Anna Watson's Scrapbook: A Study of Historical Memory and Identity
Author(s): SARAH SENETTE
Source: Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association , Vol. 59, No.
2 (Spring 2018), pp. 133-166
Published by: Louisiana Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26475478
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Anna Watson's Scrapbook:
A Study of Historical
Memory and Identity
By S A R A H S E N E T T E*
"I don't pretend to account for inconsistency; I
merely state the hard fact."—Anna Watson
On the very first page of her voluminous scrapbook, Anna
McCall Watson wrote in her somewhat shaky hand, "what
hath made thee sad my darling, why those fearly [sic] wars?
I see what hast caused that frown—o sorry I have not been
more kind to thee."1 Beneath these lines, Watson posted a
vivid print of two young lovers (Figure One). In the image,
entitled "Stealing a Kiss," the girl coyly leans away from a
slightly older man, presumably her beau. Roses lay strewn
*
The author is a doctoral candidate at Tulane University.
1
Anna Watson, "Scrapbook," n.d., box 9, fol. 1, Cross Keys Plantation
collection mss. 918, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New
Orleans, La., hereafter cited as Plantation collection. Please note that
Watson did not write on to the back-cover but wrote the poem out and
pasted it there. To me this act suggests that she was both covering old
writing and wanted this poem to open the scrapbook. I believe the latter
suggestion also implies that she felt the poem to be important.
133
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134
LOUISIANA HISTORY
in her lap and in a basket nearby. While this use of floral
imagery visually suggests that the girl is in "the flower of
youth," its strategic placement on her lap likewise indicates
that she has not been deflowered, or is still a virgin. The
overall tone of romantic innocence in the image contrasts
sharply with the sorrowful and self-reproachful tenor of the
writing.
When Anna Watson placed these two items in her
scrapbook she was sixty-three years old, had buried three
children, and had lived through a radical transformation in
southern society. Although born in Mississippi to Dugall and
Susan McCall, Watson spent the majority of her life in
Tensas Parish, Louisiana, at Cross Keys plantation after she
moved there at the age of seventeen with her husband
William Watson. Despite the fact that the Civil War
drastically altered the area, there is considerable continuity
in the written records surrounding the plantation. Watson
herself kept numerous diaries but did not begin her
scrapbook until the end of her life. For Watson, as for many
women in the nineteenth century, scrapbooking was "a
creative expression, a deliberate effort by one individual to
make sense of her life by composing it."2 It was, in short, her
autobiography.3 As such, it provides a highly emotional lens
to examine what Watson felt were the most important
aspects of her life and acts as a forum for her to define
herself as woman in post-bellum society. Yet Watson's
scrapbook can do more than help the reader explore one
woman's psyche. It provides a unique glimpse into
antebellum and post-war society while probing the function
of memory in the creation of cultural identity. Moreover, the
2
Patricia P. Buckler and C. Kay Leeper, "An Antebellum Women's
Scrapbook as Autobiographical Composition," Journal of American Culture,
14 (March 1991): 1-8.
3
Ibid.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
135
Figure One: "Stealing a Kiss," color lithograph, 1890, Anna Watson's
Scrapbook, mss. 918, box 8, fol. 9, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane
University.
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136
LOUISIANA HISTORY
scrapbook itself is an unusual source, containing visual
material, personal writing, snippets of popular poems, and
prose, and it merits examination in its own right as a
historical document. Using the medium of Anna McCall
Watson's scrapbook, in addition to her diaries, this essay
will examine how Watson's perspectives on motherhood,
women's rights, and plantation life evolved from 1849 until
her death in 1902. As such, this study likewise demonstrates
the way in which the South's shifting cultural terrain and
Anna Watson's personal history often contradicted, distorted, or reframed women's roles in the creation of
southern post-war memory and nascent Lost Cause
ideology.
Although extremely popular in the nineteenth century,
scrapbooking as a self-conscious medium through which
scholars can engage with both history and memory has only
very recently been taken seriously by historians.4 This
reluctance is unsurprising as scrapbooks themselves are a
difficult medium, at once public and private, idealized and
confessional. Indeed, the physical aspects of scrapbooking
offer numerous challenges to historians as items are rarely
placed chronologically and generally combine a variety of
materials such as newspaper clippings, poems, photos,
cartoons, advertisements, ticket stubs, and other ephemera.
4
Scrapbooks have an interesting history of their own, as they grew out
of commonplace books over the course of the nineteenth century but
trace their origin to the medieval period. They were equally popular with
men and women and were practiced across socioeconomic and racial
lines. Scrapbooks could be blank books sold for that purpose or
repurposed books. Scrapbooking became so popular by the end of the
nineteenth century that the practice was taught in school. Indeed, it is
probable that Anna Watson may have first heard of scrapbooking from
her children. For a history of the scrapbook see Ellen G. Garvey, Writing
with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance
(New York, 2012), ch. 1.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
137
The reader must infer a hierarchy of importance because
there is no generally accepted scrapbook format. Most items
are undated and, even if they are, nineteenth-century
newspapers often reprinted older material.5 Nonetheless,
scrapbooks represent an untapped wealth of information
because they "express individuality [and] memorabilia
scrapbooks also mark entry into group identities."6 Ellen
Gruber Garvey defines this process of nineteenth-century
scrapbooking as "performing archivalness," because it is a
personal process of cataloging one's life for public
consumption.7 This interplay between personal representation and the desire to present an idealized self is but
one of the challenges, and lures, of scrapbooks as history.
Indeed, "the appeal of scrapbooks may well lie in their
ambiguity."8
While scholars of the nineteenth century have been
somewhat slow to embrace the historical potential of the
scrapbook, they have had no such reservations about
engaging historical memory more generally.9 Although the
5
Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 2-4, 6-7.
6
Ibid., 14.
7
Ibid., 18.
8
Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia Buckler, eds., The Scrapbook in
American Life (Philadelphia, Penn., 2005), 25.
9
Due the chronological scope of this paper, I am only going to engage
with the historical memory of the plantation South and the Civil War. For
an excellent extended discussion of the historiography of historical
memory, individual memory, and social memory see Bruce E. Baker, What
Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (Charlottesville, Va., 2007), 3-4, 6-10. For a more detailed look into the dissent in the
creation of historical memory and the Lost Cause see Victoria E. Bynum,
The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 2010). For a short rendition of how the Civil War became repurposed
in the memories of both the North and the South read C. Vann Woodward,
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138
LOUISIANA HISTORY
field of historical memory saw rapid expansion in the late
1970s and early 1980s, it continues to gain traction from
both international historians and popular debates over
issues such as the meaning of the Confederate battle flag.10
Since the 1980s, historians of memory in the nineteenth
century centered their studies on the development of
southern Lost Cause ideology, which functioned as "a
collective memory," that emphasized the bravery of the
Confederates soldiers who had died for a noble cause—in a
war fought in the name of states' rights, not slavery.11 More
recently historians such as Nina Silber have examined the
role of sentiment in northern historical memory as well.12
Although the expansive field of nineteenth-century
historical memory covers much terrain, including race,
literature, and gender, the field can be divided into
historians who examine the phenomena of creating
historical consensus versus those who study the critical
"Reflections on a Centennial: The American Civil War," Yale Review, 99
(June 1961): 104-13.
