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

Introduction

Introduction Sarah Haynsworth Gayle’s Alabama in 1810 was frontier country in the Old Southwest . The Haynsworth family was part of the westward migration of farmers from the Piedmont of South Carolina who became the pioneer planters of Alabama. They left the exhausted fields of the seaboard Piedmont for the fertile Black Belt of the Mississippi Territory, seeing the southwest as a land of opportunity. The Haynsworths moved in March 1810, although settlers usually moved westward in the fall when trails were dry and hard and swamps more passable. The Federal Road that they traveled was little more than a horse path four feet wide hacked from forests and swamps with split logs five feet long laid for a roadbed. With the Spanish lurking in West Florida, memories of the Burr conspiracy still fresh, and war with England on the horizon, the federal government built the road for military communication southwest across the Mississippi Territory between Wash­ ing­ ton and New Orleans. Ambitiously intended to handle supply wagons, cannon, men on foot and horseback, the road alarmed the Creek Indian Nation, who foresaw a white invasion that would overwhelm them. Along the road white settlers created what they called “forts” for their safety. Actually, these “forts” were no more than a cabin with a surrounding stockade located on an elevation at a river junction.1 Born on Janu­ ary 18, 1804, near Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah was six years old when the family migrated west. The trip was a lark to this only child, as she perched on the wheel of a cannon and enjoyed the soldiers’ attentions. The family settled west of the junction of the Tombigbee and the Alabama Rivers near Fort Stoddert (Mount Vernon today) near St. Stephens, north of Mobile, land recently ceded by the Choctaws. The outlet to the sea for the Tombigbee and Alabama Rivers was the port of Mobile that Ameri­ cans would seize during the War of 1812 and retain thereafter. For the developing cotton planters in central Alabama such access would be essential for success in the world of commercial agriculture. After the Creek Indian War, 1813–14, the Creeks ceded the land east of the Alabama River, and only then did the Haynsworth family move across the river to what became Claiborne in Monroe County in the Alabama Black Belt. Claiborne sat at the head of schooner navigation on the Alabama River and became the center of a cotton-­ planting com- xviii Introduction munity. It was the only white settlement in the midst of Indian tribes. For most of the first twenty years of her life Sarah lived in a world where Indians were always nearby and where white settlers were always armed for their safety, of­ten sleeping with a pistol.2 Such a raw wilderness offered little opportunity for education or culture for a little girl. Although her only formal education was attendance at nearby St. SteFig . 3. The Old Southwest, 1806. Craig Remington, cartographer Introduction xix phens Academy, she did not grow into an uneducated adult, despite her feeling mortified by the “deficiencies” of her formal education. She possessed an insatiable intellectual curiosity that she fed by continual voracious reading through­ out her life. When, as an adult, Sarah anticipated a move to Tuskaloosa, the prospect of living where there was a “book store” excited her. Unfortunately, she had no opportunity to widen her horizons by travel, and as an adult she admitted that the only towns that she had seen were Greensboro and Tuskaloosa.3 Fig. 4. Southwest Alabama, 1825. Craig Remington, cartographer xx Introduction Sarah Haynsworth married John Gayle at “Sheldon,” her family’s plantation near Claiborne on No­ vem­ ber 14, 1819, the year when Alabama attained statehood. Sarah was not yet sixteen and John was twenty-­seven. No portrait or drawing of Sarah has been found, although she was reputed to be a great beauty with dark hair and eyes. Little more than a child herself, she quickly found herself the mother of baby after baby almost every other year. Her life now revolved around the lives of her husband and her children. The man that she married was born in the Sumter District of South Carolina on Sep­ tem­ ber 11, 1792. After graduating from South Carolina College in 1813, he joined his parents in Alabama in August of that year, a few weeks after the Fort Mims massacre; his...