Want to learn more about the impact of civic education on students in Massachusetts? Join us for the inaugural Civic Learning Week, 24 to 30 April, organized by the MHS and partner organizations belonging to the Massachusetts Civic Education Coalition.
Massachusetts Civic Learning Week, April 26-30.
On Tuesday, 27 April 2021, from 3:15 to 4:00 PM, award-winning National History Day student Morgan Gibson will be a featured speaker as part of a panel of Massachusetts legislators, who have championed civic education in the state. Sen. Harriette Chandler, Rep, Linda Dean Campbell, and Rep. Andy Vargas will speak about past and present legislation to improve civic education in the Commonwealth, including the 2018 Act to Promote and Enhance Civic Engagement, which made Massachusetts a national leader in civic education reform.
The legislators are joined by students who are leading or have led civic action projects in their communities. The students will share their experiences of leading civic action projects. Following their individual presentations, the legislators and students will engage in dialogue to discuss what the future of civic education in Massachusetts should look like. Learn more and register for this online event.
By Neal Millikan, Series Editor for Digital Editions
Transcriptions of more than 1,200 pages of John Quincy Adams’s diary have just been added to the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary, a born-digital edition of the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The new material spans the period August 1809 through August 1817 and chronicle Adams’s experiences as a diplomat in Russia and Great Britain.
It was with a heavy heart that John Quincy Adams accepted the role of America’s first minister plenipotentiary to Russia. Taking the position would mean traveling with his wife, Louisa Catherine Adams, and his youngest son, Charles Francis Adams, but leaving behind his two eldest sons, George Washington Adams, then age eight, and John Adams, age six, to continue their education in America. Adams, a born diplomat, utilized his new post in St. Petersburg to keep abreast of the shifting European alliances during the Napoleonic Wars. He was on good terms with Emperor Alexander I, and the two men often ran into each other on their walks around the city. During their time in Russia, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams lost their only daughter, also named Louisa Catherine, to dysentery shortly after her first birthday. He agonizingly recounted her illness in his diary, recording that “Her last moments were distressing to me and to her mother, beyond expression.”
View of St. Petersburg, Russia
When the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, owing to issues left unsettled after the Revolutionary War, including the impressment of American sailors, Adams watched from afar. Appointed to lead the peace commission, in April 1814 John Quincy traveled alone to Ghent, Belgium, to help negotiate a settlement with his fellow commissioners and their British counterparts. He noted in his diary: “I commenced my Journey, to contribute if possible to the restoration of Peace to my own Country.” After months of negotiation, a peace agreement was signed on Christmas Eve. As he recorded in his diary on several other occasions throughout his life, John Quincy declared this period in Ghent to be, “the most memorable period of my life.”
Adams next traveled to Paris in January 1815, where he was reacquainted with his wife and youngest son, and then on to Great Britain in May to assume his new role as U.S. minister at the Court of St. James’s. On the 25th, John Quincy had one of the most momentous reunions of his life when he, Louisa, and Charles, were reunited with George and John after almost six years apart. Adams marveled that George had “grown almost out of our knowledge” and noted that John was “yet small for his age.” According to John Quincy, Louisa was “so much overcome by the . . . agitation of meeting so unexpectedly her long absent children, that she was obliged to retire, and twice fainted.” These years in Great Britain were some of the happiest of John Quincy’s adult life; surrounded once again by his entire family, they lived in the aptly named “Little Boston” house in the London suburb of Ealing. Adams traveled into the British capital when necessary for diplomatic work and made many new acquaintances, including the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham.
John Quincy Adams received notice in April 1817 that President James Monroe had offered him the position of secretary of state. The family sailed for the United States on 15 May and arrived in New York on 6 August. Continuing on to Quincy, on the 18th John Quincy was reunited with “my dear and venerable father and mother,” John and Abigail Adams, recording his “inexpressible happiness” to find them both “in perfect health.”
