Samuel Gilman entered Harvard in 1807 at the age of 16 and graduated with the Class of 1811. “For a few months after graduation” he was employed in a bank in or near Boston, “for he writes of himself as ‘a counter jumper by day and a gentleman by night;’ but by November, 1811, he had returned to the university, and…registered as a resident graduate,”² as theology students were called before the Divinity School opened in 1816. He received his M.A. in 1814 and stayed on at Harvard, tutoring younger students in mathematics. Among those students was Ralph Waldo Emerson. A list of faculty in 1816 designates him as “Proctor”.¹⁴

“The earliest of (his extant, published) papers go back to his school days, the first being a translation of Florian’s Estelle from the French…when the translator was fifteen….After this come a number of college exercises, — A Classification of the English Language; a dissertation in Latin on Buchanan’s version of the psalms; translation and extracts from the Greek and Latin classics; translations from Boileau, Mascaron, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, Voltaire.”

“During his residence in Cambridge he was a frequent contributor to the North American Review, in which periodical his papers are marked by their polished elegance of diction, the grace and felicity of their illustrations, and their racy humor.”¹³

“Gilman’s years in Cambridge were is some ways the high point of his life:”⁸ His “poetical gift was recognized by his classmates, who made him class poet, and in 1815, only four years after graduation, he was the poet at the meeting of the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity. He had already acquired something of a reputation for verse. In January, 1812, he had written a lament, in a somewhat stilted 18th century style, for a disastrous conflagration in Richmond at which there had been distressing loss of life.”²

In the spring of 1819 he traveled south to preach as a candidate here in Charleston. “He spent a considerable period in this city, experience(ing) a severe attack of yellow fever, and was invited to become minister.”² It is said that he was selected unanimously.

Next we have another problematic date. Returning to Boston, he and Caroline were married on October 14, 1819, although the UUA says it was September 25th, and soon afterward the couple journeyed overland back to Charleston, “a journey of 11 days. On December 1st of that year he was ordained minister of this church. The Rev. Joseph Tuckerman, D.D., of Chelsea, Massachusetts preached the sermon. Gilman’s classmate, Rev. Jared Sparks, later president of Harvard and a distinguished historian”² also participated.

Obviously a dedicated linguist, Samuel Gilman sought to learn German. One of his early friends in Charleston was “Dr. Jasper Adams, and Episcopal clergyman, then president of Charleston College….In consideration of Adams’ multiplied avocations through the day, and his liabilities to interruption at night, we were compelled to fix upon the hour between five and six o’clock in the morning. Accordingly as he lived in my neighborhood I visited his house every morning at that hour summer and winter, for about two years.”²
Young and ambitious, Samuel Gilman threw himself into his new ministerial duties, managing to retrieve this congregation from debt and expanding Unitarianism in Charleston — and the South. He and Caroline found creative ways of acquiring money; sub-dividing the churchyard into burial plots, renting pews, and establishing the precursor of the Alliance for fundraising.

“After his removal to Charleston he continued to write for different periodicals, his contributions embracing a wide range of subjects, from profound philosophical discussions to sparkling satirical essays.”¹³ He maintained submissions to “the North American Review, contributed to the Southern Quarterly Review, and wrote occasional poems such as The Union Ode, which was composed for a Fourth of July Unionist meeting in 1831.”¹² What he considered the best of his publications he collected in Contributions to Literature, published in 1856, two years before he died.

“His sermons were written with conscientious regularity and thoroughness, from familiar texts and on themes popular in the early 19th century. A number of them were printed two years after his death in what was titled Contribution to Religion”² (in 1860). Our archives contain a copy.