10
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and
Southern Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 2-4, 5, 8, 11-4, 16, 18, 22-3; W.
Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 16, 18-9. One example of the contradictory and
extreme ways in which historical memory continues to fascinate the
public is found in Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the
Unfinished Civil War (New York, 1998). The book was so popular it was
reissued in 2010.
11
Please note that the term has many connotations and can serve many
different aspects of post-war society. I have selected this relatively simple
definition because it includes what I consider the three main features of
Lost Cause ideology: valorization of Confederate dead, collective memory,
and pre-war nostalgia. Glenn W. LaFantasie, Gettysburg Requiem: The Life
and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates (New York, 2006), xxiii.
12
Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), 2-3.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
139
minority. In this capacity, white women occupy a
problematic historical place because they are well
documented as both builders of Lost Cause ideology and as
dissidents.13
Post-war, southern women's remembrances took a variety
of forms and influenced southern society directly and
indirectly. Initially dismissed by Gaines M. Foster in Ghosts of
the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the
13
For histories of women as consensus builders in historical memory see
Karen L. Cox, Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and
the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, Fla., 2003); Sarah E.
Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War,
1861-1937 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003); Sarah H. Case "The Historical Ideology of
Mildred Lewis Rutherford: A Confederate Historian's New South Creed,"
Journal of Southern History, 68 (2002): 599-628; Elizabeth Young, Disarming
the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago, Ill., 1999);
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
(New York, 2008); Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead, But Not the Past:
Ladies Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008);
Cynthia J. Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. Monuments to the Lost
Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville, Tenn.,
2003); H. E. Gulley, "Women and the Lost Cause: Preserving a Confederate
Identity in the American Deep South," Journal of Historical Geography, 19
(1993): 125-41. For women as dissidents see Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of
Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 2014) 7-8, 17; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War:
Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, 2013); Nina Silber, Battle
Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (New York, 2006),
particularly "Sexual Terror in the Reconstruction South," as this is one of
the few accounts that examines the experiences of African American
women during Reconstruction and engages in the idea of historical
memory. For a discussion of historical memory more broadly see Michael
G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in
American Culture (New York, 1991); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The
Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); David W. Blight,
Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst,
Mass., 2002); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost
Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (New York, 1987).
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LOUISIANA HISTORY
New South, the pivotal role women played in shaping public
memory has been explored by more recent historians of
southern women in the post-war South. In addition to
monument building, women "produced a steady account in
both fiction and prose to consecrate a 'proper' southern
understanding of antebellum society."14 Yet, as historians
such as Drew Gilpin Faust have noted, women's reshaping of
southern society and their reestablishment of their place
within it led to a "rehabilitation of patriarchy" that
conflicted with women's more public post-war roles.15
Through their writing, among other avenues, women
transformed southern definitions of manhood and womanhood. As Jane Turner Censer argues, women's writing
initially critiqued Confederate men, but "by the 1890s
women authors had lapsed into admiration for the assertive
strength they identified with the southern male."16 While
historians of memory have used women's novels and
published memoirs to great effect in examining women's
participation in recasting southern memory and society,
women's diaries have a more ambiguous usage.17
Like scrapbooks, unpublished diaries are both public and
private. Women diarists, such as Anna Watson, used diaries
as "self-improvement and self-instruction," in addition to
14
Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 26-33, 38-46, 31-9, 69-78.
15
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South
in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 247.
16
Thomas J. Brown, "Civil War Remembrance as Reconstruction," in
Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum
America, (New York, 2006).
17
Gardner, Blood and Irony, 5; Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff,
Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries (Amherst, Mass., 1996),
2-4, 6, 8; Sharon Talley, Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma
and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861 (Knoxville,
Tenn., 2014) x, xi, xiii.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
141
guides for subsequent generations.18 Diaries could also be
intensely personal and reflect the diarist's unadulterated
opinions. As such, historians have used women's diaries in
illuminating both the discourse surrounding women in the
nineteenth century and their actual experiences.
In some ways, women's participation in the discourse
surrounding the Civil War is far easier to reconstruct than
their lived experiences and, like the historiography of
nineteenth-century memory, has generated substantial
scholarship. Indeed, monographs pertaining to women in
the Civil War actually predate the women's rights
movement. Fundamentally, however, the historiography of
white southern women in the Civil War era grapples with
the issue of the degree to which the war created new roles
for women.19 While many historians see the Civil War as
rupturing women's social fabric, other historians argue for
more continuity. Regardless, the overwhelming majority of
the historiography on white southern women focuses on
elite planter women. Yet even in this relatively small group
of women, there is considerable diversity in the ways in
which women conceptualized major life experiences, such
as motherhood.20
18
Kimberly Harrison, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and
Confederate Persuasion (Carbondale, Ill., 2013), 16.
19
Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction A
Nation of Rights (New York, 2015), 188. Please note this is not the only issue
within this historiography, just a way of framing the issue of women's
experiences before, after, and during the Civil War.
20
Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control
in the Old South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 16, 18-21; Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett
Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana, Ill.,
2000), 1-3, 4-5; Faust, Mothers of Invention, 3, 4-8; Stephanie McCurry,
Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge,
Mass., 2010), 2, 3-4, 5-6, 7, 9-10; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of
Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008), 2-
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LOUISIANA HISTORY
Anna McCall Watson's scrapbook depicts being a mother
as one of, if not the, most important aspects, of her life—in
spite of her complicated history as a mother before and
after the Civil War. In 1890, her scrapbook is littered with
sentimental poems about mothers and children, pictures of
children at play, and saccharine anecdotes about children.
Her scrapbook portrays motherhood as a near-sacred
calling. For instance, Watson posted a newspaper clipping of
a poem, simply entitled "Mother." The poem exalts motherhood beyond any other nineteenth-century female role,
exclaiming "in all the world—a where e're you roam—with
sister, wife or brother, you'll never find so sweet a home as
that one made by mother."21 Even if "a wife you may in
goodness smother," a mother's love will always supersede
any other feeling.22 Watson's effusiveness in her scrapbook
indicates, but distorts, a relationship that she appears to
have had with her children. Rather than mirroring her
complicated and occasionally frustrating experiences as a
mother, Watson's depiction of motherhood in her scrapbook
reflects shifting views of motherhood in the years surrounding the Civil War.
