EARLY DAYS AND OLD FIELD SCHOOL
My mother, Adèle Petigru, was the granddaughter of Jean Louis Gibert,
one of the Pasteurs du Desert, who brought the last colony of Huguenots
to South Carolina in April, 1764, after enduring persecution in France,
holding his little flock together through great peril and having the
forbidden services of his church in forests, in barns, at the midnight
hour, in order to escape imprisonment and death. There was a price set
upon his head for some years before he made up his mind to leave his
beloved land and escape with his little band of faithful to America.
These perils and the martyrdom of some of his followers is told in “Les
Frères Gibert.” It is a thrilling story, but too long to tell here. The
two brothers, Etienne and Jean Louis, escaped to England, the little
flock following one by one. King George III made a grant of land in
South Carolina to Jean Louis for the settlement of the colony. He
retained Etienne in England as his chaplain.
The difficulties and setbacks encountered by the little band were most
harrowing and discouraging, but at last they reached the shores of what
was to them the promised land, and disembarked at Charleston, South
Carolina, April 14, 1764, from which city they made their way some 300
miles into the interior of the State where their grant was. Their
difficulties were by no means over; indeed, to them it seemed sometimes
as if they were only begun. The wild rugged wilderness where they were
to establish themselves, they called by the names they had left in their
beautiful France, New Bordeaux and Abbeville, and they set to work to
clear land and plant the cuttings of grape-vines to make wine, and the
cuttings of mulberry to carry on the manufacture of silk, which were
their industries at home. It is hard for us now to realize what they had
to encounter and endure--wild beasts, Indians, difficulties of
transportation, of transforming the big trees of the forest into lumber
suitable to building houses; but all these they conquered. They built
homes, they planted vineyards and orchards and mulberry-groves, and
succeeded in the manufacture of silk with their spinning-wheels and
hand-looms. There is at the old home place in Abbeville now one of the
little spinning-wheels with which the silk was spun, that the colony
sent with pride as a gift to be made into a dress for the royal wardrobe
of the Queen of England.
My great-grandfather was a man of executive ability and strength, with
that personal charm which made him intensely beloved and revered by his
little flock; and they prospered as long as he lived, but, alas, his
life was cut short by an unfortunate accident. He had brought with him
from France a devoted and capable attendant, Pierre Le Roy, who in this
wilderness filled many and diverse offices; he delighted to vary the
often very limited diet of the pasteur by preparing for him dainty
dishes of mushrooms with which he was familiar in the old country. There
are many varieties here unknown there, and any one who knows this
delicious but dangerous vegetable, knows how easily confounded are the
good and the poisonous; the deadly Aminita resembles very closely one of
the best edible mushrooms; we know not exactly how, but one night the
dainty dish proved fatal to the great and good pasteur, and his flock
was left desolate in August, 1773, just nine years after their arrival
in the New World.
Jean Louis Gibert had married Isabeau Boutiton, a fellow emigrant and
sister of his assistant minister, Pierre Boutiton. She was left a widow
very young, with two little daughters, Louise and Jeanne, and one son,
Joseph, to struggle with the difficult new life. I cannot pursue the
fortunes of the colony, but without the leader and counsellor on whom
they leaned the colony soon began to disintegrate and disperse, and
their descendants are now scattered all over the country. But of this I
am sure, wherever they have gone they have carried their strong, upright
influence, always raising the standards and ideals of the communities
they entered.
Little Louise Gibert very early married William Pettigrew, a blue-eyed,
fair-haired young neighbor, who was charmed by her dark beauty. His
grandparents had come from Ireland and settled in Pennsylvania, from
which State their sons had scattered, Charles settling in North
Carolina, where he was to become the first bishop of the Episcopal
Church, and William settling in South Carolina as a farmer.
They had a large family, four sons and five daughters:
James Louis, who became a very distinguished man, a lawyer.
[Illustration: JAMES LOUIS PETIGRU.
Miniature by Fraser.]
John, clever and witty, but the ne’er-do-well of the family.
Tom, who died a captain in the U. S. navy.
Charles, who graduated at West Point.
The daughters were:
Jane Gibert, who married John North.
Mary, who never married.
Louise, married Philip Johnston Porcher.
Adèle, married Robert Francis Withers Allston.
Harriet, married Henry Deas Lesesne.
The sisters were all women of rare beauty, but Mary. Outsiders never
could decide which was the most beautiful, but, of course, each family
thought their own mother entitled to the golden apple. My mother was
painted by the artist Sully when she was twenty-two, just a year after
the birth of her first child, Benjamin, when she was so ill that her
hair was cut, so she appears in the portrait with short brown curls, and
is very lovely. There is a portrait of her painted by Flagg, in middle
life. When she died in her eighty-seventh year she was still beautiful,
with brown, wavy hair only sprinkled with gray.
