Chronicles of Chicora Wood by Elizabeth Waities Allston Pringle: A Fascinating Memoir

I ran across this gem of a family memoir made available as a free e-book by the Gutenberg Project. It was written by Elizabeth Waities Allston Pringle (1845-1921), who was a teenager at the time of the Civil War and went on to become a rice planter in her own right.  Apparently she’s written a whole book about that, too, but I haven’t yet read it. Chronicles of Chicora Wood (published 1922) was of particular interest to me because the author wrote about a locale fairly close to where my ancestors lived—and to where The Silk Trilogy is based.

I originally found the book when I was researching the word Chicora. I’d read that the SC Native Americans called the region Chicora, and I was quite curious to know exactly what Chicora encompassed, so I was delighted when I saw a book that might shed some light on it for me. It didn’t, of course, but I’m still quite glad I found it. Chicora Wood was actually the name of the rice plantation that Bessie was raised on, apparently renamed when she was a girl by her father for the Chicora Indians who (had) lived in the area. It seems that they once occupied the entire coastal area of South Carolina all the way inland to the Piedmont—according to the tribe’s Facebook page, anyhow, though many tribes live(d) in that broad area. I’d already had the notion that Chicora included much of the Lowcountry, though, and so this does confirm my inkling there.

I actually rather adore Bessie, the author of this work.  I found some criticisms of her ‘racism’ in reviews of her book, but I find her to be vastly less racist than, say, Mary Chestnut, or even Fanny Kemble Butler, who was an ardent abolitionist!  Bessie expressed at once how relieved she was at not having inherited the responsibility of the ownership of people—how she felt that that age had ended, and she was glad of it.  Some of the terminology she uses was not terribly flattering for the slaves in their care (and who took care of them), and perhaps Bessie whitewashed some of the darker moments from her mind, but I do believe that she found the entire institution of slavery to be rather awful. One of the criticisms of her that I ran across was that she acted as though the slaves wanted to be owned, and YES, she did present those awful scenarios—of families desperate to stay together, begging her father to buy all of them; of an old man begging to be able to stay with their family after the war, where he’d lived his entire life.  She was sympathetic to them, and she cried terribly when her now-nearly-penniless mother turned the wonderful old man away, saying she couldn’t afford to pay him. A slave woman named Phoebe sat with them as Sherman’s troops were nearly upon them, and they encouraged her to leave, but she insisted that she was going to protect them—Bessie was showing the complexities of the situation, how Phoebe was loyal to them even though she could easily have left them there. No, Bessie doesn’t in any way suggest that Phoebe should have left them there, nor does she ever overtly express sympathy for any rage on their part—nor does she go on about the injustice of slavery, even.  Certainly I would not describe her as any sort of abolitionist nor activist. She was just an intelligent and somewhat typical daughter of a slave-owner who loved her family and tells about life as it was, from her perspective. The end of the book is actually an interview with one of the older male slaves—it was interesting, and I think it was meant to reinforce that her father was a good man, as in part it related yet another time that her father bought slaves due to requests by others to keep those families together (I though it was a different time when I read it, but maybe not).  In fact, Bessie goes so far as to say right off that her father mortgaged the properties for this purpose, and that’s why they lost almost everything after the war.  Maybe she is an apologist for her father—okay, I suspect that much—but she’s not an apologist for the institution of slavery itself, not beyond praising how her West-Point-educated father managed the plantation and slaves, proud of his executive skill. There is a difference.

For descendants of slaves around Georgetown, SC, who are interested in genealogy, if you can get past the awful-but-typical situation those folks were in—and some of the common, now-offensive lingo of the day—then you might find some of the descriptions of the individual slave folks of interest.  For instance… Hagar isn’t such a common name, right?  She was only a bit older than Bessie, and there is a great story about her trying to help Bessie out—sneaking the little girl out onto the roof to get inside another room to see her dead baby brother, whom Bessie didn’t think she’d get to ever lay eyes on; Hagar was quite annoyed, however, with the girl’s lack of self-control when Bessie started to scream (despite having promised she wouldn’t).  Perhaps Hagar’s descendants, if there are any, would be interested in this anecdote. [Note that Hagar is the name of the key ancestress of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. I wonder if her parents practiced Islam? Hagar’s name is actually in the Bible itself, too, though...]

There were some other anecdotes about the (ex-)slaves as well, and Bessie mostly seemed to feel friendly towards them so long as she didn’t feel personally injured by them.  No, that’s not to say that the situation was okay for the slaves, but both Bessie and they were born into it, and she was glad when it was over—even if she wasn’t on the Yankee side. At all. She speaks with relief of having an uncle who was against secession—and therefore his family was able to help hers a bit after the war—but she makes sure to clarify that his wife, her aunt, didn’t actually agree with him.

Bessie was indeed the daughter of a rice plantation owner who made money off of the labor of slaves.  He was governor of South Carolina only a couple of years before the war started—and was an ardent secessionist, right along with most of the rest of the white population of the state. If Bessie is an apologist for him, it runs deep—she also relates how he gave her two severe switchings when she was little, and she seems to have convinced herself that those switchings made her adore her father even more.  So I’m not even saying that her father was a good man, but it does seem there were much worse people out there, and if Bessie is to be believed at all, he did seem to have a sort of moral code within the societal framework he’d been raised within.  He died of illness during the war, owning more than one plantation. Bessie and her mother didn’t have too difficult a time with the ex-slaves on the plantations where they had resided, but when they first visited a seldom-seen site, they actually did face a quite scary arrival, with the ex-slaves taunting them for hours, encircling them with hoes, singing about killing.  So Bessie was NOT saying that all the slaves were delighted to be slaves—not at all.

Whew… I didn’t mean to go on about that so much, but it is a touchy issue, and I can’t very well blog about Bessie’s book without addressing it—not without seeming obtuse at best.  And Bessie certainly addresses it!  However, she also talks so much about daily life, from well before the war—and after—and I loved being immersed in this primary source for how life actually was for someone of her social standing at that time.

She talks about wearing overshoes.  She talks about the schoolhouse on the plantation, then how she boarded in Charleston. Actually, I associated with so many of her mentions!  I play piano (pitifully--she was better) and have a weak but nice voice, and I journal and love the ocean, like so many people—but she also lived in a boarding school on Meeting Street, and I lived on Meeting Street for a year when I was at the College of Charleston (where her brother attended).  Her husband studied in Heidelberg, and I’ve done quite a bit of research around my supposed ancestress Sophia of Hanover, whose father’s people ruled as electors from there for centuries. Bessie has Huguenot ancestry, and my family claims to have some French ancestry (most likely Huguenot, given that area’s history). 

I even ran across the name of a woman who could possibly be my ancestress in these Chronicles of Chicora Wood. Mary Holland took care of Bessie’s mother when she was gravely ill. “[A]n old woman, but still tall and stately in figure, and with great dignity and poise. She was about the color of an Indian.” I was so excited to read this, though of course Mary is a common name…  and those are actually only the first and middle names of my ancestress, who was an old woman at the time, mind you! Bessie often refers to her cousins, at least, by only their first and middle names, and with all the Mary Janes and Mary Anns, why not a Mary Holland? My own Mary Holland’s granddaughter is the darkest-skinned of my great-grandparents hands-down, according to the one photograph I have of her, at least, so that description only intrigues me.  It’s so hard to find anything describing our ancestors in 1840 for the most part, unless they were public figures or otherwise news-worthy.

One of the broader take-aways I gleaned from this memoir is how very brief our country’s history is as an independent nation.  I was a little stunned, actually. Bessie was talking about how she was named for her great-aunt Elizabeth who lived with them, who had died about five years before the author was born.  Bessie’s mother was very close to the woman and missed her sorely. There are some tales about this great-aunt in her old age, but here is the part that so surprised me:  The older Elizabeth had married a man who was a doctor during the Revolutionary War.  Not a baby, even. A grown man!  Elizabeth herself was a teenager at the beginning of the Revolutionary War and was 21 years old at the end of it.  She had actually grown up in a colony of Great Britain!  So this woman had lived with Bessie’s parents, nearly crossing dates with Bessie, and then Bessie lived through the Civil War (only 19 years old when it was over). Bessie lived on well into the 20^th century—she’ll have died exactly 100 years ago on December 5^th of this year, actually!  All of my grandparents were born by then.  I think I already had a fairly good grasp already of how few generations there have been since the Civil War, but I hadn’t really thought about how there was even less time between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. They were fairly close, less than a century apart.  Undoubtedly some people actually lived through both.

Mind you, though… the American colonies existed for almost as long under the rule of England as they have as an independent nation (with much fewer people, of course), so for a vast number of us, our ancestral history here is far longer than just going back as far as Bessie’s great-aunt!

I can’t say how interesting these memoirs would be to a person from outside the area, who has no personal connection to that region, but I found them fascinating.  For instance, as a child, Bessie went through a 3-day fast to treat her awful dyspepsia, drinking only a half-glass of milk topped off with water each day—and it worked!  Their English governess straightened her sister’s posture with having her lay on a board at an angle. The boarding school they went to in Charleston spoke only in French! She was advised by her uncle not to speak to non-uniformed men on a train ride alone, advice that nearly left her without her trunk (and she praised how things had changed since then for young women travelers).  So many riveting tidbits, and I both laughed at Bessie’s admissions and sympathized with her plight quite often.  She’s a much nicer person than so many others I’ve read, at least so far as she has presented herself.