“Caroline Gilman found happiness in South Carolina. Her whole life was bound up in her husband and his ministry (‘He for God Only,’ she poetically explained, ‘She for God in Him’); in the aspirations of her state (‘A word against Carolina, is a personal offense to me!’); and her region (‘the South is dearer to us for its troubles’).”¹⁷

She “took readily to the conservative influences of her adopted environment; her (gender) befit her to write of domestic themes in an age of many sentimental lady authors.”⁹ She writes: “In 1832, I commenced editing the Rose Bud, a weekly, the first juvenile newspaper, if I mistake not in the Union (a matter of contention today)….The Rose Bud gradually unfolded through seven (annual) volumes, taking the title of the Southern Rose, and being the vehicle of some rich literature and valuable criticism. From this periodical I have reprinted, at various times.”³
But reprints, often with differing titles, were confusing, especially as the Civil War threatened. When she rushed previous works into print with new titles in order to influence a new generation, it was downright misleading.

Samuel and Caroline “furnished a comfortable, if not extravagant home at 11 Orange St. and her earnings helped to add domestic staff and build a summer home on Sullivan’s Island.”¹⁶ Seven children were born to the Gilmans, five girls and two boys. Only four survived to adulthood; all girls.

“(D)uring her lifetime, (Caroline Gilman) published some ten books, beginning with Recollections of a Housekeeper in 1834 and ending with Poems by Mother and Daughter in 1872. Both…Gilmans had a ready outlet for their work…in… The Southern Rose….The journal gradually expanded under Caroline’s editorship and published works by a number of established authors including William Gilmore Simms and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Much of the Gilmans’ material in The Southern Rose was later collected in their books….Caroline folded The Southern Rose with the issue of August 17, 1839.”¹²

Her most popular book — perhaps the best — was Recollections of a Southern Matron (1837). She writes, “My ambition has never been to write a novel; in the Matron and Clarissa Packard (her heroine in Recollections of a Housekeeper) it will be seen that the story is a mere hinge for facts.”³

Recollections of a Matron “tells the story of a girl growing to maturity on a southern plantation, which is represented as an emblem of a domestic, moral, community-based social order as opposed to the materialistic individualism of the northern city. The novel offers a defense of slavery in which the ideal paternalistic plantation master is represented in domestic terms as the head of a large, happy, well-regulated family.”¹

“In Recollections of a Housekeeper, Gilman emphasized that woman conscientiously strives to fulfill her domestic duties, yet ‘cares eat away at her heart.’ The demands made were unceasing; each ‘day presses on her with new toils, the night comes, and they are unfulfilled; she lies down in weariness, and rises with uncertainty.’ ‘Many a woman breaks and sinks beneath the wear and tear of the frame and affections’….She timidly offers an explanation for the husband’s failure to respond to his wife’s needs. Suggesting that men did not understand ‘the moral and physical structure’ of women, she noted that they ‘wound through ignorance and are surprised at having offended.’”¹¹

In 1859, when Caroline Gilman republished Housekeeper with the more upscale title of Recollections of a New England Bride, a reviewer writes: “This book was based on truth and was largely autobiographical in fantasy and reality. Mrs.Gilman wrote in her preface to the book, ‘Every part, except the ‘love-passages’ is founded in events of actual occurrence’…no one can doubt that the book does present as exact a picture as possible of local habits and manners.”¹⁷

I don’t believe it threatens Lady Chatterley’s Lovers place in literature but it and Matron were republished together in a single volume and may be found in the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston, should you wish to find them.

“The most famous of all” Samuel Gilman’s writings was authored on one of his many journeys north “when in 1836…he wrote the Ode, which we know as Fair Harvard for the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the college….The poem was it is said, written at short notice in answer to a request for a song appropriate to the coming anniversary.”³ It is a “hymn in spirit if not in form, stately, dignified, suited to the ‘jubilee’ and the ‘festival-rites’ for which it was written, but touched with a warmth of emotion which makes it an uplifting conclusion for every Harvard festival. That Harvard was not unappreciative of… Gilman’s literary achievements, as well as of his honorable and useful life, is shown by the bestowal upon him of the degree of Doctor of Divinity the next year.”²