For more on John Quincy Adams’s life during these years, read the headnote, or, navigate to the entries to begin reading his diary. The addition of material for the 1809–1817 period joins existing transcriptions of Adams’s diary for his early years as a lawyer and diplomat (1789–1801), as secretary of state (1817–1825), and as president (1825–1829), and brings the total number of transcriptions freely available on the MHS website to more than 5,000 pages.
The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also support the project through funding for the Society’s Primary Source Cooperative.
By Cassy Jane Werking, PhD Candidate, University of Kentucky, Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Research Fellow at the MHS
The ship in the distance gave hope to Lucy Lord Howes Hooper, passenger aboard the American Southern Cross. Her vessel was not lost at sea because civilization was in sight. The ship, however, served as an unexpected reminder of a civilization fraught with conflict—the American Civil War. The feeling of hope felt by Massachusetts natives Lucy Lord Howes Hooper and her husband, Captain Benjamin Howes, quickly vanished as the approaching Confederate ship, sailing under the disguise of the British flag and taking advantage of Britain’s neutrality, announced that all on board the Southern Cross were now prisoners of war for the Confederacy. Hooper watched the Confederate flag quickly replace the English flag and commented, “I had been standing on deck all this time in the rain, watching the proceedings with an aching heart.” [1] The discomfort of the rain falling on her head may have matched the discomfort she felt in her heart about the situation unfolding in front of her eyes and the uncertainty that would undoubtedly follow. Passengers packed belongings as quickly as possible, evacuated the ship, and boarded the Confederate Florida before their capturers burned the American Southern Cross. Hooper served time as a Confederate prisoner of war for six days in June 1863 alongside her husband who was the merchant captain of the Southern Cross. They were on route from Mazatlán, Mexico with a shipment of brazilwood when the Confederates found them. [2] Hooper left the ship she referred to as home in an unusual way. She stated, “I was wrapped in the American flag and lowered over the side in an arm chair into the boat, with one of my cats in my lap.” [3] This unusual scene highlights the variety of forms the Civil War took and the unsuspecting civilians who were caught in the cross hairs.
The experience of Lucy Lord Howes Hooper shows that the Confederacy took advantage of fluid borders in international waters through Confederate privateers with the goal of destroying Union commerce. Hooper’s story provides a female perspective from the southern end of the North American continent to contrast with northern regions that my dissertation explores—the international border between Canada and the United States. The Confederacy extended its reach beyond the borders of the South and beyond the United States. Hooper’s diary and my dissertation contribute to the more recent trajectory of Civil War scholarship that has involved “internationalizing” the war’s scope. Historians have examined Europe and South America to broaden our understanding. They have also highlighted the importance of Latin American nations to the Civil War Era. Examinations ranged from the escapades of filibusters before the war like William Walker, who led a private expedition into Nicaragua in order to acquire land needed for the expansion of slavery, to the lives of white southerners who did not want to live in the United States during Reconstruction. Yet, North America on a larger scale remains understudied. Analyzing international borders by land, and by water, adds a new dimension to how the scholarship conceptualizes the geography of war and builds on recent studies of borders as contested spaces.
Confederate Lieutenant John Newland Maffitt treated Hooper less like a prisoner and more like a guest. He offered Hooper his personal room for her to stay in and taught her to play Solitaire. Hooper was from Dennis, Massachusetts and even talked about Cape Cod with Maffitt in which the captain reported that the Cape Cod girls are “great flirts.” [4] Interesting conversations may have briefly diverted Hooper’s attention away from her capricious situation, but she remained uncomfortable because there was no destination or freedom in sight. Hooper demurred, “Still prisoners we are discounted, suffer considerable from ennui, a dull rainy disagreeable day.” [5] Hooper knew that the ticket to her release hindered on the presence of a non-American ship coming in the path of the Confederates. Ultimately, the French ship Fleur De Para unknowingly liberated Hooper, her husband, and a handful of other passengers. The Confederate privateers posing as Englishmen explained that they saved them from a burning vessel, but secretly kept the remainder of the crew as prisoners.
Examining Confederate actions in international waters and the safety of civilians threatened on ships, shows that the Civil War, despite its name, was not a war that transpired only within the borders of the United States, but also on the border, specifically in the “borderlands.” Therefore, a fuller understanding of the war that encompasses all the diverse actors, like Hooper, who were affected and their varied experiences of war requires a reframing of the Civil War that positions it as a fight that played out across North America.
