed the lives of workers, including Anthelia Holt, Henrietta Aiken Kelly, and Florida’s public health nurses. Anthelia Holt, a mill worker at Virginia’s Matoaca Manufacturing Company, kept up a regular correspondence with Lottie Clark, the daughter of a tobacco farmer. Holt’s letters offer a rare glimpse into the life and work of a member of the New South’s industrial workforce. Henrietta Aiken Kelly, founder of the Charleston Female Seminary, fought to establish a raw silk industry in South Carolina as an employment alternative for white women like Holt. She became the first special field agent for sericulture in the United States. Florida’s first public health nurses were employed by the State Board of Health to bring basic disease prevention and control to the state. Among them was Lottie Culp Gantt, Florida’s first African American state health nurse, who worked in the poor, segregated neighborhoods of Tampa. These documentary selections, featuring chapters by Beth English, Debra Bloom, and Christine Ardalan, explore the social and economic effects of industrialization on the New South.

Part three, Regional Commentators, focuses on women’s views on politics and reform through the stories of Louisa and Mary Poppenheim, Mary Johnston, and Corra White Harris. Louisa and Mary Poppenheim owned and edited the Keystone, the official organ for women’s clubs across the South and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The magazine encouraged its readers to take up social reform work and provided advice on how to become the ideal southern clubwoman. Mary Johnston was the author of a string of best-selling novels, including a Civil War epic, The Long Roll. The South figured prominently in Johnston’s work, but hers was not a voice of the Lost Cause. Instead, Mary Johnston used her love of southern history and her celebrity as an author to champion the cause of woman suffrage. Fellow writer Corra White Harris stood on the opposing side to Johnston. Self-educated and regionally identified, Harris maintained a national reputation as a social critic, literary reviewer, spiritual pundit, and southern apologist until the late 1920s. These documentary selections, featuring chapters by Joan Marie Johnson, Lisa A. Francavilla, and Catherine Oglesby, reveal how women used regionalism to champion, or condemn, the case for suffrage and social reform.

These documentary stories do not sit in isolation but are connected by people, places, ideas, and events. Mary Johnston addressed the plight of mill workers like Anthelia Holt in her speeches on suffrage, as did Henrietta Aiken Kelly in her pleas for the establishment of a raw silk industry. Several Keystone contributors were Charleston Female Seminary alumnae and members of a women’s club named in Kelly’s honor. Florida’s nurses collaborated with clubwomen in their tuberculosis outreach and worked with Mary McLeod Bethune’s Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls to bring health care to the African American community. Mary McLeod Bethune became active in the club movement, cofounding the Florida Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Women discussed the same events—Henrietta Aiken Kelly and Corra White Harris both published opinion pieces on the Sam Hose lynching in Georgia, for example—and debated the issues of the day, including equal pay for equal work, woman suffrage, and how to become a social reformer without sacrificing home, family, and femininity.

These documentary stories deepen our understanding of women in the Progressive Era and the opinions, philosophies, initiatives, and achievements that defined the period. They chart women’s contribution to a variety of reform communities, their work as leaders of associations and federations, and their role in government organizations charged with enacting social change. Each story highlights the part that regional identity, and particularly race, played in suffrage campaigns, club work, and health and education reform. In their own words these women reveal the promise of the Progressive Era, and its limitations, as they sought to redefine their role as workers and citizens of the American South.

PART ONE

Activists in the Making

Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (1866–1948)

Memoirs of a Southern Feminist

ANYA JABOUR

Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge was an influential educator and activist in twentieth-century America. Born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, she spent her adult life in Chicago, where she founded the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, the nation’s first graduate program in social work affiliated with a major research university. In collaboration with the community of women reformers associated with Hull House, Breckinridge was active in virtually every reform of the Progressive Era, including legal aid for immigrants, civil rights for blacks, labor legislation for workers, equal rights for women, and juvenile courts for youth. She also collaborated with European and Latin American feminists and social workers to promote both social welfare and international cooperation. Breckinridge reached the height of her influence in the 1930s, when she served on an advisory board for the Social Security Act, the basis for the modern welfare state, and was the first woman delegate to represent the United States at an international conference, where she helped advance the Good Neighbor Policy and a new framework for U.S.–Latin American relations. Yet when she sat down in 1945 to record her life, she answered the question Who am I? by situating herself in the context of her family of origin. As Breckinridge recognized, her family legacy and early relationships had a profound impact on her career as an educator and a reformer.¹

