Workshop 5 Assignment

Black Autonomy, Red Cross Recovery, and White Backlash after the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893

Caroline Grego

Journal of Southern History, Volume 85, Number 4, November 2019, pp. 803-840 (Article)

Published by The Southern Historical Association DOI:

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 17 Jul 2020 23:05 GMT from University of California @ Santa Cruz ]

https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2019.0244

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/739575

Black Autonomy, Red Cross Recovery, and White Backlash after the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893

By Caroline Grego

President of the American Red Cross Clara Barton boarded the steamer Catherine to tour the storm-stricken sea islands of South Carolina at 4 a.m. on September 17, 1893.1 South Carolina’s governor, the infamous white supremacist and demagogue Benjamin R. Tillman, had invited Barton to investigate the situation and determine if her organization could assist the reeling state.2 Less than a month earlier, on the night of August 27–28, a massive hurricane with 125 mph winds struck the sea islands around Beaufort, taking an immense toll: between 1,500 and 5,000 people died, all but a couple dozen of whom were African American. The storm trailed destruction up the southern Atlantic shoreline. But the string of islands clinging to South Carolina’s coast bore the brunt of the death toll and the worst of the storm damage. The storm ruined the fall harvest and left 30,000 people in the Lowcountry

Caroline Grego is a visiting assistant professor of history at Queens Uni- versity of Charlotte.

1 Clara Barton Diary, September 17, 1893, Folder “May 1893–May 1894,” Box 5, Diaries and Journals, Clara Barton Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), online at https://www.loc.gov/item/mss119730041/, image 137; hereinafter cited as Clara Barton Diary, with the date and image number. I would like to acknowledge Dr. Paul Sutter, my adviser, for patiently going through multiple rounds of revisions on this piece and for his always incisive advice in crafting an article; Dr. Peter H. Wood, for always being ready to discuss Lowcountry history and for talking me through ideas for this article; and Dr. Samanthis Smalls, for reading an early draft of the article and providing valuable comments that helped me refine subsequent drafts.

2 Tillman’s decision to invite the Red Cross went through a few stages. Tillman did not consider a role for the Red Cross in his relief plans immediately after the storm, and he demurred when Barton first offered the organization’s assistance. See “600 Lives Lost,” Columbia (S.C.) State, September 1, 1893, pp. 1, 5; and “A Noble Response,” Columbia State, September 9, 1893, p. 8. Senator Matthew Calbraith Butler of South Carolina pressured Tillman to accept Barton’s assistance, and Tillman capitulated and agreed to escort Barton on her initial tour of the islands. Likely he was pleased to have the responsibility of relief off his shoulders. “The Red Cross Muddle,” Columbia State, September 12, 1893, p. 8. On Tillman, see Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, 2000).

The Journal of Southern History Volume LXXXV, No. 4, November 2019

destitute.3 The Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 was one of the worst natural disasters in the nineteenth-century United States. Several his- torians have turned to the storm as a transformative and explanatory moment in Lowcountry history. They have explored the hurricane’s impact on rice cultivation and the region’s phosphate industry, and they have interpreted the storm as a flashpoint for memories of Re- construction and for questions of responsibility in disaster recovery.4

This article draws on this rich, growing scholarship and focuses on a piece of that story, the hurricane recovery effort under the American Red Cross.5

What Barton saw and heard during that steamer trip convinced her that the Red Cross was obligated to lead the recovery effort. The steamer tracked north from Beaufort all the way to Charleston, winding up tidal waterways, passing the hurricane-wrecked dredge the Wimbee, navi- gating through treacherous waters into the Stono River, and landing at a wharf on the Cooper River. Along the way, the group stopped at several sea islands. At each place, an unofficial emissary, most of whom were African American, delivered news of the island’s plight. Barton listened to these reports, dispensed food from the hull of the steamer whenever possible, and considered the scope of the disaster. On September 29, 1893, she wrote in her diary that she had “decided to take charge of the

3 “1500 Dead,” Columbia State, September 3, 1893, pp. 1, 5; Clara Barton, A Story of the Red

Cross: Glimpses of Field Work (New York, 1904), 77. Five thousand dead was Barton’s high estimate. Joel Chandler Harris, who visited the region for Scribner’s after the hurricane, put the death toll at between 2,500 and 3,000. See Joel Chandler Harris, “The Sea Island Hurricanes: The Devastation,” Scribner’s Magazine, 15 (February 1894), 229–47, esp. 243; and Joel Chandler Harris, “The Sea Island Hurricanes: The Relief,” Scribner’s Magazine, 15 (March 1894), 267–84. On the storm generally, see Bill and Fran Marscher, The Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 (Macon, Ga., 2003); Walter J. Fraser Jr., Lowcountry Hurricanes: Three Centuries of Storms at Sea and Ashore (Athens, Ga., 2006), 165–84; and Lawrence S. Rowland and Stephen R. Wise, Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past and Present, 1893–2006: The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Volume 3 (Columbia, S.C., 2015), 1–18. One of the most useful books cataloging the history of hurricanes is Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton, 2015), though the 1893 storm is not included. Hurricanes did not start receiving names until 1953, so the storm of 1893 does not have one.

4 For the hurricane’s impact on rice, see Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens, Ga., 1996), 236–38; for its effect on the phosphate industry, see Shepherd W. McKinley, Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina (Gainesville, Fla., 2014), 163. On its role in cultural memory, see Ras Michael Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (New York, 2012), 257–58; and Robert D. Bland, “‘AGrimMemorial of Its Thorough Work of Devastation and Desolation’: Race and Memory in the Aftermath of the 1893 Sea Island Storm,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 17 (April 2018), 297–316.

5Marian Moser Jones’s The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore, 2013) has been invaluable in understanding Clara Barton’s character and the nature of the Red Cross throughout the nineteenth century. Some of the framing regardingwhite backlash and the racialized paternalism of the Red Cross owes a debt to Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, 2016).

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relief of the Sea Islands” after a nighttime meeting with her closest colleagues. Misgivings plagued her. She did not write of the nobility of charity work but instead commented on what “a great undertaking” it would be “to feed, clothe, work & doctor & nurse 30,000 human beings for eight months, and do it all upon charity gathered as one goes along.”6

To understand what the Red Cross’s recovery effort meant for the South Carolina sea islands at a crossroads moment, this article explores the Red Cross’s measures of relief, the role of black sea islanders in harnessing Red Cross relief to protect their autonomy, and the white supremacist backlash against the coalition of the Red Cross and black sea islanders. Above all, this article tracks how a uniquely independent black Lowcountry community, the white supremacists who resented the persistence of black autonomy on the coast, and a rare third-party in- termediary, the Red Cross, all vied to implement their visions for re- covery from the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893. Throughout the recovery process, the Red Cross attempted to nurture the long-term self-sufficiency of black sea islanders through short-term aid. The or- ganization shared similar objectives with black sea islanders and ac- complished a great deal of material good, but its attitude toward black sea islanders was laced with undeniable paternalism, demonstrated in its volunteers’ rhetoric and methods, that led the Red Cross to doubt the capabilities of black sea islanders. Some Red Cross volunteers even suggested that the deadly hurricane had been a strange kind of blessing: “They did not know how to live,” one said; “The Red Cross lifted those people and placed them years ahead of where they would have been had it not been for this cyclone.”7 For black sea islanders, maintaining their autonomy after the hurricane through the acceptance of short-term relief anchored their fight against white supremacists, who resisted the presence of the Red Cross. Black sea islanders drew on hard-won traditions of landownership and autonomy to help shape the recovery effort and, through their alliance with the Red Cross, achieved mean- ingful successes for their communities that promoted their independence

6 “A Voyage of Desolation,” Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier (2nd ed.), September 18,

1893, pp. 1–2; “Red Cross to the Rescue,” Columbia State, September 19, 1893, p. 1; Clara Barton Diary, September 29, 1893, image 143 (quotations).

7 Testimony of Dr. E. Winfield Egan, June 2, 1895, Folder “Speeches and Writings, 1893–June 1895 and undated,” Box 116, Relief Operations: Sea Islands, S.C., American National Red Cross, Red Cross File, 1863–1957, Barton Papers, online at http://www.loc.gov/item/mss119730626/, images 1–13 (quotations on 13); hereinafter cited as Red Cross Speeches and Writings, with image number.

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from both white landowners and an oppressive political system that was steadily gaining ground.

White supremacists did not want black independence in the Low- country. Instead, they moved to consolidate white dominance, ma- neuvering to end Red Cross relief to black sea islanders, so that they could take advantage of the hurricane’s destruction. White supremacists sought to narrow the divide between black South Caro- linians’ losses as a result of the hurricane and black South Carolinians’ potential privations as an outcome of racial oppres- sion.8 They hoped to forge Jim Crow in the crucible of the hurricane: to take advantage of a natural disaster to enact a disaster of their own that would strip black sea islanders not only of their health and harvest but of their civil rights as well. White supremacists thus saw the presence and actions of the Red Cross as an insidious threat to their nascent Jim Crow project to subjugate African Americans economically, politically, and socially. Throughout the conflict, the Red Cross struggled to maintain a middle ground, even as white supremacists worked to impress the organization with the impos- sibility of impartiality and as black sea islanders tried to convince the volunteers of the immorality of neutrality.

Even into the 1890s, the sea islands sheltered one of the last strongholds of black political and economic power in the South. Black sea islanders, especially in Beaufort County, owned land at rates unparalleled anywhere else in the South, held elected and appointed public offices, and voted.9 Historians have seen this as a legacy of the Civil War–era Port Royal Experiment and black sea islanders’ postwar

8 Similarly, Ted Steinberg emphasizes that a difficulty of recovery efforts is determining where the destruction of a natural disaster ends and the deprivations of society begin. Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000).

9 Bland, “‘Grim Memorial of Its Thorough Work of Devastation and Desolation,’” 298; John Scott Strickland, “Traditional Culture and Moral Economy: Social and Economic Change in the South Carolina Low Country, 1865–1910,” in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill, 1985), 141–78; Edward A. Miller Jr., Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915 (Columbia, S.C., 1995); John F. Marszalek, A Black Congressman in the Age of Jim Crow: South Carolina’s George Washington Murray (Gainesville, Fla., 2006); Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Su- premacy; Rowland and Wise, Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past and Present, 89–110, 169–83. Among the Lowcountry’s black officials were George H. Reed, the sheriff of Beaufort County; Robert Smalls, the famous Civil War hero, at the time the collector of the Port of Beaufort; and George W. Murray, member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the state’s coastal Seventh District. George Reed and his sisters barely survived the hurricane; he provided a substantive account of the experience in “1500 Dead,” Columbia State, September 3, 1893, pp. 1, 8.

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activism.10 But forces were pressing in on black autonomy in the Lowcountry even before the hurricane, from the so-called eight box lawof 1882, which disenfranchised African Americans outside the Lowcountry through a discriminatory system involving multiple ballot boxes, to Tillman’s gubernatorial win in 1890.11 The hurricane, too, had the po- tential to challenge black autonomy in the Lowcountry, and the story of the Red Cross recovery after the hurricane brings to the forefront how the ascendancy of JimCrowwhite supremacy intersected with environmental forces. If starvation, disease, and exposure threatened black sea islanders’ lives in the wake of the hurricane, so did the rising tide of Jim Crow.12

Whether Clara Barton and the Red Cross would bear witness to and support the struggles of black sea islanderswas an open question that these communities hoped would be answered in their favor.

