"For mercy’s sake, don’t let anybody see this letter": Sarah J.C. Whittlesey
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So wrote an Alexandria woman named Sarah Whittlesey to her Williamston, North Carolina, friend Catherine Wilson on March 11, 1858.
With that warning, here I sit reading this and two other letters now housed at the North Carolina State Archives (in addition to the 1858 letter, January 3, 1860, and April 26, 1861). My intent is not to delve into the private life of these two friends, who shared one of those deeply emotional, nonsexual (I conjecture) 19th-century female bonds. Rather, in my search for primary sources about Alexandria, I seek some small anecdote or quote from one of those elusive creatures in any archives—a woman. Did she talk about the times in which she lived? It turns out she was not overly reflective, but did share a few observations.
About the Letter-Writer
Sarah and her brother Oscar, from inside an 1889 book.
Sarah J.C. Whittlesey (1824-1896) wrote and sold stories and poems, sentimental pieces that have not endured but did earn her some money and recognition at the time. Sample titles: Heartdrops from Memory’s Urn, The Stranger’s Stratagem, and Bertha, the Beauty, a Story of the Southern Revolution, as well as shorter pieces for newspapers and magazines.
She had faith in her talent. She write Catherine about some of her successes, including a literary prize or two. And she was keen to sell her work, not just rest on accolades:
I hope to be with you all in old Williamston before very long—that is, as soon as I get another edition of my book. I had 500 published and have now but a small number left, so you see I have done first rate. I send you a copy of my book with this letter. Don’t lend it to anyone for I want to sell at least 25 copies when I go down there and if you let them read it, it might injure the sale for some people are so stingy, they won’t buy what they can borrow. I have been highly complimented by the Press.
In Alexandria, according to local historian Jay Roberts, Sarah lived with her brother and parents in a house on the corner of Duke and Washington Street. She had a tumultuous previous years. Born in Williamston, she married a man named Harry A. Smith in 1842 at age 18. For whatever reason, the marriage was so bad that she left him and returned to her parents’ home. Fortunately, they moved to Alexandria in 1848 so she could start anew. She shed the name “Smith” and referred to herself as “Miss.”
About Alexandria
Sarah liked Alexandria. Her father was from Connecticut, and the city seemed to have the mix of North and South that the family enjoyed.
The letter written in 1858 notes that her brother
is rising very rapidly here, is a member of a debating society composed mostly of lawyers. This week he has been appointed one of the polemics and it is rumored his speech will be requested for publication. If it is, I will send you a copy. He is said to be the best speechifier in the society.
Oscar, or Bud as she called him, worked hard as a relative newcomer to make his way into the ranks of Alexandria’s civic elite.
In early 1860, a month after the hanging of John Brown for his raid on Harpers Ferry (and ensuing visceral reaction to it), she wrote:
Here it is 1860 and we are all alive and well, with pleasant prospects for the future…May the New Year wane as peacefully as it has dawned upon you and us. I had expected to be with you but the late abolition excitement prevented it. Ma would not consent to my leaving home and I could not go in opposition to her wish, you know.
In the third letter saved in the archives, written in April 1861 about a month before Virginia formally seceded from the Union, Sarah wrote:
I have heard that down South letters are broken open and examined before they are suffered to leave the P.O. Who knows but the Secessionists here will act as mean! Any how, three poor fellows have been run out of time for expressing Union sentiments! Good mercy what a state of things in this once free country!! This was decidedly a Union city three weeks ago. Is it so in Williamston? I hope not. Well, it will blow over after a little and then I will come down and have a good talk with you “Providence permitting.”
Clearly, she was not an accurate political forecaster.
I am not yet sure what the family did during the Civil War. They are not listed among those citizens who signed an oath of allegiance to the Union (a transcribed list is here). Sarah was described as a friend of the South in an 1869 book entitled The Living Writers of the South. However, as Jay Roberts found, Oscar joined a group called the Union Republic Organization after the war, and a cousin who lived in Alexandria, was an active Republican.
Provenance of the Letters
In the collection is an outer envelope, with a Philadelphia business address, on which it is written in pencil that the letters were obtained “on the march.” The finding aid states that “The letters appear to have been part of a small cache taken as ‘spoils of war’ by a Yankee soldier on November 7, 1862, when Williamston was ransacked by U.S. General John Gray Forester’s troops on an expedition out of federally occupied New Bern.” According to the finding aid, the owner of the letters immediately before they come to North Carolina was the Jackson Homestead in Newton, Massachusetts.
Cover envelope, Sarah J.C. Whittlesey Collection, North Carolina STate Archives
Two North Carolina asides to end this short piece. First, Sarah’s family lived briefly in Edenton, the home of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (who worked in Alexandria as a relief agent during the Civil War). Although Sarah lived in Edenton after Harriet had escaped North, would she have frequented Jacobs’s grandmother’s bakery or visited the medical office of Jacobs’s enslaver, Dr. James Norcom? We don’t know.
Second, in pinpointing Williamston’s location, I learned about its important role in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s: “Mass meetings at Green Memorial Church for32 days, June-July 1963, & nonviolent marches led to the desegregation of local public facilities.”