Although popular media depicting mothers prior to the
Civil War portrayed them as "having great power over
children's present and future," and "described them as akin
to heavenly influenced [people]," Anna Watson appears to
have remained largely indifferent to this interpretation of
motherhood as a primarily moral endeavor until the last
5, 6-8, 17; Thavolia Glymph, "The Civil War Era," in Nancy A. Hewitt, ed., A
Companion to American Women's History (New York, 2002), 168-71, 174, 176,
178, 181, 188-89.
21
H. C. Dodge, "Mother," n.d. Anna Watson Scrapbook, box 9, fol. 1,
Plantation collection.
22
Ibid.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
143
decades of the nineteenth century.23 In contrast to the
dictates of the "True Womanhood" movement, which was
popular before the Civil War, Watson did not aggrandize
motherhood's ethical importance and instead took a rather
mechanical view of it.24 For example in her 1849 diary, at
age twenty, Watson never once remarks on the positive
traits of her two young children, Eddie and Willie. There are
no sentimental reflections on their character and almost
nothing on their development. This is not true for the other
members of the household. Ann, the thirteen-year-old
house slave, is "quite smart," and Watson regularly
comments on the disposition of her female neighbors.25 The
mechanics of child-rearing get comment, such as when
Anna "began weaning Willie" or when she completed an
article of children's clothing.26 Indeed, the only time she
elaborates on her personal relationship with her small
children was to complain when she "had considerable
trouble with Willie to get him dressed and everything."27
23
Sarah Frances Smith, "'She Moves the Hands that Moves the World,'
Antebellum Child-rearing: Images of Mother and Child in Nineteenthcentury Periodicals for Mothers," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Minnesota, 2006), 146; Nancy M. Theriot, Mothers and Daughters in
Nineteenth-Century America: The Biosocial Construction of Femininity
(Lexington, Ken., 2015), 25-6.
24
Susan M. Cruea, "Changing Ideals of Womanhood During the
Nineteenth-Century Woman's Movement," General Studies Writing Faculty
Publications (September, 2005): 191, accessed February, 14, 2017, http://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=gsw
_pub.
25
Anna Watson, "Diary," July 30, 1849, box 1, fol. 1, Plantation collection;
Edwin McCall to William Watson, "Bill of Sale," August 10, 1853, box 8, fol.
9, ibid. This bill of sale was for various slaves, including Ann. She was
seventeen when sold.
26
Anna Watson, "Diary," May 26, 1849, box 1, fol. 1, Plantation collection.
27
Ibid., November 8, 1849.
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LOUISIANA HISTORY
Even when they fell ill, Watson rarely seems distressed
about the children. Despite an outbreak of cholera so severe
that her neighbors at Island Place plantation moved their
slaves, Watson almost off-handedly observes that "the baby
[Willie] is not very well today."28 There is no record of
Watson having ever sent for a doctor when one of her
children was sick, which would have been a good idea as it
does not appear that Watson herself was much of a
physician. For example, when Willie contracted a summer
cold, she "gave him [her] Laudanum through mistake."29
Despite the exhortations of Watson in the 1890s that "you'll
never find another who'll stick to you through good or ill
and love you like a mother," Watson's accounts in 1849 tell a
different story.30 The only time Watson sent for a doctor was
when her husband, not her children, fell ill. Additionally, on
another occasion when her husband was ill, Watson "was
awake with him all night," something she never records
doing with the children.31 Of course it could be that Watson
did not record sitting up with her small children because it
was an expected duty, but when taken in conjunction with
other evidence from the period, it is more likely that Anna
Watson was not a particularly emotionally invested
mother—and certainly not the fervently devoted parent she
seems when assembling her scrapbook decades later.
Watson became more interested in her children as they
grew older and less dependent. By 1867, she frequently
mentions taking her children, William and Olive, with her
28
Ibid., January 8, 19, 1849.
29
Ibid., August 2, 1849.
30
H. C. Dodge, "Mother," n.d. Anna Watson Scrapbook, box 9, fol. 1,
Plantation collection. Italics added for emphasis.
31
Anna Watson, "Diary," May 24, 1849.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
145
on visits.32 Watson was closer to her thirteen-year-old
daughter, however, than to her son. From Watson's diaries,
the reader gets a sense that this closeness between mother
and daughter grew from the gendered nature of women's
work on the plantation. Willie, for example, accompanied
his father fishing and down to the cotton gin, whereas Olive
helped her mother sew and occasionally iron. Olive and
Anna Watson did most of the social work, meaning they
called on their neighbors, prepared the gatherings that took
place at Cross Keys plantation, and even "planted seed in
the flower garden."33 The frequency with which Watson
mentions Olive's help strongly suggests to the reader that
Watson was grateful for it and valued this particular
relationship with Olive.34
Yet this affection born out of working side-by-side is still a
far cry from the idealized vision of mother and infant that
emerges from Watson's 1890 scrapbook. One poem,
rendered in infantile dialect and entitled "The Mammas,"
depicts two small girls engaged in conversation about their
"babies," which the reader is led to believe are in fact baby-
32
While unclear, due to the lack of consistent census records around the
Civil War, Anna Watson may have also lost her son Eddie during this time.
Third Ward, Tensas, La.; Roll 472; Family History Film 1254472; Page 100D;
Enumeration District 077; Image 0203 1860, Anna Watson, ancestry.com,
accessed May 3, 2015, http://search.ancestrylibrary.com/cgibin/sse.dll?gss=angsg&new=1&rank=1&msT=1&gsfn=anna&gsln=watson&mswpn__ft
p=Tensas+Parish%2c+Louisiana%2c+USA&mswpn=2873&mswpn_PInfo=7%
7c0%7c1652393%7c0%7c2%7c3246%7c21%7c0%7c2873%7c0%7c0%7c&MSA
V=0&catbucket=rstp&pcat=ROOT_CATEGORY&h=40284787&db=1880usfed
cen&indiv=1&ml_rpos=3.
33
Anna Watson, "Diary," April 30, 1870, box 1, fol. 2, Plantation collection.
34
Anna Watson, "Diary," January 9, 1868, April 1, 9, 23, 30, 1870, May 6,
1870, March 2, September 10, December 26, 1871, March 22, 1872,
January 28, February 5, 1873, ibid.
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146
LOUISIANA HISTORY
dolls. This sentimental poem exalts youth and motherhood
specifically in regards to mothers' relationships with their
babies. For example, the poem reads "dat the cwoop, and
dip-dipfewey is de kind of 'sease dat makes de mammas all
so wohn and' weawy."35 This nostalgia over babies does not
reflect Watson's actual experience, as Watson seems to have
actually preferred older children. More likely than
indicating her genuine feelings, Watson's scrapbook reflects
the growing trend in the 1890s to exalt the role of the
mother.36
Images of women in the years during and immediately
following the war tended to glorify soldiers' sweethearts
and wives, but this ideal gradually shifted in the 1870s as it
"drew on [emerging] antifeminism, but also white Protestant anxieties about the pace of family formation amidst
the tide of southern and eastern immigrants to American
cities."37 Watson herself would have had experience with
this influx of immigrants as, post-war, her diary mentions
several visits to New Orleans. While New Orleans could not
compete with the population boom of northern cities, it
nonetheless boasted a substantial immigrant population.