Within the rapidly growing historiography of disasters, historians frequently demonstrate how preexisting social and political condi- tions cause marginalized groups to suffer the most in the wake of

10On the Port Royal Experiment, see Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, 1964). For more on black sea islanders’ communities and patterns of resistance, mostly in the nineteenth century, see Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry; Allison Dorsey, “‘The Great Cry of Our People Is Land!’: Black Settlement and Community Development on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, 1865–1900,” in Philip Morgan, ed., African American Life and Culture in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee (Athens, Ga., 2010), 224–52, though that whole book is excellent generally; Norrece T. Jones Jr., Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Hanover, N.H., 1990); LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion,Music, and LivedMemory amongGullah-GeecheeWomen (Durham, N.C., 2014); and Melissa L. Cooper,Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill, 2017). The wordGullah does not appear in the primary sources that I used, and historians like Cooper argue that the term mostly came into circulation in the twentieth century.

11Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 91–115, esp. 94.

12 For books on labor, gender, and culture that explore the labor regimes in the South and the intersection of race and the environment that have lent heft to this article, see, for example, Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll, eds., “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and En- vironmental History (Pittsburgh, 2006); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Com- munists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005); and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955). For an overview of the state’s history of violence during Jim Crow, see Terence Finnegan, A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940 (Charlottesville, 2013). The idea of both the hurricane and Jim Crow as disasters owes some intellectual debt to Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). A full portrait of South Carolina at the dawn of Jim Crow has yet to be compiled, but several excellent biographies provide rich context: see, for example, Miller, Gullah Statesman; Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy; and Marszalek, Black Congressman in the Age of Jim Crow.

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disaster.13 This suffering is by design, as those in power leverage the disaster to exaggerate extant conditions of oppression. However, the Red Cross–led recovery after the Great Sea Island Storm alters that traditional disaster narrative, both because black sea islanders had, until the hurricane, insulated themselves from a larger wave of white supremacist–driven repression and because the outcome of the Red Cross recovery effort benefited black sea islanders. White supremacists plotted to breach the hurricane-weakened walls of black sea islanders’ stronghold of political power, and, within the context of recovery from the hurricane, they did not succeed. This article examines this unusual historical narrative in two stages. First, an exploration of the material workings of the Red Cross recovery demonstrates how black sea islanders’ history with outside intervention, enslavement, and activism affected their engagement with the Red Cross. Black sea islanders had long used their traditions of autonomy as a buffer against white su- premacy and applied the same tactics to hurricane recovery, with the Red Cross as a critical mediator. Second, this article surveys the strategies of white backlash. In an increasingly desperate series of attacks that depicted white South Carolinians as the true victims of both the hur- ricane and outside intervention, white supremacists repudiated the need for aid at all, accused the Red Cross of racial favoritism, and plotted to dislodge the Red Cross from the Lowcountry. This article, then, presents a rare southern story about the failures, however temporary, of white backlash against carefully preserved black autonomy.

The unique history of the South Carolina Lowcountry impacted black sea islanders’ expectations for and their engagement with the Red

13On disasters as a part of larger social, economic, and political changes, see, for example, Schwartz, Sea of Storms; Steinberg, Acts of God; Susan Millar Williams and Stephen G. Hoffius, Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow (Athens, Ga., 2011); Joanna L. Dyl, Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake (Seattle, 2017); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998); Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes (Chicago, 2013); Ellen Griffith Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All- American Town (Chapel Hill, 2014); John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York, 1997); Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago, 2013); Sherry Johnson,Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2011); Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples, from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (New York, 2012); Louis A. Pérez Jr., Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill, 2001); Jacob A. C. Remes, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Pro- gressive Era (Urbana, 2016);MarkM. Smith,Camille, 1969:Histories of a Hurricane (Athens, Ga., 2011); and Andy Horowitz, “Hurricane Betsy and the Politics of Disaster in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, 1965–1967,” Journal of Southern History, 80 (November 2014), 893–934.

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Cross’s recovery effort, and they brought to bear their own familiarity with labor organization and landownership. Black sea islanders were no strangers to outside intervention or to molding it toward their own ends. Indeed, the Red Cross’s recovery mapped neatly onto an even more expansive project of social and political transformation that had occurred thirty years earlier and had profound impacts on the hurricane relief effort. In late 1861 the sea islands became a testing ground for Re- construction after the U.S. government retook the islands around the town of Port Royal. In what was known as the Port Royal Experiment, white northerners worked to transform enslaved sea islanders into obedient wage laborers. The federal government took advantage of “critical shortages of the basic material necessities of life” to deliver relief only to those black sea islanders who worked, even if that meant returning to white-owned land—in some ways an unwitting precursor of the labor-based relief structure that the Red Cross implemented thirty years later.14

With the issuance of General William T. Sherman’s Field Order No. 15 in January 1865, which turned the sea islands into a haven “for the exclusive settlement of blacks,” African Americans settled into the region and claimed, purchased, or “simply seized” the land of former labor camps. Though sympathetic to the cause of emanci- pation, the federal government balked at black sea islanders’ re- distributive actions and outright rebellions against white landowners who imposed untenable restraints on black labor practices. The U.S. government preferred instead to ensure stability and to “preserve . . . large- scale productive units,” and even deployed the U.S. Army to back the white enslavers who returned to reclaim their land. Black sea islanders used the advantage of sheer numbers and the necessity of their labor to the Lowcountry economy to push back against the efforts of the federal government and white South Carolinians to subdue their emancipatory spirit. Black sea islanders fought back, seeking to modify their “extensive experience managing their own affairs” under enslavement for emancipation.15 The task system, which standardized daily units of labor in the rice and sea island cotton fields of the Lowcountry, and absentee enslavers, who avoided the Lowcountry much of the year for fear of malaria, had shaped black sea islanders’

14 Strickland, “Traditional Culture and Moral Economy,” 153. 15 Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983),

74–110 (first and second quotations on 82; fourth quotation on 79); Strickland, “Traditional Culture and Moral Economy,” 151–53 (third quotation on 153); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana, 1997), 158–61.

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enslavement. Hoping to adapt those practices to emancipation, black sea islanders developed a flexible, autonomous family economy that diversified their labor practices to escape reliance on a single eco- nomic activity.16

Thirty years later, black sea islanders continued to successfully nurture a family economy and, with the Red Cross as a valuable buffer against white supremacists, used the recovery effort to protect those traditions. In 1890, for example, black sea islanders owned land at an astonishing rate of twice that of African Americans in the rest of the state, and just 8 percent sharecropped, a third of the statewide average.17 Some inhabited, as landowners or sharecroppers, the same labor camps on which they and their ancestors had been enslaved. Sharecroppers’ labor was typically organized by a structure known as the two-day system, in which white landowners granted them access to several acres of land, a house, and even a cash wage in exchange for two days’ work each week on the land- owners’ crop.18 Others purchased farms of one to twenty acres, frequently adjacent to those of familymembers, where they farmed subsistence crops and sea island cotton.19 Many black sea islanders, whether or not they owned land, engaged in day labor to supplement their living, in the phosphate beds of the coast or on the rice and cotton plantations of wealthy white landowners. The position of black sea islanders may have been better than that of African Americans elsewhere in the South, but they still lived and labored precariously, surrounded by the workings of a hostile state government that had, through fraud and violence, ascended in

16On the task system in the Lowcountry, see Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 99–101; Schwalm, Hard Fight for We, 19–30; and Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984), 57–59. On white absentee landowners fleeing the Lowcountry due to their fears of an unhealthy climate, see Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 35–40; and Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 72–76. On the family economy, see Schwalm, Hard Fight for We, 176–77, 229.

17 Strickland, “Traditional Culture and Moral Economy,” 158–62, esp. 159. Strickland’s re- search shows that black farmers in Beaufort County in the 1880s in fact increased their land- ownership rates, from 47 percent to 72 percent. While Beaufort County was the heart of black political power in South Carolina for decades after the Civil War, and black Beaufortonians held on to local offices until the mid-1890s, that is a remarkable increase that deserves further study.

18 On the two-day system, see ibid., 154–55; Schwalm,Hard Fight for We, 226–31; and Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 85–87.

19 On sea island cotton, see Richard Dwight Porcher and Sarah Fick, The Story of Sea Island Cotton (Charleston, S.C., 2005); andHarryHammond, “TheCulture of Cotton,” in U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Experimental Stations, The Cotton Plant: Its History, Botany, Chemistry, Culture, Enemies, and Uses (Washington, D.C., 1896), 225–69, esp. 228–33.

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1876.20 Aware of the danger that white supremacists posed to them generally and after a natural disaster particularly, African Americans welcomed Barton and the Red Cross because the organization, in helping them survive starvation and destitution in the aftermath of the storm, supported black sea islanders’ desire for autonomy. Black sea islanders, capable of managing outside intervention and maintaining their own autonomy, knew how to leverage their labor and landownership to their advantage.

Some black sea islanders were also inclined to work with Barton because they remembered her as a U.S. Army nurse during the Civil War. Soon after Barton’s arrival, three black veterans of Fort Wagner arrived at her door. Oliver Middeton (it is likely that Barton misheard Middleton, a common Lowcountry surname), Abram Fuller, and Dago Haywood came to see the woman they remembered from the battle- field. They had served in the First and Second South Carolina Vol- unteer Infantry regiments, and, at the battle of Fort Wagner, all three had been injured.21 Barton had bandaged Middleton’s head, Fuller’s arm, and Haywood’s leg. When he visited Barton in Beaufort, Fuller lifted his sleeve to reveal a scar that sliced from his elbow to his shoulder and said, “‘You drissed it for me that night, when I crawled down the beach—’cause my leg was broke too . . . . But we all got to you, Miss Clare. And now you’s got to us. We’s talked about you a heap o’ times, but we nevah ’spected to see you. We’s nevah fo’git it.’” Perhaps the veterans wished simply to thank Barton for binding their wounds, because they had been too ill to do so during the war. Perhaps they were trying to remind Barton that they had served in the Civil War to battle for their emancipation and citizenship, which were

20 This situation calls to mind the analysis in both W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935); and Kelley, Hammer and Hoe. What distinguishes the sea islanders’ case is the timing. Three decades removed from the Civil War, the year 1893 was for many African Americans a moment when hope was contracting rather than expanding. The 1920s and 1930s of Kelley’s narrative possessed a new globalism, as socialist and communist activists turned to the rural South for the first time to reimagine their ideologies for rural African Americans.

21 Clara Barton, miscellaneous materials, n.d., Folder “Miscellany,” Box 114, Relief Opera- tions: Sea Islands, S.C., American National Red Cross, Red Cross File, Barton Papers, online at https://www.loc.gov/item/mss119730619/, image 11; hereinafter cited as Red Cross Miscellany, with image number. The name Middleton is common because it was the name of a wealthy white family who enslaved hundreds of people near Georgetown, South Carolina; Middleton Place is, today, a tourist site. On the battle at FortWagner, see Douglas R. Egerton, Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (New York, 2016), 121–47. The First South Carolina became part of the Thirty-third U.S. Colored Troops, under Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and the Second South Carolina became part of the Thirty-fourth U.S. Colored Troops, under James Montgomery.

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increasingly tenuous. At last back in South Carolina, Barton, they thought, ought to remember whose side she had once been on and whose side she should be on now. The scars were their struggles made manifest, and they bared them for her. Normally so confident, Barton did not know how to respond. She reflected later, “The memory, dark and sad, stood out before us all. It was a moment not to be forgotten.” She gleaned a mutual bond and a sense of responsibility, but she pushed them away in favor of a more facile interpretation of black sea islanders’ characteristics. She introduced this moment in her recol- lections as an example of a “tender memory of the childlike confidence and obedience of this ebony-faced population.”22

The Red Cross served the storm-stricken coast from October 1, 1893, until the late summer of 1894, taking the reins from a few locally or- ganized relief committees that had previously administered the distri- bution of donations.23 With only $30,500 and in nine months, the Red Cross distributed rations, some of them weekly, to 30,000 people; purchased 1 million feet of yellow pine lumber; coordinated work crews to repair and build houses and to dig 250 miles of drainage ditches; initiated sewing circles for women to refurbish thousands of garments and blankets; and ensured that sea islanders had successfully planted for a harvest in 1894.24 At a time when the federal government and state governments offered little recourse for the survivors of disasters and when those governments were frequently inimical to the interests of

22 Barton, Story of the Red Cross, 79–80 (first quotation on 79–80; second quotation on 80; third quotation on 79). Barton transcribed the veterans’ Lowcountry Gullah dialect as written here, but it must be noted that her transcription was not especially graceful and must be taken with a grain of salt.

23When Barton and the Red Cross arrived in Beaufort, coastal residents had already developed their own committees to raise money and distribute food and clothing to the sufferers. In the week after the hurricane, businessmen, politicians, planters, and prominent citizens formed two ad hoc organizations, one in Beaufort and one in Charleston, that dominated the Lowcountry recovery effort before the Red Cross’s arrival. In an era before regular government-organized disaster relief, citizens acting in the public interest accomplished what the state did not. Beaufort’s Sea Island Relief Committee, an integrated body, was a firmly Republican and professional enterprise, consisting of local politicians and businessmen, both black and white. It was, in many ways, the fulfillment of white Democrats’ greatest fears: an integrated coalition of respected, locally mo- bilized, sufficiently well-to-do businessmen and politicians. The Charleston Relief Committee, headed by JosephW. Barnwell, was also representative of the city’s political milieu, staffed as it was by Confederate veterans, descendants of wealthy enslaver families, railroad magnates, financiers, and phosphate industrialists. The two committees had collected thousands of dollars but struggled to dispense aid. Though eager to assist, the committees lacked the expertise to handle the scope of the disaster and willingly handed the effort to the Red Cross. On the Sea Island Relief Committee membership and activity, see Sea Island Relief Committee to Benjamin R. Tillman, June 1, 1894, Folder 9, Box 35, Governor Benjamin R. Tillman Papers (South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C.); on the Charleston committee, see Joseph S. Elkinton, Selections from the Diary and Correspondence of Joseph S. Elkinton, 1830–1905 (Philadelphia, 1913), 320–22.

24 “The Work of the Red Cross,” Charleston News and Courier, June 25, 1894, p. 1.

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African Americans in the South, the American Red Cross under Clara Barton launched a recovery effort that was more ambitious than any other in the organization’s history since its founding in 1881. Indeed, it may have been the largest coordinated, centralized recovery effort from a natural disaster in the nation’s history to that point.25

Barton and her fellow volunteers had a definitive vision for what recovery meant for black sea islanders, the group most heavily impacted by the storm: to nurture modest, self-reliant prosperity among the devastated population. As one report declared, “‘They must not eat the bread of idleness,’ said our president. ‘We must not leave a race of beggars, but teach them the manliness of self-support, and methods of self-dependence.’”26 The Red Cross hoped to deploy lessons in moral behavior and modern farming practices alongside the donated grits and pork. Just as Tillman had warned earlier against the “abuse of charity,” Barton and the Red Cross volunteers forged a system of relief linked to work.27 It was a new kind of effort for the American Red Cross. The organization had not required labor for rations after the destructive floods at Johnstown in 1889 and along the Ohio River in 1884, whose victims were predominantly white. The Red Cross’s decision to require labor for relief was in part made to ward off criticisms from the white South Carolinians who already begrudged the organization’s presence in the state. The Red Cross recovery effort was extraordinary, and in many

25 See also Marian Moser Jones, “Race, Class and Gender Disparities in Clara Barton’s Late Nineteenth-Century Disaster Relief,” Environment and History, 17 (February 2011), 107–31. There were, of course, efforts of recovery in the wake of war. The Civil War is the most instructive example, and the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the war provided some interesting precedents for federal intervention in the management of environmental factors. See Judith AnnGiesberg,Civil War Sisterhood: TheU.S. Sanitary Commission andWomen’s Politics in Transition (Boston, 2000). Nothing, though, seems to have approached the scale of the Red Cross’s effort, not even its as- sistance after either the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood of 1889 or the Charleston earthquake of 1886. See Jones, American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal, chap. 3. Susan Millar Williams and Stephen G. Hoffius make a case for the significance of the Charleston earthquake disaster within the historical moment, with South Carolina poised on the edge of Jim Crow. But the location—Charleston, a fundamentally more conservative place—and the scope of the recovery provide very different insights and produced different outcomes than this hurricane. Williams and Hoffius, Upheaval in Charleston, 145–47.

26 “Report of Shipping Room, Medical, Surgical and Sanitary Departments,” p. 5, Folder

“General Reports, Nov. 1893–July 1895 and undated,” Box 115, Relief Operations: Sea Islands, S.C., American National Red Cross, Red Cross File, Barton Papers, online at https://www.loc.gov/ item/mss119730622/, image 64; hereinafter cited as Red Cross General Reports, with image number; “Report by E. Winfield Egan, M. D.,” in Clara Barton, The Red Cross in Peace and War (Washington, D.C., 1899), 222–27 (quotation on 225).

27 In his first reported comments after the hurricane, Tillman said, “I do not want any abuse of charity. . . . The people have the fish of the sea there to prevent them from starving . . . . They doubtless have their potatoes left in the ground. I hope, too, that some onewill make them go towork at once and plant turnips on the islands.” “Relief for the Sufferers,” Columbia State, September 3, 1893, p. 1.

813THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

ways, the organization acted in solidarity with the goals of black sea islanders themselves. At the same time, the organization’s volunteers never fully relinquished a paternalist attitude toward the black sea is- landers with whom they worked. Red Cross representatives often adopted language that echoed tropes about the contented slave or the stereotypes seen inminstrel shows. OneRedCross volunteer commented on “the happy, careless, cheery manner” of what Barton called the “industrious, grateful class” of black sea islanders to whom they tend- ed.28 The Red Cross’s general field secretary, George H. Pullman, demeaned black sea islanders for not planting Irish potatoes before: “‘We were told . . . that you couldn’t get a n[-----]r to have anything to do with an Irish potato.’”But once seed potatoes had been distributed by the Red Cross, “‘They were like children with a new toy,’” noting “‘each inch of growth with shiny eyes and grinning faces’” (Figure 1).29

Barton had with her a small crew of trusted, longtime Red Cross volunteers to manage the organization and administration of the re- covery effort from a headquarters and warehouse in Beaufort.30 Local leaders in the Beaufort area, some of whom had headed up the Sea Island Relief Committee, also worked closely with Barton. This motley assortment of medical professionals, local leaders, businessmen, and seasoned Red Cross volunteers all reported to Barton, whose authority over the effort was total. This autocratic structure was sometimes a source of frustration for the white Republicans in Beaufort who assisted Barton as local fixers for the effort.31 However, Barton’s willingness to toil tirelessly, frequently for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, as “the first to enter upon any work and the last to leave it” as one associate remarked, especially at the age of seventy-one, stifled most criticism from the people working with the Red Cross.32 Her coterie of advisers and colleagues, both seasoned and newly arrived, felt deep loyalty toward Barton and the Red Cross, and such bonds of trust were

28 “Mrs. Reed’s Report,” in Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 263–65 (first quotation on

264); Barton, Story of the Red Cross, 79 (second quotation). 29 “Helping a Stricken People,” New York Times, April 16, 1894, p. 2.

30 Jones, American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal, 53, 73. 31 Sea Island Relief CommitteeMemo, October 2, 1893, Folder 653, Christensen Family Papers

(South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.); Niels Christensen to Abbie Christensen, April 8, 1894, Folder 26M55, Christensen Family Papers. Niels Christensen, a member of the Beaufort relief committee, a Union army veteran, and a Beaufort businessman, expressed frustration that Barton did not take advice from anyone. Christensen’s wife, Abbie, was a fascinating figure in her own right, with leftist politics and a distaste for white Democrats in the South so severe that she preferred to live in her home state of Massachusetts rather than with her husband in Beaufort. See Monica Maria Tetzlaff, Cultivating a New South: Abbie Holmes Christensen and the Politics of Race and Gender, 1852–1938 (Columbia, S.C., 2002).

32 “Mrs. Reed’s Clothing Report,” n.d., p. 5, Red Cross General Reports, image 16.

814 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

necessary to face the field of recovery. The Red Cross had few precedents from which to choose. None of its previous efforts, along the flooded Ohio River in 1884, in response to the yellow fever epidemic in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1888, or in the Johnstown flood in 1889, had been on this scale.33

Barton and the Red Cross divided up the issues facing the storm sufferers into a few categories, each of which required its own structure: distributing rations, mending garments and cloth goods, providingmedical care, raising money to support the effort, rebuilding infrastructure, and preparing for the next planting season (Figures 2 and 3). Each element was an integral part of a recovery thatwould fill the stomachs, clothe the bodies, busy the hands, and heal the wounds of sea islanders. Barton decided that a system of community-administered relief distribution would serve the needs of the sea islanders best and also relieve pressure on the town of Beaufort, where between 15,000 and 20,000 refugees had gathered to receive aid. Several local black leaders visited Beaufort in early October to talk with Barton about how this plan would work. Barton asked them to return to their homes and elect from among themselves “somebody in whom they had confidence.”These “committeemen” traveled once aweek

Figure 1. “Women Cutting Potatoes for Planting—Sea Island Relief, S. C., Febru- ary, 1894.” From Clara Barton, The Red Cross: A History of This Remarkable In- ternational Movement in the Interests of Humanity (Washington, D.C., 1898), 199.

33 On the Red Cross’s earlier efforts, see Jones, American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal, 40–51.

815THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

or month by foot, by boat, or by wagon to Beaufort to deliver a stamp card to a RedCross volunteer who filled their ration order. Their responsibilities went beyond ration distribution. A committeeman was also a represen- tative of his constituency and “the director of various kinds of work that should be carried on among his people.” The Red Cross chose democratic election of committeemen to “avert criticism. . . . because they [potential detractors] could not in that case accuse us of having any motives in selecting the persons that we did.” Thirty thousand sea islanders received weekly rations of one peck of grits and one pound of bacon for each family of seven, collected and redistributed by committeemen across the sea islands; 40,000 South Carolinians on the mainland obtained rations, too, either by a special envoy or a committeeman.34

Figure 2. “Distributing day for St. Helena and Ladies’ Island at Massey’s Ferry op- posite Beaufort. Beaufort in the distance at the right.” From Clara Barton, The Red Cross: A History of This Remarkable International Movement in the Interests of Hu- manity (Washington, D.C., 1898), 236.

