Edward S. Philbrick and the Port Royal Plantations

 By Robert W. Philbrook

(Originally published in the December 2001 issue of the PPFA Newsletter)

     Edward S. Philbrick was the son of Samuel Philbrick and Eliza Southwick and was born on November 20, 1827 in Boston, Massachusetts.  Graduating from Harvard College in Boston in 1846, Edward became a civil engineer and was “employed by the Sate at the boring of the Hoosac Tunnel.”  Edward married Helen Maria Windsor on September 16, 1857. 

     At the beginning of the Civil War, late in 1861, Union forces landed at Port Royal Island in South Carolina which contained many plantations abandoned by the retreating Southerners.  On those plantations were about 8,000 slaves who worked the vast cotton fields.   Fleeing South Carolina whites had told their slaves that the Yankees would “harness them to carts and make them pull the carts around, in place of horses” Susie Taylor, a young slave at the time recalled.  The older slaves told her these were lies and that “the Yankees was going to set all the slaves free.”  Northern abolitionists and supporters organized a group of plantation superintendents, missionaries and teachers to go to the area to help the Negroes as the former slaves became free men.  Among those headed for Port Royal was Edward S. Philbrick.

     Harvard educated Edward Philbrick was at first troubled by his encounters with the newly free Negroes, in the spring of 1862 he wrote:  “I am surprised to find how little most of these people appreciate their present prospects.  Once in a while you find an intelligent man who does so, but the mass plod along in the beaten track with little thought about the future and no sort of feeling of responsibility.  They feel a sense of relief that no one stands to force them to labor, and they fall back with a feeling of indifference as whether they exert themselves beyond what is necessary to supply the demands of necessity.”

     By the end of 1862, Edward changed his opinions of the freed slaves and wrote, “Just a year ago to-night I entered this house for the first time.  If our Northern croakers could only be made to realize as we do here the ease with which we have reduced a comparative degree of order out of the chaos we found, and see how ready this degraded and half-civilized race are to become an industrious and useful laboring class, there would not be so much gabble about the danger of immediate emancipation, or of a stampede of Negro labor to the North.”

     “We found them a herd of suspicious savages who regarded their change of condition with fear and trembling, looking at the cotton-field as a life-long scene of unrequited toil, and hailing with delight the prospect of ‘no more driver, no more cotton, no more lickin’.’  They had broken up the cotton-gins and hidden the iron-work, and nothing was more remote from their shallow pates than the idea of planting cotton for ‘white folks’ again.”

     “Now they have, without the least urging, prepared for planting some two hundred acres of cotton-land upon this plantation, having spread on it sixteen hundred ox-cart-loads of manure, and worked up every inch of the ground with their hoes.  They have also planted on hundred and thirty acres of corn…”

     “As a sample of the change of feeling in regard to working on cotton, I will relate how I got the cotton ginned on this and the various other plantations in this neighborhood.  I walked through the Negro quarters one day in December and told the people I would pay them three cents per pound of clean cotton if they would gin, assort, clean, and pack their cotton ready for market.  They said in reply their gins were all broken up.  I told them that was their own fault, and that, if they wanted other people to gin their cotton and get their seed away from the place, they would do so, and so get all the money and leave them no good seed to plant.  ‘Dat’s so, Massa,’ said they, and I passed along.  The next time I came they had hunted up the broken pieces of twenty-five gins, and patched them up, and had ginned and packed all their cotton, in two weeks.”

     According to Chapman, Edward (probably after the war) traveled in Europe, Asia and Africa.  His lineage ends, as he and Helen did not have any children; but his brother William Dean Philbrick and descendants are numerous today.

Sources:

Rev. Jacob Chapman.  Philbrick & Philbrook Families.  Pg. 59

James M. McPherson.  The Negro’s Civil War. Pp. 57-8; 120-1.

Elizabeth Ware Pearson.  Letters from Port Royal, Written at the Time of the Civil War.  Pp. 63, 180-2