It Wasn't All Moonlight and Magnolias

In early September, 1833 a few people stood around a small, open grave on the grounds of the Chapel of Ease on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. In the grave was a small, wooden coffin which bore the body of little Caroline Mary Scott, age 3 years and 10 months, who had died a few days earlier. Her mother, Sarah A. Scott, stood quietly weeping – her grief at the loss of her little one compounded by concern for her other child – Adaline Matilda, who lay seriously ill at home. Imagine the depth of her grief when, after watching Caroline pass away, she then saw Adaline Matilda die three days after her sister, one month short of her 6th birthday. The poignant scene on the grounds of the Chapel of Ease repeated itself all over again.

To be a child in the 19th century was a perilous affair. In the south, 6% of children born in 1850 died before their first birthdays. 12% died by the age of 5. Nationally, children under the age of 5 accounted for 38% of all deaths in the United States. By 1860, that number had increased to 43%. A walk through any cemetery in the Lowcountry attests to this fact, tiny tombstones adorned with lambs and rosebuds standing vigil over the sad reality.

We don’t know what happened to little Adaline and Caroline. We also don’t know what happened to the little girls buried next to them – Anna Catherine and Sarah Jenkins Pope, who died in 1851 and 1853 at the ages of 10 months and 16 months. But we do know that life for children during that time was full of hazards. Not only were they prone to accidents, but they succumbed to diseases that seem so foreign to us in our medically enlightened world today – Yellow Fever, Malaria, Typhoid, and Scarlet Fever. Stillborns, miscarriages, and newborn deaths also contributed to the anxiety of antebellum parents.

An antebellum child

Mothers worried constantly about their children. In a letter to Elizabeth Bordley Gibson in 1839, Nelly Custis Lewis wrote, “When our children are sick we are miserable and should they recover, we constantly fear that they may be again ill, and when we see them suffer without the power of relieving, and often unable to discover what it is which afflicts them, happiness seems out of the question.”

Motherhood was the prevailing source of a sense of worth to southern women in the mid-19th century. It was central to their status. But there was also great responsibility put exclusively on mothers to keep their children alive and healthy. In many ways, given the severe lack of medical understanding and knowledge at the time, this was often an impossible task and a very unfair expectation. And when their children died, the evangelical teachings of the day confined them to only one of the stages of grieving – acceptance. They were told that it was God’s will that their children died and they should quietly resign themselves to it. Many believed that God had taken their children because they loved them too much –more than God himself, and they believed that He punished them for it. Mary Jeffreys Bethell reflected on her living daughter in her diary, saying “we must not love her too much, the Lord might take her." (Mary Jeffreys Bethell Diary)

Carl Wilhelmson's "The Sick Child"

An inquiry into the culture of antebellum life on the Sea Islands lends some interesting insight into the rituals and customs that surrounded these untimely deaths. Letters were written to family members and friends on mourning paper - stationery lined with black borders. The heavy black borders indicated the deepest grief; the borders lightened as the bereaved transitioned through the mourning period. If you received one of these in the mail, you knew immediately that someone you knew had passed on.

Frequently, these letters would contain a lock of hair that was made into jewelry. We take pictures of everything these days but, in the mid-19th century, sometimes a lock of hair was the only thing the family would have to remember the child by. And it may seem very morbid to us today, but photography was so new and hard to come by that families frequently only spent the effort to “make a likeness” of the child after he had died. Perhaps having a picture didn’t seem important while the child was alive. But certainly the grief over the loss of the child would be compounded if there was nothing with which to remember him.

Some historians have argued that the high mortality rate made mothers somewhat indifferent; that the loss of children to accident and sickness happened so often that mothers weren’t affected by it. What a ridiculous idea. In 1849, Margaret Dickins wrote to her husband in a letter saying, “I am very, very miserable , every day I miss and mourn for my Mary. It is dreadful to think I shall never see her on earth again, at times I can scarcely bear up under the agonizing thought.” (Francis Asbury Dickens Papers). And although southern patriarchy required strength and stoicism from men they were allowed to openly express their grief at these times even while their wives were encouraged and expected to resign themselves to the fate of their children. While quelling their emotions was expected of women, it was praised in men and the entire household did everything it could to support him and help him recover from his grief.

So a visit to the Chapel of Ease always leaves me with a faint melancholy feeling. I never go there without stopping at the graves of Anna, Sarah, Adaline, and Caroline and thinking of what it must have been like to have been a parent isolated on a remote island off the South Carolina coast, helplessly watching a little one pass away. The Chapel of Ease is a charming and graceful spot, but is also a place where the realities of living on a lonely sea island in the mid-19th century are evident. To stand at the graves of these children and imagine the events surrounding their deaths is to be reminded that life in the antebellum south wasn’t all moonlight and magnolias.

The pictures of children used in this post are not pictures of the Scott and Pope girls. Unfortunately, I couldn't find pictures of them. However, the pictures do reflect the time period of the mid-19th century and what they might have looked like.

Additionally, I made an assumption that the Scott children were buried at two separate times, given that they died 3 days apart and burials during that time generally happened very quickly. It is possible that the two girls were buried at the same time.
The painting is Carl Wilhelmson's "The Sick Child".