Carol Montgomery, who died on September 15 at the age of 79, lived a fascinating life.
As an Army wife, she traveled the world, learned to fly, observed sea turtle nests at Fort Fisher, and served as a volunteer and instructor at national parks and wildlife refuges across the United States.
She also earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of California Irvine.
Now her husband, former Kure Beach Mayor Mac Montgomery, has published her 1991 doctoral thesis entitled “Charity Signs for Herself.” The volume is available at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and at local libraries.
Montgomery’s academic subtitle, “Gender and Withdrawal of Black Women from Field Labor, Alabama, 1865-1876,” may intimidate some readers. Nevertheless, she discusses topics that turn out to be surprisingly topical.
And the story isn’t just limited to Alabama. It has its roots in the Somerset Place Plantation near Edenton, NC. Celebrated in Dorothy Spruill Redford’s Somerset Homecoming, the plantation is now a State Historic Site that pioneered the interpretation of history from the slaves’ perspective.
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Montgomery does not tell her story in chronological order, but as follows: In 1842, Thomas C. Harrison, a poor physician, married Louisa Collins of the wealthy family that owned Somerset. (Her father and brothers considered him a parvenu and a manly gold digger, so Harrison had to work hard to prove himself.)
Louisa’s dowry brought 50 slaves. Under Victorian law, Harrison was now in control of them, so he marched with them to Alabama to start their own new plantation, Faunsdale, near Selma.
In 1858 Harrison died and Louisa remarried her episcopal priest, Rev. William Stickney. Under the law of the time, the husband was boss, so Stickney became Lord of Faunsdale. He was in charge when Union troops arrived in 1865 and (technically) freed the slaves. Stickney responded by signing up the freedmen for labor contracts that were little better than slavery.
Montgomery, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, uses the Faunsdale and Somerset records as virtual core samples into the history of plantation life before and after slavery.
And she notes a paradox: Before the Civil War, slave men and women worked side by side in the cotton fields, with the women producing as much as the men (and sometimes more).
Between 1865 and 1876, however, the number of women signing labor contracts steadily declined. Traditional accounts from the period claimed that black women withdrew into domestic life and occupations because they wanted to.
However, Montgomery suggests the story is more complicated. For one thing, black husbands are now “signing” their wives’ work. (Remember that according to the law of the time, the man is boss.)
Only single women, like slave Charity Paine in the title, “signed for themselves”. And their numbers dwindled, possibly because Stickney found them too argumentative and argumentative and not subservient enough.
A plantation or two alone is not enough to prove Montgomery’s thesis. Nonetheless, it offers a detailed picture of plantation life before and after the Civil War.
book review
“CHARITY SIGNS FOR YOURSELF: Gender and the Withdrawal of Black Women from Field Work, Alabama 1865-1876”
By Carol Lemley Montgomery
Self-published, $21