The Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, 1827–1835: A Substitute for Social Intercourse

Epilogue

Epilogue Sarah Gayle’s journal ends abruptly with the entry dated Tuesday July 1835, probably July 21, ten days before her death with lockjaw on July 31.1 A few days earlier she had described with a shudder the primitive work of the antebellum dentist filing her teeth, and for years she had repeatedly expressed in her journal an ominous foreboding about dental work. John Gayle was absent when she fell ill, now involved in a business effort with the Chickasaw Nation. One of Sarah’s grandsons, Hugh Aiken Bayne, described the death scene in his Extracts from the Journal of Sarah Haynesworth Gayle. With her raven hair falling around her, and her brilliant black eyes fixed in speechless agony upon the group of helpless little ones who surrounded her, she lay eagerly listening to every sound, hoping to hear the familiar step she had so of­ten greeted with rapture; until, as the hours went anxiously by, she realized that the shades of death were closing around her.2 For a few days she suffered the “most excruciating pain.” Shortly before she died, she wrote a last message to her husband: “I testify with my dying breath that, since first I laid my young heart upon his manly bosom, I have known only love and happiness .” John Gayle was “sent for,” but she died before he returned home.3 The announcement of her funeral service stated: The friends and acquaintances of Mrs. Sarah A. Gayle are requested to attend her funeral, this afternoon at the hour of four o’clock, from the residence of Gov. Gayle to the Methodist Church where Divine Service will be performed and from thence to the place of interment.4 She was buried as she wished, beside her mother on the grounds of the Hayns­ worth family home, Sheldon Plantation, near Claiborne in Monroe County. Later she was moved to the Gayle family plot in Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile, where John Gayle, his sec­ ond wife, Clarissa, and other family members are buried.5 318 Epilogue His wife’s sudden death devastated John, crushing him, he said, so that he “came near” becoming “a maniac.”6 He had left child-­ rearing entirely to his wife. Now he did not know what to do with his children, much less how to console them. Sarah had predicted his inability to cope with them in the event of her death when she observed that although her husband’s nature was “all kindness,” she feared that he “would be unable to chide or to correct, when both might be most deserved.”7 He now scattered his six children, ranging in age from fourteen years to five months, to live with relatives and friends. When his term as governor ended five months later in De­ cem­ ber 1835, he moved from Tuskaloosa to Toulminville near Mobile and resumed his law practice. The children continued with relatives and friends until he remarried in 1837, when they joined their father and stepmother in south Alabama.8 In the 1840s John Gayle resumed his po­ liti­ cal career. After defeat in 1841 as a Whig candidate for the U.S. Senate, he was elected in 1847 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Whig. In Congress Gayle focused on issues of state and local concern, in­ clud­ ing obtaining federal funds for railroad construction in Alabama. On national issues he was most interested in matters related to the expansion of slavery. He did not seek reelection and returned to Mobile. In 1849 he was appointed judge of the U.S. District Court in Alabama and served in that position until his death in Mobile on July 21, 1859.9 Clarissa Stedman Peck Gayle, John’s sec­ ond wife, grew up in Greensboro but studied in New York for two years, receiving a more advanced education than had Sarah Gayle. She married John Gayle on No­ vem­ ber l, 1837, in Gaston, in Sumter County, Alabama; Clarissa was twenty-­ two, and John was forty-­ five. The couple settled in Toulminville, where they had four children. After her husband’s death in 1859 she lived in Mobile and in Greensboro with her children and her eldest stepson , Matt. After the Civil War her two stepsons-­ in-­ law, Josiah Gorgas and Thomas L. Bayne, supported her financially. She moved with the Gorgas family to Sewanee, Tennessee, in June 1870, and after the marriage of her daughter, Helen, in 1871 she returned to Greensboro...