Therefore, Watson's personal experiences would have
supported the resurgence of discourse sacralizing the
mother in the years surrounding the Civil War. Still,
Watson's actual relationships as a mother were more
complex. She seems to have not been particularly interested
in her children in their formative years and preferred them
older. Moreover, she also demonstrated a preference for her
35
"The Mothers," n.d., Anna Watson Scrapbook, box 9, fol. 1, ibid. The
translation reads: "this is the croup and the dysentery, is the kind of
disease that makes the mammas all so worn and weary."
36
Mills and Simpson, Monuments to the Lost Cause, xxi-xxii.
37
Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South
Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2015) 121.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
147
daughter over her sons and seems to have forged this bond
with her daughter in their shared work.38
The contradictory nature of Watson's perspective on
motherhood in the 1890s, when compared to her accounts
of it before and after the Civil War, likewise characterizes
her views of women's rights. Watson's scrapbook displayed
a marked fear of being "unsexed," which almost certainly
developed in response to the emergence of the "New
Woman," who challenged women's "innate purity" and
championed "the same sexual activities as men."39 Moreover, in the nineteenth century, cultural attributes were
commonly thought to have biological underpinnings.
Women and men, having innately different biology, also had
innately different cultural traits. If a female went outside of
what was considered socially accepted work, she would
acquire masculine qualities that led to gender confusion and
social disruption. In the words of one nineteenth-century
historian, to be unsexed meant "the popular belief that any
woman who seeks profession must of necessity be
masculine, unsexed, indelicate, and unworthy of public
esteem."40 In the South, the concept of women being
unsexed was also related to both race and gender as the
"unfeminine" qualities suggested in the term evoked
38
Ibid., 120-22; Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 83-85; Elizabeth Fussell, "Constructing New
Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans," Journal
of American History, 94 (2007): 847-48, accessed April 30, 2015, http://journalofamerican-history.org/projects/katrina/Fussell.html; Smith "She
Moves the Hands that Move the World," 146-48; Anna Watson, "Diary,"
May 22, June 12, 1872, box 1, fol. 2, Plantation collection.
39
Cruea, "Changing Ideals of Womanhood," 201.
40
G. P. Putnam, The 19th Century: A Review of Progress During the Past One
Hundred Years in the Chief Departments of Human Activity (New York, 1901),
193.
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148
LOUISIANA HISTORY
northern abolitionist and feminist movements prior to the
war—and the ostensibly asexual and hardy black "mammy"
of post-war southern memory.41 In 1890, Watson herself
exhibited considerable anxiety over the shifting field of
gender roles in society and what it suggested about the
"nature" of women. For example the cartoon "Doubtful,"
one of several such cartoons in Watson's scrapbook, depicts
a young female cyclist in conversation with an older
gentleman (Figure Two). She is wearing bloomers, a style of
clothing made popular by northern feminists and
abolitionists before the Civil War.42 The young woman also
appears to be smoking a cigar, a clear indication of un-lady
like behavior in the nineteenth century.43 In response to a
query made by the young woman, the older, more
traditionally attired man responds that he is unsure of
whether the company the woman seeks "was a young lady
or one of you young fellows." In assuming that the young
female is male, the man in the carton articulates southern
women's anxieties that removing women from the domestic
sphere and gaining more social liberties will eventually
result in gender confusion and the loss of fundamentally
female attributes.44
41
David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and
Southern History, updated ed. (Baton Rouge, La., 2013), 109; Kristen
Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War
Kansas (Baton Rouge, La., 2009), 100; Faust, Mothers of Invention, 6.
42
Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics,
Health, and Art (Kent, Oh., 2003), 33. It should be noted that American
women's rights advocates Amelia Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the
Grimke sisters, and Lucy Stone were among the first women to wear
trousers in public.
43
Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts eds., High Culture: Reflections on
Addiction and Modernity (Albany, N.Y., 2002), 264.
44
There are several such cartoons in Watson's scrapbook that operate
along the gender confusion theme. They generally ridicule gender-
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
149
Figure Two: "Doubtful" print, 1890, Anna Watson's Scrapbook, mss. 918,
box 8, fol. 9, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University.
bending according to nineteenth-century standards, such as the poems
"Plausible" and "Girl Bachelors." Karen Sánchez-Eppler, "Bodily Bonds:
The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition" Representations, 24
(Autumn 1988): 28-59; Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women
Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 47; Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil:
Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), x, 1, 3-4, 194;
Cunningham, Reforming Women's Fashion, 33; Louise Michele Newman,
White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New
York, 1999), 26.
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150
LOUISIANA HISTORY
Watson's apparent unease in 1890 about gender confusion
as a result of women not maintaining their proper sphere
conflicts with her sustained interest in plantation management and her eventual ownership of Cross Keys plantation.
In 1849, for example, Watson rose early, "before breakfast,"
to go down to the gin and "watch the pressing." Furthermore, she happily records that they "shipped eighteen bales
[of cotton] and sold nine."45 About one week later, Watson
recorded an even bigger shipment of cotton, "twenty bales
on the 'Magnolia.'"46 Watson occasionally accompanied her
husband to the gin, monitored the potato harvest, and
seemed interested in the running of the plantation.47 By
1868, this interest had expanded, deepened, and assumed a
more managerial tone. Rather than merely remarking that
they were planting corn, Watson observed that "no
contracts were made yet, so no work for the laborers ."48
Indeed, in addition to the increased frequency with which
she mentions aspects of plantation management, this more
direct interaction with field hands indicates Watson's
enlarged role in the management of Cross Keys plantation.
Watson also records conducting many sales herself, in
contrast to before the war. For instance, among her many
post-war transactions concerning livestock, Watson sold her
mother's cows to "a Negro man," for "sixty dollars for the
two."49
By the 1870s, Watson was a woman in her mid-forties and
had grown in authority since the Civil War. This shift in
45
Anna Watson, "Diary," September 2, 1849, box 1, fol. 1, Plantation
collection.
46
Ibid., October 6.
47
Ibid., October 12, 13, 19, 25, November, 3, 8, 9, 13, 20.
48
Ibid., January 25, 1868.
