The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké by Charlotte Forten Grimké

First published: 1988 (portions published in 1953 as The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten)

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: 1854-1892

Locale: Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; St. Helena Island, South Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida

Principal Personages:

• Charlotte Forten Grimké, the bright, ambitious, but overly self-critical daughter of Robert Bridges Forten
• Robert Bridges Forten, Charlotte’s father, a dedicated abolitionist
• John Greenleaf Whittier, a celebrated poet, essayist, and abolitionist who was a friend of the Forten family
• William Lloyd Garrison, the renowned antislavery speaker, essayist, and editor of The Liberator
• Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prominent white abolitionist from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who became the commanding officer of the First South Carolina Volunteers
• Seth Rogers, a physician who was also an active abolitionist
• Ellen Murray, a fellow teacher of freed slaves with Charlotte on St. Helena Island
• Francis Grimké, Charlotte Forten Grimké’s husband, whom she married in 1878

Form and Content

Although Charlotte Lottie Forten Grimké was a teacher as well as a minor essayist, poet, and translator, it was her personal journal, which she started keeping at the age of sixteen, that proved to be her most lasting contribution to African American letters. She began her journal in May, 1854, beginning with a preface that explains her intention to use this journal to chart her own intellectual growth. The first dated entry, from May 24, is typical of her early diary in that it begins with her expressing disapproval that by awakening at 5:00 a.m., she let the sun rise several hours before she did; this, she declares, is an advantage she will not let the sun have over her again any time soon. She goes on to note that she has just begun reading Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and is certain that she will enjoy it. Her first entry, like many of the entries to follow, reveals her absolute drive that she must work incessantly to improve herself. Growing up at a time when slavery was still an active institution in southern states, and when inferiority of African Americans was assumed by many white Americans, including many of Charlotte’s fellow Northerners living in and around Philadelphia and Salem, Charlotte was driven not only by the need to develop her own talents and abilities but also by the need to prove, through her example, the talents and abilities of black Americans.

Born in Philadelphia on August 17, 1837, as the daughter of Robert Bridges Forten and Mary Virginia Woods Forten, Charlotte Lottie Forten grew up in one of the most active black antislavery families in Philadelphia at the time. In November of 1853, she was sent to Salem to continue her schooling. While there, she stayed with Charles Lenox Remond and his wife Amy Matilda, both black abolitionists and friends of the Forten family. They were well connected to the abolitionist movement in and around Salem. It was the intellectually and emotionally stimulating environment of being part of a movement dedicated to eliminating slavery and improving conditions for Northern free blacks that excited the intellectually thirsty Charlotte during her teenage years and that infuses the early entries of her diary.

The second dated entry in Charlotte’s diary, from May 25, 1854, concerns the arrest of Anthony Burns, an escaped slave who was arrested off the streets of Boston for return to slavery in the South. In the days that followed, his case became celebrated as antislavery activists demanded his release. On June 2, Charlotte reports in her diary that he had been sent back to slavery. As disheartening as this news was to Charlotte, it was to have a more personal implication. Her father, tired of striving against the ever-present racism in Philadelphia and looking to relocate, decided because of this case that moving his family to Massachusetts, where his daughter already was, would be no improvement. Instead they moved to Canada in the autumn of 1855.

A desire for her father’s approval was certainly one of Charlotte’s motivations for working so hard on the program of self-improvement recorded in her journal. In her early entries, there are repeated references to her hopes that her father and the rest of her family will join her eventually, and it was quite a disappointment for her when they did not. Her father’s financial support of her ceased during her final year as a student at the Salem Normal School, quite probably because of financial hardships of his own. She found herself forced to go into debt to her hostess, Amy Remond, to support herself. Upon graduation, Charlotte was offered a position at the Epes Grammar School in Salem. She accepted in the hope that this would ensure her ability both to support herself and to live among the active abolitionists of Massachusetts whom she found so stimulating. In her first term as a teacher, though, the health problems that were to hound Charlotte for the rest of her life forced her to miss several days of teaching. In June, 1857, again suffering ill-health, she retreated to Philadelphia for six weeks to recover from a respiratory ailment. Over the next few years, she was forced to resign several teaching posts for similar reasons.

Against such pressing realities, Charlotte’s continued dedication to self-education (including studying French, German, and Latin) and to the abolitionist cause shows Charlotte’s spirit. Reading the works of great authors—her favorites included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom she refers to several times as “the priestess of poetry”; Harriet Beecher Stowe; John Greenleaf Whittier; and Ralph Waldo Emerson—was for her a worthy end in itself, but she was always particularly pleased when she read a writer such as Whittier or Stowe whose talent she respected and who dealt directly with her constant concerns of eliminating slavery and confronting racism.

Although living in a free state, Charlotte was keenly aware of the prejudice directed at her as a black woman. Her September 12, 1855, entry deals with her happiness upon returning to school but immediately turns to her acknowledgment of being looked down upon by her classmates. “I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope,” she muses, and asks several rhetorical questions: “When, oh! when shall this cease?” “Is there no help?” “How long oh! how long must we continue to suffer—to endure?” Partly as a response to this alienation from her classmates, she persuades her one friend from school, Sarah Brown, to join the Female Anti-Slavery Society with her. It was an integrated group that sponsored antislavery lectures and talks, and it continued to help Charlotte focus her intellectual life around the abolitionist cause.

