Download Redcliffe Southern Times - South Carolina State Parks

REDCLIFFE PLANTATION
181 REDCLIFFE RD
BEECH ISLAND, SC 29842
Redcliffe Southern Times
(803) 827–1473
V O L U M E
UPCOMING
EVENTS AT
REDCLIFFE

African-American
Experience Tours
Throughout February
Th-M @ 11, 1 & 3
$5/Adult, $3/SC Seniors

Life, Love & Leisure:
Women of Redcliffe
Tours
Mar 9 & 10 @ 11, 1 & 3
$5/Adult, $3/SC Seniors
For more information on these
programs please contact the park.
Park Staff
Park Manager
Joy Raintree
Park Interpreter
Elizabeth Laney
Park Technician
Doug Kratz
Interesting Fact
On January 28, 1841 a boy
was born to enslaved
laborers Coober Shubrick
and Henry Fuller at Silver
Bluff Plantation.
His name?
Hardtimes.
Unfortunately Hard (as
he was nicknamed) died
after just 5 months.
“Hardtimes” was a boy’s
name that can be commonly seen in the records
of large slave populations.
7 ,
I S S U E
8
F E B R U A R Y
2 0 1 3
.
Redcliffe & the Emancipation Proclamation
January 01, 2013 was the 150th
year since the passage of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation,
a
document
whose importance to US History
has been compared to the Declaration of Independence and the
US Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln actually issued
a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 following the
Union victory at Antietam. This
preliminary address made several key points—the first being
that Lincoln would officially
issue the proclamation on January 1, 1863 if the Confederate
states did not return to the Union. He even offered confederate
states the option of instituting a
measure of “gradual” emancipation of their slaves— a measure
that had previously been adopted
by many Northern states. The
second point that he made was
that the war was being fought to
restore “constitutional unity.”
The irony being that the official
proclamation he would release
the following year would be critical to supporting the idea that
the war was not just about con-
stitutional unity but about the
emancipation of enslaved human
beings as well.
The impact of the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation was
felt at Redcliffe. It would not be
until the 1920’s however, that
Elizabeth Hammond, a teenager
at Redcliffe during the Civil War,
would finally record the experience. Writing about the Christmas
of 1862 she states: “I did not
know till long afterwards how
uneasy my Mother was. Lincoln
had ordered a proclamation setting all negroes free. Nobody
knew how they might behave.
Ours took no notice of it, till after
the close of War. And then very
few of them left us.”
Lincoln had certainly not set out
to free the slaves when he ran for
election back in 1860. His republican party campaign ran under a
slogan of “Free Speech, Free
Homes, Free Territory.” The original intent of his platform was to
keep new territories free of slavery. Obviously this focus had
changed by late 1862. When none
of the southern states took Lincoln up on his offer to return to
the Union in September of 1862
he made good on his threat to
issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 01, 1863. The
proclamation, however, freed only
slaves in states that were in rebellion against the United States, but
not in border states like Kentucky
or West Virginia. Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward,
had this response: "We show our
sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot
reach them and holding them in
bondage where we can set them
free."
It is very likely that many of the
Hammond slaves did not know of
the proclamation or its promises
of freedom and if they did, that, as
Seward had predicted, they were
beyond the reach of Union forces
and protection. So long used to
the condition of slavery, when
freedom did finally come to many
of the people enslaved on the
Hammond plantations they didn’t
know what to make of their new
status. On being offered his freedom, Henry Slow, an enslaved
butler at Redcliffe had this to say:
“I don’t want no freedom.”
February’s African
African--American Experience Tours
All Month, Thursday—Monday @ 11, 1 & 3
Join Redcliffe Plantation SHS throughout the month of February while we turn our regularly scheduled house tours into African-American Experience tours! The tours will feature prominent Redcliffe families such as the Henleys, Smiths, DeWalts,
Wigfalls, Crawfords and many others as we explore the historic slave cabins, 20th century kitchen and historic mansion.
How is your attention to detail?
Do you know where (and what) these objects are at Redcliffe?
Look for them on your next visit!
answer: (left to right), birdhouse right above basement to the left of the mansion front porch; soap dish on
wall of slave quarters, room on the left; track servicing door to one of stable stalls
Document of the Month
JH Hammond’s Slave Birth & Death Register
James H. Hammond’s register of slave births
and deaths consist of eleven pages in two separate locations in Hammond’s daily plantation
journal. It is perhaps one of the most important
records that documents the enslaved families of
African descent on the Hammond Plantations.
What kind of information does the register contain?


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Records of 439 births (including the name of
child & parents)
Records of 322 deaths
Lineages of approximately 70+ families, for
multiple generations dating back to 1831
Naming trends in the enslaved community
Birth & death rates for the slave population
Although the records are held in the James Henry Hammond
Papers at USC’s Caroliniana Library, Redcliffe Plantation has
scanned copies and a searchable transcription of the records
which it makes available to family descendants, researchers and
members of the public on request.