34 “Sea Island Relief Methods in the Field,” n.d., Red Cross Speeches and Writings, images

18–21; Testimony of Dr. E. Winfield Egan, June 2, 1895, p. 6, Red Cross Speeches and Writings, image 4 (first and fourth quotations); Barton, Story of the Red Cross, 80–81; “Dr. Hubbell’s Report,” in Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 232–38 (second and third quotations on 232); Clara Barton to Charles Hebard, January 3, 1894, Folder “Correspondence, Aug. 1893–Feb. 1895 and undated,” Box 114, Relief Operations: Sea Islands, S.C., American National Red Cross, Red Cross File, Barton Papers, online at https://www.loc.gov/item/ mss119730618/, images 30–32; hereinafter cited as Red Cross Correspondence, with image number; Clara Barton, “Mid-Field Report,” January 7, 1894, Folder 621, Christensen Family Papers, and in Red Cross General Reports, images 3–5.

816 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Once the Red Cross had arranged the system for ration distribution, Barton tackled another dilemma. Hundreds of barrels of donated clothing clogged theBeaufort warehouse.However,much of the clothingwas poorly suited to the needs of sea islanders. Barton’s solution, which she work- shopped with three local black women, BettyMiddleton, May Chaplin, and Mrs. Brown, was as community-minded as the ration distribution system. Barton traveled to various sea islands, calledmeetings at local churches, and solicited female volunteers who, in groups of six, took one-week shifts in a sewing tent to repair and remake garments to distribute among their community. Black women primarily ran and operated the sewing circles, and they came from a variety of backgrounds and occupations.35 Long at the core of an exploitative slave economy in the rice swamps, sea island cotton fields, and kitchens and houses of South Carolina, these same women, as Leslie A. Schwalm argues, had played a key role in demanding and shaping

Figure 3. Dan Smith, Rations for Lady’s Island. From Joel Chandler Harris, “The Sea Island Hurricanes: The Relief,” Scribner’s Magazine, 15 (March 1894), 267–84 (illustration on 268).

35 “Sewing Societies,” Clara Barton Diary, n.d. [ca. late October 1893], images 151–52; Clara

Barton Diary, November 27, 1893, image 173; “Mrs. Gardner’s Clothing Report,” Red Cross General Reports, images 30–32; Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 257–60.

817THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

their own emancipation and the control of their labor.While in other parts of the South freedwomen increasingly retreated from agricultural labor as a means of asserting a new domestic identity that had so often been denied them during slavery, freedwomen in the Lowcountry forged a new identity that embraced the value of their field work as well as domestic tasks.36 The organizational skills of blackwomen had bolstered black independence on the sea islands, and they used those skills for a recovery that the Red Cross subsidized.37 Yet Red Cross volunteers were not always sensible to the women’s capabilities. Barton claimed that the sewing circles, “perhaps the most important feature of the field” after food distribution, taught black women “not alone the lesson of self-help, but of mutual help, which they had never known before.”38

Nineteen sewing circles across the sea islands operated for months, mending thousands of garments. Dozens of women worked for each sewing circle. One hundred and one women bent over cloth and thread at Bennets Point; twentywomen on Sampson Island; sixty-seven at Seabrook; and many more elsewhere. The women agreed to sew without pay, though they received double rations for the weeks that they worked in the sewing circles. That was the typical “wage” that the RedCross paid to sea islanders, bothmen andwomen, who volunteered labor for the organization. The Red Cross deliberately paid the same tomen andwomen. In an official report on the effort, Dr. E. Winfield Egan, one of the regular volunteers for the Red Cross, defended Barton’s choice as self-evident: “Will some of my readers think that these women, some with large families to support, and all having some one depending upon them, should receive less than the men, because they were women?”39

For the Red Cross, the improvement of the lives of black sea islanders applied, too, to the improvement of the land. One Red Cross volunteer observed that, between the hurricane and the rain after, across the sea islands “water lies and becomes stagnant, causing fever and rotting the crops. . . . [Draining] will improve the production of the land 700 per cent in addition to making it more healthy.”40 The sea islands required a great deal of humanmodification and engineering to be inhabitable and arable.

36 Schwalm, Hard Fight for We, 204–7. 37 For example, “forty women were hired to come over from the islands and cut potatoes for

seed.” Barton, Story of the Red Cross, 85. See also Figure 1. 38 Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 260. 39 Ibid., 260–61; “Bennets Point,” n.d., Red Cross Miscellany, image 9; Mrs. [Ida] MacDonald,

“Clothing Branch, Hilton Head District,” in Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 220–21; “Report by E. Winfield Egan, M. D.,” in Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 224 (quotation).

40 “Hilton Head,”November 3, 1893, Red Cross General Reports, images 2–3 (quotation on 2).

This document appears to be an early report written by a Red Cross representative, perhaps by Barton herself.

818 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Endemicmalaria and high tides that flooded low-lying areas and shallow wells alike were environmental problems to be solved through proper, efficient planning and execution.41 In January, the RedCross determined that the organization had enough supplies to “pay” sea islanders double rations on weeks that they dug drainage ditches, rebuilt homes, and constructed bridges, but Barton wanted to allot monetary compensation to the sea islanders. The lack of federal or state funding stymied this plan. Nonetheless, black sea islanders were “verywilling to do any kind of labor and gladly accepted the means offered them,” as volunteer H. L. Bailey noted, which was no surprise in view of the enthusiasm among black women for the sewing circles.42 The spring planting season, which comes early to the subtropical climate of the sea islands, was rapidly approaching. By January, the time was right for the Red Cross to put into motion another part of its plan: to remake the sea islands into a healthful, flourishing agrarian landscape and to deploy black sea islanders as the agents of this dual process of community and environmental improvement.

The amount of time andpower required to carve out andmaintain drainage ditches was often too much for independent black farmers to complete on their own. It was difficult enough to get in their own crop each year without the additional burden of spending a few weeks clearing ditches. Because of the nature of the work and the constraints on black landowners’ time, drainage ditches on the sea islands were indeed choked with weeds and plants. At Gray’s Hill on Port Royal Island, Dr. Julian B. Hubbell reported that the boss, SandyHaywood, said the ditching there had been neglected for more than ten years.43 TheRedCross, then, provided black sea islanderswith an opportunity. The Red Cross gave farmers rations, thus lessening the

41 For example, Dr. Egan discussed the unhealthiness of wells after the hurricane, noting that the wells were “refilled with a brackish red-colored water,” and that some wells had to be abandoned entirely because they could not be rehabilitated; he also estimated that two-thirds of the cases of illness that he tended to weremalaria. E.Winfield Egan, “Medical and Sanitary Report,” in Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 228–31 (quotation in note on 228). See also Red Cross General Reports, images 67–69. For more on how white enslavers in particular understood the swampy southern landscape, see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill, 2006); Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill, 1995); David C. Miller,Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York, 1989); Theodore Rosengarten, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, with the Plantation Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890) (New York, 1986); and Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture (Jackson, Miss., 2006). On malaria, whose cause in humans was established in 1898, just a few short years after the hurricane, see Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore, 2001).

42 Clara Barton, “Mid-Field Report,” January 7, 1894, Folder 621, Christensen Family Papers, and in Red Cross General Reports, images 3–5; H. L. Bailey to Clara Barton, June 1, 1894, Red Cross General Reports, images 22–24 (quotation on 22).

43 “Labor on Port Royal Island at Gray’s Hill,” handwritten note byDr. Julian Hubbell [signed H—],

n.d., Folder “Labor Reports” (in two parts, “A–L” and “M–Y”), Box 115, Relief Operations: Sea Islands,

819THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

urgency of feeding their families while waiting for the crop to grow, and the tools with which to clear the ditches.With this assistance, black sea islanders now possessed an unusual advantage that freed them from their usual di- lemma: work on white-owned land or go hungry.

Aswith the rations distribution and the sewing circles, theRedCross not only facilitated the organization of labor at the community level, which in and of itself was not unusual, but also made it into a form of remunerative labor. AfricanAmericans in each community elected their own foreman, or boss. The bosses led crews of twelve men on a weekly basis to refurbish homes, ditches, and wells. Black sea islanders who had experience en- gineering irrigation ditches for rice fields were particularly in demand because they could build “flood gates, or ‘trunks,’ as they are called, and dams . . . to protect the openings of the ditches from the incoming tides.” They also coordinated their drainage ditches across property lines to ensure that a drainage system on one farm did not interfere with another. The bosses traveled to the Beaufort headquarters to check out shovels, axes, hoes, and other tools, all marked with the organization’s Greek cross, from the warehouse, a contrast to the need of many African American tenant farmers to have to buy tools on credit and become indebted as a result. They signed their name ormade their mark and then brought the tools back to the Red Cross once the work was completed. Finally, they wrote reports documenting the labor completed. A few of the bosses, always black sea islanders, included the names of their crew. Rarely did black sea islanders receive recognition for their labor. But the lists of names bore witness and claimed a stake in the historical record for their labor and skill. It was a small but important act of pride and resistance in a political and economic system that told black sea islanders that only their brute labor mattered, not their personhood or proficiency.44

The two pecks of hominy and two pounds of bacon per week that the Red Cross paid in exchange for labor may not have been much, but the work was worth a great deal to black sea islanders, who threw themselves into the labor despite sometimes being “[w]ithout proper clothing, bare- footed and hungry.”45 D. E. Washington of St. Helena Island, who worked as a boss, wrote in his report that the thirteen ditches of 34,331 feet that his

S.C., American National Red Cross, Red Cross File, Barton Papers, online at https://www.loc.gov/item/ mss119730623, image 54; hereinafter cited as Red Cross Labor Reports, with image number.

44 “Sea Island Relief Methods in the Field,” Red Cross Speeches and Writings, image 19

(quotation); see also Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 233–34 (quotation on 234). See Red Cross Labor Reports generally, but for specific examples of reports that listed the crew names, see “Labor on Ladies Island at Plantation,” July 20, 1894, Red Cross Labor Reports, image 8; and Cato Brown, “Labor on St. Helena Island,” February 27, 1894, Red Cross Labor Reports, image 18.

45 “Hilton Head,” November 3, 1893, p. 2, Red Cross General Reports, image 2.

820 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

crew dug had a “value to us [of] $2000.”46 Another boss said something similar, appending a note with his report that “the people through whose land these ditches run, consider that they are of more value to them than if they had . . . received $100 cash.”47 All told, black sea islanders dug between 250 and 300 miles of ditches crisscrossing Port Royal, Hilton Head, Ladies, Coosaw, Musselboro, Sampson, Beards, Little Edisto, Edisto, Wadmalaw, and Johns Islands. They rebuilt or repaired at least five thousand houses and as many as eleven bridges, the longest of which spanned ten feet by eighty feet.48 The work crews of the sea islands were willing to work for double rations because they recognized that the Red Cross’s rations gave them an opportunity to refurbish the Lowcountry landscape, performing labor that they otherwise unwillingly neglected.