Despite some early literary publications, including several poems in William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper The Liberator, Charlotte’s own high standards, as well as her frustrations at her ill-health, caused her to be overly critical of herself. Birthdays tend to be days on which she reflected on how little she had accomplished. Between May, 1859, and June, 1862, there is only one entry. Shortly after she returned to her daily journal keeping, John Greenleaf Whittier suggested that she (using him as a reference) apply for a post teaching on the South Carolina Sea Islands. After being rejected by the Boston Education Commission, the members of which tell her that they are not seeking female teachers, she moves back to Philadelphia, where another contingent of teachers is being organized. On October 21, 1862, she learns that she has been accepted and will ship out the next day.

Charlotte’s students were to be the so-called “contraband” slaves of the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast, where the Union had established a military outpost. At the time, slaves from plantations under Union control were considered the contraband of war and thus under the direction of the Union. Because the Emancipation Proclamation officially freed all slaves living in Confederate States on January 1, 1863, Charlotte’s students all became officially free slightly more than two months after Charlotte arrived.

The effort to provide a basic education to the newly freed slaves living on the Union-controlled South Carolina Sea Islands is sometimes referred to as the Port Royal Experiment. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase saw in this population of former slaves a chance to disabuse many of the common prejudices among white Americans that stated that African Americans were inherently inferior. A successful experiment, he recognized, would help serve as a model for programs that could be set up during the Reconstruction period.

Because Charlotte’s students brought little educational background with them to her classroom, and because many of them spoke Gullah, a heavily African-influenced English dialect, Charlotte’s job was to give them basic instruction. She launched into the work with all the energy and enthusiasm she had, though not without some trepidation and not without recurring bouts of ill-health. On her first day of teaching there, November 5, 1862, she frankly records in her journal her dismay at how much work has to be done and how unprepared her students are for school. Her disappointment, however, is constantly tempered by her loving fascination with the people she is meeting, her sympathy for their plight, and, not least of all, her appreciation of the strange (to her) natural beauty of her surroundings.

It is also in the South Carolina entries that she records what is evidently a romantic impulse toward a man, Dr. Seth Rogers, a married white surgeon who had treated her before the war and who volunteered as a surgeon for the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of black soldiers. Both are careful to keep their relationship within proper bounds, and though their attachment is to all appearances romantic, Charlotte does record that he asked her to think of him “as a brother.”

During the summer of 1863, poor health and the heat impelled Charlotte to take a vacation from her teaching. She traveled north for the summer. Upon her return, she recorded several sporadic entries. Her fourth journal ends abruptly with a May 15, 1864, entry that mentions that the last few months have had some happy and some painful events. Among the painful ones, left unmentioned by her, was the death of her father on April 25, 1864, of typhoid fever scarcely six weeks after he had joined the Union forces as a sergeant-major.

Her fifth journal is by far her shortest. It covers the period from November 15, 1885, to July, 1892. Entries are sporadic: Gaps of months or years between entries are not uncommon. Nevertheless, a composite picture emerges of Charlotte Forten Grimké as a mature married woman. She married the Reverend Francis Grimké on December 19, 1878, and remained married to him until her death in 1914. During these years, ill-health was a constant companion, not an occasional visitor. Nevertheless, she remained busy and committed to her literary pursuits as well as to the larger goal of equality. Her final entry, dated July, 1892, three years later than the previous one, briefly summarizes her life being busy but on the whole happy, with the greatest drawback being her constant poor health.

Critical Context

A 1985 American Playhouse production, “Charlotte Forten’s Mission: Experiment in Freedom,” helped revive interest in Forten’s South Carolina experience. Until the publication of the complete The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké in 1988, Grimké was most widely known through the abbreviated diary edited by Ray Allen Billington, which emphasized her relationship to the abolitionist movement and her work with the Port Royal Experiment. Her journals were widely considered to be primarily of historical interest, providing one young woman’s account of important people and events before and during the Civil War.

The publication in 1988 of both an essay by Joanne Braxton, “Charlotte Forten Grimké and the Search for a Public Voice,” and the complete journals helped to change that perception. Braxton argues that in the complete journals, a reader can see a young African American female writer who is trying to find literary models that will be useful to her as well as trying to make established European-American models meaningful to her own life and writing.

In her own lifetime, Grimké received praise for her literary talents, most notably from William Wells Brown, the former slave and noted abolitionist, and John Greenleaf Whittier, both personal friends. The judgment of history on her literary production other than her journals has been rather cool. Her journals stand as her most significant literary work by far. As Ray Allen Billington said in his introduction to her journals, Grimké’s “bequest to humanity was a journal which could reveal to a later generation her undying belief in human decency and equality.”

Bibliography

Billington, Ray Allen. Introduction to The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten. Edited, with an introduction, by Ray Allen Billington. New York: Dryden Press, 1953. Reprint. New York: Norton, 1981. Billington’s introduction to his heavily edited edition of Forten’s journals remains an essential source for those interested in placing Forten’s work with the Port Royal Experiment in its historical context. This edition also contains helpful maps.

Braxton, Joanne M. “Charlotte Forten Grimké and the Search for a Public Voice.” In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. An analysis of Grimké’s complete journals, based on Braxton’s archival research and personal appreciation of the journals. This article maintains that Charlotte, as a young woman, used her journal to try out different poetic voices.

Brown, William Wells. “Charlotte L. Forten.” In The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements. New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863. An attempt by a leading abolitionist to publicly recognize Forten’s talents while she was still a young woman.

Sherman, Joan R. “Charlotte L. Forten Grimké.” In Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. A consideration of Grimké’s poetry. Concludes that although she was a minor poet, her skills and sensitivity were above the ordinary.

Stevenson, Brenda, ed. Introduction and notes to The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A thorough introduction to Grimké’s life and work. Includes a chronology of events in Grimké’s life as well as a key to persons mentioned in her journals. The complete journals themselves, as reprinted in this volume, have become the definitive text.