When she came into the world on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1866, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge was the newest member of one of Kentucky’s greatest dynasties. Through her father, William Campbell Preston (W. C. P.) Breckinridge, she was descended from Prestons and Breckinridges who some family members believed could be traced back to Lord Braedalbane in Scotland. By way of her mother, Issa Desha Breckinridge, she traced her ancestry to the Currys and the Deshas, who claimed to be descended from the French Huguenots. Whether these claims were true or inflated, both sets of relatives had reason to boast of their heritage. One of Sophonisba’s great-grandfathers, Joseph Desha, had been governor of Kentucky, while the other, John Breckinridge, had drafted the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. W. C. P. and Issa Desha Breckinridge reinforced the importance of family ties by naming their children after ancestors on both sides of the family, dating back four generations. They christened their second child Sophonisba after her paternal grandmother, but they called her Nisba, a childhood nickname that she continued to use with intimates for the rest of her life.²

Like many other future feminists of her generation, Nisba enjoyed a close relationship with her father, lawyer and politician W. C. P. Breckinridge. She learned her letters from his law books before she could even walk, thus acquiring a lifelong interest in both learning and the law. By contrast, Nisba had an attenuated relationship with her mother, Issa, whose health was poor, largely as a result of repeated pregnancies. Although a gap of four years separated the eldest, Ella, from the second-born, Nisba, the next three children, Desha, Campbell, and Little Issa, were born at intervals of only fifteen months, and there were still more babies and babies to come: Robert and Curry. The illness and death of two children, Campbell in 1870 and Little Issa in 1872, also consumed Issa’s attention and sapped her strength. Although she fostered a close relationship with her eldest child, Ella, Issa had little time or energy to devote to Nisba and her siblings. Instead, she relied on African American servants to perform basic domestic tasks, from preparing meals to bathing and dressing the children.³

If Nisba could not compete for her mother’s affection, her siblings could not compete with her for her father’s approval. W.C.P. urged all his children to work hard in school by offering them rewards for perfect reports, but it was Nisba who quickly outpaced her siblings. Ella was more interested in boys than books; Desha was an indifferent student; Robert was a wayward adolescent; and Curry had a learning disability. As Issa once remarked, I fear you [are] Papa’s sole [and] only hope for an educated daughter. W.C.P. encouraged Nisba to seek alternatives to what he called the aimless life of the southern belle and to carry on the family tradition of higher learning and public service. The [Breckinridge] name has been connected with good intellectual work for some generations—for over a century, he counseled. You must preserve this connection for the next generation.⁴

Eager for Nisba to continue her education, W.C.P. convinced the trustees of Kentucky Agricultural and Mechanical College to admit women to its new teacher-training program. In 1880 fourteen-year-old Nisba entered A&M along with forty-one other female students, who were outnumbered by male students nearly five to one. Nisba undertook coursework in mathematics, German, geography, and English literature. Although she excelled in her classes, she did not obtain a degree from the future University of Kentucky. In 1884 she enrolled at Wellesley College, one of the Northeast’s Seven Sister schools, which enforced proper feminine conduct as well as rigorous academic standards. She graduated with distinction in science in 1888. Breckinridge then relocated to Washington, D.C., where her father was serving a term in Congress, and took a position as a high school teacher. The salary was certainly a real contribution to the family income and I greatly enjoyed my first earnings which I gave to Mama, she recalled. After a severe bout of influenza forced her to relinquish her post, Breckinridge traveled to Europe to recover her health and study law. Her trip was cut short in 1892, when she received word that her mother was ill. Breckinridge hastily returned home, only to find that Issa had already died.⁵

