Handwritten letter, undated — Peter's stolen shirts and the Yankees (conclusion)
Book 1, Page 75
Transcription
The concluding leaf of a handwritten letter, brown ink on lined paper. A struck-through word and what appears to be a small folio mark sit at the top left.
tho[ugh]t[2/] of my trunks had been Saved & that Peter had them when she came again & they were enquired after. She said she beleived they was Stributed by the Yankees & the next devel- / opment is Peter in His Shirts. I never let him know that the dishonesty had been detect- / ed because he professed faithfulness &c — we were making use of him which we would lose & gain nothing by telling him we knew it. Meantime it was very agravating to have to buy cloth & make other shirts & His go ragged for a while — But these are small troubles even to very poor people now. Clem is awake again so goodbye —
AI Notes
The concluding leaf of the multi-page handwritten letter that begins on page 074. The writer describes how Peter (a servant) had taken shirts from her trunks, claiming the Yankees had distributed them, and explains why she did not confront him — they needed his labor. She closes abruptly as Clem wakes. The Yankees reference places the letter during or just after the Civil War.
The writer’s “Stributed” (underlined for emphasis on the page) is her shortened rendering of “distributed” — likely echoing the way Peter himself or the unnamed woman she questioned had used the word. The “Yankees” reference places the letter during or just after the Union occupation of the South Carolina Lowcountry — most likely in the wake of Sherman’s Carolinas Campaign (Jan–Apr 1865), when household goods seized or “distributed” during the army’s passage were a common postwar grievance among planter families. The writer’s restraint — refusing to confront Peter because his labor was needed — is characteristic of the precarious labor relations of the immediate Reconstruction years, when former enslavers depended on the continued service of newly-free Black workers.