An American Quilt Read online

  Susan’s father, Jason, and his father, Elijah, were Rhode Island merchants whose ships traveled these Atlantic waters, captained by men they hired. Between 1799 and 1808, they invested in sloops, schooners, and brigs that traveled the Eastern Seaboard, from Rhode Island down to South Carolina and the West Indies. The repeated words in the quilt’s papers—sloop, schooner, seaman, West Indies, Barbados, Havana, casks, shuger—were likely remnants of his shipping manifests and contracts. Their ships carried New England rum south and molasses and sugar back north, along with muslin, silk, tea, coffee, and other goods traded from the West Indies. So it was Susan’s father and grandfather who were part of the mercantile system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a cyclical system that fueled, and was fueled by, the slave trade.

  The Seaman’s Friend. Types of ships, schooner sloop brig.

  After one of the ships in which they’d invested was captured by the British during the embargo of 1808, Jason and Elijah cut their losses. Jason would continue to pay off these debts for years. To sustain himself and his family, he and his wife continued to take in boarders. Because their house was right next to Brown University, they always had plenty of students in their home; Sarah Rose, his wife, was responsible for their care.

  Jason focused on the dry-goods store he owned in Providence, which was likely the source of his access to cheaper fabric and goods than Susan would have had down South. He bought and sold from Atlantic merchants every day. He could get yards of fabric—and anything else she and Hasell needed—at lower prices than she could if she were to shop in Charleston.

  In addition, the Providence textile mills—Sprague Print Works, Allen Print Works, among others—were making yards of cloth just a few miles from Jason’s doorstep. He had easy access to the cottons Susan used in the quilt, along with the fabric she requested for clothes for herself and her family. Thus, the quilt tops and the notebooks (the latter of which include handwoven as well as machine-made cloth) marked the start of the United States’ booming Industrial Revolution, which would drastically change the lives of Susan’s family and enslaved people in the South.

  Those letters that are full of requests for goods from Susan and Hasell are evidence of the way the family profited from their connections between North and South. Letters went back and forth between the two branches of the family as they asked each other for hominy, potatoes, figs, cotton, dried apples, stoves, “tin kitchens,” pots and pans, shoes, hats, and feather beds—among so many other goods that were shipped on the brigs that ran up and down the coast. Eventually, Hilton and Winthrop would use their father’s merchant connections to build their southern businesses; they sent raw goods from the South to factories and consumers in the North with whom Jason had connections. As an “old New England family,” store owners, and former shippers, they had a solid network of buyers. Jason had easy access to buyers of Hilton’s lumber and Winthrop’s cotton, and he sent south all the goods his children needed as they built their businesses and furnished their homes.

  “Ask Father,” Hilton tells his sister Eliza in Providence, “what clear northern pine boards are worth at Providence and what the prospect is of there being a supply in market in the spring.” After requesting his business tips, he goes on to request “a box of Flagg Tooth Powder it can be purchased at Dr. Johnson’s Apothecary Shop in Weyboset Street,” and “Susan wishes you to send a piece of cotton about the quality of my shirt. She would like it bleached and about a yard wide as she wishes it for pillowcases &c. Father can charge it to me and I will settle with him one of these days.” He also wonders if his father paid “Brown” for his coat and says one of the sleeves smells so bad he doesn’t wear it. He wishes he could send the family potatoes from the barrel he bought, “but nearly all of them have spoiled and I cannot find any that will keep; all that I can see have been touched by frost, which makes them rot. If the vessel does not sail tomorrow, I will send you a barrel of flint corn but you need not send me any more grayham flour . . . Susan does not make any bread. We do not use any except bakers. I would like very much to have some of your nice Grayham bread.” And so their letters went back and forth with requests for the food they missed, barrels of hominy and dried meats, flour, fabric, and later, other supplies.

  While Hilton worked to found a lumber mill in Charleston, young Winthrop, struggling in his early days in South Carolina (he was working for a clerk in Columbia when Hilton wrote about the lumber), would become a rich man from the cotton industry and his northern connections. After working for Mr. Ewart in Columbia for several years, he and Ewart cofounded a cotton-trading business. Ewart secured northern buyers from his New York hometown, and Winthrop organized the buying of cotton from plantations around Columbia and the selling of it at the ports in Charleston. Both Hilton and Winthrop would come to own enslaved people, as would Susan, and Winthrop, the more extreme and daring of the two brothers, came to be known as a “fire-breathing southerner,” in favor of secession, by the time of the Civil War. Winthrop shifted up in class, from a working professional back in Providence to a respected “factor” and bank president in Charleston. He’d amassed what amounts to millions in today’s dollars, lost it all in the war, and built it again. His sisters Emily and Eliza Williams remained in the North and were opposed to slavery and his way of life.