Rather than attending either graduate school or law school as she had planned, Breckinridge assumed responsibility for running the household and educating her younger sister, Curry. In late 1892 she passed a legal examination and became the first woman admitted to the Kentucky bar. Breckinridge decided to join her father’s law firm, but those plans were dashed in the spring of 1893, when W.C.P. married a widowed cousin, Louise Wing. His longtime lover, Madeline Pollard, promptly sued for breach of promise, presenting incontrovertible evidence that the two had carried on a lengthy affair—begun during Breckinridge’s first year at Wellesley and continuing through Issa’s final illness—that had resulted in the birth of two children. After conceiving a third time, shortly after Issa’s death, Pollard secured a promise of marriage, only to miscarry and then to learn that her lover had married another woman. The resulting scandal and highly publicized trial, which took place in Washington, D.C., and continued into 1894, spelled disaster for everyone involved. The fallout from the affair ended W.C.P.’s political career, destroyed his legal practice, and ruined him financially.

The Pollard affair also had a profound effect on Breckinridge. Postponing her plans to attend law school at the University of Michigan and turning down a fellowship to study sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Breckinridge instead accepted a teaching appointment in Staunton, Virginia, where she lived with her sister Ella and Ella’s husband, Lyman Chalkley, and taught Latin and history and arithmetic and all kinds of things. At the conclusion of the term, Breckinridge returned to Washington, D.C., where she undertook the task of housekeeping as well as caring for her father’s new wife, whose frail mental health had crumbled under the strain of the scandal. Prioritizing family responsibilities over her professional goals took a toll on Breckinridge’s health and happiness. As she later recalled, by the mid-1890s the question of my health and my future became acute.⁶

At this critical juncture Breckinridge visited a Wellesley classmate in Chicago. There she met Marion Talbot, dean of women at the University of Chicago, who encouraged her to pursue graduate study. Breckinridge was awarded a fellowship in political science and secured a special position as Talbot’s assistant. I was grateful for the opportunity to earn my room and board that way, and the contacts were always interesting, she wrote. With Talbot’s support, Breckinridge completed the coursework for her master’s degree in political science. Out of funds, she then returned to Lexington, where she wrote her master’s thesis on Kentucky’s early judicial system and became the first women to qualify to present cases before the Kentucky Court of Appeals. Finally taking up a post in the law office her father now shared with John T. Shelby, Breckinridge practiced law for the first time; one of her first cases was a contentious divorce involving domestic violence and a child-custody battle. But when Talbot arranged a fellowship for her to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, Breckinridge seized the opportunity to earn her Ph.D. in political economy, which she completed in 1901. Passed over for faculty appointments in favor of her male colleagues, Breckinridge enrolled in the University of Chicago’s new law school. She graduated in 1904 at the top of her class and became the first woman to earn a doctor of jurisprudence degree at the university. Her father died that same year, severing Breckinridge’s most important tie to Kentucky.⁷

Still unable to find a faculty position in any of her fields of expertise, Breckinridge stayed on at the University of Chicago as assistant dean of women and head of Green Hall, a women’s dormitory. She also accepted a teaching appointment in the Department of Household Administration, created and chaired by Talbot. In this capacity, Breckinridge offered a course on The Legal and Economic Position of Women. In addition to being perhaps the first women’s studies course in the nation, this class also acquainted her with Edith Abbott, a former schoolteacher and brilliant statistician who had come to the university in 1903 to pursue her Ph.D. in economics. Breckinridge suggested that the two women collaborate on a statistical study of women’s work in the United States, and with the enthusiastic support of settlement house workers, club women, and labor leaders, Breckinridge and Abbott launched a long-term study under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Labor.⁸

Breckinridge’s efforts on behalf of working women brought her to the attention of settlement house leader Jane Addams, who invited her to live at Hull House. Although her university responsibilities required her to live on campus during the academic year, Breckinridge became an official resident of Hull House, spending her summer quarters there from 1907 to 1921. Breckinridge’s association with Hull House cemented her ties to Chicago’s activist community and launched her lifelong career in social activism. She became a member of the Women’s Trade Union League and the Juvenile Protective League, and founded the Immigrant Protective League—all organizations that met at Hull House. During her time at Hull House, Breckinridge also joined the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and helped found the Chicago Urban League, a local civil rights organization. For the rest of her life, Breckinridge remained a powerful advocate for African American rights. With Jane Addams and others, Breckinridge cofounded the Women’s Peace Party, later the U.S. chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and remained an outspoken pacifist throughout both world wars. Addams and Breckinridge also served as co–vice presidents of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

