Fanny Kemble’s Damning Journal about Slavery on a Southern Plantation

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 by Frances Anne Kemble is a series of journal entries that she wrote in the form of letters. The editor suggests that she didn’t send them at all, that she crafted much of the journal later from brief notes taken at the time, but I am not convinced that she didn’t send the originals to her friend Elizabeth in Pennsylvania after all. It was commonplace at that time to keep a letterbook, recording correspondence for later reference. Her letters were so long that she may have just jotted summaries for some of them, then elaborated on it all for publication over two decades later. This English actress was also a prolific, eloquent writer, and her call for justice and humanity rings clear.

Author Sophia Alexander
with Fanny Kemble's Journal

The journal begins with a moving essay against the institution of slavery, even before she arrives in the South:  “the slaves of a kind owner may be as well cared for, and as happy, as the dogs and horses of a merciful master; but [their happiness] must again depend upon the complete perfection of their moral and mental degradation… if they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to them… the moment they are in any degree enlightened, they become unhappy.”

Her goal is eventually clear as she ventures to reside on a rice plantation with her Southern, plantation-owning husband and two children: she intends to document the abuses that she sees—or perhaps it was simply the purpose of the publication, with some of the journal re-crafted to suit. Since the point of the journal’s publication was to expose the cruelties of slavery, it makes sense that it would begin with a powerful anti-slavery essay. Her accounts go from terrible to worse to even worse so that you begin to question if the original wretched hovel that is eventually likened to a palace in comparison to the later ones was really so wretched after all.  I’m sure conditions were poor, but I’m still not quite sure just how loathsome they really were. While the details left me waffling, Fanny’s powerful writing did convince me more than ever before, in a visceral way, that slavery is a wretched, horrible crime against humanity.

Almost ironically, I’m not convinced, however, that she admits to all the crimes she’s privy to. I suspect she’s trying to protect her daughters’ family’s reputation—for the girls’ custody was given to their father, Pierce Butler, at their divorce. I personally believe she alludes to one, however, that may have fueled some of her rage, and justifiably (if it’s true): Fanny readily admits to the loveliness of a mulatto slave named Psyche—and relates an incident of Pierce giving Psyche’s distraught husband away, almost as soon as they arrive at the plantation. Later, Psyche is placed in an exalted position on a riverboat ride that almost doesn’t make sense if she isn’t Mr. Butler’s concubine. Perhaps I’m reading into it (was I supposed to?), but I could only imagine that Fanny was seeing red. 

Aside from my confusion as to the precipitously ever-increasingly-devastating conditions that each group of slaves that she sees lives in, the editor does point out a few factual inaccuracies, even the dramatization of a killing of a neighbor that did not actually happen while she was on the island, according to newspaper accounts of the day (it happened months before she arrived). Unfortunately, she laments in the published journal how she went to church the following Sunday after the incident, where not a soul alluded to the tragedy, holding that up as proof of how calloused they all were to the brutalities of their feudal existences. I’m disappointed not to believe her entirely honest, because she writes forcefully with an oh-so-important message. However, it really is possible that with twenty years’ distance, she may have mistakenly recrafted some of those letters, remembering only the stark details of the incidents that she knew were discussed in the letters, according to her notes. After all, she didn’t witness the events for herself, even in the journal. She may vividly recall that no one mentioned the event at the church when she actually was there (so recently afterwards) and wondered why the minister wasn’t better admonishing his flock not to commit such acts of violence. I’m not convinced that her account is substantially different from the truth, after all—and I well know how mixed up I can get over the details of events that happened two whole decades ago!

Her candor is not my only point of hesitation in recommending this journal. The other issue is actually a form of brutal candor that she overuses—regarding her own prejudiced perceptions and opinions of the slaves themselves. Often incredibly insulting, she seems to feel superior in education, attractiveness, and morality even as she desires them to know and believe they are her equals. She sometimes shows a certain obtuseness when she claims that they believe they are inferior just because they say so, as if not realizing that they are saying what they imagine she wants to hear. She repeats her dismay at this often—though I wonder if she’s actually just trying to draw a picture of the abject wretchedness of slave existence.  She seems far too clever not to catch on… but then again, she seems to operate with a sort of forthright zeal and very well may take others too much at face value.

