Abstract: The Otey family of Meridianville, Ala., and Yazoo County, Miss., included William Madison Otey (1818-1865), merchant and cotton planter; his wife, Octavia Wyche Otey (fl. 1841-1891); and their children, Imogene Otey Fields, Mollie Otey Hampton; William Walter Otey; Lucille Otey Walker; Matt Otey, and Elliese Otey. The collection includes family and business correspondence, financial and legal papers and volumes, and personal items. Family correspondence is with members of the Wyche, Horton, Kirkland, Pruit, Landidge, and Robinson families in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and Tennessee. A few letters from Confederate soldiers in the field appear as do some letters relating to difficulties on the homefront. There is also a letter dated 27 February 1863 from a slave in Mount Shell, Tenn., to his master about building a stockade. Business papers pertain mostly to William Madison Otey’s merchant activities in Meridianville, Ala., especially with Chickasaw Indians in the 1830s, and to the Oteys’ cotton plantations in Madison County, Ala., and Yazoo County, Miss. Others concern the financial affairs of the Wyche, Horton, and Kirkland families. Included are accounts with cotton factors and merchants, estate papers, deeds, loan notes, summonses, receipts, agreements for hiring out slaves, and work contracts with freedmen. Volumes include account books, plantation daybooks, a receipt book, and a diary of Octavia Wyche Otey that covers the years 1849-1888. The diary and other papers offer detailed descriptions of women’s lives, especially in nineteenth-century Alabama.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Letters from Rebecca Wyche in 1835 and Rodah Horton in 1832, as well as other family members throughout the 1820s and 1830s,  discuss buying and selling enslaved individuals (Folder 1).

Correspondence from William Otey to his wife in the 1850s and 1860s discuss the management of their property in Yazoo County, as well as the welfare of enslaved people on the property (Folders 4-17).  There is also a letter dated 27 February 1863 from an enslaved man named Thomas, in Mount Shell, Tenn., to his master, J. M. Oaty, asking him to get a substitute for him in the building of a stockade (Folder 17).

Financial and legal papers in Series 2 contain several references to enslaved persons. William Wyche’s 1829 papers concern hiring out slaves to the firm Otey Kinkle (Folder 30). There is also an order issued in 1838 for the delivery of a enslaved woman named Eliza, who had belonged to Dr. A. A. Wyche, deceased, to Joseph Leeman. Also included is a receipt for Eliza signed by Leeman in 1838. There is also agreement dated 1849 for the hire of an enslaved woman and three children belonging to the estate of Jackston Lightfoot, which John Wyche was executor of (Folder 31).

Octavia Wyche’s antebellum diary (Folders 39-42) contains frequent mentions of managing and punishing enslaved people on her property, as well as instances of illnesses.

After the Civil War, Octavia wrote in a large volume about interacting with free people of color on her plantation, as well as copies of contracts in 1866 for Maria, Nina, and Anderson, former slaves at Green Lawn plantation. (Folder 38 also contains a contract Octavia Otey signed in 1866 with Maria, who worked as a laundress and cook). Of particular note in the diary are descriptions, dated 29 November and 6 December 1868 and 19 January and 1 February 1869, of visits to Green Lawn by the Ku Klux Klan.Also included is an entry for 22 November describing wedding preparations for the daughter of a former slave, Maria, and another for 12 January 1880, in which Octavia complains that local blacks “will not work for white people if they can help it.” (Folders 43-63).

A merchant’s account book of William Madison Otey contains an account from at least one customer, Sally Shochoty, is listed as a Negro; the spelling of her name as Shock.ho.ty at one point suggests that she may have intermarried with the Chickasaws (Folder 64).

The daybook from 1857 in Series 4.2 contains records of cotton picked by enslaved individuals on Otey’s plantation, listed by name (Folder 65). Folders 67 & 68 also contain daybooks from the Civil War era.

Folder 74 contains an 1849 clipping related to the enslaved African American musician “Blind Tom” at Camp Davis. Tom Wiggins was born in Columbus, Ga., and was an extremely talented musician who composed a number of songs and could play music by ear. He was an autistic savant and was unfortunately exploited throughout his lifetime for his musical abilities. Click here to link to a website dedicated to preserving Blind Tom’s legacy.

After the war, Octavia Otey’s correspondence received from family in the late 1860s and mid 1870s discusses relations with free people of color (Folders 18 – 23).

