Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South

Conclusion

189 Conclusion cd In 1860, the Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer of South Carolina asserted his loyalty to an emerging southern nation, writing that “born upon her soil, of a father thus born before me—from an ancestry that occupied it while yet it was a part of England’s possessions—she is in every sense my mother.” Nearly four decades later, Victoria Clayton of Alabama made a similar link between her birth and her sense of southern identity. In her memoir of life in the Old South, Clayton suggested that “our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs, are consequences of our place of birth.”1 Although the South’s political experiment in nationbuilding had failed, for many southerners, black and white, the belief that the land of their nativity shaped their identities remained. The foundations laid in the antebellum period, in which birth and motherhood provided individuals with a sense of personal identity and linked them to broader social networks, remained a salient part of what it meant to be southern in the postbellum world. While the Civil War left basic family structures intact, both small and at times radical shifts had occurred in how people lived within these structures . Newly freed black mothers looked forward, with aspirations of bettering the condition of both their children and their race; white mothers looked backward to memorialize the past. The possibility of recognizing commonalities in birth and mothering experiences seemed to dissipate in the late nineteenth century.2 Elite white women increasingly had their children in hospitals, abandoning both the racially integrated and gender-segregated birthing room. Black women, too, moved away from integrated birthing rooms, although the gendered space of their birthing room remained much longer because of their continued reliance on black midwives.3 But while these experiences gradually 190 born southern changed to reflect the social and political realities of a racially segregated South, birth itself remained essential to southerners—black and white—in defining their identity within this society. Emancipation transformed the family life of freedmen; it also changed the meaning of “family” for many white southerners. Birth and motherhood remained important social symbols for southerners of both races, but the meanings embedded in these symbols had altered for everyone. No longer did birth determine the legal status that a person held in southern society. For black southerners, emancipation entailed , among other things, the legal recognition of their family ties—no one could now take away their infants and treat them as commodities. For white southerners, absent the enslaved labor force, emancipation meant that they had to reformulate their understanding of household structures. Just as the separation of mothers and children had symbolized the abuses of the slave system, the claim to ownership of their own children became a mark of freedom for formerly enslaved mothers and fathers. As early as 1864, newly freed father Spotswood Rice wrote to his children still held in bondage: “Don’t be uneasy my children[,] I expect to have you. If Diggs dont give you up this Government will and I feel con- fident that I will get you. Your Miss Kaitty said that I tried to steal you. But I’ll let her know that god never intended for man to steal his own flesh and blood.” Rice also wrote to Kitty Diggs, the white woman who held his children, with a warning: now I want you to understand that mary is my Child and is a God given rite of my own[,] and you may hold on to her as long as you can but I want you to remembor this one thing that the longor you keep my Child from me the longor you will have to burn in hell and the qwicker youll get their. . . . now you call my children your pro[per]ty not so with me my Children is my own and I expect to get them . . . .4 Rice, who had been denied a claim to his own personhood as a slave, now insisted on the identity and rights of fatherhood for himself and freedom for his children. Even when formerly enslaved couples did not wish to remain married to each other after emancipation, a desire to claim their children did not necessarily diminish. Madison Day and Maria Richard of Florida, for Conclusion 191 example, sought not just to gain possession of their children from white owners, but from each other...