Small Finds, Big Lives

My name is Kelly Sharp and I am an Assistant Professor in Africana Studies and History at Luther College. The image below is unique in that we know not only the identity of the girl, Charlotte Ann Middleton, but also the name of the bondwoman holding her, Lydia Middleton. With the research I conducted this past summer, we now know more than just her name but also details about daily life under enslavement and how she rebuilt her life when she walked out of the Russell house a free woman. I am currently working on an article to contextualize the thousands of objects recovered by the Historic Charleston Foundation’s 2018 excavation of the Nathaniel Russell House kitchen and slave quarters. This research is the beginnings of my second manuscript project, tentatively titled Small Finds, Big Lives, which will primarily use sensory history and material evidence to reconstruct the textures of daily life and labor of urban bondpeople in antebellum America.

This photograph of Lydia and Charlotte serves as a visual reminder of the entwined relationship between the white and black residents of the Russell household, antebellum Charleston, and the US South at large. Charlotte Hellen Middleton (Mrs. E.P. DeWolf) and Nurse Lydia, 1857, by George Smith Cook (American, 1819-1902). Ambrotype on glass. (Courtesy Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association, 1937.05.10)

In 1808, merchant and slave trader Nathaniel Russell moved his family to their newly built home at 51 Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina. During the family’s half-century tenure in the home, the enslaved population of the household varied between nine to thirteen individuals. Lydia was likely born into the enslaved household 51 Meeting Street circa 1795 and labored there as a nursemaid until obtaining her freedom during the Civil War. Fellow bondpeople of the household included a gardener, a seamstress, a cook, a butler, and several maids and footmen, Lydia’s role as nursemaid to the white children of the Russell family possibly required the most intimacy with her enslavers’ family.

While mothers oversaw etiquette and educational efforts of their young sons and daughters, Lydia’s main role was to see to the day-to-day physical needs, comfort, and safely of the white family’s children. This labor included the intimate and daily tasks of quietly entertaining her charges in the third-floor nursery day in and day out alongside basic care like wiping snotty noses, changing diapers, and soothing tears. Over the decades, Lydia cared for three generations of Nathaniel Russell’s family. One tool she likely used was recovered from between the floorboards of the slave quarters: a small coral bead. A commodity extracted principally from the Mediterranean, through the 17th-19th centuries coral was a costly material employed as a status symbol by both enslavers and enslaved. However, in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, parents who could afford to do also supplied their babies with a necklace of coral beads, believed to aid in teething and ward off disease. Since pricy materials such as ivory were used as a cheaper alternative, it’s likely this bead made its way into the slave quarters either as a result of Lydia’s work or as hand-me-down from her enslaver to use with the enslaved children of the household. Perhaps, Lydia nicked it as just one of many coral beads belonging to her charge which she then used to pacify her own child. In any manner, the bead now acts as a symbol, reminding us of the complex material but emotional connections between enslaved women and the white family members for whom they labored.

Though her photograph has been a fixture in tours of the Russell house museum, docents never had answers as to what became of Lydia just a few years after this photograph was taken. With some digging, I uncovered in the 1870 census a black woman named Lydia Middleton living with her husband Sam Middleton in Lowndes Township, about 30 miles from Charleston. Lydia and Sam are both listed as unable to read and write, suggesting their status as former bondpeople, and are both listed as 75 years old. That the 1850 household of 51 Meeting Street included a 55 year old enslaved woman (Lydia) as well as a 55 year old enslaved man suggests Sam and Lydia were together during their time in bondage. Did Lydia and Sam have children of their own, breastfed by Lydia alongside her charges? If so, did she know what became of them or had her offspring been sent to a Russell plantation or, worse yet, sold off? While these are details we cannot ever likely reconstruct, it is safe to speculate that in Lowndes Township, Sam and Lydia were living a humble lifestyle, much like the millions of other former bondpeople displaced by not only the tumult of the Civil War but generations of enslavement.

In the introduction of their 2014 edited volume, Diana Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris celebrated, “We are amid a renaissance in the study of slavery and emancipation in the United States.” While many well-written and well-researched works explore the economic, environmental, political and social histories of the plantation South, scholarship on experience of urban slavery remains peripheral. This coral bead and singular line in the 1870 census are just but two examples in which it is possible to reconstruct the labor and lives of urban bondpeople in the antebellum South. These small clues into Lydia’s life during and after enslavement are representative of tens of thousands of other stories waiting to be told.

- Dr. Kelly Sharp, @sharphistorian