At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis

7 Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard and Sojourner Truth: Faith, Race, and Gender

244 B 7 Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard and Sojourner Truth Faith, Race, and Gender rivate diaries, at least those not subsequently edited by the diarist with a view to publication, are more likely to offer genuinely candid expressions of the author’s feelings and judgments at the moment than are letters and speeches composed by politicians for colleagues or the electorate. Such is the case with the extraordinary diary kept by Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, a pietistic Christian and slaveholding widow in South Carolina during the secession crisis. Her journal reveals much about the life and thoughts of a highly independent woman living and working on a plantation, often in the company only of black people.1 Brevard’s account demonstrates how a woman could manage plantation affairs quite well without a white man’s presence and supervision, even as she held to Victorian assumptions about the proper gender roles assigned to genteel men and women.2 Kizzie was one of five children born to Keziah and James Hopkins, although only two of their daughters survived childhood. She also had three stepsiblings from her mother’s first marriage; one of them, James Hopkins Adams, served as governor of South Carolina for two years in the mid-1850s. A daughter of privilege, Kizzie Hopkins received a first-rate education for a young woman in the Old South, attending both a local school and the Columbia Female Academy. She and her sister, Caroline, married a pair of North Carolina brothers, Joseph and Theodore Brevard. Caroline died in childbirth ; Keziah and Joseph had no children before his death in 1842, following recurring mental and physical disorders. Her mother had died two years earlier, and her father passed away two years later, leaving his entire estate to his surviving daughter, with four men serving as trustees. Her father’s Sand Hills home place, situated about ten miles east of Columbia in the Carolina Piedmont, became Kizzie’s principal residence. She never remarried, personally running the farm and slaves at Sand Hills and hiring overseers to manage her other properties. She enlarged the Sand Hills house and purchased a townhouse in Columbia, probably seeking to increase her social outlets. Yet she spent most of her time directing affairs at Sand Hills, demonstrating Keziah Brevard and Sojourner Truth 245 what John Hammond Moore, the editor of her diary, terms “a competent, nononsense mind capable of making decisions, formulating plans, and carrying them out.” As much as any male head of a farming household, she valued her rural domain as a source of independence. She seems to have found “the responsibility of managing a large agricultural operation . . . more appealing than giving parties and making small talk over tea and cakes.” According to the 1850 census, Keziah Brevard owned two farms in Richland County, together comprising twenty-six hundred acres and 180 slaves. During the 1850s, she purchased large amounts of real estate in the Lower Richland area, even as some of her neighbors “departed to try their luck in Florida, Texas, and other far places.”3 By 1860, she had more than doubled her landholdings to some six thousand acres, and she owned 209 slaves.4 Unlike Senator Jefferson Davis, Brevard lived close to many of her slaves during most of the secession winter, and her diary testifies to her constant struggle with “the morality of slavery and secession.” Where Davis had been raised a Baptist but became an Episcopalian, Brevard was nominally a PresKeziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard (Courtesy of Dr. Edward D. Hopkins Jr.) 246 Keziah Brevard and Sojourner Truth byterian and was “not disposed to unite” with either Baptists or Episcopalians , although she contributed to a local Methodist mission. Like many plantation owners, concludes Moore, Brevard “wanted desperately to be respected and even loved by those she owned and often tried to cultivate their affection.” She wrote, “Make my servants (those who labor for me) to know thee & love thee is one of my constant prayers.” Yet “like most wealthy people,” Moore notes, she was “accustomed to having her own way in all matters.” When her “servants” did not behave as she expected and wished, they became “impudent ,” a fault that, as Frederick Douglass explained, “was one of the commonest and most indefinite in the white catalogue of offenses usually laid to the charge of slaves.”5 Brevard admitted her occasional lack of patience with the slaves, as when she confided to her diary...