  It was strange to watch their lives unfold in the letters before me, from youth to old age—Hilton’s verve and ebullience, even sometimes a hint of sarcasm (he asked Winthrop to write him a few lines and “lo and behold!” he had), to striving, longing to be successful in business and family, to his old age. I sank into their lives in the 1830s, as I sank myself into the Atlantic trading world. Here were Providence and Charleston a few decades after the start of the Industrial Revolution, with their bustle of commerce at the wharves, their markets for meat and vegetables, their residents in long, swishing skirts and corsets and snug-fitting suits and ties and black hats. I zigzagged between archives, from my days with the quilt, to Charleston’s various collections—emerging between each visit to what Winthrop once described as “intolerable hot” summer days, sweat slipping down my skin, which pinked in the sun—back to Providence. There were piles of letters, hundreds of letters, neatly stacked in manila folders that were filed tidily inside acid-free boxes, like the wooden nesting dolls I loved as a child, eagerly uncapping each one to find the tiniest solid doll in the center, the answers that filled the gaps. Several times every day at the historical society, a hushed room with researchers settled at wooden tables around me, I awaited each box that held another piece of the story; it was rolled down on a cart for me by patient and peculiar archivists—people with the same penchant for unspooling a trail as I’ve found in myself. I grabbed my cotton-covered page weights to hold the pages open, and I read and read and took picture after picture. I went back to Charleston, to St. Helena, to Columbia, South Carolina, to talk to more people, to look for more contracts. The days became weeks, months, years. I followed the lives of the family and dug to find more on the enslaved people. I found the weight that rested on Little Hasell’s life—a tiny child whose fate would come to determine Susan’s, Hasell’s, and Eliza’s, Minerva’s, Juba’s, and their children’s lives, too.

  Mosaic quilt top.

  In Susan’s first days in Charleston, fresh from Providence, she and Hasell live with his brother and sister-in-law, Charles and Eliza Crouch.* Susan is eager to “go to housekeeping” with her husband, but they have to wait to set up their own home when he’s done with medical school. While Hasell and Charles are accustomed to—and defend—the slave system, Susan comes from Providence, where slavery had been declared illegal at the end of the previous century and, by the 1830s, had been completely eradicated. Susan dislikes owning enslaved people, not for moral reasons but because she found them lazy and destructive.

  You mentioned in one of your letters that you would like to send me something but did not know what to send. I will tell you what I would like to have, some old linen an
d an old tablecloth. For I shall want some such things very much. Eliza has nothing of the kind. Everything is destroyed or stolen by the negroes. I never saw so much destruction in one house as there is in this. I do not know what Ma would do if she had these negroes to deal with. They are so careless. I think it is partly owing to their not being managed right. Eliza is easy with them. There is not one of them that has one quarter of the work to do that either of you have. There is no regularity or order about everything and for that reason it takes a great deal longer to do the work and nothing is done properly. I do wish we would keep house. It would be so much pleasanter. It would seem more like a home for I could have one of you with me then. But it will be an impossible thing until Hasell gets his profession.

  . . . I wish Emily could come here and live. This climate would be of great benefit to her health. If you could only look at Hilton and see how much better his health is. I wish we could go to housekeeping but it would be much more expensive.

  Back home, Susan’s sisters either do the work themselves or have domestic workers who help in the home. Abby has a housekeeper and a “young girl” to watch the children. She mentions an Irish girl Susan hired after her return to Providence in the late 1830s, who is “as good as any other.” Before Susan moved to Charleston, she lived with her parents and two sisters in their house on George Street, in Providence. The family was wealthy enough to send their children to school—Susan and her sisters finished their education through early high school in Massachusetts boarding schools—but still needed to hire boarders to supplement the income that Susan’s father brought in from his general store. Susan and Abby bemoaned this burden in their letters home, wishing that their parents didn’t have to work so hard and that they could eschew the trouble of taking in boarders.

  Despite Susan’s initial misgivings about having enslaved women do the housework, she adjusts quickly, as do her brothers. Over the years, she mentions in her letters home the names of enslaved people they owned at different times: Minerva, who would have a daughter, Celia or Cecilia, and a son, Samon or Lamon. A woman named Juba and her children. They rent a man named Jimmy who is “let with [the Sullivan Island House]” each summer; sometimes he comes to the city house with them. Susan’s brothers Hilton and Winthrop, and her brother-in-law, Charles, and his wife, Eliza Crouch, own enslaved people as well, and they all live within a few blocks of one another.

  Susan seems to adjust to the system quickly. Two years after her initial assessment of Eliza Crouch’s enslaved women, she writes:

  I want to come on very much this summer but it will not be possible for me to leave.

  I think of you all very often and wish I could go home as easily as Abby can. I am sorry to hear she has no help. It is so bad to have all the work to do in the warm weather. Has not she a little girl to mind the children. I should think she might take one to bring up. I hope you have help. I do not think Father ought to do the white washing himself. I have thought of you a good deal this spring. I know what a job it is to clean house. I do wish you could all live here you would not have to work so hard.

  I have Juba to cook for me, the one that Eliza had to cook for her when I first came. She behaves as well as I could wish. If I send her anything to bake or cook she will do it as nice as possible. She washes and irons very well. She does all our washing but Hasell’s shirts and those I put out. I iron my frocks and muslins. Last summer I ironed Hasell’s shirts but this summer I thought I would not. I get them done for 37 ½ cents a dozen. I do not wish for a better servant. She likes Hasell and tries to please him. She is very fond of little Hasell. He calls her mammy. He hears her children call her so.