“Despite these accomplishments, Samuel Gilman’s professional and private life in Charleston was sometimes difficult. While his wife’s literary endeavors brought in some additional income, he was forced to supplement his meager salary by teaching. Although Gilman preached a conservative version of Unitarianism… he was frequently attacked as an infidel by other Protestant ministers in Charleston. The rise in sectional distrust after the Nullification Crisis (1828-1833) greatly complicated life for the Gilmans and other New Englanders. Samuel joined a unionist association and wrote (the) Ode to the Union, but generally tried ‘to enter into no discussion of these everywhere agitated themes.’ Sectionalism, however, triumphed in South Carolina and in Gilman’s own thinking: in 1850 he wrote John Calhoun’s funeral ode, and by 1856 he had concluded that secession was both necessary and inevitable.”⁸

“Although there is sufficient evidence that the antebellum South was friendly to the creative temperament, its unique culture having inspired writings of high stature and considerable variety, some intellectuals found Southern life frustrating if not stultifying….(One assessment) has convincingly shown that ‘the career of Samuel Gilman was that of a talented and conscientious man enervated by a stifling environment.’ Despite his overt accommodation to Charleston and his wife’s complete acceptance of the conventions of their adopted region, Gilman was torn between his duty as a Southern clergyman and nostalgia for his native New England. Emotionally, he never left home.”¹²

“How and where to pursue gradual progress within such an intolerant society as antebellum South Carolina proved troublesome questions for a northern intellectual. As both preacher and literary critic, Gilman felt his public responsibilities keenly. Yet he also duly noted the importance of not getting too far ahead of those being led.”⁹

“Basically, however, Gilman the reformer was not so much ahead of his time as behind it. Gilman’s reform activities reflected an eighteenth-century point of view: a faith in gradual progress, in tolerance and reasonableness, and in the leadership of a paternalistic elite….Although he was a liberal in religion, Samuel Gilman thought of himself as a conservative in his political orientation…and he never really left John Adams’s Federalist party in spirit. Gilman did not welcome the democratization of American politics that occurred during what we conventionally term the age of Jackson.”¹⁰

“Despite her northern origins, Caroline Gilman’s loyalties gradually shifted toward the South, and she became known as an important southern woman writer during the 1830s and 1840s. (Her) books promoted domestic tranquility as a solution not only for her heroines’ ills but also for those of the nation. Writing in the pre-Civil War South, (Caroline) believed that she understood the tensions between the two regions in her fiction. Her depictions of a mutually devoted relationship between loyal house slaves and their grateful masters and mistresses seem less an angry retort to reformist northern fiction than an effort to facilitate reconciliation between North and South by promoting a shared vision of domestic tranquility.”¹

She writes in Recollections of a Southern Matron on the characteristics of working life in the South versus the North: “’What a blessed thing to childhood…is the fresh air and light of heaven! No manufactories with their over-tasked inmates, to whom all but Sabbath sunshine is a stranger, arose on our plantation. Slaves enjoyed an infinitely superior fate to that of northern workers. Long before the manufacturer’s task in other regions is closed, our laborers were lolling on sunny banks, or trimming their gardens, or fondling their little ones, or busy in their houses, scarcely more liable to intrusion than the royal retirement of a Guelph or a Capet.’

“There is no mistaking Caroline’s intent. Slaves, who lead a healthier life than urban workers, enjoy the benefits of leisure, gardens, children, and private homes—explicitly identified as their castles. Membership in a plantation household, moreover, ensures their full exposure to the highest benefits of civilization. The influence of the plantation mistress’s manners ‘was evident on the plantation producing an air of courtesy even among the slaves,’ who held her in the deepest reverence and who were themselves capable of the most unswerving loyalty. A planter’s daughter, Gilman notes in passing, ‘fears none but white men.’ She assuredly credits the beneficent influence of country life upon the character and bearing of women, whom cities can transform from healthy lasses into polished belles, who spend their time ‘calculating all night and dressing all day.’ The country she celebrates is not rural life in general; it is the southern household within the confines of which slavery exercises a mutually beneficial influence on owners and owned. Enslavement affords slaves the benefits of religion, decent living conditions, and frequently an appreciation for refined taste unknown to northern workers. Most southern plantations, Gilman insists, ‘were regulated with almost military precision. No punishment was ever inflicted but by and authorized person, and if he overstepped the boundaries of mercy in his justice, he was expelled from his authority. From my infancy, I had never seen a gentleman forget the deportment of a gentleman to our slaves.’”¹⁸

