COVID-19 Road Trip

By Rakashi Chand, Senior Library Assistant

With COVID-19 precautions in mind, my husband and I attempted to provide our children with a wholesome school vacation experience by going on a road trip.

We were tested before and after our road trip, wore masks whenever we existed the car, and avoided crowds. We did stop to stay overnight in hotel rooms that we sanitized ourselves with an array of cleaning products packed into the car. We decided this would be the best we could do in the midst of a pandemic. So we drove, and drove, and drove…

Eventually we made it from Boston’s subzero temperatures to northern Florida in what had at times seemed like an impossible mission.

We ended up in the old city of St. Augustine and were pleasantly surprised by the cultural influences that had shaped the small city over the centuries. As we drove, we passed the old Castillo de San Marcos dating from 1672 which proudly boasted to be the oldest masonry fortification in the continental United States.  And here, I had to stop. I needed to get out and look at the Castillo.

“Fort Marion,” I uttered as my children and husband watched me walk towards it.

Images flooded my head as I approached the walls of the old fort. This was not a place that I ever thought I would visit. Yet there I was on an unplanned road trip with no destination. Colors, faces, images, and pictographs poignantly came to life in front of me as I thought of a collection housed at the MHS that has always touched my heart, the Book of Sketches Made at Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Fla., 1877.

Members of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche Nations were imprisoned during the Red River War of 1874-1875 and forced to walk over a thousand miles from their homelands to an internment camp at Fort Marion. There, Lieut. Richard H. Pratt lead an experimental program to force prisoners to ‘integrate’, by dressing them in military uniforms, teaching them to read and write, farm, or do carpentry, and converting them to Christianity. A 24 year-old Cheyenne warrior named Bear’s Heart (“Nockkoist”) was among the prisoners. While at Fort Marion, he became an accomplished artist. The prisoners were given blank books or ledgers, pens, and colored pencils and used this new medium as they would have in the traditional practice of decorating hides with depictions of life on the plains. Often referred to as Ledger Art, the most striking of these drawings is a possible depiction of the Sand Creek Massacre by Bear’s Heart, uniquely portraying the massacre from an Indigenous point of view. His art is beautifully melancholy as it captures and preserves the way of life he left behind. Bear’s Heart documented the prisoners’ long and arduous journey to Florida through his art. After release from Imprisonment, he went on to be a spokesperson for Lieut. Pratt’s education program. Over 100 of Bear Heart’s drawings survive, and the MHS is fortunate to have seven of his pieces. Learn more.

Another name that came to mind was Howling Wolf or Ho-na-nist-to, a Cheyenne warrior who was appointed sergeant of the guards at Fort Marion. When he was released in the spring of 1878, he intended to remain in the east to continue his education but his eyesight was failing. He came to Boston for eye surgery. It was unsuccessful so he rejoined his people on a reservation. There he was struck by the poverty he witnessed. He began speaking out for Indigenous Rights and against the encroachment of Anglo-American culture including the implementation of the Dawes Act in 1887.

When Howling Wolf left Fort Marion, he drew a pictographic map of his journey from Fort Marion to Savannah, GA and beyond on a postcard that he sent to his father. Both the pictogram postcard and a translation of the pictogram by historian Francis Parkman are in the Book of Sketches Made at Fort Marion. I thought of what it must have meant to finally leave Fort Marion and felt honored that I was going to follow in Howling Wolf’s footsteps (Though I had the unfair advantage of a car!).  Luckily, the pictogram had been tucked into the Sketchbook so it could live on.

 

Native American Indians hunting buffalo
Native American Indians hunting buffalo, by Making Medicine (Cheyenne), Pages 20-21, Book of sketches made at Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida, 1877.

The art from the sketchbook is a vivid and beautiful memorial to the lives that the artists once lived, before Fort Marion. Hunting Buffalo by Making Medicine is one beautiful example. The collection is fully digitized to explore at home. Within the walls of Fort Marion, many people dreamt of the lives they lived before and through this collection of Sketches we can view some of those moments through their eyes. And, if you are willing to drive, you can even touch the very walls that held so many prisoners surrounded by the beating ocean and wind swept palm trees.

See Howling Wolf’s pictogram to his father Minimic: MHS Collections Online: Howling Wolf’s pictogram to his father Minimic (masshist.org).

