I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives

Life on the Old Plantation in Ante-Bellum Days, or a Story Based on Facts by the Reverend I. E. Lowery (1911)

Life on the Old Plantation in Ante-Bellum Days, or a Story Based on Facts by the Reverend I. E. Lowery With Brief Sketches of the Author by the Late Rev. J. Wofford White of the South Carolina Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church (1911)
Introduction Susanna Ashton and E. Langston Culler Just a few short years after the Civil War, Rev. I. E. Lowery, a nineteen-yearold former slave, became the first student to be admitted to Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in the year 1869.* Moreover, as the first student at Claflin, he was also the very first student enrolled at a black university in the entire state. Young Irving Lowery embodied all the hope that the ideals of Reconstruction portended for African Americans in South Carolina: if a former slave could become a college man and follow his calling to both religious and civic leadership, he might help rebuild all that was the best in the South. Despite the hardships Lowery encountered throughout his life, his narrative is marked by an almost disconcerting optimism. The product of a Reconstruction-era education, Lowery’s memoir is marked by a relentlessly positive perspective constructed quite consciously as an agenda of uplift and inspiration. Yet, despite the tone of optimism that characterizes *As stated in Blinzy I. Gore, On a Hilltop High: The Origin and History of Claflin College to 1984, “A former Baker Theological Institute matriculant, Irving Lowery, is credited with having been the first student to enroll at Claflin University” (Spartanburg , S.C.: Reprint Company, 1993), 53. 168 | I Belong to South Carolina this narrative, Lowery’s story nonetheless reveals much about the uneasy relations between blacks and whites in the immediate and later years following the Civil War. His story demonstrates just how much was at stake in maintaining such optimism and not falling into fatalistic despair. The purpose of his narrative is clearly stated: he “felt it to be his mission to write of the better side” of slavery. Lowery admits, “I cannot express the pleasure I have had in sitting down, and recalling the incidents of my childhood and youth.” While this observation may seem surprising coming from someone who had been enslaved, his descriptions of his upbringing seem to justify such nostalgia. Lowery’s description of the Frierson plantation on Pudden Swamp is vivid and even graceful. He wistfully recalls the old plantation to be much like a paradise, where the slaves, as well as the whites, “got their portion” of its making. Lowery’s Pudden Swamp was an “old farm house, where the white folks lived, nestled in the midst of a clump of stately old water oaks.” To emphasize his notion that the Friersons treated their slaves well and had nothing to hide, he adds, “On most plantations in those days the ‘negro quarters’ was located in the rear, or at least some distance from the white folks’ house. But not so in this case, for these were located in front, but a little distance from the house and from the avenue.” Lowery’s paradise includes fields of orchards bursting with fruit and a smokehouse full of meats, a place in which neither the “white folks” nor the slaves wanted for anything. Lowery portrays Pudden Swamp as almost entirely self-sufficient and likens its barns to “one of Pharaoh’s barns in Egypt at the end of the seven years of plenty.” As a boy, Lowery was responsible for a few simple chores, such as blowing the horn to wake the slaves in the morning and fetching the mail, but his overall duties, as he recalls them, appear to have been minimal. As Lowery matured, his master did not fail to notice the talent of his young slave. According to Rev. J. Wofford White, who wrote the section of the narrative titled “Brief Sketches of the Author,” Lowery’s life was so simple and he was such a favorite on the plantation that Frierson even purchased a pony for his “exclusive use to ride for mail and do errands.” Lowery’s narrative is initially shaped by the mediation of the aforementioned Reverend White, a childhood companion, close friend, and fellow black man whom Lowery describes as “born and reared in the same neighborhood with myself.”* White’s initial “Brief Sketches of the Author” section *Reverend White’s “Brief Sketches of the Author” were written and published in a Boston newspaper, the Christian Witness, twenty years before Lowery’s...