The Red Cross rations and tools did not just aid in survival. They gave black sea islanders the time and freedom to conduct a large-scale project of infrastructure improvement that would make the soil more productive and their harvests richer. Throughout the Red Cross recovery, black sea islanders tapped into traditions that they had developed during Re- construction and that valued community-oriented engagement. Black sea islanders transformed the Red Cross’s hominy, pork, shovels, and axes into something powerful, enhancingRedCross relief with their own traditions to produce a fruitful recovery. The Red Cross’s resources enabled black sea islanders to turn down low-paying field work with white landowners so that black sea islanders and the Red Cross could pursue the work of recovery. No longer meager offerings, these goods became tools for autonomy in the hands of black sea islanders. The Red Cross here was attached to an ideal of yeoman independence that was central to an older free-soil ideal in which independence was manifested as a small, family-run farm that rewarded hard work—not wage labor.

Red Cross officials believed so strongly in their vision for recovery that they underestimated the structural and political forces that undercut their successes. The recovery became quickly enmeshed in South Carolina’s

46D. E. Washington to the Red Cross officers, “Labor on St. Helena Island at Chaplin & Fripp,” June 1, 1894, Red Cross Labor Reports, image 112.

47 P. W. Washington, “Labor on Port Royal Island at Retreat,” Red Cross Labor Reports, image 114. 48 See “The Work of the Red Cross,” Charleston News and Courier, June 23, 1894, p. 8, and

clipping in Folder “Newspaper Clippings, 1893–1894, and undated” (in two parts), Box 115, Relief Operations: Sea Islands, S.C., American National Red Cross, Red Cross File, Barton Papers, online at https://www.loc.gov/item/mss119730621/, image 41, hereinafter cited as Red Cross Newspaper Clippings, with image number; “The Work of the Red Cross,” Charleston News and Courier, June 25, 1894, p. 1; and the Red Cross Labor Reports generally; for the longest bridge, see H. L. Bailey, “Labor on South Johns Island,” Red Cross Labor Reports, image 5.

821THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

fraught politics. Governor Tillman, who had invited the Red Cross to the state, soon turned the organization into a target for white supremacist discontent. White farmers, politicians, and businessmen, when they saw how the Red Cross was working with black sea islanders, scorned the Red Cross as carpetbaggers intent on imposing a second Reconstruction. Wild accusations of corruption, fraud, and graft splashed across newspaper headlines and traveled far and wide through word of mouth.49 White supremacists’ hatred of the Red Cross was not dog whistle racism but a blaringly loud clarion call to oust the Red Cross and halt aid to black sea islanders through playing on racist anxieties. White supremacists saw the devastation wrought by the hurricane as a chance to undermine a troubling region of black independence, and they maneuvered at every turn to accelerate the processes of destruction and subsequent dependence set in motion by the hurricane. White supremacists wanted to keep black sea islanders in the condition in which African Americans found themselves after the hurricane: hungry, without shelter, and without a crop.

The Red Cross’s recovery effort leaned toward inculcating black in- dependence, and that was exactly what white supremacists feared. Even before the arrival of theRedCross,white supremacists had sought strategies with which to dispossess black sea islanders from their land after the storm. Major Harry Hammond, whose father James Henry Hammond was the infamous sexual abuser and pro-secessionist U.S. senator and South Carolina governor, proposed a solution that would drain the coast of its African American population and circumvent the need for aid. Against a backdrop of white supremacists disparaging outside intervention and the capabilities of black sea islanders, his was the boldest and most explicitly dispossessive plan put forward. Hammond, a Confederate veteran, was one of themost prominent agricultural policymakers in South Carolina after the Civil War. His conservative vision advocated careful land management conducted by individuals, not state bodies, and promoted management of black labor. If his father represented the cruelest, worst excesses of the U.S. slave empire, Harry Hammond embodied a newer, if no less racist, form of governance in which a seemingly benign interest in improving southern agricultural production coalesced with a desire to control black labor. He was, in short, a planner of the New South.50

49 For a particularly breathless and fallacious example, see W. W. Price, “Cursing the Red Cross!: Bitter Feeling Against It in Beaufort County,” Columbia (S.C.) Daily Register, May 25, 1894, Red Cross Newspaper Clippings, images 42–43.

50 On Harry Hammond, see Carol Bleser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (NewYork, 1988), 317. Harry Hammond’s father, James Henry Hammond, sexually assaulted his four nieces, the daughters of General Wade Hampton III, and enslaved women, one of whommay have been his own daughter. He was also avidly proslavery and

822 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Harry Hammond suggested in a letter to the editor published in the Columbia State that agricultural organizations like the Farmers’ Alliance should give black sea islanders train tickets to the farms of the upcountry South, where “all may engage” in cheap labor, including “women and children from eight years to extreme old age.”Hammond argued that “the peasant proprietory of the Sea Islands had reached the end of their career,” havingmisused the “genial climate,” “abundant supplies of fish and fruit,” and “fertile soil” of theLowcountry and taken advantage of lands that were “almost a free gift to them,” despite having been “aided by government largesses and magnificent charities.” “The result?” he asked: “One thousand perish in a catastrophe that destroys only three of their white neighbors! What promise is there that any outside help can enable them to build up their waste places.”Hammond’s faux benevolence would coerce black men, women, and children to work on land not their own, being uprooted a second time from their homeland and “spread out among the white population” to dilute their political and cultural coalescence.51 This mass dispossession would clear the sea islands of black landowners—and black voters. Hammond’s proposal did not come to pass. However, it demonstrated the desperation of white supremacists to dissipate black political power on the sea islands, and their willingness to render the sea islands, once the heart of antebellum white wealth in the state, an eco- nomic sacrifice zone at the altar of white supremacy.

By the early spring of 1894, as black sea islanders prepared the earth for planting using Red Cross supplies, white landowners had found an angle to undermine the Red Cross’s relief effort and to reframe the plight of black sea islanders after the hurricane as a blatant power grab. They staged their coup against the Red Cross on two battlefields: Bluffton and Pocotaligo. Both were inland communities, barely apart from the sea islands but nonetheless away from Beaufort and its environs where African Americans still held offices, owned land at high rates, and maintained businesses. In these places, white landowners had a tighter control over black laborers, and African Americans were less likely to own property. In South Carolina, it was astonishing what a difference being on the other side of a waterway could make. White landowners’ choice to fight back in Bluffton and Pocotaligo was deliberate, calcu- lated to maximize their success.

antidemocratic. See ibid., xvi, 18–22; and Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000).

51 “A Striking Idea: Maj. Harry Hammond Proposes a Negro Migration from the Coast,”

Columbia State, September 11, 1893, p. 4.

823THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

Bluffton, a small town on the May River, is closer to the ocean than Beaufort is, but it is nonetheless on the mainland. Nestled in the two arms of the Harbor River’s terminus on the coastal plain, Pocotaligo was then a tiny rice planting community on the mainland near the bustling Yemassee railroad junction. White supremacists’ contention against the relief effort across the state followed a template: the Red Cross neglected white South Carolinians in favor of black sea islanders, and black South Carolinians were undeserving, lazy, and corrupt. The attitude of Lewis Grimball, a white landowner outside Charleston, conveys the general feeling of white supremacists toward both suffering black sea islanders and the Red Cross. “Does it not seem remarkable that so many of the negroes down here,” he wrote, “were stupidly asleep, and opened their eyes merely to close them again in death? . . . Around here I have not heard of a case of utter destitution—[what is intended as a great charity] will be to make the negro lazy and sassy and less inclined to work than he was before.”52 That the Red Cross had requested money from private citizens, the federal gov- ernment, various cabinet-level departments, and the South Carolina General Assembly to extend its field of recovery to include and tend to mainland farmers of both races meant little.53 Indeed, the Democrat- dominated South Carolina General Assembly had flatly refused to dispense state funds to the Red Cross in November 1893. The leg- islators, Barton wrote indignantly in her mid-field report, “at the holidays adjourned without having made the slightest provision for these sufferers.”54 The white South Carolinians who led the charge against the Red Cross did not care to consider how they had already failed poor whites in the state. They were dedicated instead to a project of white supremacy. What Red Cross officials saw as aid to encourage black independence and self-sufficiency, white South Carolinians saw as dangerous and misguided welfare that would make people lazy.

The first hints of conflict peppered private letters. On November 7, 1893, Thomas Martin, a white landowner, wrote to the editor of the CharlestonNews and Courier, J. C. Hemphill, with a litany of accusations against Barton and the Red Cross. According to Martin, the Red Cross’s

52 Lewis Grimball to Elizabeth Grimball Munro, September 21, 1893, Folder 48, Grimball Family Papers #980 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

53 For example, Barton requested assistance from the U.S. secretary of the treasury John G. Carlisle, who granted her use of a couple revenue cutters. See “Sea Island Sufferers,” Columbia State, November 29, 1893, p. 1.

54 Clara Barton, “Mid-Field Report,” January 7, 1894, Folder 621, Christensen Family Papers, and Red Cross General Reports, images 3–5 (quotation on 3).

824 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

representative in Bluffton, who was John McDonald, “did not call on a single land owner or a representative white citizen.” Instead, McDonald “went around among the negroes.” And not just any African Americans, Martinwrote, but blackRepublicans,Union veterans, and crooks, arrogant malefactors who poisoned the minds of other African Americans. Martin alleged the rampant abuse of welfare, perpetrated by black South Carolinians and enabled by the Red Cross. Martin pointed to the demographics of Bluffton, arguing that “this peninsula has more white farmers and people than colored, and also more Democrats than Republicans, yet note the list of managers and the fact that no whites are helped, and it looks rather peculiar if not partisan.” Martin im- plicitly, though not subtly, alluded to the Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction, claiming, “The negroes all say that Uncle Sam is going to feed them a year, and they will not [work] and are selling nearly all their corn.” The Red Cross, Martin declared, “is an in- flammatory failure.”55

Feeling that such an account would “require a full and candid ex- planation,” Hemphill sent Martin’s letter to John McDonald and asked if McDonald had a rebuttal for the accusations. McDonald did indeed have a response, a powerful and rousing repudiation ofMartin. He opened his letter with an anecdote about his arrival in Bluffton: “I saw three of the representativewhite citizens standing on thewharf,—one a landowner—and overheard the remark, as I was only fifteen feet away, ‘That boat has brought the men belonging to that Cross concern which proposes to feed all these worthless n[-----]s.’” McDonald built a case exposing the intersecting classism and racism of the white elite in Bluffton and refuted every charge laid against the Red Cross. He was profoundly uninterested in humoring the claims of well-to-dowhite men likeMartin and expressed his abiding trust in the poor farmers, both black and white, of Bluffton: “What information from alleged representative white citizens, who represent none but themselves! what could they have told me that would compare with what I saw? Would they have told me that they were threatening the people with ejection from their homes, if they did not get the rent? . . . I have in my book a list of such cases where hogs, horses, mules &c., have been taken away from these poor people by the white

55 ThomasMartin to J. C. Hemphill, November 7, 1893, RedCross Correspondence, images 7–9 (first and second quotations on 7; third, fourth, and fifth quotations on 8). In the archives and in Barton’s publications, the name of this Red Cross representative, like that of his wife (“Mrs. MacDonald” cited above in note 39), is spelled at different times as “McDonald” or “MacDonald,” sometimes both, within official reports. “McDonald” is used here, but either seems to be correct. See Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 211.

825THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

merchants, because the cyclone had rendered them helpless.”McDonald, he informed Hemphill, was in Bluffton on the authority of two petitions sent by two different committees in Bluffton. Neither petition was signed by “a single landowner,merchant, or professional”whiteman, and as such McDonald did not feel bound to represent their interests. McDonald, a native Scotsman, also refuted the charge of partisanship, saying that he had never cast a vote in the United States. Instead, “Mr. Martin’s spiteful cry of partisanship recoils upon himself, for he evidently wishes to make a political issue out of the trivial [matter] of men to measure out a peck of grits to starving people.”56

Indeed, that was just whatMartin wanted to do.Martin and his friends had much to gain if their narrative of corruption won the sympathy of white South Carolinians and frightened the Red Cross into retreat. McDonald had seen enough to glean Martin’s goals. The gravest ac- cusation that McDonald leveled at Martin was that white landowners, storekeepers, and merchants in Bluffton were colluding to stop aid distribution in order to “force these destitute people to purchase on credit or mortgage, from the stores.” The economic stranglehold of the white elite on land, labor, and capital in the rural South was not unique to Bluffton. Martin and his associates were conspiring to replicate what they saw happening all over the South. The hurricane had forced poor farmers in Bluffton into a vulnerable position, and the kind of destitution that foments desperation now characterized their precarious economic condition. Martin and his men were waiting, ready to extend credit that would afford no real relief, only an endless and brutal cycle of debt and exploitation. The Red Cross was standing in their way and providing poor farmers with a lifeline that would foil those plans. Ultimately, Hemphill did not print either letter in the News and Courier. But Barton nonetheless took the accusations seriously; she recorded the trouble with extending the field of recovery to the mainland and pondered the Red Cross’s exodus, originally scheduled for late March. Barton feared March was too early if she wanted to help both sea island and mainland sufferers through the harvest. Before the expected departure date, Barton decided to extend the Red Cross’s stay to address the concerns of the people on the mainland and to see the spring’s crop planted.57

56 J. C. Hemphill to JohnMcDonald, November 29, 1893, Red Cross Correspondence, image 18 (first quotation); JohnMcDonald to J. C. Hemphill, December 2, 1893, Red Cross Correspondence, images 20–23 (second and fourth quotations on 20; third quotation on 21; fifth quotation on 22).

57 John McDonald to J. C. Hemphill, December 2, 1893, Red Cross Correspondence, image 22 (first quotation); Clara BartonDiary,March 17–28, 1894, images 45–50; Niels Christensen toAbbie Christensen, April 2, 1894, Folder 26M55, Christensen Family Papers.

826 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Barton’s decision to extend the Red Cross’s stay again stirred up white South Carolinians, who redoubled their efforts to force the or- ganization out, first in Pocotaligo in late March 1894 and then in Bluffton in May. The Red Cross encouraged black sea islanders to focus on their own crop but continued rations distribution to ensure that they would not take out loans during this lean time of the year. That course of action collided with the interests of white landowners, who relied on the hunger of black sea islanders as their food stores ran low in the late spring to force black sea islanders to sow, tend, and harvest crops on white- owned land. White landowners in Pocotaligo thus schemed to deprive black farmers of the rations that gave them this relative independence and to compel them back into white-owned fields. In Pocotaligo, the Red Cross had been providing rations for months and had facilitated the organization of work crews, despite its mainland location, with William Grant serving as the community’s committeeman and boss.58 The black farmers of Pocotaligo were determined to plant and harvest their own crops, and the Red Cross rations and construction work had presented them with an occasion to claim greater self-sufficiency.

This opportunity chafed white landowners in Pocotaligo who relied on black labor to tend their fields, particularly EugeneGregorie.Gregoriewas a prominent local landowner, who, in 1881, was called forth as awitness in behalf of George D. Tillman, Ben Tillman’s brother. The Civil War hero and Republican politician Robert Smalls had sued George Tillman after the contested 1880U.S. House election, which Tillman had stolen through voter fraud and intimidation. Members of the white supremacist para- military organization the Red Shirts, who had assisted Wade Hampton III in his violent seizure of the South Carolina governorship in 1876, had spent the election season of 1880 menacing and attacking black voters, killing at least two, to prevent Smalls’s election.59 Gregorie had been one of those Red Shirts. Thirteen years and one destructive hurricane later, Gregorie resented the Red Cross’s intervention because it emptied his fields and his wallet at the very moment that he had hoped to use the hurricane as a disciplinary tool to bend black farmworkers to his will.

Gregorie wrote to William Elliott, a Confederate veteran and Democratic politician, to convey a message to Barton about “the wrong

58William Grant, “Labor on Main Land at Pocotaligo,” n.d., Red Cross Labor Reports, images 39–40.

59House Miscellaneous Documents, 47 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 20: Testimony and Papers in the Contested Election of Robert Smalls vs. George D. Tillman from the Fifth Congressional District, South Carolina (Serial 2040; Washington, D.C., 1881), 651;House Reports, 47 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 1525: Report on the Contested Election, Robert Smalls vs. George Tillman (Serial 2069; Wash- ington, D.C., 1882).

827THE GREAT SEA ISLAND STORM OF 1893

she is doing the planters by her indiscriminate issue of rations to the lazy negroes of this section.”Gregorie claimed, “My foreman tells me that the negroes about Pocotaligo boast that they are not going to work as long as the Red Cross issues rations and clothing. . . . Unless it is all stopped beforeMaywe had just as well not plant.”60 Other white landowners had been making similar claims for months, including a Dr. Daniel T. Pope who complained to the Columbia State that “if the negroes are fed they will not work any more.”61 White landowners across the South tried to keep African Americans in a state of perpetual need, with the hope of retaining a large and cheap labor pool. Then the hurricane created a new kind of environmental opportunity for white supremacists in South Carolina, one that distorted the line between the harm done by a natural disaster and the habituated disaster of racial oppression. Gregorie clearly recognized that the Red Cross’s rations threatened white supremacist control over black labor and, in response, fomented a powerful racist argument against welfare provisioning to protect his own economic well-being and to prevent black independence.

Somehow, the black farmers of Pocotaligo learned of Gregorie’s accusations. Barely a couple days after Gregorie’s letter arrived on Barton’s desk, these farmers had organized a letter-writing campaign to appeal to the Red Cross as the sympathetic mediator of their situation with white landowners. The Pocotaligo farmers wrote seven petitions protesting Gregorie’s stance, clarifying the deal that white landowners had actually offered to them, and explaining the beneficial consequences of Red Cross rations. These black farmers were not members of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, which, by the late 1880s, had grown into a substantial organization representing the interests of black farmers in the South. But the language of their petitions reflected one of the central tenets of the Colored Farmers’Alliance, which was that collective action “‘is the only thing that will give us protection for our labor and crops.’” Just like members of the alliance, the black farmers of Pocotaligo be- lieved they had to rely on themselves to protect their property and their interests. The seven petitions from this small farming community on South Carolina’s coastal plain were an exercise in popular democracy at a time when such protests were increasingly dangerous for African Americans generally, and particularly for those in the rural South.62

60 Eugene Gregorie to Colonel William Elliott [extracts], March 29, 1894, Red Cross Corre- spondence, image 59.

61 “Fearful on the Islands,” Columbia State, September 14, 1893, p. 8.

62 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 256–57 (quotation on 257); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political

828 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

The petitionswere unequivocal and unflinching in their condemnation of white landowners. They also employed forms of legalistic language. The first petition opened with the phrase, “This is to certified that we was informed that theContrey Farmers hadReported to you saying thatwewont not work for them even when they offered Wages that we are to lazy to work for our living[.] we will denie it[,] it is not the truth.” “[A]ny Bodey whosoever say that . . . the People of Pocotaligo is lazy and wont work for themself is telling untrue,” the petition claimed; “it is a fals Report and I can Prove it By the vegitable that is growing in the garden and By the Cul- tivation of soil in the Field.”63 The proof of their hardworkwas in the earth, planted for themselves and not for others, material evidence to refute racism.Other petitions elaborated on other points of exploitation and abuse. A second opened in similar fashion: “We lernt that Parties have Sent in Report that we will not work for No Price on account of Being seplied by the Red Cross[.] That Statement . . .we denie.” However, this petition, signed by at least eight men, added more information to counteract Gregorie’s letter: “We also lernt that the farmers said that they offer the labourers from (75) cts to one dolla Per day. That Statement we also denie.”64 Instead, white farmers were giving around 40 cents for a day’s work, and “not all cash” but as “white paper” that could be exchanged for goods at a single store in Pocotaligo, whose prices were double or triple the market value. Other petitions confirmed these figures.65

One of the petitions, with eleven signees, pointed out a gender discrepancy: “The informers have willfully exaggerated[.] the most wages paid to women are 30 cts and to men from 40 to 50 cts per day and only give us 4 cents per task for ditching and who can live at such wages as that[?]” Another letter agreed that the wage was untenable: “Dear Sir who can live on fourty cents per day with a large familey?” Another, a sort of sworn testimony that William Grant had notarized, stated that the individual had asked Gregorie for work, and Gregorie had turned him

Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). These petitions are included consecutively in Folder “Resolutions and Statements, Sept. 1893–June 1894 and undated,” Box 115, Relief Operations: Sea Islands, S.C., American National Red Cross, Red Cross File, Barton Papers, and online at https://www.loc.gov/item/mss119730625/, images 2–26; hereinafter cited as Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, with image number.

63 Pocotaligo farmers to Clara Barton, March 24, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, images 7–10 (first quotation on 7; second and third quotations on 9).

64 Boston Barker et al. to George H. Pullman, March 28, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, image 11.

65 Ibid. (first quotation); Simon Green et al. to Clara Barton, April 3, 1894, Red Cross Res- olutions and Statements, images 17–20 (second quotation on 17); S. Jackson and Jimmy Hamilton et al. to George H. Pullman,March 28, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, images 12–13; MatthewMcPherson andW. J. Jones to George Pullman, April 3, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, images 15–16.

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away because he claimed to have enough hands. Others agreed that Gregorie was rejecting laborers: “[We] will name one man that went to him for work for it and he refused to give him any thing.” A few named Gregorie as a perpetrator in this scheme, and one other named John Frampton and aMr. Schnider. The act of putting names to deeds, as used in the Red Cross labor reports to honor black laborers, appeared in these petitions as an act of deliberate and daring protest. The means of ex- ploitation were manifold: pay too low to support a family; too few jobs; the existence of the agricultural version of a company store.66

The final petition was the outcome of widespread community orga- nizing. Signed by sixty-five people after “a mass meeting,” it contained numbered grievances reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence and resolutions expressing gratitude to the Red Cross and “condemning the statement made by the planters.” The five-part petition broke down their case. First, the planters offered “employment to notmore than 12 person in no one week,”with pay not in cash but in white papers at the nearby store. “Whether we want the goods or not,” they wrote, “we are compell to take it.” Second, they called out the exorbitant prices at the store: “Take the white paper $3.00 to the farmers stor we are paid in goods from the same which will amount to about $1.50 for the week work.” Third, they pointed to the job scarcity: “[T]here is nothing for the mass of the poor people to do. And these Farmers know it. What little work there is not one third of the people git any thinge to do.”Fourth, the petitioners explicitly described the system of racism that entangled and constrained their lives and labor: “TheWhite Farmers is pregeded agence the poor colored people & do not want any Society to help us. The[y] know if we can git a Little Helpe that we [can] stay on our own place and plant our crops andwork there. The[y] depend on us to make there crops. And as longe as these can make Falce statement to theWorld agence the BlackMan to git you to withdraw from us theBeter.”Theypromised to use the rationswisely as “Weare Trying to plant and do all we [can] for our self.”Then followed the names of twenty- three black farmers, seven of themwidowedwomen, including howmany each had in the household, for a total of sixty-five people.67 Other pe- titioners similarly ended with requests that the Red Cross continue ration distribution to enable black farmers to plant their own crops and not have

66Matthew McPherson and W. J. Jones to George Pullman, April 3, 1894, Red Cross Res- olutions and Statements, images 15–16 (first quotation); S. Jackson and Jimmy Hamilton et al. to George H. Pullman, March 28, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, image 12 (second and third quotations); Statement notarized by William Grant, April 2, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, image 14.

