(Top) Portrait of Annie Wigg Smalls, circa 1890, courtesy of Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. (Bottom) Portrait of M. Ellen Murray, Penn School founder, courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Over the course of the next few months, Black women from the Lowcountry formed nineteen sewing circles—stationed as far north as Johns and Wadmalaw Islands and as far south as Hilton Head Island. Each society had a president who served as emissary between the society and the Red Cross’s headquarters in Beaufort. 

A slight majority of sewing society presidents were Black women, with just under half headed by local and Red Cross volunteer white women or men. Sewing was a socially acceptable way for women to contribute to the relief work, and it drew upon skills that both Black and white southern women had been taught. Well-known figures in the area, both white and Black, also took charge of sewing circles. Annie Smalls (“Mrs. General Smalls”) the wife of Civil War veteran and famous Black politician Robert Smalls and a well-educated and esteemed woman in her own right, was placed in a coveted position as head of the Beaufort sewing circle. Mrs. Sam Green, the wife of a prominent Black boatman, farmer, and former House representative and U.S. Customs Official, took the helm of the Ladies Island society. Ellen Murray, one of the founders of the Penn School and one of the few white people living on St. Helena Island, headed that island’s sewing society. For some societies, members of Barton’s inner circle served as president. Evelyn Beardslee, the wife of U.S. Admiral Lester Beardslee, for example, was the liaison for Parris Island; H. L. Bailey, a long-time Red Cross volunteer, took on the Rockville circle; and Mrs. Ida McDonald, a nurse from Milwaukee, headed up the Hilton Head Island circle.

Barton kept a list of the sewing society presidents, but that list only partially represented who managed the societies’ labor. While McDonald was a key liaison and contributed a great deal of labor to the circle, she wrote in her report that Miss Mary Clark, a young Black woman, “was put in charge” of designating tasks to complete, whether “patching…buttons to sew on…[or repairing] apparently useless garments to make into children’s clothing.” Similarly, while C. C. Richardson may have been the go-between for the Bennets Point sewing circle, a document by four Black women—the Mrs. Lacy Jones, Lucy Whaley, Eugenia Boulis, Caroline Milton, and Amelia Smalls—makes it clear that they actually organized and ran the society. In a sort of charter of the society, they described the responsibilities of the circle and the commitment of local women (“the other ladies agree to sew without pay”) and vowed to uphold “the honest & faithful distribution of all the clothing intrusted [sic] to it and that they will work together in peace & harmony.” Their charter designated their duties and also contained language to assuage Barton of their trustworthiness—not that they had given Barton reason to doubt it, but perhaps this was their way of responding to Barton and the Red Cross volunteers’ repeated paternalistic worries about “abuse of charity.”

With the organization and leadership established, the work began. At headquarters, volunteers unloaded and unpacked shipments of clothing before repacking them into “barrels and boxes” for distribution to the societies. Barton kept a close eye on the day-to-day operations of the clothing department. Not only did she assist daily in packing clothing, but she also wrote out the distribution lists stating which locale needed how many boxes or barrels of clothing.

Once sent to each society, much of which had to be transported by boat, African American women gathered in whatever space they could—sometimes tents, sometimes a donated room in a house—and commenced their work. Many of the sewing societies followed a similar cycle, where crews of women would sew for a week, then trade off, and return to the work every few weeks. At Bennets Point, for example, twenty-four women volunteered in crews of six, each contributing a week of their time every four weeks. Most women sewed without a sewing machine, though the Hilton Head sewing circle was able to obtain one to speed up the work. At that circle, Black women repaired and handed out 3,400 garments after ascertaining every family’s individual needs. While precise numbers do not appear to exist for every sewing circle, it seems clear that many thousands of items of clothing were refurbished by hundreds of African American women.

Sea Island women dancing as a man claps along, "The Sea Island Hurricane: The Devastation, 1894," from Scribner Magazine, drawing by Daniel Smith, Sea Islands, South Carolina, 1894, courtesy of the Avery Research Center.

At least for the African American women working for the Hilton Head sewing society, the circle provided an opportunity not only to gain much-needed rations, but also to gather. McDonald wrote that the Black seamstresses at Hilton Head Island would, once “steadily to work,” “commence a patter song.” Then, “the rest would quickly join in, and, to the accompanying rattle of the sewing machine, work and music blended.” What McDonald calls a “patter song” must have been a Gullah-Geechee song, perhaps a spiritual or a rhythmic work song. And while she interpreted their singing as an indication that “their troubles were over,” singing together was more complicated than that. In the Lowcountry, singing during labor was common, and it could represent much at once: a way of processing their sorrows, a habitual activity to move along the working hours, a communal form of artistic and emotional expression.

Black women sewed and sang their way through the winter and into the spring, addressing shifting needs in seasonal clothing. In February and March, even as many storm sufferers traveled to Beaufort for both resources and news or wrote to the Red Cross to thank them for their assistance, many also knew the work was not yet done. The work of Black women and the rations assistance from the Red Cross had softened the immediate clothing and food distribution crisis, but sewing circles remained busy. New troubles also loomed, with the arrival of the spring planting; the changing of the season would shed light on additional challenges that the storm sufferers faced.