See Francis Parkman’s translation of Howling Wolf’s pictogram: MHS Collections Online: Francis Parkman’s translation of Howling Wolf’s pictogram (masshist.org).

Posted in From Our Collections

The Diary of William Logan Rodman, Part I

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the first installment of a series on the diary of William Logan Rodman. Stay tuned to the Beehive for more.

About a year ago, the MHS acquired a very interesting diary kept by William Logan Rodman of New Bedford, Mass. Though it covers only a year and a half of Rodman’s life, it’s full of terrific anecdotes, descriptions, and hot takes on current events leading up to and including the first year of the Civil War.

Rodman diary
Page of William Logan Rodman diary

If he sounds familiar to you, that may be because of his grandfather Samuel Rodman (1753-1835), a very prosperous merchant who made his name in the whaling centers of Nantucket and New Bedford. Samuel married Elizabeth Rotch, and several other Rodmans also married into that family, interweaving the two powerful New England whaling dynasties. William’s maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was Thomas Morgan, a prominent merchant of Philadelphia.

Members of the Rodman, Rotch, and Morgan families were also practicing Quakers and fervent opponents of slavery.

In October 1860, when he began his diary, William Rodman had a comfortable life. He was 38 years old, unmarried, living in New Bedford, and “participat[ing] moderately in business,” as his Harvard biography puts it. But his life would change dramatically in the coming months, and it all began with the momentous election of Abraham Lincoln on 6 November.

Abraham Lincoln photo
Carte-de-visite photograph of Abraham Lincoln, ca. 1861-1865

Southern backlash to the election was fierce, but Rodman was initially sanguine about it, writing the day after, “I have no fears of Secession or Revolution. The South will bluster & Resolve but […] all will be quiet.” And a few days later: “They will have to submit to the will of the majority viz the Union or go to everlasting smash out of it.” He dismissed what he called “Southern secession nonsense” in the newspapers.

James Buchanan was now a lame-duck president. Rodman hated him, and he did not mince words. He called the administration “corrupt and degraded” and the man himself “the meanest & vilest of the American Presidents,” lacking “a vertebral column.” He rarely even referred to Buchanan by name, preferring epithets such as “the Old Public Functionary,” “an inefficient old fool,” and even “Mrs. Buchanan,” probably a not-so-veiled reference to rumors about the bachelor president’s sexuality.

James Buchanan photograph
Photomechanical of James Buchanan, undated

Buchanan’s political positions were abhorrent to opponents of slavery like Rodman. Buchanan had intervened in the deliberations of the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott, pressuring justices to rule against Scott and deny citizenship to Black people. He supported the Fugitive Slave Law requiring free states to return enslaved people to their enslavers and argued for a federal law protecting slavery in the territories. And he used his 1860 State of the Union address to pre-emptively blame the Northern states for Southern secession (emphasis mine):

The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects. The different sections of the Union are now arrayed against each other, and the time has arrived, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, when hostile geographical parties have been formed.

I have long foreseen and often forewarned my countrymen of the now impending danger. This does not proceed solely from the claim on the part of Congress or the Territorial legislatures to exclude slavery from the Territories, nor from the efforts of different States to defeat the execution of the fugitive-slave law. All or any of these evils might have been endured by the South without danger to the Union (as others have been) in the hope that time and reflection might apply the remedy. The immediate peril arises not so much from these causes as from the fact that the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable. […]

How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! They, and they alone, can do it. All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.

Historians have consistently ranked Buchanan at or near the bottom in lists of U.S. presidents. One 2015 biography is even called The Worst President: The Story of James Buchanan.

At the beginning of December, still three months away from Lincoln’s inauguration, Rodman was beginning to sound a little less sure of himself on the question of secession. He wrote, “I cannot feel that this great confederacy is to be destroyed just yet and I dont like to contemplate the fearful ruin that must overtake the South if they pursue their mad schemes.”

Sure enough, on 20 December 1860, South Carolina became the first of eleven states to dissolve its ties with the Union. Rodman had not wanted to see it happen, but now that it was underway, he recorded his feelings in his diary:

Some of our citizens talk blood and warfare, but this is easy talking far away from the probable scenes of danger. I hope we may have peace without blood but if not why my first wish is for wiping Charleston off the face of creation.