67 Simon Green et al. to Clara Barton, April 3, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, images 17–20 (first through sixth quotations on 17; seventh, eighth, and ninth quotations on 18).

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to rely on white landowners for a paltry wage. One group of petitioners thanked the Red Cross for its past assistance, assuring Barton that “no matter what is said By the Southern white People we Belive that god sent you here.”68 “We Beg that you will continue to help us a little longer so that wemayBe able to make our crop as we are making Every Effort to do so,” one group wrote.69 Another short statement signed by more than eighty black laborers promised the Red Cross that all they wanted was to “be able to finish make our crops and secure provisions for the Future.”70

The black farmers of Pocotaligo succeeded. Barton continued sending rations to Pocotaligo, for that summer William Grant, the community’s district committeeman, sent a letter of thanks to Barton for a shipment of sevenwagons containing “17 sacks of provissions 8 sacks of corn 9 sacks of grits & 8 sacks of seed,” divided among 509 people.71 These farmers had won a victory, uncommon for the time and place. This flurry of organization and protest had triumphed due to the black farmers’ vigorous effort and the Red Cross’s increasing realization, which the farmers pushed the orga- nization toward, that white South Carolinians intended to make its job harder through deception and exploitation. The attempts of white South Carolinians to stonewall recovery from the hurricane and instill black dependence would not, after all, end with their loss in Pocotaligo.

At the same time, in May 1894, another controversy flared up in Bluffton. There, white supremacists focused not on spreading racist stereotypes of African American workers but instead on the Red Cross’s supposed neglect of poor whites on the mainland whose livelihoods had also been hurt by the hurricane. Months earlier, in January 1894, Barton had estimated that the original 30,000 sufferers had swelled to 70,000 as mainland sufferers flocked to Beaufort for relief.72 Poor mainland farmers, both black andwhite, did needmaterial assistance—but that had not been assigned within the purview of the Red Cross, and the state of South Carolina had not granted the Red Cross permission to tend to people beyond the sea islands. The organization was an invited guest only, and so it could not impose itself on a population without the

68 Pocotaligo farmers to Clara Barton, March 24, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, image 10.

69 Boston Barker et al. to George H. Pullman, March 28, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, image 11.

70William Grant district committee to Dr. J. B. Hubbell, June 22, 1894, Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, images 21–23 (quotation on 21–22).

71William Grant to Clara Barton, n.d. [ca. June 1894], Red Cross Resolutions and Statements, image 20.

72 Clara Barton, “Mid-Field Report,” January 7, 1894, Folder 621, Christensen Family Papers, and Red Cross General Reports, image 3.

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sanction of the proper state authorities. The Red Cross was still a liminal organization: it was not integrated with state or federal governments, but it was unwilling to operate without their consent. Barton nevertheless did distribute many rations to the mainland sufferers, but the ostensible line drawn around her field of care allowed white supremacists to attack the Red Cross’s perceived disregard of the needs of white mainlanders.

The trouble began after the Columbia State announced sensationally that six hundred white residents of Bluffton were destitute and on the brink of starvation. The story was a shot in the night.73 The Columbia Daily Register in South Carolina immediately dispatched correspondent W. W. Price to Bluffton to investigate the claims. Price’s report, headlined “Cursing the Red Cross!,” was an exercise in inflammatory slander that emphasized the differences between the Beaufort enclave and the rest of the state and implicated the Red Cross in a discriminatory scheme: “[T]here are not a dozen white men in Beaufort county, unless it be in the towns of Beaufort and Port Royal, who have a goodword for the society. It is roundly cursed and abused and the charge is openly made here that the suffering and destitution of the white people in this township are due to the discrimination of the Red Cross Society or some of its managers.” Locals, above all black sea islanders and white Re- publicans in Beaufort, assisted the Red Cross only to advance their own political agenda, he charged. Furthermore, the Red Cross had helped only “the worthless class of negroes, who never had anything in their lives, who had nothing to lose by the storm, and who were as well off after the storm as before,” but ignored “industrious negroes.” In the minds of men like Price, material wealth was equivalent to respectability and industriousness. Absent those markers, a black sea islander was surely of poor character. In a different diatribe, Price appealed to pride in Anglo-Saxon heritage and history, which often fed turn-of-the- twentieth-century white supremacy: members of the “Anglo Saxon race were on the verge of starvation.”74

The Columbia State reiterated the Bluffton relief committee’s call for charity for white sufferers and made explicit the underlying charge: “these white people have been strangely neglected by the Red Cross,

73 “Sufferers Starving: Six Hundred White People in Distress,” Columbia State, May 18, 1894,

p. 8. 74W. W. Price, “Cursing the Red Cross!,” Columbia Daily Register, May 25, 1894, p. 1 (first,

second, and third quotations), Red Cross Newspaper Clippings, images 42–43; W. W. Price, “On theVerge of Starvation,”ColumbiaDaily Register,May 25, 1894, p. 1 (fourth quotation), RedCross Newspaper Clippings, images 44–45. An excellent book on the use of Anglo-Saxon rhetoric in the United States is Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

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while the negroes on the coast have been well provided for,” proving “the discrimination against white sufferers by the Red Cross.”75

Governor Tillman adopted the cause a few days after. He wrote “an appeal on behalf of the white residents of Bluffton township, Beaufort County,” that was published in papers across South Car- olina. Tillman leveraged the incident as a moment to encourage white racial solidarity, describing that he had only recently learned that “great destitution existed among the people of our own color” in Bluffton. These poor whites had “lost their entire crop” and had subsequently “exhausted all means of credit in an effort to support themselves and to plant anew.”76 Dozens of monetary contributions flew into Tillman’s office from private citizens, white churches, and a few Farmers’ Alliance organizations from South Carolina. Many donors echoed the same sentiment, sometimes emphasized with a thick line of ink: “for the White sufferers of Bluffton township”; “please distribute among the White storm sufferers”; “for the benefit of the destitute white citizens of Bluffton”; “for the storm stricken white sufferers of Bluffton”; “for the Bluffton white sufferers.”77

Tillman donated $125.00 from his own coffers to the white sufferers of Bluffton.78

The members of the integrated Sea Island Relief Committee, who had administered relief in the area before the arrival of the Red Cross and had worked closely with Barton since, shot back an outraged response. They did not deny that white farmers at Bluffton were in trouble but did remind Tillman that the Red Cross had been asked only to administer to the sea islands. They felt “impelled by a sense of duty and in simple justice to an organization which came to our relief at a time when their advent was regarded as a most fortunate event to say that we have been deeply impressed with the integrity, impartiality, economy and un- swerving devotion to duty” of the Red Cross. The “unfounded and unprovoked attacks” and “numerous ill-considered criticisms in the public press, some of which have verged upon the borders of libel,”

75 “Give, and Quickly!,” Columbia State, May 18, 1894, p. 4 (quotations).

76 “The Governor’s Appeal,” Sumter (S.C.) Watchman and Southron, May 30, 1894, p. 1

(quotations). See also “Appeal to the People,” Columbia State, May 25, 1894, p. 8. 77Mrs. McCants to Governor Tillman, May 28, 1894, Folder 3 (first quotation); N. S. Rune to

Governor Tillman, June 5, 1894, Folder 12 (second quotation); E. P. Shedel to Governor Tillman, June 4, 1894, Folder 11 (third quotation); Jacob Lomox to Governor Tillman, May 31, 1894, Folder 8 (fourth quotation); J. B. Pickett to Governor Tillman, June 4, 1894, Folder 11 (fifth quotation), all in Box 35, Governor Benjamin R. Tillman Papers (South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C.).

78 “Receipts and Expenditures,” Columbia State, June 17, 1894, p. 5.

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could not stand unchallenged. Barton had gone out of her way to assist tens of thousands of people, “white and colored,” on the mainland. The relief committee members, including Robert Smalls, typed their names under a curt Signed.79 Barton herself followed up with a letter to the head of Charleston’s relief committee, Joseph W. Barnwell, who had declaimed the Red Cross’s recovery effort, which the News and Courier reprinted:

You will recall . . . that on the 30th of March last the American National Red Cross, through me, presented to your honorable committee the reports then beginning to circulate relative to alleged suffering and destitution on the mainland of the State adjacent to the sea islands.

It was pointed out that an appeal to the country at large would be distasteful to the citizens and an injury to the fair name of South Carolina, that with very slight pecuniary or material assistance all danger would be averted and the situation relieved . . . . No action was taken. You will recall that no criticism has been made by us on that non-action.80

Barton, who rarely showed anger, here betrayed some of her frustration. She refused to let the Red Cross take blame for negligence in a state where no authority had stepped forward to provide aid. She especially could not let such accusations pass when they came from politicians who had refused to advocate for their own people, against her recommendations.

That six hundred poor white farmers were destitute in Bluffton was not a point of dispute, especially after June 16, 1894, when a letter of thanks signed by dozens of white “storm sufferers” from Bluffton appeared in the Columbia State.81 The proportionality of their suf- fering when compared with that of the other 30,000 on the sea islands, however, could have been. That the Red Cross had not practiced racial discrimination did not matter. It did not matter that the Red Cross distributed 20,000 garments, rations for 34,000 people, and double labor rations for 6,500 to the mainland alone.82 What mattered was that white South Carolinians believed that white northerners were meddlers with an insidious agenda. They were right to a degree, if by insidious they meant that the Red Cross was willing to promote African American landed independence. By late May, as the Bluffton con- troversy swelled, Barton did not regret her decision to stay in the

79 Sea Island Relief Committee to Benjamin R. Tillman, June 1, 1894, Folder 9, Box 35, Tillman Papers; “The Red Cross Vindicated,” Charleston News and Courier, June 1, 1894, p. 1, Red Cross Newspaper Clippings, image 40 (quotations).

80 “Miss Barton’s Letter toMr. Barnwell,”CharlestonNews andCourier, June 1, 1894, p. 1, Red

Cross Newspaper Clippings, images 40–41. The letter to Barnwell was dated May 27, 1894. 81 “Gratitude of Bluffton,” Columbia State, June 16, 1894, p. 5.

82 Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 268–70; “The Work of the Red Cross,” Charleston News and Courier, June 25, 1894, p. 1.

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Lowcountry until July, but the onerous onslaught of slander made the responsibilities of managing the relief effort weigh more heavily upon her and her organization.

