The Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, 1827-1835

Editors Wiggins and Truss provide the first complete transcription of this 19th-century Alabama woman’s journal. Gayle was the wife of prominent Alabama politician and eventual governor John Gayle. While her husband worked in politics, Sarah Gayle managed the family household in Claiborne and later Greensboro, raising their six children and overseeing the family’s slaves. Isolated and lonely, Gayle found solace in her journal, which she never intended strangers to read. Her candor openly reveals her struggles with bearing and raising children, slave management, health issues, acquaintances, and being wife to an absent husband. While others have created transcriptions of Gayle’s journal, Wiggins and Truss have painstakingly compiled the most complete version, restoring portions of the journal that had been defaced and reorganizing pages to place them in correct order. Their accomplishment provides valuable insight into the lives of white antebellum southern women and, as this is the only extant journal of an Alabama woman from this period, a valuable source about white Alabama women from the era. Highly recommended." - CHOICE

"The journal kept by Sarah Haynsworth Gayle (1804-1835) illustrates poignantly how much women’s lives have changed since the early nineteenth century . . . Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins and Ruth Smith Truss have achieved an impressive reconstruction of Gayle’s journal, which some legacy-minded descendants had disordered and defaced. The resulting definitive text is a treasure for scholars of antebellum frontier, southern, and women’s history. Those interested in illness and death, religion, family life, or literary reception in the antebellum Southeast will also find material here." - The Journal of Southern History

"Anyone interested in the lives of early-nineteenth century women will rejoice at the publication of this important edition of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle’s engaging journal. Married at fifteen in near-frontier Alabama to John Gayle, a young lawyer who would quickly rise as a jurist and politician to serve as the state’s seventh governor, Sarah Gayle filled the days and weeks of her husband’s absences by recording in a free-flowing journal her daily concerns, memories of her own childhood, her hopes and fears for her children, and her struggles to manage the slaves who served her. Sarah writes with a lively intelligence and a clear eye, giving us a rare extended look at a woman’s world. She recounts jokes and joys, but hers is a world punctuated by childbearing, illness, and death; one by one her girlhood friends suffer loss, sicken and die. Only twenty-three when she begins the journal, Sarah has already borne several children, and mourns her youth and her beauty (she fears that the loss of her teeth will lessen her husband’s love for her). Her death from tetanus at the age of thirty-one left six young children—and a matchless legacy in this journal. Thanks to skillful application of recent technologies, editors Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins and Ruth Smith Truss have been able to restore many passages hitherto unreadable. We are in their debt." - Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, author of Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography

"We have in Sarah Gayle’s Journal the captivating story of a remarkable life. Its sharp focus on a variety of issues in Alabama during a specified period is unique. Gayle’s story finds its center not in over-arching political power of the day, masterful triumphs in business, or the insatiable lust for land, although she is a keen observer of those things, especially in her husband, or her friends’ lives. Gayle’s contribution to Alabama, to scholarship, and to the generation then unborn—to us—is her human story. Her life resonates because we can hear the vibrant heartbeat of her community, and sense the fear and excitement of the time when she still lived so remarkably close to an American frontier that she and others worked so feverishly to transform." - Jimmie Lewis Franklin, author of Back To Birmingham: Richard Arrington, Jr. and His Times

"Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins and Ruth Smith Truss have performed an invaluable service in editing Sarah Haynsworth Gayle’s insightful, perceptive journal she kept between 1827 and 1835. This diary had been in various stages of disrepair, with incomplete, defaced sections and scattered, unreadable pages. Through the use of modern technology, including computer scanning, the editors have saved and restored many of these defaced pages and created a nearly complete and valuable edition of the diary. Gayle’s journal is unique in revealing a young woman’s world in early frontier Alabama. She begins writing her journal as a young mother during her husband’s rising political career. His frequent and lengthy absences mean she often finds herself alone, a “sort of widowhood,” as she characterized her situation. In her journal, Sarah describes her daily experiences, often in intimate detail, and pours out her heart until dying of lockjaw in 1835, not yet thirty-one years old. Interestingly, Sarah shares few details about slaves who eased her daily life, though she often expresses frustration in trying to control them. Sarah’s thoughts on courtship and marriage, her descriptions of daily activities with family and friends, her church-going and strong reactions to various ministers, and her several health problems due to bad teeth and an opium addiction are fascinating to read. Like so many other women in similar circumstances, it was female friendships that sustained her. Scholars as well as those fascinated by antebellum southern women will find this an important addition to the growing number of published volumes of southern women’s personal writings." - Sally G. McMillen, author of Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing and Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South

"Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins and Ruth Smith Truss have made this challenging manuscript available to a much wider audience in a superbly edited edition. Sarah Gayle offers a fascinating look into the world of antebellum marriage and motherhood in a journal filled with valuable information on social life, religion, slaveholding, mental anguish, drug use, and a host of other important topics. Invaluable." - George C. Rable, author of God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War