Heading: (African American, 1860)
Author:
Title: Letter written by a young Illinois woman who had gone South to teach in Louisiana
Place Published: Amite, Louisiana
Publisher:
Date Published: 1860
Description: Autograph Letter, in pencil. 6 pp. with remains of original mailing envelope. Sent (according to envelope address) to Mrs. E(lisabeth?) B. Fitch, Aurora, New York. Dec. 30, 1860.The anonymous letter to a former Illinois classmate concludes with the dire prediction, "...we anticipate more trouble after next week, as I suppose we shall secede..." (Louisiana left the Union 27 days later). That ended a long and innocent description of a Christmas vacation jaunt by some northern women teachers from their school in Plaquemine.The ladies traveled from south of Baton Rouge, to Amite, 65 miles away, then on to New Orleans where they saw beautiful residences, "fancy stores, crowded with ladies purchasing Christmas presents", and an amusement park "where we found the hippopotamus, dwarf and bearded ladies...and other monstrosities." In the city, the writer met some "agreeable people...who could talk of something besides politics", she being "so disgusted with what I am obliged to hear, that I feared they would make me an abolitionist". One New Orleans gentleman who was "so conscientious as to wear homespun clothes" (as opposed to cotton from slave plantations) "talked politics with me, but in such polite style that I really enjoyed it...I had almost been made to believe that Southerners had no ideas of civility. I have received downright insults without the slightest provocation, and not because of any difference of opinion. These things do not annoy me, but I was glad to meet a different class of the genus homo." That the writer may not have been as oblivious to political events as she makes out are innocuous details of her trip: She was visiting in Amite "at Mr. Selby's", who had brought her to Louisiana from Jacksonville, Illinois. Many "old acquaintances" from the north were also there, including a Mr. Selleck. After they returned to Amite, along a road that runs through a cypress swamp where alligators find a home," they rode another mile to the Collegiate Institute, "where we are having just the nicest time."

Probing the details of the letter, probably unsigned for good reason: "Mr. Selby" was 35-year-old Paul Selby, Principal of a newly-formed coed Collegiate Institute, who had come to Louisiana from Illinois where, unknown to his Southern neighbors, he had been close friends with Abraham Lincoln, newly-elected (and hated) President of the United States, assisting him in forming the state's Republican Party, then leaving the Female Seminary where he taught to edit what his local enemies would describe as a "violent. rabid, abolitionist newspaper, "a medium for the fulmination of the most malignant and extreme doctrines of the anti-slavery school of political fanatics" Selby made so many enemies, even in Illinois, that he happily accepted the offer of his father-in-law, Presbyterian Rev. C. G. Selleck to go to Louisiana to open a prep school. Allegedly, along the way, he had helped a Black woman slave escape from her Illinois mistress via the Underground Railroad. Two weeks after Fort Sumter, a Confederate Committee of Safety formed to weed out northern sympathizers in Louisiana, denounced Selby as an "Abolitionist traitor", and together with Rev. Selleck "a sympathizer with our enemies" declared him "Expelled" from Amite, offering evidence of letters received from his "Copperhead" enemies in Illinois, who claimed that Selby, besides his other misdeeds, had frequently "engaged in running off negroes from Missouri" to Canada. After being horsewhipped in the streets, Selby "narrowly escaped", returning to Illinois to volunteer for a year of Commissary service in the Union Army, then becoming editor of a succession of Republican newspapers and finally receiving federal appointments from two Republican Presidents. In one of his more famous editorials, Selby had declared "President Lincoln died at the hand of Slavery. It was Slavery that conceived the fearful deed."

Very good.