 

 

Abstract: Members of the Harris and Foust families lived in Orange, Alamance, Chatham, Guilford, and Randolph counties, N.C. Thomas West Harris was graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1859. During the Civil War, he served in the 5th North Carolina Cavalry Regiment, after which he studied medicine in Paris and New York and then opened medical practices, first in eastern North Carolina, then in Chatham County, and later in Chapel Hill. He also served as the first dean and professor of anatomy, 1879-1885, of the University of North Carolina’s medical school. He married Sallie Maria Foust in 1865, and with her had five children, including Elizabeth who married Thomas R. Foust, superintendent of Guilford County schools, 1904-1941. The collection consists of correspondence, other papers, and photographs chiefly documenting the Harris and Foust families. Antebellum correspondence is largely between Isaac Holt Foust and daughter Sallie Maria Foust about routine matters and offering fatherly advice to Sallie at school. Post Civil War letters report daily happenings among Foust and Harris family members and include information about student life at the University of North Carolina. Some antebellum letters mention slaves, including buying and selling; after the war, some letters discuss African Americans. There is also a series of love letters exchanged by Thomas West Harris and Sallie Maria Foust Harris while he studied medicine in Paris and New York. Other papers (some photocopies and digital surrogates of materials not included in this collection) provide information about members of the Harris, Foust, Holt, and Steele families. Original documents include school materials from the 1850s; receipts from Paris; the Harris’s 1865 marriage license and related papers; an 1874 estate inventory; a scrapbook documenting the family history and career of Thomas R. Foust; and postcards and genealogical correspondence. Copied materials include letters with descriptions of camp life at Fort Fisher and Camp Lee; slave sales; mountain living near Asheville; attempted horse thievery by soldiers returning home in spring 1865; raising a regiment of black soldiers; and an 1899 Civil War reminiscence. Other copied materials concern Thomas West Harris’s military service and medical career and Reverend Robert J. Graves, a Presbyterian minister who was accused of spying for the Union. Also included are photocopies of cartes de visite, chiefly of Confederate generals and other public figures, and photographs, including daguerreotypes, tintypes, and cartes de visite, of Foust and Harris family members.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Some antebellum letters mention slaves, including buying and selling; after the war, some letters discuss African Americans.

An 1856 letter from Nancy Harris describes the accidental death of a female slave (Folder 2). In February 1859, Isaac Holt Foust wrote two letters in which he mentioned the death of a slave and the subsequent decision to adjust his workforce through buying and selling slaves (Folder 2).

In a 4 September 1865 letter, Thomas West Harris mentioned the possibility of relocating to northwest Texas, in part to be “removed from the intolerable presence of the negros,” but at the same time he feared that “Indians and the Jay hawkers seem to have things too much their own way out there just now.” (Folder 2). In a A 20 December 1866 letter, Sallie Maria Foust Harris described how her mother, Maria Foust, assisted with the birth of a baby by an African American woman (Folder 3).

Abstract: Albert A. Chase served in the 28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment as acting assistant surgeon from 7 April to 28 June 1865. At the end of the war, Chase was contracted by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, to serve as a physician in the Raleigh district of North Carolina. The collection contains Albert A. Chase’s commission as assistant surgeon in the 28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, orders to report for duty at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, two documents related to an invoice for medical and hospital property given to Chase, and an order form for the Turkish Medical Company. Other items include the contract of employment with the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land and orders to report for duty at Raleigh, N.C.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: In Folder 1 there is a contract for Chase’s employment with the Bureau of Refugees, Freedman, and Abandoned Land, along with orders to report for duty in Raleigh, N.C.

Abstract: John Poynter Streety was born in Bladen County, N.C., in 1820. He arrived in the town of Haynesville, Ala., circa 1839, where he became a prosperous businessman. Streety’s plantation was located in Lowndes County, where he was primarily active in cotton farming, raising livestock, and other agricultural activities. He was also involved in a co-partnership with a firm named J.P. Streety and Company, which participated in several types of businesses, including mercantile and advancing credit, ginning and milling, and acquisition of land. Streety died in Haynesville, Ala., in 1894. The bulk of the collection is manuscript volumes, mostly written by John Poynter Streety, 1874-1894. The volumes contain entries describing life on his plantation and in the town of Haynesville, Ala., as well as a few accounts of national occurrences. Many entries describe Streety’s farming and mercantile endeavors, the weather and its impact on crops, family and town life, the performance of workers, and local politics, while others describe race relations in the post-Civil War American South and include Streety’s personal views, accounts of lynch mobs, and other information. Some entries discuss yellow fever, social and economic conditions, and the national political environment. Also included are research materials, late 1960s-early 1970s, relating to Streety and belonging to Roland Mushat Frye, a Streety descendant and professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania; a 2001 Streety family newsletter; and other items.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: There are several references to race relations and African Americans in Streety’s writings. From Volume 2 in Folder 4, The entry written 12 June 1875 concerns the Radical Republican Party meeting attended by “a crowd of Freedmen,” and describes it as “noisy and turbulent.