For Breckinridge women’s rights and social justice were inextricably linked. Speaking in her home state of Kentucky shortly before the ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, Breckinridge hailed the full enfranchisement of the American woman as the beginning of a new era both for women’s rights and for the nation’s welfare. With full voting rights, she predicted, women would be able to develop every faculty they inherit in common with men without hindrance from him. There is henceforth to be a fair field and no favor. Not only would woman suffrage advance women’s equality, she explained, but it would also advance public welfare, the greatest good for the greatest number. The newly enfranchised female electorate, Breckinridge proclaimed, would help the entire nation deal with the leading issues of the day.⁹

In addition to introducing her to a panoply of progressive reforms, Hull House also offered Breckinridge professional opportunities. Fellow resident Julia Lathrop invited her first to deliver lectures at a local training school for social workers, the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (CSCP), and then to direct research as the head of the Chicago School’s Department of Social Investigation, which sought both explanations for and solutions to social problems through social science. Breckinridge promptly hired Edith Abbott to collaborate with her on research. Reflecting the priorities of the reform organizations associated with Hull House, Breckinridge and Abbott conducted studies of women’s work, education, immigration, housing, and juvenile delinquency. At the same time, they transformed the CSCP into the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. It was not only the first graduate school of social work affiliated with a major research university but also the power base from which Breckinridge and Abbott worked together to promote the profession of social work and shape public policy.¹⁰

Breckinridge was just beginning to establish herself as a social work educator and social justice activist. She would not reach the height of her career until the 1930s, when she became part of an influential network of New Deal women who shaped the emerging welfare state. But when she looked back on her life in the mid-1940s, Breckinridge returned to the Progressive Era, her coming-of-age story, and the childhood experiences that predisposed her toward a life of social activism. Breckinridge’s extant autobiography remains unfinished and, until now, unpublished. It consists of an assortment of fragmentary reminiscences, some typed and some handwritten, most unnumbered and out of order, and all much amended, on approximately 150 sheets of paper, a mix of bond and yellow lined pages.

Breckinridge wrote several different versions of the table of contents for her autobiography. The chapter headings suggest that she intended to write a segment on her work at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and another on the School of Social Service Administration. Her precise intentions for these latter portions of her life story remain a mystery, however, since the manuscript ends with descriptions of her work as Talbot’s assistant instead of documenting her own rise to prominence. Perhaps her reluctance to promote herself made it impossible for her to write these latter sections. Or perhaps she was stalled by poor health: dated material is from 1945 and 1946, and Breckinridge died of heart problems in 1948. Or perhaps the later chapters were separated from the materials used here and have yet to be located or identified.

Covering Breckinridge’s first four decades—from her Kentucky childhood through her introduction to progressive reform in Chicago—Breckinridge’s unfinished autobiography offers an extended meditation on why and how she became a leader in both national and international reform. Successive drafts and extensive edits offer insight into how Breckinridge thought about herself and how she wished to present herself to the world. Because Breckinridge approached this writing project in her characteristic fashion—double-checking details and correcting minor errors—it is factually accurate. Despite her claims that some details were blurred in her memory, Breckinridge’s memory only failed her when she addressed painful topics, such as her extended bout of depression following her mother’s death and the revelation of her father’s extramarital affair.

However, like all memoirs, Breckinridge’s life story is a selective account, and the events that she chose to include and exclude, as well as how she chose to present them, are revealing. While Breckinridge’s male ancestors loomed large in Kentucky’s political history and in her memoir, she devoted scant attention to her female ancestors, even though her maternal great-great-grandmother Katherine Montgomery Bledsoe was allegedly a dispatch bearer for General George Washington during the American Revolution, and she was named for her paternal grandmother, Ann Sophonisba Preston, a descendant of founding father Patrick Henry. And while Breckinridge’s family tree included wealthy slaveholders who vociferously defended slavery and supported secession, she emphasized the ways in which they championed free African Americans’ civil rights and, by contributing to sectional tensions, helped bring about the Civil War and emancipation. As an adult Breckinridge was a civil rights advocate, holding membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and supporting Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s antilynching campaign. By the time she wrote her memoirs, then, she sought to distance herself from her white supremacist upbringing.

