Fanny Kemble - Anti-slavery Activism and Controversy

Anti-slavery Activism and Controversy

Kemble had kept a diary during the brief period of several months she spent on her husband's Georgia plantations, including observations and opinions about the manager's and overseer's treatment of slaves. Tensions grew and remained high between Kemble and her increasingly estranged husband, and eventually Butler threatened to deny her access to her daughters if she published anything about her impressions of the plantations on Butler's and St. Simons islands. Kemble's manuscript was circulated among abolitionists in the United States prior to the American Civil War, but she did not publish the "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839" until 1863, after the war broke out and nearly fifteen years after her divorce. Kemble wrote in her journal,

"I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution."

She continued to be outspoken against the institution of slavery, and often donated money from her public readings to charitable causes.

In the twenty-first century, historians Catherine Clinton and Deirdre David have studied Kemble's Journal and raised questions about her portrayal of the Roswell Kings, who managed Pierce Butler's plantations, and Kemble's own racial sentiments.

Clinton noted that in 1930, Julia King, granddaughter of Roswell King, Jr., stated that Kemble had falsified her account about him because he had spurned her affections. There is little evidence in Kemble's Journal that she encountered Roswell King, Jr. on more than a few occasions, and none that she actually knew his wife, née Julia Rebecca Maxwell, whom she nevertheless denounced as "a female fiend" because a slave named Sophy told her that Mrs. King ordered the flogging of Judy and Scylla "of whose children Mr. K was the father." In fact, Roswell King, Jr. was no longer in the employ of her husband when Pierce Butler and Kemble took up their short residency in Georgia, King having tendered his resignation since there had been "growing uneasiness. . . . born of the dispute between the Kings and the Butlers over fees the elder King thought were owed him as co-administrator of Major Butler's estate."

Before arriving in Georgia, Kemble had already concluded, “It is notorious, that almost every Southern planter has a family more or less numerous of illegitimate coloured children.” It is significant that her statements about Roswell King, Sr. and Roswell King, Jr. and their alleged status as the white fathers of enslaved mulatto children are based on what she was told by slaves who themselves were in some cases inclined to accept hearsay accounts about their paternity. The mulatto Renty, for example, "ashamed" to ask his mother about the identity of his father, believed he was the son of Roswell King, Jr. because "Mr. C's children told me so, and I 'spect they know it.' However, John Couper, the Scottish-born owner of a rival plantation adjacent to Pierce Butler's Hampton Point on St. Simon's Island, had had marked disagreements with the Roswell Kings in the past, and Kemble's partiality towards Couper is tellingly in evidence.

David noted Kemble's quotation of Roswell King, Jr.'s statement against slavery in her journal. He had published a long letter in The Southern Agriculturalist on 13 September 1828, in which he blamed overseers for many of the problems of cruelty. According to the letter, he supervised a relatively healthy diet for the slaves, which claim is at variance with what Kemble reported in her journal.

Some have noted passages in Kemble's writings describing the physical characteristics and behavior of blacks that suggest she harbored racist prejudices even though she represented herself as a supporter of abolitionism. David attempted to explain that Kemble's contradictory attitudes are not uncommon in English language sources of the period, and in that context, her descriptions of blacks were "relatively mild and moderately conventional."