New Year’s Day in the Diaries of Black Women: How Frances Anne Rollin’s writings reveal the evolving meaning of emancipation at the turn of the year

As the new year invites us to reflect on past struggles and future possibilities, the following guest post by Jennifer Putzi, author of The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition, reflects on how Black women diarists have long marked this moment with hope and resolve.

On New Year’s Day, 1863, writer and teacher Charlotte Forten began her daily diary entry by proclaiming it “the most glorious day this nation has yet seen.” Although a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation had been announced in late September, 1862, it took effect on the first of the new year. While the Proclamation had its limitations, it emancipated close to 3.1 million people in states rebelling against the Union, provided for the enlistment of Black men into the Union army, and proclaimed the abolition of slavery a central goal of the Civil War. At Watch Night celebrations across the country on New Year’s Eve, African Americans awaited the arrival of midnight and the news that the Proclamation had taken effect. “I count the hours till to-morrow,” Forten had written, “the glorious, glorious day of freedom.” “Glorious,” it seemed, was the only word worthy of the occasion.

“The year renews its birth today with all of its hopes and sorrows. Uncertainty and doubt are in its wake.” —Frances Anne Rollin

“I rose early,” she wrote on New Year’s Day, “and early we started, with an old borrowed carriage and a remarkably slow horse. Whither were we going? . . . To the ferry; thence to Camp Saxton, to the celebration.” Living on St. Helena Island off the coast of South Carolina and teaching recently enslaved children, Forten celebrated the day on the grounds of a former plantation turned military camp, surrounded by Black soldiers in the 1^st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, hundreds of formerly enslaved people, and white teachers, doctors, and military officers. All were working toward what Forten called “a year of such freedom as we have never yet known in this boasted but hitherto wicked land.” 

Writing five years later in Boston, diarist Frances Anne Rollin acknowledged the commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation, which she was unable to attend because of inclement weather: “A rainy gloomy day. Speakers tonight at the Tremont Temple but so terribly rainy that there is no possibility of reaching there.” The “Emancipation Jubilee,” as the Boston Evening Transcript called it, was organized by a committee chaired by Leonard A. Grimes, African American pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church, and featured addresses from speakers including Wendell Phillips, William Wells Brown, and Charles Lenox Remond. Rollin’s inability to participate in the celebration contributed to a feeling of uncertainty as she looked forward to the new year. “I sent a letter to Mother today which I wrote last night the latest hour nearly of the old year,” she continued. “The year renews its birth today with all of its hopes and sorrows. Uncertainty and doubt are in its wake. For me and mine I know not, but may God enable us whatever may be my lot. To murmur not, but patiently bear, and wait and labor.”

As I write in the introduction to The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition, Rollin was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and educated at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. After teaching formerly enslaved children in Charleston after the war, she traveled to Boston in late 1867, remaining there until late July. While there, she wrote and published a biography of Martin R. Delany, the activist, physician, and adventurer who was one of the highest-ranking officers in the Union army when he was reassigned to the Freedmen’s Bureau and stationed in Hilton Head, South Carolina after the war. Leaving behind his efforts to organize African Americans to emigrate to Africa, Delany wanted to reframe his past to position himself for further activism and perhaps even for political office. He invited the ambitious young woman to write his biography and she accepted, likely as much for the financial support he offered as for the opportunity to further her career as an author.

Even as she pursued her own “lot” in Boston, Rollin knew that the success of the new year depended in great measure on what would happen in her home state, where, in just two weeks, a majority-Black delegation would meet to draft a new, more progressive, state constitution. Later in the year, her future husband, William J. Whipper, would be elected the House of Representatives. Soon after, she secured an appointment as a clerk to the Judiciary Committee, which Whipper chaired, and returned home. The two were married in mid-September and the diary ends in late October with the Frances’s immersion in South Carolina politics and, on October 16, 1868, the assassination of Benjamin Franklin Randolph, an African American minister and state senator, by the Ku Klux Klan.

Rollin, of course, knew none of this on New Year’s Day. Like many African America diarists to come, she saw the new year as both a commemoration and a fresh start, a new beginning that was marked by the anniversary of one of the most important moments in African American life and history. Having purchased her pocket diary from Taggard and Thompson’s Booksellers’ and Newsdealer’s Agency on Cornhill Street in Boston for fifty cents, Rollin inscribed her name and local address inside and began writing. 

As we begin this new year, the diary of Frances Anne Rollin is on display in an exhibit titled Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism at the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington D.C. Viewed alongside a pair of gloves owned by Mary Church Terrell and items from Stacey Abrams 2018 gubernatorial campaign, the diary is deservedly honored as part of Black women’s history. This history is at risk in a nation where Black women experience unprecedented unemployment rates, Black women like Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, are fired by Donald Trump, and school curricula and museum exhibits are rewritten to make white people more comfortable. Rollin perhaps anticipated a moment like this when she wrote on February 22, 1868, “if things continue as they are there will be but little Country left to celebrate.”