Black South Carolinians were eager to work with the Red Cross and flocked to the organization’s headquarters to formulate their plans for recovery. Billy Middleton, Mary Chaplin, and Mrs. Brown met with Clara Barton in October 1893, just days after the Red Cross’s arrival in Beaufort, South Carolina, to discuss an important proposition. Likely they met with her in the organization’s bustling headquarters at 901 Bay Street, during those first days during which Barton’s time was consumed by meeting with informal delegations of mostly African American community leaders from up and down the sea island coast. The three conferred with Barton on the formation of what came to be known as “sewing societies” to help clothe the destitute survivors, and they discussed how to solicit participation among African American women.

Sketch of a Sea Island woman holding an infant, "The Sea Island Hurricane: The Devastation, 1893," from Scribner's Magazine, drawing by Daniel Smith, 1893, courtesy of the Avery Research Center.

The newly forming sewing societies addressed a critical need after the hurricane. Among the material losses that the survivors had endured—of destroyed homes, harvest, crops, and possessions—so too had they lost the clothes off their backs. Stories of the hurricane’s winds and waters depriving people of their clothing abounded. Diana Murray, a laundress to a white family on Edisto Island, lost her baby and her husband to the storm surge—and was herself so cast about on the waves that she washed ashore on Jehossee Island with “every strip of clothes…ripped off of her body by the wind.” Some families had to dole out clothing selectively to the groups who traveled to Beaufort to appeal for food and clothes, with “the rest left nearly naked in consequence.”

Fortunately, donated clothes were abundant. In January, months into the effort, the Red Cross was sending out between 100 and 150 barrels and cases of clothing and bedding each week. Barton averred that she wished to send more, but that was the volume that the boats available to them could handle.

However, those clothes needed mending and tailoring to be useful. After consulting with Middleton, Chaplin, and Brown, Barton devised a system to organize sewing societies, and the group then traveled from Beaufort to Coosaw Works (likely on nearby Chisholm Island) to launch the program in grand fashion. She brought with her a large retinue of Red Cross volunteers and local officials on a boat ride and then a three-mile journey on cart tracks to a church thronged with African American men, women, and children. They greeted Barton with songs and prayers before she charged them with the responsibility of organizing and operating the sewing societies.

The sewing societies, Barton proposed, would receive donated barrels and boxes of clothes from the headquarters in Beaufort, determine the precise needs of local families, alter the clothing according to those needs, and deliver the tailored clothing to those families. Black women were central to this plan. They worked in groups of six, receiving rations in exchange for their time and skill. Barton was a keen logician, to be sure, but paternalistic concerns guided the streamlined system: she sternly commented in her journal that “no promiscuous giving” would be allowed, suggesting that she thought that abuse of charity was a possibility. There is no evidence that she should believe that the storm sufferers would misuse aid, or that any ever did, but it was an omnipresent concern that she and her volunteers expressed.