Posted in From Our Collections

Rendezvous at the Lines: The Murray Family During the Siege of Boston

By Lauren Duval, NEH-MHS Long-term Research Fellow, Assistant Professor of History, University of Oklahoma

This past fall I was delighted to spend time at the Massachusetts Historical Society as a research fellow. Analyzing British-occupied cities during the American Revolution, my research centers the urban household and examines how civilian families navigated the disruption of occupation and the consequence of this experience, both during and after the war. The voluminous correspondence of the loyalist Murray family proved an exceptional source for examining these dynamics, offering a fascinating glimpse into how one Boston family navigated the hardships of martial law during the early months of the war.

On April 20, 1775, in the wake of the battles at Lexington and Concord, Bostonians awoke to startling news that they were, in the words of one woman, “Genl. Gage’s prisoner[s]—all egress, & regress being cut off between the town & country.”[1] In the months that followed, both the British army and the militia (later Continental army) besieging Boston were hesitant to allow civilians to cross military lines, fearing disease, espionage, and the loss of resources. Some fortunate Bostonians managed to secure passes.[2] Many others, however, lingered in the besieged city (whether by choice or circumstance), where they endured food shortages, disease, plunder, and violence, and struggled to communicate with friends and family outside the British garrison.

The Murray family was stranded on both sides of the lines. Residing in Boston alongside his wife, Elizabeth, and youngest daughter Betsy, loyalist James Murray occupied his time by gardening and reading books, the latter of which he jokingly referred to as “the best friends now left to me.”[3] His sister, Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith Inman and eldest daughter, Dolly Murray Forbes dwelt at the family’s Brush-hill estate, in Cambridge, surrounded by Continental troops. Later in the occupation, Betsy, to her parents’ distress, would abandon the garrison to shelter at Brush-hill.[4] Crossing the lines was nevertheless a fraught endeavor, even with permission. In the fall of 1775, for instance, Elizabeth Inman was advised to remove into the garrison for safety. She obtained a pass to visit Boston and became stranded there for the remainder of the occupation.[5]

Despite being separated by only a few miles, the Murray family was divided by both wartime circumstances and military boundaries. Obtaining passes from commanding officers, they arranged meetings at the military outposts that separated the British garrison at Boston from the Continental camp in Cambridge. Such conferences permitted them to visit, exchange news, and offer reassurances of safety. But they were far from private. As James Murray explained in July 1776, a British officer would observe the family’s gatherings “to be Eye & Ear Witness of all that passes.” This precaution, Murray explained, was for the family’s protection and he strongly advised “the Ladies . . . to use the same precaution, on their side: the Times require it.”[6] With various family members stranded on either side of the lines, dependent upon the protection of both armies, the Murrays could ill-afford to be charged with treasonous behavior by either faction. Witnesses, both British and Continental, who could attest, if necessary, to the content of the family’s conversation was an important shield against such charges. Still, the Murrays were cautious not to meet too frequently, fearful of raising suspicions among Massachusetts revolutionaries.[7]

Like inhabitants of occupied cities throughout British North America, the Murrays struggled with the lack of private communications. They lamented the necessity of leaving letters unsealed for inspection and bemoaned the uncertainty of conveyance. The Murrays, with their regular visits at the lines, were in some ways, more fortunate than those families who had to settle for letters or word-of-mouth reassurances of safety. When possible, the Murrays used private channels, entrusting their missives to neighbors who had obtained passes to cross the lines. Such conveyances were nevertheless circumspect; nothing of consequence could be committed to paper, lest the letter be intercepted.[8] Occasionally, the Murrays sent letters and goods via servants and enslaved messengers, whose roles as laborers permitted them to more easily traverse military lines.[9] Such mobility could, however, be perilous. Enslaved laborers were routinely plundered and kidnapped. Disease flourished near military encampments. Like white civilians, the enslaved could become trapped within the garrison, far from their own families and where they encountered far more difficulties in learning about their loved ones’ well-being. Proximity to the British army nevertheless offered a chance for freedom, and approximately twenty thousand self-emancipated men, women, and children made their way to the British lines during the war.[10]