I don’t often sense that she has much real respect for the slaves, excepting a few of the more skilled and knowledgeable workers.  She’s overwhelmed with pity, however—especially for the new mothers who have to go back to work in the fields at just three weeks postpartum, the neglected elderly, etc. At least a couple of the women (maybe several) have mulatto children, having been raped by the overseer, as Fanny tells it—and even under the best-possible case scenarios, power differentials make this deplorably problematic.

Fanny makes a powerful, convincing argument in a letter included in the appendix that the brutal isolation of these plantations negates the argument that practical reasons will preserve the slaves: “it is sometimes clearly not [in] the interest of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of inferior or superannuated laborers… Who, on such estates as these, shall witness to any act of tyranny or barbarity, however atrocious?... the estate and its cultivators remaining… under the absolute control of the overseer, who, provided he contrives to get a good crop of rice or cotton into the market for his employers, is left to the arbitrary exercise of a will seldom uninfluenced for evil by the combined effects of the grossest ignorance and habitual intemperance… among a parcel of human beings as like brutes as they can be made.”

I did find this journal fascinating. The gorgeous, familiar landscape descriptions help to balance out the degrading conditions of the slaves, keeping us from falling into absolute depression. There are numerous anecdotes and observations, tales of visits to neighbors, and accounts of the wilderness. The lines that amused me most, as I rather identified with them, were these: “I sometimes despise myself for what seems to me an inconceivable rapidity of emotion, that almost makes me doubt whether anyone who feels so many things can really be said to feel anything… it is, upon the whole, a merciful system of compensation by which my whole nature, tortured as it was last night [her husband had forbidden her to bring him any more complaints from the slaves], can be absorbed this morning in a perfectly pleasurable contemplation of the capers of crabs and the color of mosses as if nothing else existed in creation… I have no doubt that to follow me through half a day with any species of lively participation in my feelings would be a severe breathless moral calisthenic to most of my friends—what Shakespeare calls ‘sweating labor.’ As far as I have hitherto had opportunities of observing, children and maniacs are the only creatures who would be capable of sufficiently rapid transitions of thought and feeling to keep pace with me.”

I’m inclined to believe that Fanny adhered to the essential truths in writing this journal, and where she stretched the truth, if on purpose, it was for a greater cause. Apparently some have even credited its publication in 1863 with dissuading the British from supporting the Confederacy in the American Civil War, so it very well may be one of the most significant pieces of political propaganda that most of us have never heard of!

Word of Warning: I enjoyed Fanny’s voice overall, but I am certain I would have had much more trouble with much of it if I were black. As it was, I was still sometimes ashamed of how overtly racist she sounded when she expressed her aesthetic tastes, not entirely attributable to the situation she found the slaves in. The slaves are described in the most degrading terms, quite often.  For that matter, the Irish are, too, if not quite as often.

I also took issue with her brief condemnation of the local white plantation women breastfeeding their own babies in a prolonged fashion, the local standard being to nurse them past their second summer. It was nice to learn that it was the norm, however, at the time.

Note: Their plantation home still stands on Butler Island near Darien. After I began reading Fanny’s journal last year, my husband and I ventured out to see the property, which we believed to belong to the Nature Conservancy (according to signs on the house and the land). I contacted this organization upon seeing the rapidly dilapitating condition of the house, but it turns out they no longer own it. I’m glad we got there while we still could. We saw so much majestic wildlife there, as she describes in her journal as well. Fanny talked about taking daily walks on the dikes through the rice patties, and so I was delighted with walking the overgrown dikes myself, following in her footsteps that way.

Additional Note: I purchased this book at a Georgia State Park gift shop, but it seems that Fanny Kemble published many more memoirs in her lifetime, this one simply being the most famous. I’m curious to read more. Perhaps I’ll start with the one about her girlhood.

I’m also mildly curious to read her daughter’s rebuttal to this journal—she spent far more time on the slave plantation and married an English minister—though I’m not so keen to read a vindication of slavery (if that’s what it is). Still, it would be interesting to see where their accounts agree.

Extra-Special Additional Note: I’m publishing this blog on Fanny’s 213^th birthday, a sort of ‘Happy Birthday!’ to the dynamic Ms. Kemble (born on the 27th of November in 1809).