Stepping on Toes

My great-great grandmother, MD Bibb, left a trail of letters. Hers by far outnumbered all the others I found in "the box". She carefully copied in duplicate her own letters and held onto them. She also kept correspondence to her family and to her. She is undoubtedly responsible for assembling the majority of documents I found together in one place. Of course, there were others after her who treasured what she had archived, and they probably added bits and pieces, too. I can't help but wonder what they all would have wanted me to do with their legacy. That now is my dilemma.

The next series of correspondence had to do with an on-going dispute with Martha Dandridge Bibb initiated by the family of Mary Phelan who served as Vice President of the Ladies’ Memorial Association under Sophie Bibb. Mrs. Phelan's children believed their mother was being shoved from a rightful place of honor in historical records. I shall mention this dispute briefly, compared to the amount I have in my book.

From Mrs. Phelan's daughter:

Phelan vs. Bibb

Montgomery, Ala.

June 24, ‘93

Mrs. M.D. Bibb.

Pres of L.M.A. (Ladies’ Memorial Association)

Montg. Ala.
"Dear Madam:

I beg your forbearance to read the enclosed letters, I am sure a perusal of them will show you the tenor of mine and my family’s feelings in the discussion between us and prove to you how deeply painful is the fact of seeming to wish to glorify our demised Mother. I have been forced to the issue by a flat contradiction several years after when I said before the Ass’n I had a right to speak to it because my Mother was one of the originators of the Ass’n. I would not have made that speech if I had foreseen the result, then to know a history had been written and her name ever being in doubt. I felt I must correct an injustice. What has subsequently occurred no one can regret as I...

I feel the name of my “dear good Mother” had been trailed in the dust by an excited scene for which I am grievously sorry. I did not wish or intend to convey an impression, I questioned your great, good Mother may have been primary in conceiving the idea of a Memorial Ass’n,..."

Mary Phelan Watt

Response by Martha Dandridge

Hand-written

Montgomery, Ala.
July 1st, 1893

"Dear Madam,

Your note and letters were not received until last night. Absence from home and business engagements must plead my apology for tardiness in acknowledging them.

I did not then make any suggestion in reference to the origin of this ‘Association’ as I did not suppose there was any difference in public opinion in regard to a fact, having the sanction of so many years, and on both occasions, I denied your assertion, simply, because it placed my mother in the unenviable position of receiving commendations for that which she did not deserve...

She was too modest, and too sincere, to have accepted the homage paid her as (your sister expressed it) “the mother of the Association”, had it not been a well known fact, but true to her noble nature would have declared, to Mrs. Judge John D. Phelan this honor is due...

Neither have I any desire to 'glorify my mother'. She only obeyed the promptings of her poise, unselfish character, and her tender sympathy for suffering humanity. She never claimed any superior merit for duty she performed, but often said that the ladies of the ‘Hospital’ and Memorial Associations deserved great praise, and that a nobler band of co-laborers never lived and without their hearty cooperation such grand results could never have been obtained..."

Believe me

Martha Dandridge Bibb

This type communication went on, and on, and on for over ten years!  The Phelans and MDB never resolved their differences but the Phelan family discredited  and assailed Martha Dandridge in a preface to one of the written histories of the Ladies' Memorial Association of Montgomery.  Martha Dandridge responded "in her manner born" by saying to S.H. Phelan--

"I have not replied to the charges made against me in your preface, because I am intensely averse to dissension and contention, and regard our sacred cause as too exalted to have its harmony broken by a discordant note. In this reply, I 'nothing extenuate or set down aught in malice'. In justice to the Memorial Association, to our faithful Secretary and to my honored mother, I must decline to accede to your request. Serious illness of five months duration will plead my apology for the tardiness of my reply."

I suppose the entire issue arose as a result of filial love, an honorable thing. I'm not sure, though. It's only my opinion, but I don't think the mothers, either Mrs. Phelan or Mrs. Bibb, would have cared at all who got credit for what. They seem to me the ones whose intentions were honorable.

Family Tree

It seems appropriate and helpful to include a tree of some kind outlining where this pilgrimage is headed.  Ergo, here it is.  The red and blue entries veer from the maternal line to give both parental links because in my book I include something about them along with all the families listed in black print. In a future post, I'll include a more precise family picture of the Porter, Kennedy, Dunlap line. Governor James D. Porter left many letters, etc. and much has been archived with Tennessee's Department of Archives and History. The letters  I have, and  the documents  by one prominent historian and another by a poet and feminist of the day have never been published or seen as far as I know.

Next Step

So. I had retrieved "the box" from a closet of memories and mess. Old Boy Scout uniforms and a wedding dress--gone, along with years of clutter. But the filthy insect-spotted letters and ancient paper had been rescued and waited in the car with the Old Paris porcelain and Waterford crystal.

I have been uninterested in old family relics and tales that have been stuffed down my throat since I was a baby. Being the only girl in a clan with three brothers, maybe I should have inherited the old family spirit. Alas! All these treasures, these family heirlooms, meant little to me. Nor had they ever. I had resented the constant reminders of the past and wholeheartedly blasphemed the family’s loyalty to “The Lost Cause”. Call me a heritage heretic. All the pieces of the past the family had cherished through the years were pieces of needless debris in my mind.

Traitor that I was, I felt no devotion to those people or things. To make me a bigger turn-coat, the thought occurred to me that I might be able to make some money off some of this stuff. Maybe, the old guys fortuitously waited to endow me with their things for my financial well-being. Funny how the mind goes in circles, especially when it's dizzy with dust, aching from such strain. And dealing with the loss of things that DID matter-like a family home and a mother.

These last four years as I began to organize the stacks of letters and documents, I realized why all the Southern history had been collected in one single place. The Sophie Bibb Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, named for my great-great-great grandmother, stored their archives in the old Bibb home where the group frequently convened. When the home was demolished, most of its belongings went with my grandmother to my house on Thorn Place. The majority of the documents included in my book and on my blog are the remnants of those archives.