Last year, the American Antiquarian Society received a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to support the reorganization, rehousing, and digitization of 655 pages of letters, notebooks, and photographs created by formerly enslaved people. The new digital resource Letters from Freedom provides additional context to the materials and to the stories of the people therein.
At the heart of this project is the Chase Family Papers collection. The Chase family were Massachusetts Quakers who valued education and championed abolition. The collection contains letters from formerly enslaved students of Lucy and Sarah Chase, sisters who traveled from Worcester to Virginia and other parts of the South to teach in freedmen’s schools. At the end of the Civil War, formerly enslaved adults and children sought education at newly founded freedmen’s schools. These schools received support and funding from the Freedmen’s Bureau, missionary associations, and formerly enslaved people themselves.
The Chase Family Collection includes letters written to Lucy and Sarah written by the sisters’ students throughout the South between 1864 and 1870. Letters written home to Worcester by Sarah and Lucy Chase provide descriptions of their schools and students.
The students’ letters tell stories of adversity and achievement. At least two of the students, Julia Anna Rutledge Kitt (b. 1849) and Elias Fenwick Jefferson (1844-1904), continued their studies at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, and later became teachers themselves. Both were students of Lucy and Sarah Chase at the Morris Street School in Charleston, South Carolina, where the sisters taught during 1866-67.
Julia Rutledge wrote to Sarah Chase on December 2, 1867, from Charleston, with news of her sister’s illness and the steps she was taking toward pursuing her secondary education. Less than a year later, in a letter dated October 4, 1868, Julia wrote again to Sarah, this time as a student at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Julia described her daily routine and noted the presence of other students from Charleston, including Elias Jefferson. Although Julia wrote to Sarah, “if you get this letter I will send my picture as I prommise [sic] it and would like you to have one,” the collection does not contain a subsequent letter or photograph. Perhaps one day Julia’s photograph will be recovered!
Julia graduated from Hampton in 1872 and taught at Princess Anne Court House in Virginia before returning to teach in her hometown of Charleston. She is listed in the 1895 Charleston city directory as living at 109 Smith Street with her husband, Wade Kitt, also a teacher.
Two websites had previously contained some of the content now featured on the new Delmas-sponsored webpage: “Through a Glass Darkly: Northern Visions of Race and Reform,”a website developed by Assumption University professor and AAS member Lucia Knoles almost 20 years ago; and “Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries,” a subscription-based project produced by commercial publisher Alexander Street Press in 1999. New digitization of the letters and diary and complete transcriptions have now made the content easily and freely downloadable to a wider audience.
To read the letters from Julia Rutledge, Elias Fenwick Jefferson, and others, please visit the Letters from Freedom resource at:
Amazing!