In every way Breckinridge placed her individual experience in historical context: her transformation from a dutiful daughter to an activist academic, as well as her enduring attachment to her family and her home state of Kentucky.¹¹

This documentary selection features the unfinished memoirs of Sophonisba Breckinridge. From the Breckinridge Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago, Illinois, and the Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Papers, Breckinridge Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Published with permission of Catherine Harper Homan.

To begin with I should ask, Who am I? And as I try to recall these almost 80 years, I remember that the great puzzle of my childhood was how I could be as common as I evidently was and yet be kin to such very nice people. I wanted to write an account of my father,¹² but I seem unable to make the beginning of a biography of him, while I cannot speak of myself without speaking at length of him. In the following pages I shall try to give a correct account of my experiences during these more than eight decades. I shall devote a chapter to my inheritance through my Father, the Campbells, the Cabells, the Prestons and the Breckinridges, and a chapter to my mother’s family. I do this because they meant so much not in the way of my inheritance but because they meant so much in my conscious experience.

On my mother’s side the relatives were in general prosperous farmers, whose political affiliations were with the radical movements, while on my Fathers side there was a vigorous conservatism. My mother’s younger sister Mary or Molly Desha,¹³ liked to trace the family back to the French Huguenots just as another Cousin, Letitia Bullock¹⁴ liked to trace the Breckinridges back to Lord Breadalbane in Scotland.¹⁵ Evidently [great] grandfather Breckinridge¹⁶ found something to justify this claim for when he acquired a tract of land in Fayette County about eight miles out from Lexington he named it Braedalbane. My Father however never took these claims very seriously.

This narrative could begin with the year 1798, for in that year, two of my three great grandfathers, both of whom were married, were concerned with the Legislative session in Kentucky. Over the lower House of that session, my great grandfather Joseph Desha¹⁷ presided; and one of the important acts of that session was the adoption of the so-called Kentucky Resolutions of 1798,¹⁸ which John Breckinridge drafted and submitt[ed] to Jefferson as the leader of the democratic party at that time. This was a time of great uncertainty regarding the relations of the states to the federal Union and these resolutions claimed for the states the right to withdraw from the organization they had created. It seemed as simple as that in 1799.

No one of my three great grandfathers had been born in Kentucky. Joseph Desha had been born Dec. 9, 1768 in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. At this time Kentucky had not been explored, much less settled. It was only in [1769] that Daniel Boone¹⁹ made his adventurous trip. When [Joseph] was three years old, his parents, [Robert Desha and Eleanor Wheeler], moved into Kentucky where they stayed a year, then went on down to Tennessee.²⁰ They were there a year and then about 1778 they returned and settled in Mason County. In 1794 [Joseph] joined Wayne’s campaign against the Indians in Ohio.²¹ The books refer to the slaying by the Indians of two of his brothers²² and of Joseph’s eagerness in entering this campaign to avenge this catastrophe.

Joseph Desha seems to have been effective in speaking, and direct in his relationships. He was described as believing rather in much thinking than in much speaking.²³ He married Margaret Bledsoe, whose family was likewise identified with Pennsylvania and Tennessee. In 1792 he had been elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives where he served for the next ten years. He was then elected to the State Senate where he served until 1807, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, to which he was re-elected until 1819. In 1813 he was Major General of Kentucky volunteers and commanded a Division at the Battle of [Thames].²⁴ In 1824 he was elected governor and served four years, during troublous times where relief was the chief issue. Joseph Desha was a truly New Deal Governor of Kentucky in the 1820s. This was the period of the so called Old and New Court controversy²⁵ and he supported the measures intended to give relief to the debtor.

There have been few men in public office who had to face situations both public and private more distressing and difficult than Joseph Desha when Governor. The very cruel experience was having his son Isaac charged with murder and found guilty after a trial lasting approximately one week.²⁶ The murder was a brutal one in which one Baker traveling north from the deep South and stopping on his way for the night in Frankfort was waylaid, he was beaten, his throat was cut and he was left dead or dying by the side of the road. He and Desha had spent the night at the same place and were said to have started out together in the early morning. Later in the day, Desha appeared with his hand injured and his whip broken. An indictment was brought against him in Fleming County but on his motion the case was transferred to Franklin County, and as has been said, after a trial lasting a week a verdict of guilty was brought in, murder, being a capital offense. At that time no bail was allowed for such offenses and after a motion for a new trial failed, the governor is said to have pardoned the son, who is reported to have gone first to Arkansas and later to the Sandwich Islands.

Another son of Joseph was John Randolph Desha. He became a leading physician and married Mary Curry.²⁷ My mother’s parents were Mary Curry and John Randolph Desha. Mary Curry was the daughter of Major James Curry²⁸ of Cynthiana. There were three daughters, Mary who married John Randolph Desha, Martha who married William McChesney of Lexington, and Adelaide who married [William Johnson and then John Harman].²⁹

With the Breckinridges it was different. [In] the migrations of the eighteenth century, John Breckinridge, a young lawyer from Bottetoute County Virginia married Mary Hopkins Cabell, the daughter of Joseph Cabell,³⁰ and in a short time migrated to Kentucky. There he established a law practice [and] was a leader among the advocates of the French liberalism. [John Breckinridge] was elected to the state legislature where [in 1798] he secured a revision of the Criminal Code after the pattern of that adopted in 1790 by the Pennsylvania legislature and the establishment of the state penitentiary. [He] was a member of the second [Kentucky] constitutional convention in which he unsuccessfully tried to protect the franchise of free people of color, was elected to the United States Senate where he guided the revision of the federal judiciary act and the negotiation and ratification of the Louisiana Purchase, [and] became attorney general in Jefferson’s second administration.³¹ [He] died at the early age of forty-six, leaving a young widow of thirty-two and a family of four sons, John [Joseph] Cabell, Robert Jefferson, John and William Lewis.³²

[Joseph and Mary Clay Smith Cabell Breckinridge’s son] John Cabell was a person of charm and eloquence, obtained the rank of [major] in the Mexican war, was elected [as a Democrat] to the United States [Congress in 1850, and again in 1852, and] to the vice-presidency with [James] Buchanan in 1856. In 1860 he was again elected to the United States Senate, then nominated by the extreme southern group as candidate for the presidency, and so brought about the election of Lincoln.³³

My Grandfather Robert Jefferson Breckinridge not only supported the Union but gave to Lincoln the doctrine regarding the perpetuity of the Union enunciated in his, Lincoln’s, first presidential message. Two younger sons, Joseph Cabell and Charles Henry, were in the Union army. There were, however, John Cabell, a nephew of R.J.B., and the two sons Robert and [my father] William in the Confederate Army.³⁴

My mother was Issa Desha. She was the third of five children³⁵ born to her parents, the youngest of whom was a boy, Benjamin. Adelaid[e] and Eleanor were older, Molly and Ben were younger, and Ben was the special object of their mother’s pride and devotion. In 1857 when the cholera had begun to fade into memory, diphtheria, then the scourge of childhood and youth, stalked abroad in the state and within a week took Addie, Ella, and Ben as trophies of its grim power. From this blow, and especially from the loss of Ben, her mother could not recover.

[My parents’] courtship could not have been a lengthy one for the dates on the stone of [my father’s] earlier wife Lucretia Clay and of their baby Lu Clay show that only months had intervened since that earlier sorrow had befallen him.³⁶ I know that the affection and the sense of loss were abiding and I know too, that he would have been happier if he could have shared his sorrow. The situation of the second wife is a very hard one. To speak of the memories she knows that he cherishes is too difficult; not to speak is to acknowledge the existence of an area of affection and emotion into which she cannot enter but of which she remained aware.