Despite scrupulous planning, miscarried letters, delayed passes, and other mishaps disrupted the Murrays’ meetings.[11] Weather could deter visits, especially in the frigid winter months.[12] Wartime circumstances introduced additional fears; in the midst of civil war, surrounded by two armies, safety was no guarantee. Hinting at the strain of nine-months-long separation, in January 1776, James Murray wrote to his daughters, requesting them to “bring with you as healthy & chearful Countenances as you did at our last [meeting].” “Your very looks will be a feast to your old Father tho not a Word pass,” he assured them.[13] But even as such glimpses fortified the family for the hardship ahead, the long period of separation exacerbated other worries. Parted from his grandsons for several months, James Murray and his wife Elizabeth worried that “they will have quite forgot us.”[14] Each time the family sent off a letter, they worried, as Dolly expressed to her father in May 1775, that “it may be the last time we can hear from you.”[15]

Although only one facet of the wartime disruption that Bostonians faced in the early years of the war, the experiences of the Murray family underscore the deeply personal and intimate ways in which the war affected American families. Residing between two armies, the challenges that the family faced speak not only to the hardship that civil war inflicted on civilians residing in and around the Boston garrison, but also illustrate in vivid detail the consequences of these circumstances on daily life and familial relationships. As Dolly Forbes feared, the separation from her parents did become permanent. Like many Boston loyalists, James and Elizabeth Murray evacuated Boston with the army in March 1776. They eventually settled in Halifax, where James died in 1781, far from the family that he had valiantly struggled to keep unified during the war.[16]

[1] Sarah Winslow Deming Journal, April 20, 1775.

[2] Permit to pass through British lines, May 1775, Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, 1774–1775.

[3] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsey Murray, October 2, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2 (garden); James Murray to Elizabeth Inman, May 23, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2 (quotation).

[4] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsey Murray, October 2, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[5] Memorial of Dorothy Forbes of Milton to the Honble. Council & House of Representatives of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, December 12, 1775, Murray Robbins Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 4.

[6] James Murray to Elizabeth Inman and Dolly Forbes, July 26, 1775, Murray Robbins Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 4.

[7] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsy Murray, Feb 10, 1776 (James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[8] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes and Betsy Murray, November 6, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[9] For a few examples, see James Murray to Elizabeth Inman, May 17, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2; James Murray to Elizabeth Inman, Boston, Thursday, May 18, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2; Elizabeth Inman to Ralph Inman, 29th & 30th May 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2; Elizabeth Inman to Dorothy Forbes and Betsy Murray, October 28, 1776, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[10] Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2005): 261.

[11] Letter to Betsie Murray, February 23, 1776, Murray Robbins Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 5, (miscarried); Elizabeth Inman to Ralph Inman, Sunday April 30, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2 (delayed).

[12] James Murray to Dolly Forbes and Betsy Murray, February 14, 1776, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[13] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsy Murray, January 10, 1776, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[14] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes and Betsy Murray, November 6, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[15] Letters of James Murray, Loyalist, ed. Nina Moore Tiffany and Susan Inches Lesley (Boston, 1901), 199.

[16] James Henry Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (J.H. Stark, 1907), 258–60.

Posted in From Our Collections, Research fellow

Louisa Catherine Adams: “I was a Mother ”

By Sara Martin, Editor in Chief, The Adams Papers

On 8 July 1801 Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams stepped aboard the ship America in Hamburg. She was ill, worried for the son she birthed less than three months earlier, and sailing toward an America she knew only as “the land of my Fathers.” Volumes 15 and 16 of the Adams Family Correspondence, two forthcoming volumes in the Adams Papers series, chronicle the exciting and daunting changes in Louisa’s life during the first decade of the nineteenth century. She met the Adams family in the United States, carved a place for herself and her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Washington society, and most importantly embraced motherhood.

Miniature portrait of Louisa Catherine Johnson
Louisa Catherine Johnson,
miniature, circa 1792

The daughter of an American father, Joshua Johnson, and English mother, Catherine Nuth Johnson, Louisa was born in London on 12 February 1775. She received her education in France, after her family fled to Nantes during the American Revolution. Returning to London after the war, Joshua Johnson became the U.S. consul at London in 1790, and the Johnson household served as a center for Americans in the British capital. When John Quincy Adams arrived in bustling city in late 1795, he was welcomed into the Johnson home and found the three eldest Johnson “daughters pretty and agreeable.” Louisa captivated his particular focus, and the couple was engaged before John Quincy returned to his diplomatic post at The Hague in late May 1796. More than thirty letters exchanged during their courtship are included in volumes 11 and 12 of the Adams Family Correspondence and are available online through the Adams Papers Digital Edition.

