Printer-Friendly Version | Font Size: M - L - XL | Email To A Friend | Report a Problem With This Page

Miss Kemble, Dramatic Abolitionist
By Larry T. McGehee
2/26/2001 

By the time she was 20 in 1829, London-born Frances (Fanny) Kemble had followed in her family footsteps onto the stage, debuting in Romeo and Juliet to begin a career that would bring her fame on both sides of the Atlantic.

She came to America in 1832, received acclaim on a whirlwind theatrical tour, and within three months met Philadelphia-dwelling Pierce Butler, son of a southerner with extensive slave and rice holdings around the Georgia coast. She “retired” from the stage in 1834, at the age of 25, and married Butler. The couple had two daughters. Butler inherited the family estate in 1836.

In 1838, Fanny Kemble Butler made her first visit to the Butler plantations. She kept a journal of her three months there, and in 1863 she published it as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. It was a sensational book, exposing the ill-treatment of slaves and closed-society mentality of southern planters. By then, Kemble and Butler had been separated for 18 years and divorced for 14, and she was living in England, touring the continent doing Shakespearean readings and writing books and plays.

In the divorce, Butler retained custody of the two daughters until they were of age, and when they reached 21, the eldest, Sarah (Sally), sided with her mother while marrying Owen Wister, a doctor. The Wisters were the parents of Owen Wister, Jr., a famous American novelist, author of The Virginian, a western-based novel peopled by southern expatriates (familiar in our day as a television series). The younger daughter, Frances (Fan), sided with her father, and even tried to keep his plantations running after his death in 1867. Eventually Fanny and Fan reconciled, and Fanny often lived with the youngest daughter until her own death in 1893. Her last trip to America was from 1874 to 1877.

By the time of her death, Fanny had published six personal journals-a diary in 1835 and another in 1847, then the 1863 Georgia book, a book of girlhood memories in 1878, a book of later memories in 1882, and a final set of memoirs in 1890. She had been a prominent public figure, and her celebrity status guaranteed her a market for her autobiographical writings. She also published volumes of plays and poems, and a novel.

But it primarily was as an outspoken woman celebrity who held strong antislavery views that Kemble still draws attention today. Historian and biographer Catherine Clinton, who was Lewis Jones Visiting professor at Wofford College a few years ago when she was polishing her research on Fanny Kemble, has published companion volumes on Kemble which are drawing attention during Black History Month in February. They are a biography, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars: The Story of America’s Most Unlikely Abolitionist (Simon & Schuster, 2000, 303 pp.) and an edited selection of her diaries and correspondence, Fanny Kemble’s Journals (Harvard University Press, 2000, 210 pp.). (Clinton visits Wofford again March 1st.)

When Kemble published her Georgia journal in 1863, she sought to shore up British sentiment refusing official recognition to the Confederacy. Lincoln himself had personally appealed successfully to textile workers of England who suffered temporarily from cotton shortages caused by war and embargoes, but Kemble’s book rallied support among literary classes and members of Parliament. It was a timely eye-witness substantiation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s controversial but fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was published just as the tide of southern war fortunes was turning, with the Antietam victory for the Union in September 1862 and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation soon afterward.

Public opinion in the North and England had just turned towards abolishing slavery when Kemble’s book came out, revealing a famous white lady’s abolitionist sentiments that she had been espousing for some thirty years.

Ironically, by the time the book was published, Union forces had already occupied the Butler plantations and St. Simon’s Island, which became the site for training black troops and for starting institutions for educating blacks. It was in this vicinity that Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts, made famous by their attack and martyrdom on Fort Wagner and recently by the movie, “Glory”, trained and sortied forth.

Through Fanny Kemble’s public persona and her family and personal social life, historian Clinton gives readers a sweeping view of an entire century of American history. In the final analysis, Kemble’s views may seem more consequential to history buffs today than they were to opinions in her own day.

Her seductive character make her a prism through which to see schisms, postures, and history, and she glides across the globe with the beauty and drama of a celebrity for whom the whole European-American world was a stage. 

comments: mcgeheelt@wofford.edu
copyright Wofford College, SC