By Gavin Kleespies, Director of Programs, Exhibitions & Community Partnerships
At a recent meeting, a MHS staff member pointed out that it had been 400 days since we closed our doors to the public. While this was a sobering milestone, it gave us pause to reflect on what we have built in this time. The MHS began offering virtual programs the first week of April 2020. Since then we have hosted 64 programs with 11,000 attendees. Attendance has increased and the geographic diversity is truly amazing. Program attendees have joined us from 1,115 different communities across America from Anchorage, Alaska to Zephyrhills, Florida. We have also had people attend from 63 foreign cities in 18 different countries on five continents.
The shift to virtual programing has given us greater access to speakers from far-flung places. In the past, a historian who lived on the west coast would need to commit to at least two days of travel in order to speak at a program. And in many cases the MHS would have been expected to pay a speaker fee or travel expenses. Now, we need only a few hours online. We have been able to have presenters from across the country, and, in one case, the other side of the Atlantic. Virtual programming has enabled us to ask experts to moderate conversations that would have been impossible before.
The number of recorded programs has increased due to the move to online programs. Previously, we recorded around ten events a year to make available online. Since we shifted to virtual programs, we have recorded 63 programs, 3 seminars, our biannual conference, the Gomes Prize award ceremony, and our Making History Gala as well as 8 National History Day videos. All of these programs are available on our video page and YouTube channel.
While the advantages of virtual programming can’t be denied, we very much look forward to hosting in-person programs again. In the meantime, take a look at what is planned on our online events calendar.
Today is #NationalSiblingsDay! To celebrate, I took a look into the collections of the MHS to see if there are any historically significant siblings. What I found exceeded my expectations, as the MHS has collection pieces from the Otis family, one of my favorite Massachusetts families of the 1700’s. Specifically I’ll be talking about James Otis, Jr., Mercy Otis Warren, and Mary Otis Gray, three siblings who lived through very interesting times.
The eldest of the three is James Otis, Jr. who was a lawyer, political activist, and legislator in the Massachusetts Provincial Assembly and a mentor to John Adams. Otis is famous for representing businessmen of Boston during the Writs of Assistance case in 1761 where he argued against invasion of property without cause. This case, and the arguments he made, was the basis for the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, since John Adams witnessed the impassioned four-hour speech made by Otis and helped write the Massachusetts Constitution and the Constitution of the United States. Unfortunately, Otis suffered from mental illness and became much more erratic after he was hit in the head during an altercation in 1769. Although he lived during the time of the Revolutionary War, he did not take part, as his family placed him in a friend’s house in Watertown, where he passed in 1783 after being struck by lightning. His sister Mercy later stated that he had said to her: “My dear sister, I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning.”
Mercy Otis Warren, the eldest sister, but younger than James, was a Patriot before and during the Revolutionary War and an author. She wrote pamphlets, poems and plays to further the patriotic cause. She published under her own name, unusual for a woman in her social circle, and wrote one of the earliest histories of the American Revolution, the first authored by a woman. Her brothers and father supported her education as a girl, also, unusual for the time and her social circle, as she was a voracious reader, so she studied with her brothers under a tutor. She was a correspondent and advisor to many political men including Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Alexander Hamilton complimented her plays: “In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the male”. However, Warren’s sharp wit criticized John Adams in her history of the American Revolution, “History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution” which many contemporaries read after publication in 1805. These criticisms created a breach of the lifelong friendship she enjoyed with Abigail and John Adams. The friendship was reestablished with Abigail in 1812 just two years before Warren passed at age 86. She was a woman ahead of her time, and I’ve always wondered what she could have accomplished had she lived during our time. The MHS holds Mercy Otis Warren’s papers, mostly her correspondence.
This portrait of Mary Otis Gray was painted in 1763 by John Singleton Copley, whose own sibling story is also very interesting.