Volume 3 in Folder 6 includes entries regarding race relations, such as one written 14 November 1875 that contains the description of a court case against an African American for assaulting a white man, which John Poynter Streety noted as having been arranged to include a majority of African Americans on the jury. In entries written 23 October and 25 December 1875, Streety reflected on his views regarding the presence of African Americans at his store and his concern for the safety of the store’s goods. In another entry from 1 January 1876, he mentioned Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

In Volume 4 in Folder 8 for an entry dated 26 August 1876, Streety discussed the overall dissatisfaction of the African American population regarding the overwhelming Democratic Party victory in the state elections.

In an entry written on 9 May 1878, Streety discussed the time African Americans spent in court and their convictions for what he considered minor infractions (Volume 5, Folder 10)

Volumes 7 and 8 in Folders 14 and 16 contain numerous references to Streety’s views on race relations, and incidents involving newly freed African Americans

Volume 9a in Folder 18  contains entries concerning race relations, such as an account of a lynching written on 30 March 1888. In the account, Streety described an African American man being abducted from jail, where he was awaiting trial for allegedly killing a white man by a mob of masked men who hung him from a tree by the town’s public square. A few days later, on 7 May 1888, Streety commented on the consequences of the lynching, wherein numerous African Americans were arrested for organizing with the intention of avenging the action and state troops were called upon to handle the situation. In a 20 August 1889 entry, Streety reflected upon possible race troubles brought about by comments published in a newspaper edited by an African American man, in which an article characterized “the White race in most uncalled for and scandelous manner.”

There are accounts of local and national economic matters, such as the entry on 1 March 1892 noting the sharp decrease in the price of cotton and the dire situations encountered by farmers, especially African Americans. Another entry regarding race relations was written on 14 October 1893, describing a young African American girl being whipped by a white man for “rudely walking against his daughter.” The same white man had the parents of two smaller girsl whipped for the same reason. The entry goes on to describe the white man responsible for the whippings receiving a letter saying that future acts of this sort would result in the town being burnt down (Volume 10, Folder 21)

Abstract: William A. Clement (1912-2001) was an executive of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and a business and civic leader in Durham, N.C. Clement was married to Josephine Dobbs Clement and had six children. Personal and professional papers of William A. Clement, including correspondence, clippings, speeches, reports, pictures, and other items documenting his family life, career, and business and civic activities, as well as his participation in church and fraternal organizations. Included are letters and other materials relating to North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company; insurance organizations, including American College of Bryn Mawr, Pa. (formerly the American College of Chartered Life Underwriters), the Life Insurance Agency Management Association, Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association, and the National Insurance Association; Penn Community Services (formerly Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School) of St. Helena Island, S.C.; corporate boards, such as Wachovia Bank and North Carolina Central University; civic and fraternal organizations, such as the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority, Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, the Occoneechee Council of the Boy Scouts of America, the Democratic Party, Durham Academy, the Madeira School, Talladega College Alumni Association, the United Fund of Durham and Durham County, and White Rock Baptist Church. There are also photographs, apparently from the 1930s and 1940s, of African American men and women, both portraits and in groups engaged in social activities.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: William P. Hill was an itinerant Baptist preacher who travelled through South Carolina in the 1840s. Diary of Hill, recording his constant movement through South Carolina, preaching at various churches, meeting places, conferences, and conventions, and competition from other sects, with occasional comments on national events and mention of white and black congregations and temperance societies, and his accounts with the Domestic Mission Board, 1846-1849.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Hill’s diary records his activities as an itinerant Baptist preacher in South Carolina, including scattered references to white and African-American congregations. Some of the places he preached include: Mabynton, Camden, Darlington, Society Hill, Cheraw, Spartanburg Court House, Orangeburg, Savannah River Association Meeting, Hamburg, Aiken, Columbia, Stateburg, and Chester.

This diary has been digitized. Click here to link to the finding aid and to access the digital material.

Abstract: William Alexander Graham of Hillsborough, N.C., was a lawyer, legislator, United States senator, Secretary of the Navy, Whig vice-presidential candidate in 1852, Confederate senator, trustee of the Peabody Fund, and member of the board of arbitration for the Maryland and Virginia boundary dispute. William Alexander Graham’s correspondence with prominent persons about state and national politics. Correspondents include George E. Badger, Thomas Bragg, T. W. Brevard, James Buchanan, Duncan Cameron, Paul C. Cameron, Henry Clay, Dorothea L. Dix, Stephen A. Douglas, James Fenimore Cooper, William Gaston, James Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, W. W. Holden, Sam Houston, William Preston Mangum, Charles Manly, Matthias E. Manly, Elisha Mitchell, B. F. Moore, James T. Morehead, J. Johnston Pettigrew, J. L. Pettigru, Leonidas Polk, Thomas Ruffin, James A. Seddon, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, David L. Swain, William Tryon, Martin Van Buren, Zebulon B. Vance, Hugh Waddell, Daniel Webster, and Jonathan Worth. Also included is material relating to legal business; the Graham family;iron foundry; plantations, slavery, and overseers in North Carolina and South Carolina; affairs at the University of North Carolina, the Revolutionary War history of North Carolina, and letters from sons serving as soldiers in the Confederate army. Later papers are of other Graham family members, especially Augustus Washington Graham, lawyer of Hillsborough, N.C., and Oxford, N.C. Volumes are personal accounts, school notebooks, and legal notes. Also included are typed carbon copies of letters, 1823-1877, to and from William A. Graham in this collection and in collections at other repositories that were compiled for an editing project in the 1960s.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The collection contains slave lists; slave bills of sale (1825, 1838- 1840); notice of a sale of runaway slaves (1829); and discussion of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), Ku Klux Klan arrests in South Carolina (1871, 1873), and race relations (1871). Volume 5 in Folder 365 also contains account information and slave lists.

Abstract: Andrew McCollam was a sugar planter, deputy surveyor, and member of the Louisiana Secession Convention of 1861. He married Ellen Elleonori and lived first in Donaldsonville, La., and later on the family plantation, Ellendale, located outside Houma in Terrebonne Parish, La. McCollam also operated the Bayou Black, Red River Landing, Terrebonne, and Assumption plantations, whose locations are unclear, although Bayou Black was in Terrebonne Parish. The McCollams had six sons and a daughter. Sons Edmund and Alexander became prosperous Terrebonne Parish sugar growers, running the Ellendale and Argyle plantations, respectively. Edmund was also part owner of the South Louisiana Canal and Navigation Company. The collection includes business, family, and political correspondence, financial and legal papers, and miscellaneous items, chiefly 1852-1891, belonging to Andrew McCollam, members of his family, members of the related Slattery family, or his descendants in Donaldsonville and Houma, Terrebonne Parish, La. Much material relates to McCollam family plantations, including Ellendale, Bayou Black, Red River Landing, Terrebonne, Assumption, and Argyle. Financial and legal papers include sugar, merchandise, slave, and sharecropper accounts; plantation journals; deeds; and land plats. Scattered items, including canal toll records, appear for the South Louisiana Canal and Navigation Company. Miscellaneous other papers include farm equipment advertisements, political and commercial broadsides, clippings, pamphlets and magazines, school materials, and a diary (1866-1867) kept by Andrew McCollam on a trip to Brazil. Topics of note in the correspondence are an 1839 survey of lands granted to General Lafayette; secession; Civil War battles and troop movements; slave resistance during the war; antebellum and Reconstruction politics; sugar planting, refining, and marketing; land transactions; foreign travel; and school and college life in Louisiana and Virginia.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Includes correspondence describing accounts that describe resistance by enslaved individuals  during the Civil War. Ellen McCollam’s plantation journal (1842-1851) contains extensive slave lists and a draft of a public statement by G. F. Connely and Andrew McCollam concerning Lincoln’s election and the slavery controversy. Of special note is a 26 March 1863 letter in which Ellen McCollam expressed outrage at her slaves abandoning her and the plantation (Folder 14).

Letters Henry McCollam wrote to family members from Louisiana State Seminary discuss the Ku Klux Klan in the area and a near riot in Alexandria upon the election of Ulysses Grant (Subseries 1.2). Other correspondence in this series discusses relations between freedman and white sharecroppers.

