Sarah (“Sallie”) Eliza Bowen [Hamilton Swanson] (1838-1912) was the daughter of wealthy landowner and enslaver Dr. Horace “Horatio” Bowen (1792-1860). As an affluent young white woman, her life was dominated by domestic duties —supervising the preparation of meals and upkeep of the house by enslaved persons, gardening, and entertaining guests. Sallie Bowen was probably aged fourteen or fifteen when she kept her daybook (1838-1912), which she repurposed as a diary or journal. She noted horse races, balls, dances, and weddings she attended, all activities germane to the privileged lifestyles of members of the planter class. When she was middle-aged, her grand-niece Sallie (1888-?) or perhaps her grand-niece Marion (c. 1890-?), or the two of them, both about seven or eight years old, used her daybook to write poetry, draw, practice spelling family names, and even sketch a drawing of her. Sallie Bowen’s luxuries came at the expense of the freedom of the African Americans her family enslaved. Her entry of January 12, 1854 expresses this dissonance between her comfortable life and the vulnerability of the enslaved. After jotting down the state of the weather (“very warm”) and key ingredients to a recipe (“2 pounds of bacon”), she writes, “Byron* gave Silvy an unmerciful whipping for nothing.” She then closes by noting the weather: “a little shower this evening.” Her words “unmerciful” and “for nothing” reveal her sense that Byron’s whipping of Silvy is disproportionate to Silvy’s transgression. Enslaved people were whipped as a common punishment for wrongs either perceived or actual, including breaking tools, not working hard or quickly enough, talking back to White people, or escaping. The appearance of this sentence in the middle of a recipe suggests the normalization and banality of such trauma, for the victims of it like Silvy and for those who witnessed it like Sarah. Yet, this is the only entry in Sarah’s daybook that mentions a whipping. Perhaps this beating was particularly brutal, and/or perhaps Bowen had fond remembrances of playing with Silvy as a child. Is Silvy’s remark an insight into the surveillance, control, and exposure to sexual violence that Black women endured in slavery’s Big Houses? Is Sarah reminded of how White women, no matter their status or education, were expected to submit to male authority and control in their families and communities? *The “Byron” in the sentence is presumed to be William Byron Scott (1834-98), a farmer and the son of William Scott (1795-1851) and Eliza Jane Jappie Benson (1790-1850). He was the brother-in-law of Colonel Charles Hamilton (1822-79), the son of Dr. Thomas Hamilton (1790-1859), and the brother of Charles’s wife, Madaline Scott Hamilton (1832-60). Byron’s father, William, was one of the trustees of Wesleyan College, the first chartered all-female college that included founding members from Clinton’s Female Seminary. Sources: Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries Griffin, Richard W. “Wesleyan College: Its Genesis, 1835-1840.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 1966, pp. 54–73. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40578546. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021. Type: Story