Mary Otis Gray did not have the patriotic fervor of her two siblings, she lived a quieter life, despite being “raised in the midst of revolutionary ideals” which influenced her siblings heavily. She married John Gray, a Boston businessman, collector of customs before the war, and owner of the ropewalks made famous by the brawls between soldiers and civilians leading up to the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Grays married when Mary was thirty-one in 1761, older than was customary for the time, and she bore a son, John, in 1763, the same year she sat for this portrait. However, John passed six days after birth and Mary passed later that year. See the image of Mary Otis Gray along with the mourning jewelry made for her and for her son.
This is the third installment in a series on the diary of William Logan Rodman at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to read Part I and Part II.
William Logan Rodman of New Bedford, Mass. began keeping a diary just days before the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This diary would become an invaluable document containing an up-close and personal account of some of the most momentous events in United States history. In Parts I and II of this series, I’ve described Rodman’s thoughts and experiences during the turbulent aftermath of that election.
So far we’ve seen that Rodman was a staunch Republican who supported Lincoln and opposed slavery. He had also been raised in the Quaker tradition of nonviolence and didn’t relish the prospect of war. But the secession of South Carolina and other Southern states outraged him, and he vented his anger on the pages of his diary, lambasting the “Traitors” and “Devils of SC” and their “mad schemes.”
Even before Lincoln’s inauguration, Northern newspapers reported rumors of a possible attack on federal forces at Fort Sumter, S.C. Rodman dismissed the rumors on 12 February 1861 (incidentally Lincoln’s 52nd birthday), but there was a part of him that dared the rebels to try it.
This is the day consecrated, so says lasts nights Telegram (or as Prentice calls it tel-a-whopper) to the capture of Fort Sumter by the South Carolina Royalists. I dont anticipate any thing of the kind but […] I almost hope the experiment may be tried. I have a fancy to learn what effect the 10 inch Columbiad will have upon the feelings of the rascally rebels.
In fact, as the National Park Service explains in its publication Five Flags Over Fort Sumter, there was a minor incident that night that presaged coming events.
On the night of February 12 a harbor steamer approached a little closer to the fort than the sentinel liked, and he leveled his musket; when the boat came closer still, the private fired into it and drove it away.
Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March 1861, and Rodman was fulsome in his praise of the new president’s inaugural address, gushing over the “modesty & humility but a determined self reliance” that was evident in both the speech and the man.
Looking back at that address is instructive. In it, Lincoln stated unequivocally that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He refused to march federal troops into Southern states to re-order their “domestic institutions” (even when legally permitted to do so) and declared his support of the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution “with no mental reservations.”
Rodman’s wholehearted agreement with the speech tells us that he, too, while professing to oppose slavery and white supremacy, was willing to look the other way to preserve the Union. Rodman believed that “no government exists without the Union is maintained.” He was not, based on the evidence in this diary, an abolitionist.
In spite of his growing anxiety over tensions between North and South, Rodman was shocked when the Confederacy attacked Sumter on 12 April, two months to the day after he’d dismissed it as an improbability. On 13 April, telegraphs from Charleston reported the news, but it wasn’t until two days later that Rodman was sure.
Tis too true Sumpter has fallen and War has commenced. We know the fact now and altho we cannot comprehend the extraordinary details which reach us […] we accept the fact with mortification and anger. There is no mistaking now the feeling of this section and a severe reckoning must follow.
Broadside probably printed post-Sumter, [1861]It’s hard to imagine in this age of instant communication what it must have been like to wait, unknowing, for word to arrive via telegraph, letter, or printed page. But once the news was confirmed, reaction was swift, and Northern troops were on the move. In fact, some men had been called up months before. William Cushing Paine, for example, had been sent from New Bedford to Fort Schuyler, N.Y. back in January, “perhaps in anticipation of a further destination,” as Rodman had put it.
Now that civil war was upon them, Rodman described the excitement: “We think of nothing talk of nothing but the War. Each day sees [us] devouring newspapers. Reading & Rereading the same bit of intelligence.” And as troops shipped out of New Bedford and other Northern towns, “Tears rolled down many a rough face. […] We may all have to follow.”
