Mary Watson Fuller. 15 Autograph Letters Signed from the Miller Plantation [and Eutaw Plantation], Bolivar County, Mississippi. May 21, June 23, July 8, 15 and 31, August 9 and 19, Sept. 16 and 27, Oct. 20, Nov. 15, Dec. 8 and 23, 1857, and Jan. 4, 1858, to her mother, Mrs. Roxey Watson, Wolcott, Wayne County, New York; and 1 Autograph Letter Signed by Corydon Fuller, Monticello, Arkansas, Jan. 31, 1858. To his wife’s family. All but one with original mailing envelopes. 69 closely-written pages, total. Further details of the archive available on request.
Three years before the Civil War, a young northern couple, Corydon and Mary Fuller, intimate friends of 26 year-old Ohio college president and preacher James Garfield - future President of the United States – moved South in search of economic opportunity. Corydon, Garfield’s former college roommate, worked as an itinerant book salesman in Arkansas, while his wife tutored six “backward” children of the widowed owner of an 800-acre plantation, worked by 25 slaves, on the Mississippi River. In these letters to her mother in New York (echoed in letters to Garfield in Ohio) Mary gives a vivid account of her lonely 9-month “imprisonment” in a filthy and violent “foreign land”, and her horrified firsthand view of Southern slavery, the embodiment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with real life Simon Legrees, Elizas and Uncle Toms, though “to live through such a tale…in actual scenes and real characters” was far different from “the quiet reading of it in our own free land and beside our peaceful hearth.”
“Never! Never!!”, Mary exclaimed, “have I witnessed such scenes as I have seen here” - “Darkies” nearly worked to death in the cotton fields, housed in “miserable and filthy” quarters, “mere hog pens”. Her own employer was a kindly, illiterate woman, but on a neighboring plantation, a slave was murdered by an overseer who held a dance party to celebrate his acquittal (“only a Nigger dead!”); young Black children were “whipped till they could not walk or lie down, because they did not bring in the full amount of cotton” each evening. Mary heard the “terrible infernal yelps of the blood hounds pursuing the panting fugitive, their jaws gnashing and foaming for a lick of human blood” and saw a slave, “hunted down as though he were a bear…rushing in the face of danger” for “release from his cruel master,,,”. Yet these slaveholders were “very cowardly and live in constant fear” of slave revolt. For all their wealth, “I never conceived of more miserable people.…”, Their entire culture was one of wealthy indolence, plagued by mortal illness, unbearable filth and stench, blamed on “dirty niggers”, but abetted by “slovenly” whites who wore clothes washed by slaves in dirty river water and ate disgusting meals, “soaked in hog grease”, cooked by slaves in dirty kitchens. The slaveholders lived on vast wealth, acquired by “the sweat and toil and stripes of half-fed, half clothed, cursed Blacks…”, spent on “anything that's popular or abominable… whiskey, niggers, shows, excursions and the gratification and delight of the dear young massa’s and missuses …” Drunken white men who spoke of all northerners with derision and dreamed of “fighting Yankees” did nothing but swear, play cards, smoke or chew tobacco, and fight “with pistol, bowie knife and dagger”, while even the ladies smoked cigars, ate snuff “in a fashionable way”, drank wine, ale and even whiskey and lived a life of laziness that Mary “loathed”. “O give me the blessed North”, Mary exclaimed, thrilled when she could escape and return to New York.
Soon after her departure, James Garfield, whom she mentions several times in her letters with warm nostalgia, wrote Corydon that he was glad his old friends were unlike “many of our white-hearted Northerners” who “see a little of Southern hospitality, and then suppose that slavery is all right, because all the masters are not cut-throats. ”Corydon’s and Mary’s letters to Garfield undoubtedly confirmed the young man in his abolitionist passions on the eve of his entry into politics. He and the Fullers kept up an active correspondence throughout their lifetimes, and 30 years later, following the President’s assassination, Corydon published a memoir which quotes many of the letters the men had exchanged – though Mary’s nuanced perspective in these letters adds much to Corydon’s brief reminiscence of their eventful sojourn in Dixie.