Following the couple’s July 1797 marriage, they moved to Berlin, where John Quincy spent more than three years as the U.S. minister to Prussia. The young diplomat successfully negotiated a new treaty with Prussia but found many of his other duties onerous. Neither he nor Louisa relished the constant whirl of Berlin’s lavish court life, and they escaped the capital when they could, enjoying trips to Dresden and Töplitz and making an extensive tour of Silesia. Louisa’s health in this period was precarious. She experienced several miscarriages before the birth of the couple’s first child, a son named George Washington Adams, in April 1801. “I was a Mother—God had heard my prayer,” Louisa recalled in her autobiography years later.

So it was with a great deal of trepidation that Louisa boarded the America for America in July 1801. After “Sixty long and wearisome days” the family arrived in Philadelphia that September. Louisa spent several weeks visiting her family in Washington, D.C., before traveling to Quincy to meet her in-laws. “Quincy! What shall I say of my impressions of Quincy,” Louisa recalled of her introduction into the Adamses’ community. “Had I steped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished.” With her cosmopolitan upbringing in Europe, Quincy society seemed foreign. She often felt herself on the outside, looking in.

With John Quincy’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1803, Louisa returned to Washington, a city she found charming on her first arrival in 1801: “I am quite delighted with the situation of this place and I think should it ever be finished it will be one of the most beautiful spots in the world.” The close proximity to her family held great appeal, and she remained in the capital during the 1804 recess, while John Quincy visited his parents in Massachusetts. The situation was reversed in 1806 and 1807, when Louisa stayed in Boston while John Quincy returned to his post in the capital.

Louisa’s frequent letters during these periods of separation discuss a wide range of activities, from what she was reading and who she was visiting to what was going on in Congress and Washington society or locally in Massachusetts. Tender moments between husband and wife are joined by periods of miscommunication and disagreement. But much of Louisa’s letters are filled with commentary about their children, for they welcomed a second son, John Adams, in July 1803, and then another, Charles Francis Adams, in August 1807.

Letter from Louisa Catherine Adams to John Quincy Adams
Louisa Catherine Adams to John Quincy Adams, 9 July 1804

“I feel oppressed with such a heavy weight of care when I look at our lovely children separated as I am from you my life is a scene of continual anxiety,” Louisa wrote on 9 July 1804. “You know how fondly I doat on my Children you may therefore rest assured they shall be watched with the fondest care and every thing that is possible for a mother to do shall be done to promote their welfare during your absence.” Much of Louisa’s anxiety pertained to the children’s health. In a 4 October 1801 letter she noted a “terrible eruption” on George’s skin but was relieved when it “proved to be nothing more than bug bites.” She also commented on common illnesses from teething and seasonal complaints, along with the challenges in getting the children inoculated.

Louisa was delighted—and occasionally exasperated—by her sons’ antics. “George . . . says you are very naughty to go away and leave him he does teaze me so when I write I scarcely know what I am doing,” she wrote on 20 May 1804. And in January 1807 she reported that while John eagerly anticipated the return of his “very good Papa” it had “been impossible to prevail on him to go to school.” George, on the other hand, boasted that he “believed he was too clever” for his schoolmaster.

Letter from Louisa Catherine Adams to John Quincy Adams
Louisa Catherine Adams to John Quincy Adams, 21 January 1807

As the first decade of the nineteenth century drew to a close, Louisa returned to Europe with John Quincy. With her children always centermost in her thoughts, this time she looked longingly back toward Massachusetts, where she left her two oldest children under the care of the Adamses . But that is a story for a later Adams Papers volume.

The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Packard Humanities Institute. The Florence Gould Foundation and a number of private donors also contribute critical support. All Adams Papers volumes are published by Harvard University Press.

Posted in From Our Collections Tagged ,

National History Day in Massachusetts has gone Virtual… and We Need Judges!