The tradition in my mother’s father’s family was that the Pettigrews had
come from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and had
gone to Scotland, when they had changed the spelling of the name from
Petigru, and had eventually moved to Ireland. This idea was, of course,
pleasant to the little Frenchwoman, and when her eldest son, James
Louis, grew up and proposed to change the spelling of his name and
revert to the French spelling she was delighted, and the father
consented that the children should spell the name as they preferred, but
he declined to change his. So on his and his wife’s tombstone in the
most interesting little God’s acre at the old home in Abbeville, his
name is William Pettigrew, while all his children are recorded as
Petigru. My mother said to me not long before her death that she felt it
had been a mistake, as there was no survivor of the Petigru name, all
the sons having died. But I do not agree with her, for my uncle, James
L. Petigru, was a great man--heart, soul, and mind--and left a mark in
his State, having codified her laws with knowledge and wisdom. He was
almost the only man in Charleston who was opposed to secession,--I may
almost say the only man in the State.[2] But he was so revered and
beloved that, at a time when party feeling was intense, he walked out of
his pew in St. Michael’s Church (which he never failed to occupy on
Sunday) the first time the Prayer for the President of the United States
was left out of the service, and no one ever said one word of criticism
or disapproval. In a period when party politics ran high and bitter
feeling was intense, it was a wonderful tribute to a man’s character and
integrity that, even though running counter to the intense united
feeling of the community, love and respect for him should have protected
him from attack.
My mother always talked with great pleasure of her early life. She spoke
with admiration and love which amounted to adoration of her “little
mother.” Her father took second place always in her narrative, though he
was a most delightful companion--very clever and full of wit, a great
reader, and it was his habit to read aloud in the evenings, while the
family sat around the fire, each one with some appointed task. The elder
girls sewed, while all the children had their baskets of cotton to pick,
for in those days the gin had not been invented and the seed had to be
carefully picked from the cotton by hand! It would seem a weary task to
us, but they regarded it as a game, and ran races as to who should pick
the most during the long winter evenings while my grandfather read
Milton, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and other masters of literature. When
one contrasts those evenings, those influences on the minds of children,
with the amusements and diversions deemed necessary to the young of the
present day, one does not wonder at the pleasure-loving race we are
becoming. Add to this that there were no little story-books to dissipate
the minds of children. My mother’s ideal of a story-book was her beloved
Plutarch’s “Lives,” and I remember still with intense regret her
disappointment when, I having accomplished the task of learning to read
fluently, she one morning placed in my lap a large volume with very good
print, and turned to the Life of Themistocles, which she had so loved.
Perhaps if it had not been for the long s’s which adorned this beautiful
edition of Plutarch it might have been more of a success, but at the end
of the half-hour I announced that I saw no pleasure in such a dull
book.... I would gladly read to her from one of my story-books, and then
she would see what a really nice book was. My dear mother was so pained.
She had had the same experience with the older children, but she
thought me very bright and felt sure that she would find a congenial
mind in her “little Bessie.” Seeing how hurt she was and that she had
set her heart on that special book, I did not insist on my book but came
every day and read the Plutarch aloud; but I never enjoyed it, which she
could never understand.
This thing of bringing all reading matter presented to a child down to
its level is a great mistake; it lowers ideals and taste. Stories while
you are a child, and then romances, novels, detective tales, corrupt the
taste until it is so reduced that there are not many young people now
who can read Scott’s novels with any more pleasure than I read Plutarch
at ten. My mother’s school was the old field school of the long ago. The
country was thinly settled and the schools widely separated, so that
children had to make an all-day business of it. The nearest school to
the family home was on Long Cane, three miles away, and mamma, at first
accompanied by an older sister and brother, later alone, walked three
miles to school every day. She took her little basket of lunch, a
substantial one, for she did not get home again until late afternoon. It
is quite surprising to find what excellent instruction was given in
these “old field schools.” Education was not so widely diversified, but
it was more thorough and of a higher kind, as far as it went.
Mamma learned to prove sums by “casting out the nines” in a wonderful
way, which no one else that I ever saw knew anything about. Her mind was
stored with treasures of good poetry which she had been required to
memorize in school. On her solitary walk home she was never lonely. The
birds and the little inhabitants of the woods were her delight. At a big
chestnut-tree about a mile from home she had special friends--two
squirrels who ran down from their castle in the top of the tree when
they heard her coming, and she always reserved some of her lunch for
them. She sat at the root of the tree and played with them until she saw
the sun about to sink below the horizon, when she picked up her little
school-bag and started at a run for the last stretch of her way home.