My colleague LJ wrote a recent blog post on doing historical research during the pandemic. With so many archives and libraries closed, digitized materials are more precious to researchers than ever, and LJ’s post inspired me to write one on digitized historical maps and atlases that researchers can pore over (and zoom in on) from the comfort of their own computers.
On the MHS Online Resources page, you can find digitized maps in our collections by clicking on the “Subject/Era/Medium” tab and then choosing the “maps” button under the “Medium” column. (Here’s a shortcut.) Below, I share a few 18th century maps of Boston to highlight examples of just some of the different types of information the maps convey. There’s so much to explore, but I hope this will whet your appetite!
“A Plan of the Town of Boston.” London: Published by Thomas Jefferys, 1774.
The Maps of the French and Indian War exhibit includes a 1774 map of New Hampshire and Hudson River, with inset map of Boston. As would be expected, the inset of the town of Boston (seen above) identifies the various streets, wharves, and batteries within the city. Its inclusion of the Liberty Tree on the Common adds important context and speaks to the revolutionary era in which the map was made. The atlas also provides geographical information on the city’s twelve wards, each of which had its own “Company of Foot,” and lists the years in which fires destroyed different parts of the city.
Manuscript map of the 1787 fire of Boston, Mass., by Jeremy Belknap, 23 April 1787
In 1787, Jeremy Belknap, who later founded the MHS, included a hand drawn map in a letter he wrote to Ebenezer Howard, describing the extent of a fire that engulfed the city on the night of April 20. Belknap depicts where the fire began and what got destroyed. Though most of the buildings on the map are rendered simply as rectangles, Belknap, a minister, drew a nearby church in recognizable detail. He also labeled homes of a few of the neighbors–perhaps these people were familiar to his correspondent, and helped him place the fire’s setting? Like most of the fires recorded on the 1774 map of the city, Boston’s many wooden structures enabled the rapid spread of this 1787 fire, too.
To get an understanding of just how many of the city’s structures were constructed of wood, I recommend looking at Clough’s Oversize 1798 Atlas in the Massachusetts Maps digital collection. Samuel Chester Clough (1873-1949) was a draftsman for the Boston Edison Company and Boston Navy Yard. Based on years of research into various city records, Clough reconstructed topographical maps of 17th- and 18th-century Boston. His Oversize 1798 Atlas contains 12 plates that depict the city and its property owners, based on the Direct Tax Census of 1798. (To learn more about Clough’s work, see the collection guide to his research materials.)
Detail of Clough’s Atlas 1798 Property Owners of the Town of Boston, Manuscript maps by Samuel Chester Clough, circa 1900?
Plate 1 of Clough’s Atlas depicts Long Wharf, much longer then than it is today, and the many bustling businesses located on it. The buildings in pink were made of brick, but those in yellow were all made of wood. Though fire was an ever present danger, Long Wharf and the many merchants located on it connected 18th century Boston to the larger Atlantic world.
Plate 2 of the atlas, also on the coast and depicting part of the North End, similarly details property owners and building materials in that neighborhood. It also includes a nod to the indigenous people otherwise missing from the atlas. At the top of the plate, next to property owned by H.H. Williams, there is a label that reads “Winnisimet Ferry.”
Winnisimmet Ferry
The Winnisimmet Ferry connected Boston to Chelsea, an area which had previously been known as “Winnisimmet.” Like many place names in the Commonwealth, “Winnisimmet” is indigenous. The word, approximately meaning “good spring nearby,” comes from the Massachusett Tribal Nation, whose people at that time spoke an Algonquin dialect. The Massachusett people had used and inhabited the area long before English settler colonists arrived and violently displaced them, and this one place name on Clough’s 1798 map is a testament to that. You can learn more about the Massachusett Tribe–past and present–on their tribal website.
Interested in comparing Long Wharf, the North End, or any other part of Boston depicted in Clough’s 1798 Atlas to the present day? With the Boston Planning & Development Agency’s (BPDA) Historical Map tools it’s easy to do! The BPDA partnered with Mapjunction on a project entitled Atlases by Neighborhood, which allows researchers to overlay historical maps — including Clough’s two Atlases — with more modern ones. It’s a really fun way to see how the shoreline, streets, and neighborhoods have changed over time. The site provides a tutorial and shows you all of the tools you can use as you navigate. I hope you spend some time with it, and with the many digitized maps on the MHS website; every time I look at one I always seem to notice something new!
