Changing Places, Trading Faces

This project seeks to examine on how a Northern middle-class woman like Williams came to marry a plantation owner and embrace paternalistic ideals. This case study focuses on the letters of one woman, Sarah Hicks Williams, to her parents between the 1840's and late 1860s. Her letters encapsulate her time at the Albany Academy for Girls, in Albany, NY through the birth of her last child in 1867. Williams like myself is from upstate New York, we even lived five blocks a part from each other (with an almost 200 year gap in between), and though we are nothing alike, moving to Indiana, there are certain feelings that resonated with me.

There are three over-arching themes within this project—slavery, domesticity, and consumption. Throughout her life, Williams is heavily focused on material goods. Her letters document this well, as well as her relationship with domestic slaves. Sarah is uncomfortable in role as plantation mistress at the beginning of her marriage but over time proved to be a capable manager. These two areas intersect with Sarah's domestic duties to her family. Domesticity and maintaining the household was key to a woman's life during the 1840s-1860s. Sarah's letters to her parents chart her changes in behavior and modifications in domesticity. Within these smaller subsets and those are slavery, domesticity, and consumption.

This project is primarily made from Voyant text analysis tools. Using these tools can shape analysis in a new way and brings value by being able to analyze the minuscule to test theories regarding history. I feel strongly about increasing access to information and having an online analysis allows this to occur. There is a large amount of disinformation on the internet and this project allows everyone access to chart the change of a woman’s life over time. I hope that this project encourages someone to use the letters (compiled in their own section) to complete their own analysis using Voyant or other digital tools.

The project was developed in Safari and tested in Google Chrome and Firefox but all features may not appear as designed in Internet Explorer.

Letter writing was the primary form of communication for Sarah and many women of her time. Writing allowed Sarah an outlet for discussing her private feelings on school and eventually plantation life. The letters used in this project have been kept in the original spelling and grammar used by Williams.