49
Ibid., November 2, 1871.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
151
Watson's personal record buttresses the interpretation of
historians such as Drew Gilpin Faust that "with the
departure of white men for battle and the disintegration of
slavery and pre-war prosperity, prerogatives of gender,
class, and race eroded."50 When necessity dictated, Watson
seems to have expanded her role on the plantation well
beyond the ladylike and domestic, despite her reservations
over the consequences of women's rights she expressed in
the 1890s.51
As her managerial functions on the plantation grew,
Watson likewise gradually acquired ownership of Cross Keys
plantation. Immediately following the Civil War, Watson's
husband, William, transferred ownership of his interest in
the plantation to Anna Watson in a series of separate and
paraphernal claims.52 These acts probably reflected William
Watson's desire to circumvent taxes more than confidence
in his wife.53 Yet, this meant that Anna Watson had to signoff on all decisions regarding Cross Keys, such as whether to
sell two hundred and forty acres, lease tracks of land to
their neighbors, and purchase particular supplies for the
50
Faust, Mothers of Invention, 7.
51
Anna Watson, "Diary," January 9, 1868, April 20, May 3, 6, 1870,
March 3, April 6, 11, 29, May 3, 4, August 11, October 14, 27, November 2, 6,
13, January 8, 1872, box 1, fol. 2, Plantation collection.
52
"Historical Sketch," ibid.
53
I am making this assumption because tax records for the time show
that the Watsons were in debt, having lost most of their money invested
in cotton and slaves due to the war. Moreover, there is no record of
William Watson expressing that his wife was a superior manager,
although she may have been. William Watson to George W. Williams, tax
collector, "inventory of taxable items as credit," 1855, box 8, fol. 1; A. P.
Jones to William Watson, "power of attorney, " January 23, 1865, box 8, fol.
9; State of Louisiana "notice of overdue taxes," August 15, 1870, box 8, fol.
1, Plantation collection.
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152
LOUISIANA HISTORY
plantation.54 By 1871, the couple appears to have decided to
purchase the remaining interest of Cross Keys from Dr. Asa
P. Jones, who initially bought the plantation in conjunction
with William Watson.55
Anna Watson's ownership of Cross Keys came at tremendous personal cost, and the parallel experiences of
gaining fiscal autonomy and severing ties with an old friend
became connected in her mind and made her wary of
women's rights, as indicative of social disruption, in later
years. From Anna Watson's perspective, the Civil War
emotionally and physically damaged Dr. Jones, impairing his
ability to help run Cross Keys. Before the war, she
frequently records Dr. Jones and his wife Anna's visits to
Cross Keys plantation. The visits were pleasant, or at least
nothing bad enough happened to merit mention. Furthermore, records before the war show Jones and William
Watson conducting business together. Indeed, Anna Watson
went on at least one slave purchasing trip with them to New
Orleans.56 After the Civil War, however, Anna Watson's diary
records the steady dissolution of Dr. Jones. Alcohol seems to
have been Dr. Jones's preferred poison. One cold and rainy
night in January 1872, Jones and Anna Watson exchanged
terse words, with Jones ending the conversation by
54
Anna Watson, "agreement to place a lien on crops," January 1867, box
8, fol. 8; Anna Watson and William Watson, "agreement to sell A.P. Jones
240 acres from the east end," Oct 1, 1872, box 8, fol. 8; Anna Watson to
Angus C. Watson, "agreement to lease land for four years," January 25,
1872, box 8, fol. 8, Plantation collection. Please note that after 1870 all
receipts regarding purchases on Cross Key plantation are addressed either
to "Anna Watson" or "Mrs. Watson," with no mention of her husband.
55
"Liquidation of bond made by A. P. Jones to William Watson and wife
Anna Watson," January 20, 1870, box 8, fol. 8, ibid.
56
Walter J. Cambell to William Watson, "Bill of Sale," October 4, 1844,
box 8, fol. 9, ibid. Please note Anna Watson legally witnessed this sale of
several slaves to her husband.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
153
swearing "he will try to drink himself to death."57 Although
Anna Watson would maintain some correspondence with
Jones's wife, the couple does not appear to have been able to
salvage their friendship with the doctor.58
Watson's sense of loss at the dissolution of her friendship
profoundly affected her personally and shaped her opinions
on post-war society. In an undated entry in the back of her
diary from 1872-1874, Watson observed "it is so chilling to
find how lightly a matter that lies heavily on our heart
touches the heart of our nearest friend. I don't pretend to
account for inconsistency; I merely state the hard fact."59
Thus for Watson, the accumulation of property and
increased fiscal and social autonomy after the Civil War
came at a terrible price, a price paid by many women during
this period.60 While it may be entirely coincidental, Watson's
scrapbook, which she began in the 1890s, repurposes an old
account ledger beginning in 1874—the same year that Anna
fully acquired Cross Keys plantation and fundamentally
57
Anna Watson, "Diary," January 26, 1872, box 1, fol. 2, ibid. Jones's
alcoholism seems to have also affected Anna Watson's views on drinking
alcohol, as she continued to be a staunch advocate of temperance until
the time of her death in 1902. Her scrapbook argues for temperance, even
at the risk of irritating one's spouse, on several occasions.
58
Anna Watson, "Diary," January 26, 28, February, 10, October, 12, 13, 14,
1872; Anna Jones to Anna Watson, January 5, 1873, box 2, fol. 5, ibid. I am
making this hypothesis on the nature of the Watsons' relationship to
Jones based on the fact that the tenor of Mrs. Jones's letter to Anna
Watson is friendly but does not comment on the legal proceedings. It is
dated after the conflict began between Dr. Jones and the Watsons.
Furthermore, there is no mention of Dr. Jones in Anna Watson's diaries
after October 1872, suggesting personal estrangement.
59
Anna Watson "Diary," n.d., box 1, fol. 2, Plantation collection.
60
Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xi-xviii, 5, 238, 243-44.
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154
LOUISIANA HISTORY
severed ties with Dr. Jones.61 Indeed, in pasting poems and
images supporting more traditional female roles over the
financial records of 1874, one wonders if Watson is not
literally and figuratively erasing that portion of her life
while self-consciously rebranding her legacy. Regardless,
Watson's views that gender confusion resulted if women
ventured outside of the traditional domestic sphere have a
far more complex history than might first appear, one
influenced by personal experience, social change, and a
desire to shape her legacy.62 Indeed, in the years after the
Civil War and the end of Reconstruction many southern
women sought to uphold more traditional views of womanhood, move into the public sphere, and reshape southern
memory to promote a more romantic version of the past.
For Watson, this version of the past focused on her personal
relationships, and as such she rebuilt her scrapbook, but for
many southern women reworking memories was a
collective endeavor and one that helped establish Lost Cause
ideology. Just as Watson literally reformed her scrapbook to
create the past she wished, many southern women helped
physically and mentally reshape southern society through
monument building, literature, and education. As Karen Cox
argues, "women founded the Confederate tradition," be-
61
Anna Watson, "Scrapbook," n.d. box 9, fol. 1, Plantation collection.
Please note that only the first couple of pages are from 1874 and that the
bulk is 1875 and 1876.
62
Thirteenth Judicial District "Petition of Asa P. Jones" in "A. P. Jones
versus Mrs. Anna Watson and William Watson, her husband," doc# 2310,
n.d. box 8, fol. 8; "Notice for Anna Watson to Appear Before the Thirteenth
District Court," April, 1, 1872, box 8, fol. 8; Drake & Garrett "request for
payment of legal services," November 29, 1873, box 8, fol. 8, Plantation
collection. Given the late date of the last item, I am drawing the
conclusion that all the ramifications of the legal battle between Jones and
Watson did not end until the beginning of 1874.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
155
cause "the first southerners associated with the Lost Cause
were women."63
In the context of reordering the South after the Civil War
and Reconstruction, Watson's scrapbook also attempts to
enforce order, particularly racial order, despite the fact that
her experiences following the Civil War demonstrate the
way in which prewar racial and social systems would never
be totally reestablished. Watson's scrapbook reveals a
general preoccupation with categorization, hierarchy, and
race that seem to be conceptually bound together.64 For
example, one prose piece entitled "All Sorts" presents a
dialogue of various "types" of persons in post-war southern
society. In one section, two "colored gentlemen" converse
with one another.65 The first gentleman inquires of the
second what type of work he is doing. The second responds
that he "has left the field of manual labor, sah, an' am now
earning a living by head-work, sah." Intrigued, the first
gentleman asks if this information means his companion is
now preaching for a living, to which his companion
responds "No; I'm the African dodger at the shooting
gallery, sah."66 Like the cartoons mocking women's rights
advocates, this dialogue ridicules African Americans who
venture outside of their socially prescribed place, indicated
by the excessive use of the title sir, or as rendered in
63
Cox, Dixie's Daughters, 2; Glenn Robins, "Lost Cause Motherhood:
Southern Woman Writers," Louisiana History, 44 (2003): 276.
64
Watson seems to have a particular affinity for lists, demonstrated by
the fact that approximately one-fifth of all the media in her scrapbook is
in list form. Nor does this figure include poems as lists, although they also
follow a prescribed format and account for a substantial portion of the
scrapbook's media.
65
"All Sorts," n.d. Anna Watson Scrapbook, box 9, fol. 1, Plantation
collection.
66
Ibid.
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156
LOUISIANA HISTORY
nineteenth-century black dialect, "sah." The implied
assumption of the cartoon is that African Americans'
socioeconomic situation should not rise above field work or
other manual labor because of their ignorance and racial
inferiority. African Americans who attempt to do "headwork," or professional occupations, usurp the proper social
order and thus are good for nothing but target practice.
This is not the only section in which race and social order
are linked in Watson's scrapbook. In an illustrated tale
about "The Elephant and the Ape," the elephant and ape
take the advice of a "dark sage" who tells the animals that
they must work together, each using their own particular
skills, if they wish to achieve success. The animals take this
advice and the dark sage ends the tale with the moral: "each
thing in its place is best."67 While this could certainly be an
innocuous story about animals, the fact that one of the
"things" to be kept in its place is an ape is significant within
a nineteenth-century context, as African Americans in
popular media were often conflated with animals—
particularly the ape. That Watson herself may have
associated apes and African Americans can be deduced by
the fact that this story about an ape appears to the
immediate right of a long racist poem rendered in dialect
about how an older black gentleman loves to eat opossum.68
As with Watson, images of apes visually signaled to white
southern society "the black person's lack of humanity,"
while also associating them with the scientific theories of
the time that "claimed closer relation between blacks and
67
"Elephant and the Ape," n.d. Anna Watson Scrapbook, box 9, fol. 1,
Plantation collection.
68
James Edwin Campell, "Uncle Eph Epicure," n.d. Anna Watson Scrapbook, box 9, fol. 1, ibid.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
157
apes than whites and apes."69 Following the Civil War, the
conflation of black people with apes appeared in a variety of
media, including postcards, souvenirs, advertisements, and
cartoons, and as such it is unsurprising to see this popular
racist perspective in Watson's scrapbook. Moreover,
because of burgeoning theories of racial taxonomy in the
latter half of the nineteenth century, apes, Africans,
biological ordering, and social ordering were widely
connected in both the North and South. As Margret
Humphreys asserts "whether the black man was predatory
ape, or docile dumb brute, such bestial metaphors made it
clear that his body constrained social development."70
Watson is not unusual, therefore, in also relating social
order and black people though the metaphor of apes. Yet
her association of racial and social order does not only
reflect nineteenth-century racial discourse, but also was a
direct response to life on Cross Keys plantation after the
Civil War.71
Prior to the war, Anna Watson seems to have been able to
ignore most of the unpleasant aspects of slavery on Cross
Keys plantation, which is remarkable given that just before
the war the Watsons owned approximately one hundred
people.72 If before the war her brother, Duncan, who owned
69
Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham, N.C., 2004),
344.
70
Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in
the American Civil War (Baltimore, Md., 2008), 29.
71
Ibid., 28-30; Wallace, Dark Designs, 344; Kristina DuRocher, Raising
Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington,
Ken., 2011), 46-7; Jan N. Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks
in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 898-99; Leroy G.
Dorsey, We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the
Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2007), 96.
72
A. P. Jones to William Watson, "power of attorney," January, 23, 1865,
box 8, fol. 9, Plantation collection. "Tensas Parish Louisiana Largest
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158
LOUISIANA HISTORY
a nearby plantation, jailed his runaway slaves during the
heat of summer, and her husband went all the way from
Tensas to New Orleans to purchase just one "negro girl,
griffe color, age fifteen" who is not listed as having any
particular skills, Watson made no mention of it in her
diary.73 Watson raises no suspicions about whether or not
those around her mistreated their bondspeople. Indeed,
Watson does not appear to have thought much about the
lives of enslaved people nor looked too deeply at racial
tensions that may or may not have existed—at least, she did
not commit those thoughts to her diaries. The picture of
plantation life that Anna Watson paints in her 1849 diary
seems generally uneventful. While aware of the plantation's
many enslaved people, Watson gave them little comment.
Slaveholders From 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for
African Americans on 1870 Census," accessed, May, 2, 2015, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ajac/latensas.htm.
73
Duncan McCall "Fine for Runaway Slaves," box 8, fol. 14; W. J. Fallott to
W.W. Watson, "Bill of Sale," March 26, 1848, box 8, fol. 9, Plantation
collection. It should be noted that griffe was a nebulous term, as
phenotypic appearance is itself highly subjective. Griffe designated a
"brownish" color and would have, ostensibly, been less desirable for
sexual purposes than a "mulatto" or "quadroon," which indicated lighter
appearance. What is unusual about this sale is the fact that W. Watson
bought only one slave, who was a young female and, more importantly,
that Anna Watson did not remark upon it. While I imply that her husband
bought the young woman with at least partial intent to have forced sexual
relations with her, the record indicates that he paid approximately the
average price for a slave in 1848, which could suggest that the young
woman was not intended to be used sexually. Mr. Watson's guilt, however,
for the purposes of this argument is less important than Anna Watson's
indifference. Robert Evans Jr., "The Economics of American Negro
Slavery," in National Bureau Committee of Economic Research, Aspects of
Labor Economics: A Conference of the Universities (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 199;
Walter Johnson, "The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of
Racial Determination in the 1850s," Journal of American History, 87 (2000): 68, 26, accessed May 2, 2015, http://www.uvm.edu/~psearls/johnson.html.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
159
She appears to have accepted a vision of racial harmony,
wherein "the darkies have their [Christmas] dinner,"
followed by a dance.74 It should be noted, however, that
Watson never uses paternalistic phrases such as "family"
when referring to Cross Keys's bondspeople, but instead
calls them either "darkies" or by individual name,
suggesting that she did not have to employ a great deal of
intellectual acrobatics to accept the system of slavery as the
proper social norm.75
In contrast to her life before the Civil War, Watson's postwar life appears far more chaotic, particularly in her
inability to control the workforce at Cross Keys plantation.
This inability to order her subordinates almost certainly
influenced Watson's views on race and social order when
assembling her scrapbook. As previously noted, after the
war Watson interacted far more with the laborers of the
plantation than she did before, and while she rarely
indicates race, it is reasonable to assume that many of the
workers were former slaves. Census records from the years
concomitant with Watson's post-war diaries indicate that
there were hundreds of people of color still living in Tensas
Parish who assumed the surname Watson and had been
born in the South, suggesting that they may have been sold
through the domestic slave trade.76 Nor does this figure
74
Anna Watson, "Diary," December 26, 28, 1849, box 1, fol. 1, Plantation
collection.
75
Ibid. Oxford Dictionary defines paternalism as "the policy or practice on
the part of people in positions of authority of restricting the freedom
and responsibilities of those subordinate to them in the subordinates' supposed best interest," accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/paternalism. For a
more extensive discussion of paternalism, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974).
76
Census records of 1870 and 1880, via Ancestry.com, accessed May 1,
2015, http://search.ancestrylibrary.com/cgibin/sse.dll?db=1880usfedcen-
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160
LOUISIANA HISTORY
represent a substantial proportion of the African American
population in the Natchez district. In 1870, "four out of
every five residents were black in the District."77 Thus,
although not every laborer on Cross Keys plantation after
the Civil War was a former slave of Anna Watson, some
were, and the majority of the people working for her were
probably people of color. Given the strict racial hierarchy
before the war, it must have galled Anna Watson to not be
able to control her servants. Watson repeatedly mentions
her inability to keep people at work, such as when "the
Negroes went to get their photographs taken" at a time that
coincided with what may have been the first round of
planting.78
Watson's personal frustration with her inability to order
her surroundings after the Civil War became increasingly
acute in the 1870s and profoundly shaped her conflation of
social and racial order in her scrapbook. For instance,
nothing better demonstrates Watson's helplessness
controlling her workforce than her struggles to find and
keep domestic help—especially a cook. From 1871-1872,
Anna Watson went through thirteen different cooks, and
&gss=sfs28_ms_db&new=1&rank=1&msT=1&gsln=watson&msrpn_ftp=Ten
sas%20Parish%2C%20Louisiana%2C%20USA&msrpn=2873&msrpn_PInfo=7
%7C0%7C1652393%7C0%7C2%7C3246%7C21%7C0%7C2873%7C0%7C0%7C&
_83004002=black&MSAV=0&uidh=2by. It should be noted that William and
Anna were one of a couple of families in Tensas named Watson so it is
unlikely that all of these workers were their former slaves.
77
Justin Behrend, "Overthrowing Local Democracies: The Political
Geography of Reconstruction Violence in the Natchez District," Beyond
Freedom: New Directions in the Study of Emancipation (2011), 4, accessed
May 2, 2015, http://www.yale.edu/glc/emancipation/behrend.pdf.
78
Anna Watson, "Diary," April 20, 1868, box 1, fol. 2, Plantation
collection; U. S. Treasury Department, Letter from the Secretary of the
Treasury, Transmitting Tables and Notes on the Cultivation, Manufacture, and
Foreign Trade of Cotton (Washington, D. C., 1836), 102.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
161
this number does not include the multiple occasions when a
cook quit and then came back to work for the Watsons later.
In 1871, the Watsons' former bondsman, George, was the
cook at Cross Keys plantation.79 George quit on April 1, and
Watson got Rozlin to cook the next day. Watson or the
position displeased Rozlin, because she quit approximately
two weeks later, and Watson remained without a cook until
Rozlin returned to work on April 25. Watson seems glad to
have had Rozlin back, despite the fact that her companion
Jack "took off [with] Rozlin's things at night and took off a
bale of cotton."80 Moreover, Watson became tolerant of
Rozlin's trips into town.81 Despite her efforts, by January
1872 Watson was without a cook again and complaining that
"we all have work to do, [as there is] no servant but Caleb in
the afternoon."82 Caleb quit in February. Frustrated, Watson
went to town to try to get a cook, but with no success.
Finally, in 1873, Watson splurged and hired a white couple
to work at Cross Keys, one Mr. and Mrs. Donawho.83 That
Watson felt this expenditure to be a splurge is evidenced by
the fact that she listed the hiring prices, especially given
79
"Memorandum for Negro Shoes," 1855, box 8, fol. 14, Plantation
collection; Anna Watson, "Diary," March 26, 1871, box 1, fol. 2, ibid. I am
drawing the conclusion that George belonged to the Watsons before the
war because he is listed in the memorandum for shoes and appears in
Anna's post-war diaries.
80
Anna Watson, "Diary," April 25, 1871, box 1, fol. 2, ibid.
81
Ibid., May 1, 1871.
82
Ibid., January 25, 1872.
83
I am assuming that the Donawhos are white because Watson always
uses their title when writing about them, which is not the way she
references her former bondspeople. For instance George, is just "George."
Also, the governess, Miss P., always receives a title even though she is
quite familiar with the Watsons, suggesting that Anna Watson had other
white servants.
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162
LOUISIANA HISTORY
that this is the only time she mentions the amount she paid
a laborer in her diary. Mrs. Donawho received twelve dollars
a month and Mr. Donawho twenty-three. In 2015 equivalent
dollars, that means the couple received $210 and $403
respectively per month—not very much.84 This low wage
might explain why Mr. Donawho went on strike within two
months and likewise forbade his wife to work in the big
house. Although Watson does not say whether Mrs.