The anger that Barton faced from white supremacists had jarred her sensibilities. The Red Cross was supposed to be an organization that worked for the good of the nation, maintaining a moderation and neutrality that would allow its volunteers to work effectively no matter the political context. The hurricane relief effort in South Carolina had challenged that framework. Barton reflected on her experience in a final letter to the editor of the News and Courier before her departure, rec- ognizing how fraught the relief effort had been: “I realize the throes of internal dissension which are rocking you from centre to circum- ference. . . . I see how impossible it will seem to you to take note of any lesser matter till this seething, bubbling pot of political discord is still.”83

The RedCross’s presence and its support of black independence lent fuel to white southern resentment of the Lowcountry’s traditions of black autonomy and landownership. The ground that white supremacists had gained over the past ten years, between the disenfranchisement of African Americans across the state and the rise of Tillman, had thus far stopped at the Lowcountry. The Red Cross–guided relief effort was a further bulwark against white supremacist incursion, and black sea islanders deftly allied with the Red Cross to strengthen their defenses. Within that context, the attacks that white South Carolinians launched against the Red Cross and black sea islanders were shot through with a bitter vindictiveness.

In June 1894 the Red Cross began to wind down its relief efforts in preparation for its departure. Red Cross representatives scoured the countryside, speaking to black sea islanders, taking extensive notes, and writing reports on the improvement in the houses, the fields, and the lives of black sea islanders. John McDonald wrote of thriving crops thanks to the miles of new ditches, due to which “a large area of otherwise waste land was reclaimed and rendered tillable.”84 An- other volunteer, Benjamin Franklin Tillinghast, speaking to black representatives from St. Helena Island, made clear the paternalist

83 “The Work of the Red Cross,” Charleston News and Courier, June 25, 1894, p. 1.

84 John McDonald, “Report of Relief Work South of Broad River,” n.d., Red Cross General Reports, images 34–39 (quotation on 36). And see “Report by Mr. McDonald,” in Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 211–19 (quotation on 214).

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attitude that underlay the Red Cross effort: “But after a while she [Barton] will go away and you must then depend on yourselves; and are you able to do that? You must learn to work, to know the value of work.”85 One volunteer wrote that black sea islanders were “as prosperous and happy as ever in their new rebuilt homes, with their newly fenced gardens, wells cleaned or new ones dug, [and] three hundred miles of newly made ditches that reclaimed the best lands they had.”86 “It gives me pleasure,” H. L. Bailey wrote to Barton after surveying Edisto, Wadmalaw, Kiawah, and Johns Islands, “to tell you that these people are grateful for what has been done for them and are to be commended for their excellent behavior and patient attention . . . . I have every reason to think that they can now take care of themselves.”87

As a final initiative to ramify the Red Cross’s recovery effort, Barton launched a well-attended lecture series on “lessons in practical econ- omy” for black sea islanders, on such topics as:

“Owe no man anything.” How to keep out of debt. Don’t sell cotton before it is picked. Plant more vegetables, and why. Divide cottages into rooms. Don’t mortgage.

From the perspective of Barton and the Red Cross, the recovery efforts had been a success because they had directed black sea islanders how to renew the agricultural landscape of the sea islands and had conveyed lessons in frugality and self-sufficiency. These were lessons that black sea islanders were compelled to take, whether they needed them or not.88

Black sea islanders penned numerous letters to Barton thanking her and the Red Cross. Several missives used the language “We the peopel,” or something similar, to express their gratitude.89 Others wrote of the Red Cross’s fair treatment. S. J. Pinckney, apologizing

85 B. F. Tillinghast, response to D. C.Washington, “Vote of Thanks to the Red Cross,”March 9, 1894, Red Cross Speeches and Writings, images 47–51, esp. 50.

86 “Memoranda of Sea Island Relief Methods,” n.d., Red Cross Speeches and Writings, images

33–34 (quotation on 34). 87 H. L. Bailey to Clara Barton, June 1, 1894, Red Cross General Reports, image 24. 88 Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 237 (first quotation), 231 (second quotation), 242–43. 89Mary S. Jenkins to Clara Barton, February 26, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, image 34

(quotation); see also, for example, S. J. Pinckney to Clara Barton, March 20, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, images 47–48; Edward Black to Clara Barton, March 30, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, images 2–3; Billey Sheldon to Dr. Hubbell, June 7, 1894, Red Cross Corre- spondence, image 80; and J. F. Brown to Clara Barton, June 8, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, image 82.

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needlessly for his spelling and grammar, wrote, “I feel like I could work . . . with you all my lifetime for the way you all have treated me.”90 M. C. Black wrote, “I could not have been treated any better. It will be a lasting regret to part with you.”91 The Women’s Aid As- sociation of Beaufort, whose president was Annie E. Smalls, Robert Smalls’s wife, expressed its “heartfelt thanks and inexpressible ap- preciation, for your noble and unselfish work.”92 Twenty-four sea island families living on Bonnie Hall thanked the Red Cross, writing, “We are satisfid with the Committee feeling That WeWill Have Justis of What You Deliver in too his Hand.”93 A group of black Beaufort lawyers, professionals, and pastors similarly drew up a statement of thanks. The letter described Barton as a “faithful, inestimable, and Christian lady” who was “wise and impartial dealing with all the sufferers alike.”94 Black sea islanders had pushed the Red Cross to recognize their worth and equality through their labor, their collective action, their dedication to their communities, and the trust that they placed in the organization. Barton later described the purpose of the Red Cross’s mission to the black sea islanders as to “help to fit them for the citizenship which, wisely or unwisely, we had endowed them with.”95 The irony, of course, is that the Red Cross was fitting them for citizenship just as Jim Crow was poised to take it away. The letters of gratitude were perhaps a final attempt to convince Barton and theRedCross of something that was, to the letter writers, self-evident: black sea islanders, too, were indeed part of “We the people.”

Barton did not, upon leaving, forget about the people of the sea islands. In late February 1895, as “[a]nother planting season is approaching,” Barton wrote that she hoped black sea islanders “have been doing the preparatory work of ditching for the raising of good crops.” “Get the neighbors to join together,” Barton suggested, “and clean out the old ditches, make all the new main ditches and canals that they can, and thenmake the smaller ones to connect with them; this will help to give them better health, less fever, larger crops and better ones.”

90 S. J. Pinckney to Clara Barton, March 20, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, image 48. 91M. C. Black to Clara Barton, June 2, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, images 74–75

(quotation on 74). 92 Annie E. Smalls et al. to Clara Barton, June 5, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, images

75–76 (quotation on 75). 93 Billey Sheldon to Dr. Hubbell, June 7, 1894, Red Cross Correspondence, images 80–81

(quotation on 80). 94 “Commending the Red Cross,” Washington Post, June 8, 1894, p. 5, and in Red Cross

Newspaper Clippings, image 29. 95 Barton, Red Cross in Peace and War, 198.

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“They should strive to raise the best of everything,” “to keep out of debt,” and to persevere in “the general continuance of this work of improvement.”96 During the growing season of 1894 and the spring of 1895, black sea islanders watched their crops mature, tended their gardens, and held their families close after the catastrophic, tragic losses of the hurricane. One year after the storm, it appeared to be a fruitful year already. By August 1894, farmers were growing the season’s second crop of white flint corn, a type that the Red Cross introduced, a first for the sea islands since their previous varietal took the entire planting season to mature. Others reported that their crops were producing twice as much per acre as usual and that they “have never had such a fine show for crop in fifteen years.”97

The Red Cross–administered recovery effort was an unusual event in Lowcountry history and an unusual case in the history of disaster relief. This article is not intended to be a naively rosy parable about communities coming together after a tragedy or a glibly triumphal tale about the victory of the recovery effort, because both would be inaccurate. Instead, this is a historical narrative about hard-won possibility. The connection between the Red Cross and black sea islanders produced rewarding results. Black sea islanders knew that they were hemmed in by hostile white su- premacists waiting to strip them of their franchise, their economic in- dependence, and their land and to storm the enclave of black political power whose walls the hurricane had eroded. Black sea islanders un- derstood that they could ally with the Red Cross to support their struggle against South Carolina’s white supremacists, for the organization gave them time and resources to regroup and to rebuild as best they could under the circumstances. Black sea islanders took on Barton’s suggested routine and enhanced it with their own politics and traditions. The recovery that black South Carolinians sought would remedy not just the griev- ous wounds of the hurricane but also the gross injustices and privations of a hardening white supremacy.98 Landownership and political self-determination should not be particularly radical goals. But in South

96A bulletin by Clara Barton, February 26, 1895, Red Cross Correspondence, images 103–4 (first through fourth quotations on 103; fifth, sixth, and seventh quotations on 104).

97 “To the People of the Islands (To be read by their Pastors),” March 23, 1894, Red Cross

Speeches and Writings, images 46–47; “The Sea Island Sufferers,” Philadelphia American Friend, September 6, 1894, pp. 183–84 (quotation on 184), and in Red Cross Newspaper Clippings, images 52–53.

98 On such alliances, with their simultaneous power and fragility, see Kelley,Hammer and Hoe; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988); Ayers, Promise of the New South; Miller, Gullah Statesman; Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1974); and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2008).

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Carolina in 1894, advocating for those goals challenged white supremacy itself.

White supremacists recognized the danger of the alliance between the Red Cross and black sea islanders, of the autonomy and power that black sea islanders could sustain if they were not entirely cut off from sympathetic allies. White supremacists had seen it during Re- construction, through a fusion ticket of black Republicans and mod- erate Democrats in the 1880s, and, most recently, during the recovery effort. White southerners thus fought the Red Cross whenever possible. For white supremacists, the Red Cross effort seemed to be less about restoration to pre-hurricane conditions and more about the installation of a dangerous experiment in social and racial engineering that would forestall Jim Crow. The Red Cross believed that hard work could translate into economic independence, and with that logic the Red Cross justified the extension of aid over many months to avoid black sea islanders’ long-term dependence on welfare. But long-term de- pendence was precisely the goal that white southerners had for black southerners, and the only hard work that white southerners recognized was the hard work that blacks did for whites. Anything else was laziness and dependence.

Black sea islanders met a terrible test sooner than they may have anticipated, during the state’s constitutional convention in 1895. South Carolina Democrats realized that to consolidate white supremacy, they had to move the political discourse from the local level to the state level, where white supremacist control eclipsed the community-oriented successes of hurricane recovery and black independence on the sea islands. The new constitution, which placed restrictions on voters based on literacy and property ownership, was by no means the beginning of Jim Crow in South Carolina.99 Instead, it was an affirmation of a wider system of social, economic, and political control that white supremacists had been forging since the Civil War. The conditions of black sea is- landers after the hurricane reminded white supremacists in the state of the conditions of poverty and dependence that they endeavored to inflict on every black South Carolinian. The hurricane had interrupted this white supremacist project in unexpected ways, allowing three different constituencies—black sea islanders, white supremacists, and the Red Cross—to grapple with the hurricane’s destruction and to implement

99On the 1895 state constitutional convention, see Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Re- construction of White Supremacy, 198–242; Miller, Gullah Statesman, 203–15; and Marszalek, Black Congressman in the Age of Jim Crow, 83–97.

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their own visions for black dependence or independence. Yet despite Jim Crow’s ultimate triumph, the recovery effort was a meaningful interlude during which black sea islanders, with the assistance of the Red Cross, worked to protect their autonomy. Their recovery was bittersweet, perilously rooted and entwined with lingering grief. But for a short time, a sense of achievement blossomed delicately and tenuously across the sea islands.

840 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY