Letters from Alabama: Chiefly Relating to Natural History

Introduction

Introduction Letters from Alabama provides an engaging personal account of the early antebellum plantation period in the Black Belt region of central Alabama by the young Englishman Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888). It was 1838, just nine years after Alabama achieved statehood. Steamboats had opened up travel and commerce on the Alabama River as far north as the developing port cities of Selma and Montgomery. The state capital had been moved from Cahawba to Tuscaloosa , the Second Creek War had ended just two years earlier, the Creek Indian Removal west to the Indian Territory had concluded the previous year, and Andrew Jackson had just completed his sec­ ond term as US president. The Alabama frontier was beginning to enjoy newly acquired amenities and prosperity made possible by the production of cotton on the rich prairie soils of Alabama’s Black Belt, linked by a major waterway to the bustling port of Mobile, 120 miles to the south. It was in this setting that Gosse arrived in Mobile on May 14, 1838, aboard a small schooner on which he had booked passage from Philadelphia more than a month earlier. He had celebrated his twenty-­eighth birthday as the sole passenger on board. Gosse was born in Worcester, England, but grew up in the port city of Poole, Dorsetshire, on the south­ west­ ern coast. As a young boy, he became intrigued with natural history while exploring the abundant marine life along the seashoreandinthetidalpoolsborderingtheharbor .Hisformaleducationwaslimited to five years at a day school, from age eight to thirteen, and less than two years thereafter at a boarding school where he was introduced to classical literature and the rudiments of Latin and Greek. His father, Thomas Gosse (1765– 1844), was himself educated in the classics and supported his family as an itinerant painter of miniature portraits. It was from his father that Philip Henry developed his love of books and, equally important, that he learned the basic techniques of painting in miniature. By his teenage years he had become an avid reader, especially on subjects of natural history and travels to exotic places. He redrew and colored pictures of the fascinating animals that illustrated those­accounts. 2 Letters from Alabama At the age of fifteen, Gosse dropped out of school to take a job as a clerk at Garland & Sons, a counting house in Poole that was engaged in the thriving North Atlantic trade in cod and seal pelts between Poole and Newfoundland . Two years later, Gosse was offered the opportunity to go to Newfoundland under a six-­year contract as an indentured clerk in the firm’s shipping office at Carbonear. He accepted, despite heartfelt misgivings about leaving his family and home at such a young age. It was while in Newfoundland that Gosse developed a fascination for insects and began painting them in miniature, and he remained in Carbonear two more years after fulfilling his indenture. In 1835, in part due to the religious and po­ liti­ cal unrest in Newfoundland at the time, he decided to move to what was then Lower Canada (present-­ day Quebec). There he purchased two hundred acres of agricultural land in Compton Township, located south of Sherbrooke, about twenty miles north of the Vermont (US) border. He spent the next three years struggling to turn a profit as a farmer while supplementing his meager income during the winter months as a teacher at nearby government schools. Discouraged, homesick, and financially strapped, even after selling his farm in the spring of 1838, Gosse wrestled with two options: returning to England or traveling to the Carolinas and the Ameri­ can Deep South, where he had been told that schoolmasters were in high demand. He finally made the decision to traveloverlandfromComptontoPhiladelphia,hopingtofindemploymentwith one of the Ameri­can naturalists at the Academy of Natural Sciences. If he were tobeunsuccessful,hehadresolvedtoreturntoEnglandandestablishaschoolof his own or, alternatively, to continue his journey south. To Gosse’s disappointment he found no one in Philadelphia with sufficient funds to hire him. While there, however, at the Academy of Natural Sciences, he met Timothy Conrad (1803–1877), an authority on molluscan fossils. Conrad had spent two years in the 1820s in Monroe County, Alabama, collecting fossil shells from the rich Eocene deposits in the bluffs overlooking the Alabama River at Claiborne. Aware that acquaintances of his in the Claiborne area were looking for a schoolmaster, Conrad provided Gosse with a letter of introduction to a local planter, possibly a family member or friend of Charles Tait (1768–1835...