A striking intellect, exciting writer, long-time activist, and dedicated teacher, Highgate (1844-1870) certainly deserves more attention in our classrooms and our scholarship. (For more on Highgate, see my Black Print Unbound, as well as an earlier blog entry, “Edmonia Highgate, the New Orleans Massacre, and Christian Recording.”)
As part of my on-going study of nineteenth-century African American engagement with print culture, I continue to look for traces of Highgate and her work, and I wanted to share a recently-recovered letter not listed in the extant scholarship.
Published in the 3 April 1869 National Anti-Slavery Standard, it details Highgate’s later work in Mississippi.
Specifically, it offers a rich sense of the educational struggles and goals of many of the recently-freed people in and around Jackson, Mississippi. It shares local and state news, including noting an assassination attempt on James Lynch (1839-1872), former Christian Recorder editor, editor of the Jackson Colored Citizen, and Mississippi politician and activist. In all of this, the letter speaks powerfully to our current day, too.
It also gives us glimmers of the lives of figures like John Russell Parsons (a white soldier who enlisted soon after graduating from Yale, became a Reconstruction-era Mississippi State Representative from Hinds County, and was found drowned on 3 March 1869) and of Edmonia Highgate’s sister Caroline V. Highgate, listed as “Miss C. V. Highgate,” who would later marry white veteran and politician Albert T. Morgan and have, among other children, twentieth-century writer and peace activist Angela Morgan.
But the gem for me, amid Highgate’s engaging narrative, is the report of freed folks reading, memorizing, and reciting the works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Harper had already done several tours in the South, both lecturing and learning, and she was beginning to add to her rich antebellum literary production (in addition to the various editions of her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects and individual poems published in diverse periodicals, see the recently rediscovered Forest Leaves). Her long blank verse poem Moses: A Story of the Nile was garnering praise, and only two days after Highgate penned her letter, the Christian Recorder would publish the first chapter of Harper’s first serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice, a narrative with powerful echoes in the stories Highgate hints at below.
Enjoy and keep learning!
The Work in Jackson.
Jackson, Miss., March 18th.
To the Editor of the Standard:
Interesting occurrences are transpiring here continually. Perhaps we might afford pleasure to some should we essay to chronicle them. Everything plainly indicates that “good is being made the final goal of ill.”
The bell on the M. E. Church, which was formerly owned by a slaveholder to summon bondmen to their unrequited toil, now calls a large and cheerful assembly, not only to Sabbath School and other sanctuary services, but to the Benevolent and Literary Societies which convene every Saturday night. The former has $110.25 in its treasury. This amount is the combined contributions of most of the hard-working young male and female freed people in this city. Rigid self-denial alone enables them to make these monthly donations, in order that they may care for the poor among them, and defray their burial expenses when they die. In the literary society we noticed mere boys, who had found the opportunity of spending but a few hours daily from their honest vocations, acquitting themselves decorously as presiding officers, and in no instance violating parliamentary rule. Several selections from Whittier and Frances E. W. Harper were rendered by these laundresses, cooks, porters, waiters, etc., with a pathos that told truly that the rhymed story was their own. We were pleased to notice several soldiers giving respectful audience; also the teachers of these youths. Several appreciative grey-headed old aunties were in attendance whose faces expressed the fact that they never expected to see this day.
Our schools contain about three hundred pupils. A society of Orthodox Friends are well represented here by several teachers who teach graded departments in miserably insufficient shanties. “The Gen. Grant” school, taught by Miss C. V. Highgate, is composed mostly of adults who aspire to become teachers. Several promising young persons have been taken and assigned to large schools in the country.
The West Jackson school has been well supplied with maps through the generosity of Northern friends. Night schools are well attended by those who work all day. Some of our pupils were attacked by a gang of rowdies last night who threatened them with rough handling if they “did not stop going to the d----d night school.” A box from McGrawville, N. Y., has just reached us containing some very valuable clothing, also two of Dr. C. P. Grosvenor’s incomparable safety lamps. This timely donation was most acceptable.
The attempted assassination of Rev. Jas. Lynch, you will probably learn from another source. One of Massachusetts’ brave sons, Major J. R. Parsons, met his death, it is currently believed, by “foul play”; he having been over prominent as an ardent supporter of the Radical party.
E. G. Highgate
And if you're wondering about Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor's safety lamps, mentioned above, here's an illustration: