A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818-1881.

Kibler, James Everett

A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee 1818-1881, edited by Louis P. Towles. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 1,061 pp. $39.95 cloth.

God will work this thing in His own time and way, and my trust is in Him.

--Edward Allston (after Appomattox)

Too much of written history is made to take place on battlefields, in courthouses, or in legislative chambers. The home scene is all too frequently absent. This book covers that front with effective particulars; and the human element is not lost. As such, it is a splendid contribution to the social and cultural history of the South. The Palmers is a tremendously valuable primary document that allows a planter family to come to life before our eyes, a family in the upper middle class, whose members are decent, intelligent, cultured, and responsible. The family members write wonderful letters--all of them--and sometimes with the high quality of literary art. Their correspondence is engaging, very engaging; and the reader is drawn effortlessly into the world they create. The result is an entertaining drama, whose characters rise up and cast shadows--as the subjects of all good literature are able to do. Editor Louis Towles is to be praised, not only for the gargantuan task of transcribing and assembling a 941-page collection, but also for the unobtrusive, accessible, common-sensical way he has arranged it, and the context he has provided--all of which make for smooth, enjoyable reading. This is not a dry volume, and potential readers should not be put off by its size. Once into the work, they will find it hard to put down. There is something crucial to interest here that is everpresent, actually the stuff from which the book is made; and that is the concreteness of minute particulars which have the unmistakable aura of truth. Their sheer weight of accretion drives the work as "art."

The picture that rises from the Palmer letters is vastly different from that presented in some "revisionist" histories of the South or that achieved in such an edition as Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter (1822-1890). In The Palmers, we do not see aberrant sex, decay, and violence--those old standbys of the national desire for topics when the South (old or new) is concerned. The decadent, sad planter subject of Tombee is totally absent in this work. Tombee, published by Morrow & Co. of New York, and commercially distributed, had a large press run and was remaindered at various discount book stores, saturating the national market in the 1980s. The Palmers will hardly reach as many readers, although it should. The difference? Tombee presents a decadent, weak Southerner; The Palmers, a family of decent, strong ones. One may draw his own conclusions about what the Age demands, especially when the South is the subject. What we are talking about, obviously, is the stereotyping that a national audience seems to demand, the picture of the South the popular public imagination desires to hold.

The Palmers of Santee will not feed that stereotype. In fact, it will shake it uncomfortably from its foundation. The picture of the war years in particular reveals in all its concreteness both horrors and a suffering nobly and strongly endured--all to keep thirteen states in a union that half of it did not desire and from which, through legitimate elections, they had withdrawn. This volume shows very clearly in individual, personal terms what extremities the Southern people--both black and white, male and female--were made to suffer. Anna Kirtland, in her charming, blithe way, asks in October 1861: "I declare the rotten Yankees are too determined. Why don't they behave themselves and quit this war?" There are graphic accounts of the years-long shelling of civilians in Charleston: "a house on Tradd St. is on fire.., another shell has exploded and crowds are pushing up town... St. Michael's spire is their target .... Our house was struck, the kitchen next to us also." Alice Palmer, on her piazza, sees a shell coming, flees, and just in time, for the porch is ripped through "not three feet from where we were sitting" moments before. "Since that one," she writes, "more have come very near us." A woman of the city dies of starvation. Many are homeless as the city holds on through several years of "most terrific bombardments." By 1864-1865, when the invaders reach the Santee and are thieving baby and women's clothing, silver, gold watches, and all portable wealth, even robbing the blacks of their shoes, the pious motives of "freeing the slaves" and "saving the Union" have given way to one officer's admission of what he and his men really desire from the war. Harriet Palmer reports in March 1865: "The captain [a Mr. O'Cain] informed the girls he was fighting for the Union and not the darkeys. He said, `do you think we care anything for your people; we want your country.'" The bottom line then for this officer: "We want your country." As the Palmers see it, the war is a war of conquest, and the details of that battle, in the rampant burning and thieving in South Carolina, verify it. Harriet remarks that "I felt badly enough toward" the enemy before their pillaging of helpless old men, women, and children; "now I wish I could join the army .... Oh, if I knew that my brothers or any of my friends and relatives did as the Yankees did, I would hang my head with shame. I could not wish to live." House servant Peggy, on seeing soldiers trying "to suck even the eggs turkeys were setting and would have hatched in a few days," calls them "buzzards," a name Harriet agrees is a "good comparison." She writes: "We may be exterminated, but I pray never subjugated. I hope I and all mine may be laid in the grass before such a calamity befall us .... Our tyrannical enemies are very determined this must be a land of bondage." Columbia, in its ashes, now indeed "a chimney town," had in earlier pages been described by the family as "much prettier than Charleston" and "the flower garden of the sunny South." Now it too has fallen victim to the forces of conquest.

It was Harriet Palmer (1842-1922) who carefully collected and preserved this treasury of letters. As one of the "unvanquished" women of the South, she, through her care of these manuscripts, would make it possible for her family's story to be told. Harriet Palmer's goal was achieved seven decades after her death. All who have had a hand in helping bring this project to fruition deserve praise, for such a dramatic story as this one should not be lost, and such voices as these not silenced. The Palmers of Santee allows the characters in this drama to be heard as they have never been before. They tell clearly, and sometimes eloquently, a story of universal and lasting import.