After moving to Charleston, and “(f)or the rest of his life, almost forty years, (Samuel) Gilman labored to make himself and his religion acceptable in the eyes of his adopted neighbors. He wrote Unitarian apologetics, repeating all the standard arguments from reason and revelation he dad learned at Harvard.”⁹

“Inextricably linked to sectionalism, of course, was the issue of slavery. The Gilmans owned house slaves and while family tradition holds that the couple occasionally purchased young males to educate and send North to freedom, there is no clear evidence of such illegal and dangerous activities.”⁸

“The ownership of slaves was doubtless embarrassing to the Gilmans, particularly since some of their northern relatives were prominent abolitionists. Samuel’s sister Louisa married Ellis Gray Loring, Boston’s leading antislavery trial lawyer, and helped him harbor fugitives; Caroline’s niece Maria White, a steadfast abolitionist, married James Russell Lowell;”⁹ both were strong abolitionists.

“Gilman took a middle path: he defended slavery in private, and his wife was a vehement public champion of the institution, but he avoided the issue in his sermons and writings. The Charleston congregation…may have become dissatisfied with Gilman’s silence. In 1853, the church recruited Charles Manson Taggart, one of the most extreme pro-slavery Unitarian ministers, to assist Gilman. Taggart, however, died the following year. Gilman never did support the institution of slavery in public.”⁸

“As the years in South Carolina went by, Gilman turned increasingly to translations and trivial antiquarianism. More and more, his notebooks were filled with verbatim transcriptions from the books he was reading rather than with thoughts of his own. Even his published works may be described (in one of his own favorite words) as “desultory.” In this last phase Gilman could still be charming and learned…as several works testify, but it was no longer the virile charm and learning of his early satires that he displayed.”¹²

Samuel Gilman’s “desire for re-identification with New England and his frustrations in so doing are nowhere more transparent than in the sketch A Day of Disappointment in Salem, first published in The Southern Rose in 1839….The sketch centers on a trip to Salem by a professed native Southerner for the purpose of meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne. After a leisurely summer tour of Boston, the narrator,” speaking in first person, “discovers in a book shop a copy of (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s) Twice-Told Tales (1837), which he takes to his lodging and peruses so many times that the contents become for him Thrice-Read Tales.” Our narrator, “(n)ow filled with the spirit of Hawthorne’s sketches,…is compelled to journey to Salem to meet or at least catch a glimpse of the remarkable author.

“On the Salem train the next morning, the narrator encounters two lovely ladies, mother and daughter, and speculates about which one of them might accompany him back to the South and grace his plantation. These two women…stand for two attitudes current in New England at that time. Gilman describes the daughter as, ‘full of enthusiasm; imbued with the transcendental philosophy just springing up; inclined to doubt the utility of all forms; familiar with Wordsworth and Carlyle; and bent upon a certain philanthropic project of establishing schools for adults, of which the teachers should be children, as being nearer the source and Center of all spiritual Light.’ The mother is also intellectual, but she ‘seemed to have solid ground to tread upon. She reverenced, though she did not worship, the spirit of the Past.’

“After leaving the two ladies, one an ‘enchanting dream,’ the other a ‘more solid waking vision,’ the narrator traverses the town of Salem seeking Hawthorne in his accustomed haunts.” All day, all over what locals call “North of Boston”, however, “(a)t each place he seems to have just missed Hawthorne. Eventually he converses with a person he believes to be Hawthorne, but it is a case of mistaken identity. Attending a party in the evening, the narrator is told by the hostess that Hawthorne has ‘left us half an hour ago, having just made his appearance, and told us that he must return to his bed, since he was completely worn out with one of the longest walks he had ever taken.’