One of the best parts of my job as reproductions coordinator is getting to look through our collections every day, helping our researchers find the materials they need while also happening across some hidden gems inside those materials. Recently, I was photographing the three volumes of the Lucy Larcom diaries when I found some very seasonally appropriate poetry. Larcom was a teacher, writer, and poet whose works involved the themes of morality, religion, abolition, and her life growing up in Massachusetts. Reading through the poems in the volumes, which seem to be transcriptions of earlier drafts, I found that she often used nature as a lens through which she could understand these topics. She also used poetry to understand and celebrate nature itself.
The poem that I’d like to share today is one of those celebrations. In Spring, dated March 1847, Larcom describes some of the pleasures of spring, from the sound of blue birds to deep blue sky. Enjoy!
Lucy Larcom’s Spring
Spring
Have you felt the south wind blowing?
Have you seen the soft grass growing?
Have you heard the blue-birds sing?
Oh! ‘tis Spring! ‘tis pleasant Spring.
In ravines fresh streams are welling.
On the tree-tops buds are swelling.
Warmly glow the cloudless skies
Blue and deep as seraph’s eyes.
Now the frogs begin their tune
Moaning to the stately moon.
And from dawn till twilight’s fall
Sounds the grouse his mournful call.
Merrily the woods are ringing.
O’er the sky gay plumes are winging.
Brightly smile and sweetly sing;
For ‘tis spring! ‘tis joyous Spring!
To keep the spring momentum going, I also pulled some sketches of my favorite element of spring: the flowers! These sketches come from the Minot Family papers and were drawn by my old friend Henry Davis Minot.
Henry Davis Minot sketches. Clockwise from top left: Hepatica triloba; “Flowering Wintergreen” (Polygala paucifolia), Green Lily (Clintonia borealis), and Spring Beauty (Claytonia Caroliniana); 4 Painted Trillium (Trillium erythrocarpum), Dwarf Cornel (Cornus Canadensis), Goldthread (Coptis trifolia), and Starflower (Trientalis Americana); White Meadow Violet (Viola primulaefelia), Common Blue Violet (Viola cucullata), Pink Lady’s-slipper (Cypripedium acaule); Yellow Mocasson (Cypripedium parviflorum), Wood Violet (viola canina sylvestris), Yellow Violet (Viola pubescens – ? eriocarpa); Common Bellwort (Urularia sessilifolia), Clasp-leaved Bellwort (Urularia perfoliata), anenome (nemorosa), Rue- anenome (Thalictrum anemonoides); Purple Trillium (Trillium erectum), “Pitcher-plant” (Arisaema triphyllum), (True) Pitcher-plant (Sarracenia purpurea).
I don’t know about you, but these items have me even more excited for spring than I already was! May we all look forward to blue skies, bird calls, and fresh flowers.
If you’d like to place a reproductions request and fuel my future discoveries, visit the Reproductions page of our website to learn more.
By Samantha Payne, Harvard University, Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Fellow at the MHS
In the past year, the MHS highlighted collections that shed light on the history of the Black freedom struggle in the United States. The MHS holds an extraordinary range of documents relating to African American history, including the letters of former slaves like Julia Jarrett, the writings of abolitionists like Maria Weston Chapman, and the diaries of Union soldiers like Dwight Emerson Armstrong.
The MHS also holds collections that can help us explore the history of the Black Atlantic.[1] My dissertation examines the expansion of white supremacist politics across the post-emancipation Atlantic World. At the MHS, the Edwin Atkins Papers proved critical to my study. Atkins was a Boston merchant who owned sugarcane plantations along the southern coast of Cuba. From the 1870s to the 1920s, he wrote continuously to his plantation managers in Cuba. Their correspondence let me glimpse the drama of slave emancipation and anticolonial revolution on the island.