Donawho received a raise, Mr. Donawho more than doubled
his pay by summer, further indicating Watson's desperation
in securing a labor force.85
For Anna Watson the ability of her workforce to openly
negotiate pay, privileges, time off, or to leave when they so
chose represented a radical change from her life before the
war. This change must have seemed all the more sudden as
Watson was able to keep human property until just before
the close of the war.86 Formerly enslaved people's freedom
84
United States Department Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price
Index Calculator, accessed May 3, 2015, http://www.bls.gov/cpi/. While
the scholarship on overseers is quite sparse, before the Civil War
overseers on cotton plantations made anywhere from $200-1,000 per year.
Even after his raises, Mr. Donawho only made $236 per year and was likely
frustrated by being on the lower end of average pay despite likely demand
for white male labor. It may be that Mr. Donawho was not initially hired
as an overseer and was then asked to perform the duties, which would
also help explain the strike. William J. Cooper Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill,
The American South: A History, 2nd ed. (New York, 1996), 201-02.
85
Anna Watson, "Diary," May 15, 1873, box 1, fol. 2, Plantation collection.
For a discussion on white women's frustrations with their female
domestic servants post-war see Faust, Mothers of Invention, 77-9. For a more
in-depth examination into the role of African American female domestic
workers see Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic
Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010), particularly the first
chapter.
86
A. P. Jones to William Watson, "power of attorney," January, 23, 1865,
box 8, fol. 9, Plantation collection. The document reads that Jones is giving
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
163
to go where they pleased and leave unsatisfactory working
conditions following the Civil War meant that Watson, like
many a former slave mistress, lost the ability to fundamentally order her surroundings regardless of the human
cost that her order induced. Accustomed to being able to
demand whatever she chose, Watson took for granted
obedience and was shocked by her inability to force people
to work for her after the war. For example, after Watson
went into town to hire a cook, she tersely commented in her
diary that she was "in town. no cook."87 For Watson, it must
have felt like chaos. Thus, when Watson began assembling
her scrapbook in 1890, the memory of social disorder and
her need to metaphorically reestablish that order via her
scrapbook was tied to her post-Civil War experiences in
running the plantation. Through her scrapbook, Watson
tried to reestablish her perception of pre-war racial
hierarchy, wherein she never had to worry about keeping
the "help" content. She attempted to supersede her
memories of the difficulty of post-war and Reconstruction
plantation life with the more halcyon images of racial
harmony, youth, and ease.88
Unfortunately for Watson, who seems to have wanted to
fix an idyllic past, her era was one of profound change. This
battle to create a pleasing narrative of happy and peaceful
times gone by for future readership, while simultaneously
being forced to adapt to radical changes in the racial and
gender hierarchy of the South, represents a fundamental
William Watson control over "said house and slaves," so Anna Watson
likely had access to at least some enslaved people for her personal use.
87
Anna Watson, "Diary," March 2, 1872, box 1, fol. 2, ibid. It should be
noted that Watson also went to Oneonta and Harrison, in addition to
Waterproof, for the purposes of hiring a cook. She managed to secure one
in Oneonta, but the woman left within a week.
88
Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens, 14-6, 20.
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LOUISIANA HISTORY
contradiction in Anna Watson's scrapbook as it likewise did
for post-war southern identity. Yet, truth in the creation of
personal or societal identity is of secondary importance and
can withstand even the most dramatic changes. As James C.
Cobb asserts, "the history of southern identity is not one of
continuity versus change, but continuity within it."89
Weaving together elements of the past into a selfreinforcing narrative for her scrapbook, Anna Watson could
reminisce in a poem she wrote in 1890 about life "down on
the farm . . . [where] I passed life's golden hour," with
impunity, regardless of how she actually felt at the time.90
Similarly, in the creation of the Lost Cause myth,
southerners could peer past the breach of the Civil War and
spin a tale in which they, like Watson, embodied their
ideals. Of course, in practice no one, let alone a whole
society, fully embodies any ideal. Nonetheless, examining
points of contradiction and continuity illuminates the
interplay between personal and public in the creation of
history and heritage. As both creators of, and subjects to,
historical discourse, individuals in the post-war South often
relied on personal solutions to solve the contradictions of
memory. Watson found a way to cope with her inability to
control formerly enslaved people after the war by creating
the memory of order in her scrapbook and leaving that
record for future generations. Not all solutions can be so
straightforward, however, and open contradictions remain
in Watson's actual experience as a mother and manager on
Cross Keys plantation and her attempts to define those roles
decades later. There appears a lack of certitude in Watson's
scrapbook that remains compelling—a slight suggestion that
89
James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New
York, 2005), 7.
90
"Down on the Farm," n.d., Anna Watson Scrapbook, box 9, fol. 1,
Plantation collection.
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ANNA WATSON'S SCRAPBOOK
165
she is somehow aware of the futility of trying to fix the past,
and she mourns it. In the juxtaposition of the small, selfreproachful poem and the picture of the young couple that
opened this article, "Stealing a Kiss" (Figure One), the
viewer suspects that Watson is dissatisfied with her past
choices, as she is "sorry she has not been more kind," in
regard to those "fearly [sic] wars," when she was a young
woman like the one featured in the image.91 Yet the
incongruity of these two items in Watson's scrapbook, when
taken together, also speaks to the inability of both an
individual, and southern society, to coherently recreate the
past, even if that past was, itself, fiction.
While attempting to reconstruct the past from contradictory and personal material such as scrapbooks may
liken to sculpting mist, these sources are without doubt one
of the most revealing mediums by which to study the
creation of post-war identity. Discourse and personal
experience inform the creation of collective and specific
memory, and an individual's feelings about an event, no
matter how incongruous, must be taken into account.
Moreover, idealized gender roles and a person's desire to
appear a "good" woman or man cannot be disregarded.
Scrapbooks, like the identity they reflect, are ambiguous,
but they provide a prism through which historians can
examine the creation of historical memory and regional
identity. Nonlinear, intimate, and didactic, scrapbooks
illuminate the intersection between cultural phenomena
and individual experience and provide a much needed lens
to study how people, like Anna Watson, attempted to
structure their life history and create a cohesive self during
times of radical change.
Just as southern women embraced the contradictions
inherent in upholding traditional womanhood while moving
91
Anna Watson, "Untitled Poem," n.d., ibid.
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LOUISIANA HISTORY
into the public sphere, Anna Watson's scrapbook likewise
fashioned a personal vision of womanhood wherein she
could both mock nineteenth-century feminists and
simultaneously co-run and own a plantation. Similarly, just
as post-war society sought to reestablish control over
people of color through pseudo-scientific theories on race,
Watson also attempted to create a sense of control over
African Americans, and their ability to upset her daily life,
by questioning their fundamental humanity. Finally, Anna
Watson's selective and refashioned memory of both
childhood and race relations on the plantation provide a
discrete view into the gendered way in which Lost Cause
ideology became rooted in southern society. Indeed, it is the
emotional and fictitious aspects of Watson's scrapbook that
are, in the end, the most illuminating.
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