“The next morning, as he boards the train to return to Boston, the narrator overhears a conversation between two coach passengers, one of whom addresses the other as Hawthorne. Before he can accost the presumed Hawthorne, the elusive man leaves the train. The narrator says, ‘I jumped suddenly from my seat to the window of the car, where, on looking out, I caught a dim glimpse of a person who had just turned to make his way into the town.’ In his agitation, the admirer of Hawthorne steps clumsily on the foot of the younger of the two ladies, both of whom are also returning to Boston. As a result, ‘there was a point of forbearance and politeness beyond which their feminine dignity would not permit them to go. They became retired and reserved in their turn,’ and when they all reached Boston, ‘I received a spirited farewell, but nothing like an invitation to walk in, or to visit them in the future.’

“Just as Gilman’s narrator tried to apprehend Hawthorne, Gilman himself attempted to imitate Hawthorne’s (writing) style, so successfully that a controversy over the authorship of the sketch erupted and continued into the twentieth century. The futile search for Hawthorne and the attempt to capture his style are symbolic of Gilman’s quest for emotional re-identification with his native area. Much of his writing suggests his desire to escape the oppressive environment of the South.”¹²

It may be unnecessary to add that the symbolism is obvious: Gilman knows he will forever be chasing Nathaniel Hawthorne in the literary world—never catching up with his popularity. Furthermore, he has stepped on the toe of Transcendentalism so hard that he is acceptable neither to new nor old thinking in Unitarianism and will never be granted the plum Northern ministry he seeks. The College of Charleston’s Addlestone library has Contributions to Literature, which contains the full text of this story.

“Caroline Gilman’s career as a creative writer ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. In the fall of 1839 when she was almost 45 years old, she bore and lost her seventh child, Frederick Samuel (after her father, a brother, and her husband). She wrote her sister in 1840, that she had developed “something amounting to aversion to the whole writing process, “a process which now “seemed to be almost a disease.” Caroline wrote only a handful of original poems during the rest of her long life, though she continued to recycle material from the Rose journals in gift-books and annuals and produced an anthology of her poetry and a series of popular fortune-telling games based on quotations from other poets. She authored a record of the memorial inscriptions in our church and churchyard in 1860, and when it was lost in the war, she recreated it in 1870.⁷

“It is difficult to know whether Samuel Gilman loved Charleston as much as Charleston came to love him….Gilman’s reputation as a slave-owner made it virtually impossible for him to find a position outside the South. Undoubtedly depressed by political events and by the failure of southern Unitarianism, Gilman devoted himself to his congregation, to minor literary and intellectual efforts, and to his family. He was visiting one of his daughters in Kingston, Massachusetts, when he died of a heart attack on February 9, 1858….When Gilman was buried on February 17, 1858, (in the Archdale Street churchyard) the Charleston Daily Courier editorialized that his funeral occasioned an outpouring of communal sorrow comparable only to that at the burial of John Calhoun.” ⁸

“Following Samuel’s death, Caroline remained in South Carolina, removing to Greenville through the Civil War, (but) vehemently supporting the southern cause to the very end.”⁷ “The tragic events leading up to the Civil War weighed heavily upon (her). Like her husband, she had wanted the two antagonistic sections of the country to part in peace, but she knew that was unlikely now. In December 1860 she was alone in Charleston. Her husband had been dead for two years. Her children were in the North. She called her slave, James, to her side and explained to him the reasons for the difficulties between the North and the South.”¹⁷

(She) “said, ‘You know the old thirteen states made laws together, called a constitution, and promised to keep them. One of the laws was that runaway slaves should be returned to their owners. The North has broken the law, encourages the slaves to run away, and sends them to Canada. They do not take them home and make ladies and gentlemen of them, but put them in a freezing climate, to labor for their own living, good and bad together. Another trouble is about the territories. Can you tell me, James, who owned Louisiana before the U.S. bought it?’