Abstract: The Penn School on Saint Helena Island, S.C., was founded during the Civil War by northern philanthropists and missionaries for former plantation slaves in an area occupied by the United States Army. Over the years, with continuing philanthropic support, it served as school, health agency, and cooperative society for rural African Americans of the Sea Islands. The first principals were Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray, followed around 1908 by Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House, and in 1944 by Howard Kester and Alice Kester. The school became Penn Community Services in 1950, with Courtney Siceloff as the first director, and the Penn Center, Inc. in the 1980s. The original deposits are papers, mostly 1900-1970, mainly from the Penn School, and primarily correspondence of the directors and of the trustees, treasurers, and publicity workers located elsewhere. Topics include African American education, Reconstruction, political and social change in South Carolina, agricultural extension work, public health issues, damage from hurricanes, World War I, the boll weevil and the cotton industry, the effects of the Great Depression on the school and the local population, changes in the school leading to a greater emphasis on social action in the outer world, and the end of the school and the turn to community service. Volumes include diaries, extracts from letters, recollections, minutes of the board of trustees, ledgers, cashbooks, inventories, financial records, registers of students and teachers, and minutes of various clubs and societies. Printed materials consists of newspapers clippings, pamphlets, promotional literature, school materials, administrative circulars, and annual reports. There are also about 3,000 photographs in the collection, dating from the 1860s to 1962 (bulk 1905-1944), documenting school activities, Island scenes and Islanders, classes and teachers, baptisms, agricultural activities, parades, fairs, and special events at the Penn School. Also included are about 300 audiotapes with oral history interviews and recordings of community acivities, 1954-1979. The Addition of 2005, contains papers of Courtney Siceloff, director of Penn Community Services, 1950-1970, and secretary of the South Carolina Advisory Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, circa 1960-1970. Penn Community Services materials are chiefly administrative and financial. Material relating to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and its state advisory committees, especially the South Carolina Advisory Committee, includes some information about specific discrimination cases.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Administrative correspondence and records of Penn Normal Industrial and Agricultural School, a school for black students established in 1862 on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The collection also contains material on Penn School’s successor, Penn Community Services, which commenced its activities in 1948. Materials include approximately 3,000 photographs of students, teachers, school buildings, school events, and island life and inhabitants (1860s-1962). Numerous volumes include trustee minutes; account books and inventories; school and community club records; and guest books. The collection also includes diaries and papers of Laura M. Towne, founder of the school, and of others associated with the area in the 1860s. Microfilm available.

The Penn School papers cover myriad topics such as enslavement, education, agriculture, environmental conditions, family, social justice, Gullah/Geechee heritage, and Civil Rights, to name a few.

Of particular interest in the diary of Laura Towne, one of the first principles of Penn School (Folder 355a-b). She discusses life during the establishment of the school and interactions with the African American community, as well as with Union and Confederate Soldiers coming to St. Helena Island.

The printed materials in Series 3 also contain numerous annual reports, including reports from African American teachers at the school.

Of particular interest are the more than 3,000 photographs that are in the collection. They document Penn from its earliest days as a school in the 19th century, to the shift from Penn Community Services during the 1950s. The people and landscape of Saint Helena are prominently featured. Many of the images have been digitized and are available online. Click here to link the finding aid and to access the digitized content.

 

Abstract: Anne Cameron Collins, daughter of Paul Carrington Cameron (1808-1891) and Anne (Ruffin) Cameron (d. 1897), of Hillsborough, N.C.; wife of George Pumpelly Collins (1835-1903), plantation manager in Tunica County, Miss. Personal and family letters received by Anne (Cameron) Collins of Hillsborough, N.C., especially from her husband, George P. Collins, while he was away from home managing plantations in Tunica County, Miss., and as a businessman in Durham, N.C., from the late 1870s through the late 1890s. There are also many letters from the Collins’s seven children, including Annie Cameron (Collins) Wall (1862-1942), Rebecca Anderson (Collins) Wood (1864-1921), George William Kent Collins (1869-1946), Henrietta Page Collins (1870-1955),Mary Arthur (Collins) Woods (1872-1952), Alice Ruffin (Collins) Mebane (1874-1958), and Paul Cameron Collins (1877-1961); and correspondence with Cameron and Collins relatives, including Bennehan Cameron (1854-1925), Mildred Coles Cameron (1820-1881), and Arthur Collins. Also included are letters from friends, including Carrie Sargent of Bryn Mawr, Pa.There are only two items prior to 1865. The correspondence deals primarily with family concerns and includes letters from children attending St. Mary’s School, 1870-1882 and late 1880s, and the Raleigh Male Academy, 1883-1884, both in Raleigh, N.C., and the University of North Carolina, 1897, and also provides information concerning George P. Collins’s business affairs and economic and social conditions in Mississippi during Reconstruction.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: A 6 January 1872 letter to Annie Cameron Collins from George Collins describes conditions in Mississippi after Reconstruction, and the disdain for the “free negroes” in the city.