Enslaved people labored on Cuban sugar plantations until 1886. After abolition, plantation owners like Atkins continued to rely on Black labor. In 1911, Atkins observed that “field work in Cuba is done mostly by negroes.”[2] This work was often brutal. Black laborers typically cut sugar cane for eighteen hours a day for a wage of 36 cents.[3]
Unlike in the U.S. South, however, Black workers in Cuba had the right to vote. In 1908, a small group of Black men in Havana organized the first all-Black political party in the hemisphere—the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC).[4] They hoped to use the party to change working conditions for Black people on the island. Their demands included an eight-hour workday, integrated public schooling, and land redistribution.
Edwin Atkins feared the PIC. On 3 October 1908, he wrote to a plantation manager to ask his “opinion about the negro movement” in Cuba. He worried that “there will be some trouble from this source…sometime in the future.” He was right. The PIC quickly secured a broad base of support. In 1910, the Cuban Congress banned the PIC to stop them from winning national elections. Atkins was pleased. “The negroes [in Cuba] have been given too many privileges,” he declared.[5]
Still, the PIC endured. In 1912, party leaders began organizing Black workers to burn sugarcane fields. On 22 May, Edwin Atkins wrote to the U.S. War Department to ask for help managing an “uprising of negroes” that had begun in eastern Cuba.[6] For the next few weeks, Atkins lobbied for a U.S. military intervention to crush the uprising. He believed that “if a few [PIC] leaders are killed” the movement would “die out.”[7]
Atkins got his wish. Just days after his first request, “marines were despatched” to Cuba.[8] For the next two months, U.S. soldiers guarded plantations while Cuban soldiers massacred Black workers. By the end of July, the official death toll was 2,000.[9]
The story of the PIC is virtually unknown in the United States, but it is an important part of American history. As white mobs lynched African American workers at home, the U.S. military backed the massacre of Afro-Cuban laborers overseas. Through the MHS collections, their stories can be told.
[1] The term “Black Atlantic” refers to the world constituted by the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1600 and 1850, slave traders forcibly transported twelve million Africans to the Americas. The “Atlantic” framework enables scholars to study the experiences of these individuals and their descendants across national boundaries.
[2] MHS, Edwin Atkins Family Papers, Letterbooks, Volume II, Edwin Atkins to Osgood Welsh, April 10, 1911.
[3] Louis Pérez, Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1902-1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 81.
[4] Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carlina Pess, 2001), 4-5.
[5] MHS, Edwin Atkins Family Papers, Letterbooks, Volume II, Edwin Atkins to J. T. Witherspoon, June 8, 1912.
[6] MHS, Edwin Atkins Family Papers, Letterbooks, Volume II, Edwin Atkins to Major General Leonard Wood, May 22, 1912.
[7] MHS, Edwin Atkins Family Papers, Letterbooks, Volume II, Edwin Atkins to J. T. Witherspoon, June 8, 1912.
[8] MHS, Edwin Atkins Family Papers, Letterbooks, Volume II, Edwin Atkins to R. B. Hawley, May 24, 1912.
“All experience in the past history of mankind has shown that efforts for the elevation of a nation must come from within and work outward to be effectual.”
-Pandita Ramabai
The 2021 International Women’s Day slogan is ‘Choose to Challenge.’ There are generations of women who chose to challenge and fight for equality who have not been celebrated. Though their work went by unnoticed and unacknowledged, knowing that change was coming was enough to fuel their desire to continue. Realizing that you need to change the very society in which you live can be an uphill battle that may not be embraced or applauded. This was the life of Pandita Ramabai.
Ramabai spent her life fighting for women’s rights in India. She fought not only for independence, autonomy, and quality of life but also for a girl’s right to education—an idea that shook the foundations of patriarchal society. Ramabai faced opposition from her own countrymen, friends, and relatives. Yet she persisted on a lifelong battle to fight for what she knew was just and necessary.