“‘The French, ma’am,’ said he, without hesitation.

“‘Well, that state, and the other territories were bought by all the States, North and South. The South paid as much money as the North and had the same right to them. After a while some of the Northern States began to say the Southerners should not carry their slaves into new territories. Of course, they could not live without their slaves, who are their support, and this made another difficulty. Now the South wants to separate from the North and have nothing more to do with them. James, do you understand all this?”

“‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.’

“‘Now, James, I hope and trust there will be no fighting, but if there is, you must take good care of me, and I will take care of you.”

“‘Yes, ma’am.”⁶

And so James did…continue to take care of her. In a letter to her daughter, Eliza, after the war in which her home had been looted, she writes: “One great event took place. James unearthed the box he had buried in 1861.” But much had been lost. She writes, “James came a fortnight ahead of us, laid the carpets and bedding, and we had every reason, when placing our heads on our pillows, to thank God for a home.”⁶

On her return to Charleston post-war, (Caroline) continued to live at 11 Orange St., sometimes with one of her daughters, sometimes in poverty. She outlived all but one of her children and died in Washington on September 15, 1888, at the age of 93.⁷

Text of a Forum presentation by:
Dave Elder, January 27, 2008


REFERENCES: THE SAMUEL AND CAROLINE GILMAN YOU NEVER KNEW

1. Flora, Joseph M. & MacKethan, Lucinda H., eds. (2002). The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

2. Foote, Henry W. (1916). An Address on Samuel Gilman, Author of “Fair Harvard.” Charleston: J.J. Furlong.

3. Gilman, Caroline. Autobiography. Quoted in Hart, J.S. (1866) Female Prose Writers of America: With Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of their Writings. Fifth Edition. Philadelphia: E.H.Butler.

4. Gilman, Caroline. (circa 1810). Jephthah’s Rash Vow.

5. Gilman, Caroline. Letters (1869). In Stange, Douglas C. (see below)

6. Gilman, Caroline. Letters (1865). In Saint-Amand, Mary S. (1941). A Balcony in Charleston. Richmond: Garrett and Massie.

7. Haberly, David. (1999-2007). “Caroline Gilman.” Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

8. Haberly, David. (1999-2007). “Samuel Gilman.” Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

9. Howe, Daniel W. (1971). “A Massachusetts Yankee in Senator Calhoun’s Court: Samuel Gilman in South Carolina.” The New England Quarterly. 44(2). p.197-220.

10. Howe, Daniel W. (1975). “Samuel Gilman: Unitarian Minister and Public Man. The Proceedings of the Unitarian Historical Society. 17(2). p.45-71.

11. Kelley, Mary. (1984). Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in 19th Century America. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press.

12. Mathews, James W. (1986). “A Yankee Southerner: The Aesthetic Flight of Samuel Gilman,” in No Fairer Land, ed. Mathews and Dameron, J.L. Albany: Whitson Publishing.

13. New York Tribune. (1856) Obituary: Samuel Gilman. In Way, William. (1920) History of the New England Society. Charleston: New England Society.

14. North American Review. (1826). “Miscellaneous and Literary Intelligence.” 4(10). p.141.

15. North American Review. (1856).”Review: Samuel Gilman, Contributions to Literature, Descriptive, Critical, Humorous, Biographical, Philosophical, and Poetical.”

16. O.Brien, Michael. (2003). Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860. Chapel Hill-London: University of North Carolina Press.

17. Stange, Douglas C. (1978). “Abolition as Malfeasance: Southern Unitarians Versus ‘Puritan Fanaticism’ – 1831-1869.” Harvard Library Bulletin. 26(2). 146-71.

18. Thomas, Mary Martha, ed. (1995). Stepping Out of the Shadows: Alabama Women, 1819-1990. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.