  Hilton is in very good health. He comes to see us every Saturday and stays until Monday. He is loading two vessels for Providence. He has done a good deal of business this summer. He is doing very well indeed. He is doing more business than any other lumber merchant in the city.

  Here, Susan writes about the enslaved woman who was part of the group of “negroes” she’d so harshly criticized two years ago, now judging her performance with glowing remarks. She wishes her mother and older sister didn’t have to work so hard back home, that they could some south, where enslaved women could ease their burden. She envies her sister, Abby, who lives in New York and can visit Providence more easily than Susan can; Susan’s journey home takes about ten days by ship.

  By this time, the baby, Little Hasell, is a bubbly toddler, tearing apart the house with his enthusiastic curiosity. Susan can’t turn her back on him for the trouble he’ll get into. He doesn’t speak yet, she says, but that’s fine. She’s two months pregnant with her daughter, Emily. She may know as much, since she says she can’t travel to the North in the summertime. These sections of the letters also reveal, again, the connections between North and South of which Susan and her brothers are always taking advantage; Hilton is “loading two vessels for Providence,” where he ships lumber from his mills. Winthrop has started a cotton business through which he sometimes sends cotton bales north for his father to sell, and consistently sends goods north through his business partner’s northern routes. Both boys, as well as Hasell and Susan, profit from these connections. As their letters are exchanged consistently from the ’30s through the Civil War, their ties become more complicated over time, especially as Winthrop becomes more entrenched in southern politics and Susan has moved back to Providence.

  What was most important to me about these letters, though, was the information about the enslaved people, especially Juba and her children, Minerva and her children Cecilia and Samon, and, mentioned elsewhere, Eliza, as well as Hilton’s enslaved men Boston and Bishroom, who worked at the lumber mill. Now I knew their names and their roles within the household. I’d soon follow trails around Charleston and Rhode Island, and later, Cuba, to piece together the rest of their stories.

  * I’ll refer to Charles’s wife as Eliza Crouch from here on, as there are three Elizas in this story. Eliza Williams is Susan’s sister. Eliza with no known surname is the enslaved woman owned by Susan.

  2

  Eliza, Minerva, & Juba

  Suppose she is “small of her age.” That she “had . . . two short gowns, one of white linen,” the other, as we know from the quilt, of brown or red with a black print that looks like a teakettle; perhaps she has a dress in each colorway, or versions of the print in red and brown, both those prints that we see in the quilt, now just tidy hexagons, scraps left over from these “slave gowns” now repurposed.

  The dresses would have been worn to rags. Unlike Susan’s fine silk and muslin dresses with piped seams and ruffles, they would have been simply made with plain seams; and, because they were worn until they were threadbare, they’re not preserved. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—the material culture historian who coined the phrase “well-behaved women rarely make history”—writes about this disparity between the preservation of the objects of the wealthy and the disappearance of objects of the poor.

  Surviving needlework often has the very same biases as letters and diaries and was probably produced by the same relatively small group of women. For every cross-stitched picture of Harvard College thousands of plain shirts and aprons were produced in New England. Although a few survive, most were worn till full of holes, then recycled into dishcloths, pocket, rag coverlets, scrap bags, and lint.

  Ulrich adds that some of the worn pieces of cloth were even recycled into paper. This disparity between saving the elite’s objects but not those of the working class and enslaved is certainly evident in the case of the Crouch family and their enslaved people’s stitched objects. From the Crouches, we have a man’s jacket, several dresses, including the white muslin gown Susan wrote about letting out during her second pregnancy, and three quilt tops, as well as a photograph, hundreds of letters, documents, weather journals, a medical notebook, and other ephemera. There are five boxes full of their documents in the historical society, and scattered documents in Charleston on microfiche rolls and in tidy manila folders. I
can trace the ownership of their home for almost seventy years through sales records and deeds. Their names are even immortalized in online records of South Carolina slaveholders. But to find the stories of the enslaved people, that takes far more work—and imagination. I’m told, over and over, at archives and research centers around Charleston, and when I meet activists and historians, that I won’t be able to find the trail for the enslaved people, that I’ll have to make it a composite story out of historical records and slave narratives. That’s part of the frustration of this archive—reading what’s on the surface and digging for what’s been disregarded, suppressed, quieted. The enslaved people were simply considered property, so there aren’t records to be found as there are for the white family—contracts for their marriage, court cases to reclaim or buy property, birth and death certificates—all the bureaucratic minutiae that mark our lives today, missing for people who weren’t considered citizens nor even humans. Even the records of their purchase and sale weren’t always recorded. Some sales were private. Some sales contracts were destroyed over time, or never made at all.

  The cloth Susan requested for “servants” used in the quilt, probably from scraps leftover after making dresses.

  The calico bought for the teakettle prints, for the “servants’ gowns,” as Hilton called them when he wrote home requesting cloth, was not of as fine quality as the calico that Susan requested for herself. In February of 1835, Hasell writes home to his father-in-law, in Providence, with a list of requested items enclosed.

  ½ Bushell white beans

  ½ Barrel of dried apples and peaches, separate, about equal quantities