Forten, Charlotte (1838–1914), diarist. As an African American diarist in antebellum and post-bellum America, Charlotte Forten was a privileged individual by birth and endowment. Born 17 August 1838 in Philadelphia, Forten was a toddler when her famous grandfather died. James Forten, Sr., who had been a powder-boy during the American Revolution and a former student of Anthony Benezet, the Quaker abolitionist, was an ingenious man who amassed a fortune by inventing and patenting a practical sailing device. Because of his brilliant mind and rebellious spirit, he was a leading abolitionist among free Negroes in Philadelphia. Robert Forten, his son and Charlotte's father, an antislavery lecturer, hired private tutors to instruct his daughter at home before she moved to Salem, Massachusetts, in protest of Philadelphia's strictly segregated schools. Her aunts, Margaretta, Sarah, and Harriet, were active socially and politically in the women's rights and antislavery movements. Harriet Forten, Charlotte's favorite aunt, was married to Robert Purvis, an original signer of the American Anti-Slavery Society charter and later the president of that organization.
A product of this environment of revolutionary fervor and commitment, Charlotte Forten was immersed in the spirited politics of renewal. Her own sufferings, however, personalized her involvement in the campaign to end slavery and racism. She may well have been an aristocratic member of the Forten clan, but her status was no protection from the discrimination that she experienced as a person of color connected irremediably to a subjugated group of people. Her journals reveal her anguish and pain as she and her friends were barred from ice cream parlors in Philadelphia and museums in Boston. Indeed, even her white classmates from the “liberal” Higginson Grammar School were capable of ostracizing her at their convenience. She confides to her diary, “I have met girls in the schoolroom—they have been thoroughly kind and cordial to me—perhaps the next day met them in the street—they feared to recognize me; these I can but regard now with scorn and contempt”. Charlotte Forten was a victim of a psychic conflict of identity: she was both a blue blood and a member of an oppressed minority at the mercy of a racialized society and its racist whims.
Forten's diaries were written over a period of thirty-eight years from 1854 to 1892, time enough for her and her society to change. The journals capture these changes. There are five diaries, and each one permits Charlotte Forten to develop a new image of herself. The first diary is written from 24 May 1854 to 31 December 1856, when Charlotte Forten is a brooding teenager attending antislavery rallies in Boston, Framingham, and Salem. Written from 1 January 1857 to 27 January 1858, diary 2 mirrors the transformation of Charlotte Forten, a young adult, into an abolitionist snob. After receiving a caller who had failed to embrace the doctrine of radical abolitionism, she writes of him, “intelligent on some subjects—ignorant of true [radical] anti-slavery. I soon wearied of him.” Journal 3 is the core of the diaries, for it is here that a twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Forten (upon John Greenleaf Whittier's advice) applies for a commission to travel like a soldier to South Carolina as a New England schoolmarm to teach contraband slaves and nurse Union soldiers during the Civil War. This diary covers five years, 28 January 1858 to 14 February 1863. Two of the most important events recorded here are her involvement in the Port Royal Social Experiment and her eyewitness account of the official reading of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation statement to South Carolina slaves and black soldiers. Charlotte Forten left Philadelphia for the Sea Islands on 22 October 1862; excluding a two-month northern vacation, she stayed on the coast for approximately seventeen months. She taught at the Penn School, under the supervision of its founder, Laura Towne, and her assistant Ellen Murray, both New Englanders.
Forten travelled to nearby Beaufort, South Carolina, to meet Harriet Tubman. When former slave Harriet Tubman describes her adventures in assisting fugitive slaves, the diarist writes, “My own eyes were full as I listened to her”. Harriet Tubman has been called the Moses of her people for leading, single-handedly, approximately three hundred men, women, and children to freedom in Canada and the North. When “Moses” and the “soldier” Charlotte Forten come face to face, a symbolic union takes place: the old world of slavery and “ordinary” heroism and the new world of independence and acknowledgment that Americans of African descent, regardless of their place in society, have a shared racial heritage of oppression that makes differences of birth and education of secondary importance in a racialized country.
In diary 4, written from 15 February 1863 to 15 May 1864, Charlotte Forten has settled into her role as nurse to contraband slaves and Union soldiers, at first relishing her relations with the all-black Fifty-Fourth Regiment (she is called the “Daughter of the Regiment”) and its leader, Robert Shaw. But her happiness is turned to grief upon their defeat at Fort Wagner.
The last journal, November 1885 to July 1892, was written approximately twenty-one years after diary 4. Although she had been married to the Princeton-educated minister Francis J. Grimké (the mulatto nephew of white feminists-abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké) for seven years, Charlotte Forten gives no details about the marriage. Her diaries were written in secrecy, but she must have been aware of their public historical importance and apparently refused disclosure of her intimate relations. In diary 3 she asks, “What name shall I give to thee, oh ami inconnu? It will be safer to give merely an initial—A. And so, dear A”. By giving the journal an initial rather than a full name, Charlotte Forten shows her consciousness of an implied audience and her desire to keep some privacy.
She is wistful and pleased as she reviews past events. Having lost an infant daughter, Theodora, she does not wallow in self-pity and merely cites the age the child would have been had she lived—six years old. On Christmas Day 1885, she recalls dining with the aging Frederick Douglass one year earlier in Washington, D.C., at his “beautiful home.” She takes delight in the “Normal School,” managed by Booker T. Washington, and in the emergence of “colored people of the better class.” The old missionary spirit, however, is still evident, as she expresses regrets about the impending move again to Washington, D.C., from Florida, in 1889, because the latter “is a good field for missionary work.”
Her last entry is dated July 1892; she is in Massachusetts, having left Washington because of its “intense heat” and her constant illnesses. During the last twenty-two years of her life, Charlotte Forten was silent, dying in 1914. But her journals supersede the status of “mere diaries.” For Charlotte Forten captured the zeitgeist of the Civil War epoch, which she helped to transform into something noble and meaningful for all Americans.
Bibliography
- Charlotte Forten, The Journals of Charlotte Forten, ed. Ray Allen Billington, 1953.
- Esther M. Douty, Forten the Sailmaker, 1968.
- Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1988.
- Charlotte Forten Grimké, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson, 1988.
- Carla L. Peterson, Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880), 1995
Geneva Cobb-Moore