The joys of courtship and marriage, too, were clouded by the prospect of war and the bitter cleavage of opinion characteristic of many families of the border states and peculiarly apparent in her husband’s family. [My parents married on September 17, 1861, when my mother was] lacking two months or so of being eighteen years of age. [At that time], when the logic was with the secessionists but history with the unionists, William C. P. Breckinridge yielded to the plausibilities of logic and entered the Confederate service [on] July 17, 1862, leaving his wife and infant daughter, Eleanor,³⁷ in the care of her mother and father. The following day [he] was made Captain of a Company at Georgetown, Ky. They evidently went on from Georgetown to Cynthiana, and thus to Lexington, for the next afternoon, July 18 he was in a battle in the capital woodland at Ashland, the earlier home of Henry Clay.³⁸ How he felt [about the war] is briefly but touchingly told in a note to his wife’s father two years later when he was about to go into an action from which he thought he might not return.

He did, however, return, and, after the exciting days and weeks of May 1865, he came back to Lexington three years older to review and relearn his law, to build up a practice, to establish a family, and to take his place in a new union which the arbitrament of war had determined was one and indissoluble.³⁹ Being both brave and honest, he accepted the verdict of the Confederate failure and made his contribution to the building of a new nation. In [1867] he became a candidate for the office of County Attorney. He was however defeated after being questioned as to whether or not he would accept negro testimony. He issued a public statement that he would surely do so. After that defeat he did not again seek public office until in 1884. He became a candidate for the United States House of Representatives.⁴⁰

I came April 1, 1866. I was the second child but the war had intervened between Ella’s coming who was born on June 7 1862 and my birthday April Fool’s day and Easter Sunday of 1866. I was evidently at first rather a frail baby but later the pictures show a sturdy youngster. I was only 16 months older than [my brother] Desha and then Campbell, Little Issa and Robert came in swift succession.⁴¹ There was no doctrine of birth control or spaced child bearing prevalent at that time. There were babies and babies to come.

I don’t know which house I was born in, but there are two houses on High Street, one on the corner of High and Upper Streets built either by my Grandfather or my Father. If I was not born there, we moved into it shortly after my birth. My grandparents, Grandma and Dada, lived in the earliest years of my memory in the house on the north west corner of High and Upper Street. It was still standing as was the one next door which my Father built the winter after his return from the war.

I was a common child and a dull child, not exactly stupid but dull. [Everyone] said that I would miss the points of all the jokes made the day before I died; but some of them thought that perhaps Saint Peter⁴² did not have much sense of humor either and [that] he would go over there with me to make me feel quite at home. I liked all kinds of people and was not particular in my choice of amusement or companionship. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the curbstone in front of our house—we were living then on Short Street and our house was without any front yard—watching a procession go by, and having my grandmother come out and lead me by the ear into the house saying ‘you common child! How you do love the curbstone!’

My grandmother—Grandma—thought we were all more or less common. I suppose it is true that what real breeding or manners we had, if we had any—and Desha truly had both—we got from the Currys, through our mother. Gran[d]ma was an elegant woman. She had beautiful hands and feet, long heavy black hair, and a stately bearing. She read French; she enjoyed George Meredith.⁴³ She remembered La Fayette’s laying his hand on her head when he visited Lexington in 1829,⁴⁴ when she was held in her father’s arms on the crowded street. She had the forms of skill that marked the lady. Each girl must before she was really finished make a complete layette. She could tell a lady by the button holes she made, and on Saturday mornings, she would try to supplement our schooling by teaching us the essential domestic arts. She would say that she’d like us to learn as while you could tell a lady by the button holes she made, she had never known a Breckinridge woman who could make a decent button hole.

Grandma had no scruples against corporal punishment, and I recall her boxing my ears many times. I had a bad temper and later, Desha and I would have genuine encounters. Finally Gran[d]ma became discouraged about the effect of strapping and determined to adopt very vigorous methods. The most terrifying experience was that of being dunked and I don’t know what serious offence I had been guilty [of] when she decided that I must be subjected to that penalty, too. A large basin was therefore filled to the brim. Whether it was the indignity of being lifted aloft and my head submerged while my feet were in the air or the real terror of the experience of eyes, ears, nose and throat being immersed I don’t know, but that was my last experience with my Grandmother’s punitive skill.