By Kate Melchior, Assistant Director of Education

Two NHD in Massachusetts students presenting their topic
National History Day in Massachusetts students

Deadline: Wednesday, 24 February 2021

It’s time again for National History Day in Massachusetts! Our students and teachers are hard at work on their “Communication in History” themed projects in the face of this year’s challenges. Are you looking for something to do at home? Volunteer to judge at our Virtual Statewide Competition. Not only will you support our NHD MA students but you can also learn some amazing history. We need your help to provide quality judging and a great contest experience for the students!

Our competition will be held virtually with two rounds to determine our final winners. We are looking for judges—history aficionados and novices alike. No previous experience required!

Sign up now

Judging will take place between 17 and 21 March, on your own schedule. Visit our Registration Portal to learn more and volunteer to judge today!

For more information about NHD in Massachusetts and to see examples of past projects, visit our website at www.masshist.org/masshistoryday or e-mail nhd@masshist.org.

Posted in MHS News

“I preys mighty for you all”: Letters of a Black Family in the Early 20th Century, Part V

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the final installment of a five-part series on the Jarrett family letters at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

In this post, I conclude the story of Julia Jarrett and her son Homer, as documented in the Jarrett family letters here at the MHS. Julia had been born into slavery in the 1850s, and in 1909 was living with members of her sprawling family on a farm in Shiloh, Ga. Homer, after years of peripatetic wandering through the Midwest and Northeast, had settled here in Boston, where he would apparently spend the rest of his life. Below is a complete transcription of the fifth and final letter of the collection.

Jarrett letter
Letter from Julia Jarrett to Homer Jarrett, 11 Oct. 1909

Shiloh. Ga.

Oct. 11 1909

Mr Homer C Jarrett.

My dear son

I wrote you some time but no ancer have I received. Why have you not ancered my letter. If you are sick write and let me know. I have been looking for a letter some time.

I received a letter from Claud. He said a Change had taken place with him. It he said made him cry and made him do things that he never did before. I was so glad I didnt know what to do. The children got the letter out of the box and carried it to the field and I went out thair and they read it to me and I couldent help from shouting and crying and rejoicing.

All at home is well at present. I have been sick for two weeks. I went to see Sister Jane Hawkins. Yesterday Sister Sallie went with me. Sister Jane has been sick but she is better now. Grandpa is well and is try to work as usial.

Homer you must be a good boy and try to prey. I preys mighty for you all and the Lord has give me Claud. He is fix up all right and I trust you is all ready fit meat for the Lord. I trust that I will see you once more in life but if I never see you in life hope to meet you where parten [parting] is no more.

All at home sends love to you. All the children sends their best regards to you. Cora and family is well. Wilson and family is well. The drouth [drought] cut the cotton crops off. We has picked out two bales of cotton but we dont know how many bales we will get. Hasent geathered corn yet.

I remain yours Mother

Julia Jarrett.

This letter was written more than two years after the last. I don’t know whether any correspondence was exchanged in the interim (if so, it may be found in the Homer C. Jarrett letters at the University of Georgia), but Julia’s concern for her son is palpable and touching. She was anxious at not hearing from him and worried not just about his physical, but also his spiritual well-being. Overjoyed at his brother Claud’s new-found commitment to religion, she urged Homer to follow his example and “be a good boy.”

The envelope is addressed to Homer at what looks like #410 A. Col” Ave., which may have been Colonial or Columbus Avenue. He had traveled north at the cusp of the Great Migration, which historians describe as taking place in two waves between 1910 to 1970. Homer would be followed by millions of other African Americans seeking opportunity and escaping Jim Crow. According to National Park Service data, the Black population of Boston, which grew less than that of other Northern cities, still nearly doubled between 1900 and 1930.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any more information about Julia than I’ve shared in this and previous posts. Homer Clifford Jarrett worked in real estate in Boston and died unmarried in 1959 at the age of 76 or 77. Some of his siblings lived into the 1960s and ‘70s, and amazingly little sister Lizzie lived all the way to 1988. To think that a woman who lived long enough to watch the 1988 Winter Olympics on TV had had a mother born enslaved is to see how few generations removed from slavery we are today.

Posted in From Our Collections