Born in 1858 as Rama Dongre, Ramabai was a Brahmin. Her very progressive father taught her to read and write in Sanskrit. He encouraged her to become a Sanskrit scholar (typically reserved solely for men at the time) from whence she was given the title of Pundita. In 1880, Ramabai married Bipin Behari Medavi, a lawyer of a lower caste. To marry beneath your caste was considered outrageous at the time. When her husband’s untimely death left Ramabai a widow and a single mother of a 1-year-old daughter, she moved to Pune where she began the Arya Women’s Association to promote women’s causes.
Ramabai was a scholar, an educator, and a feminist—the opposite of everything she was supposed to be. She travelled across India giving lectures on Women’s Rights and was an outspoken advocate for women’s education:
The lack of education among the women of India can be fairly realized by scanning the report of the Educational Commission for 1883, and the census returns of 1880-81. Of the ninety-nine million seven hundred thousand women and girls directly under British rule, ninety-nine and one-half millions are returned as unable to read and write; the remaining two hundred thousand who are able either to read or write, cannot all be reckoned as educated, for the school-going period of a girl is generally between seven and nine years of age; within that short time she acquires little more than ability to read the second or the third vernacular reading-book, and a little knowledge of arithmetic which usually comprehends no more than the four simple rules…It is surprising how even this small number of women can have acquired the limited knowledge indicated, when we consider the powers and principalities that are incessantly fighting against female education in India. Girls of nine and ten when recently out of school and given in marriage are wholly cut off from reading or writing, because it is a shame for a young woman or girl to hold a paper or book in her hand, or to read in the presence of others in her husband’s house.[1]
In The High Caste Hindu Woman Ramabai exposed the plight of Brahmin widowhood and used the sympathy it ignited to start the first women’s school and home in India. The Sharada Sadan was opened in Mumbai (Bombay) in 1889 as a school and shelter for women, and remains in operation today.
In India, girls were betrothed at a very young age. The very same society that condemned widows would encourage widowers to re-marry. This created a potential for the bridegroom to be many years older than his bride. It also increased the chance of the bride becoming a widow before the age of twelve. Child widows were sentenced to live their lives as ghost-like creatures, looked upon with hatred and disdain. Considered cursed, they were avoided and thought to bring bad luck. It was a sad existence from which there was no escape. Ramabai was determined to not only save these girls from that existence but also to uplift them by providing a safe home to reside, a school to learn to read and write, and employable skills such as gardening and sewing.
front face Ramabai F. GUTEKUNST PHOTOTYPE from The High-Caste Hindu Woman
Ramabai’s desire to create a home and school for child widows brought her first to Europe so that she could further her education. From Europe she traveled to America in order to raise funds and find supporters. This resulted in the American Ramabai Association. As a visitor to Boston, she must have made quite an impression. Though a convert to Christianity, she never gave up her customs such as being a strict vegetarian, wearing traditional clothing, and insisting on walking barefoot inside the home. Much of this surprised and even angered some Americans. However, Ramabai was a woman powered by her own determination to improve the world around her.
Two separate manuscript collections housed at the MHS contain papers of the American Ramabai Association. They present a treasure-trove of 19th century international correspondence and collaboration between India and America. The Judith Walker Andrews Correspondence, 1887-1911, consists of letters from Pandita Ramabai describing her work to care for and educate Child widows at Sharada Sadan and Mukti Sadan as well as other correspondence and accounts. The Daniel Dulany Addison Collection, 1797-1951 also includes reports from the Ramabai Association for the relief of Hindu widows.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spike in child brides as a result of increased poverty and joblessness in India’s poorest areas. Early and severe lockdowns to stop the spread of the virus led to increased violence in some areas where workers were forced to return home without jobs. The closure of schools has not only ended education for the poor but also the loss of the one government-provided meal. In some cases this has forced families to take extreme measures such as marrying daughters off at younger ages. The authorities are unable to intervene. The thoughts and urgency expressed in Ramabai’s letters and writings are reflected in the current situation.[2]
While change may not come easily, I marvel at these writings and think of how the world can come together in an effort to bring change.
While the two collections at the MHS containing material related to Pandita Ramabai are not digitized, learn about requesting reproductions from the library on our website: https://www.masshist.org/library/reproductions.