I loved my Father and he was indescribably tender and skillful. Mama was far from strong, [and] Papa helped in many ways. I remember when he told me that I was old enough and big enough [to] lace my own shoes. Then [it] came to me that I laced them in the morning [and would need to] unlace [them] at night. At that realization I [was] overwhelmed with tragedy and wept both loud and long.

My grandmother helped [my mother] and the servants managed. [Our servant Clacy]⁴⁵ was tall with a fine standard of manners which she tried to inject into our training and conduct, and Easter tall, very dark, rather un-amiable in appearance, but indefatigable, and, in reality, kindness and efficiency incarnate. Aunt Polly⁴⁶ cooked, Easter managed the dining room, while Clacy dressed and undressed us, gave us our Saturday baptisms and tried to teach us manners. Clacy had been to Toronto when my mother and Ella were there during the [Civil] war.

I began going to school very young but I don’t know at what age. I am told that I learned my letters of [f] the backs of my Father’s law books for he had to review his law after his years in the Confederate Army, but it sounds apocryphal. When we began to go to school we got reports. We were given marks 100, 99, 98 etc. Papa said that we could have either $1.00 or a little party if we got perfect reports. I generally took the dollar while Ella took the party. I had quite a little sum saved when a lady who had been a Missionary to China came to stay with us. She gave such an account of the poverty of the Chinese Children that I gave her my savings. My mother never forgave her for taking my little savings but she undoubtedly thought that I was fortunate to have such a channel for distributing the little fund.

My father was extraordinarily liberal [about the education and employment of women]. The fact that his childhood had been so largely influenced by his two older sisters⁴⁷ and that his college life was spent in contact with girls of collegiate attainments undoubtedly influenced his attitude toward women and their intellectual capacity. He graduated in 1855 at Centre College [in Danville, Kentucky]. In the same class, there were three girls, his cousins [and] daughters of President Young,⁴⁸ who took the work but could not be given the degrees because of their sex. Only in 1905, after fifty years were degrees conferred on Mary Young Row, Caroline Young Douglas, and Jane Young Rutherford, all of whom had married Presbyterian ministers. My mother had had no such academic training. And as has been said, she was three months less than eighteen years of age when they married. [My father] had, however, a great respect for her competence and ability and was proud of her beauty and her charm.

[Papa also] saw the misery which befell the women who were left, after the war in the South, destitute and unprepared for the struggle of self support. In his own family, he had to bear needlessly heavy burdens in the support of Grandma and Auntie, whose sources of support had been destroyed by the war.⁴⁹ Grandma tried pitifully hard to find ways of contributing to her own support. She took a few pupils, she tried to use her little art of china painting. She was so able that it is very sad to recall the humiliation she had to endure as the beneficiary of my father’s support, although he made every effort to make her feel that she was useful and welcome in his home. As a matter of fact, I don’t know what would have become of us if she had not been there to keep some kind of order, in view of the strain on Mama from child-bearing and from the demands made on her by papa’s professional activity.

[Many struggled to find their way in the post–Civil War South.] One day, when I was quite a big girl, I was walking along with my Father on Short Street. Short Street is the street running parallel with Main Street and on it are several banks and business houses other than shops or dry goods stores. As we went along, a forlorn looking man crept up near my father and I saw a bill which I have always thought was a five dollar bill pass from his hand to that of the beggar, as I thought the stranger to be. We were very poor. I have told how my grandmother and aunt lived with us, how the children were coming in swift succession, how my mother’s health was very frail, and we had very long visits from very many relatives. I was therefore surprised at my father’s giving a beggar such a very large sum, and asked him how he happened to do this, and he gave me the following reason. This apparently down-and-out man was an ex-confederate soldier. Clever and witty and of good substantial family, he was one of the casualties of the war in that when he was seriously wounded and the pain seemed unendurable, he was given opiates and became the victim of the morphine habit. There was in those days no psychiatric treatment,