Baptist Faith in Action: the Private Writings of Maria Baker Taylor, 1813-1895.

Baptist Faith In Action: the Private Writings of Maria Baker Taylor, 1813-1895. By Kathryn Carlisle Schwartz. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xxx, 399. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-497-4.)

For over three decades historians have expanded our understanding of the complexities of the lives of southern plantation mistresses. Despite the fact that Kathryn Carlisle Schwartz is not a historian, this biography of her great-grandmother, Maria Baker Taylor, based on Taylor's diaries and letters, is an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century southern women. Schwartz focuses primarily on Taylor's life from her 1834 marriage to John Morgandollar Taylor in Beaufort, South Carolina, to her latter years in Marion County, Florida, where she passed away at the age of eighty-two. Taylor's pithy diary entries provide an inside view of the vast duties and household tasks she unquestioningly assumed as mother of thirteen children and mistress of as many as sixty-eight slaves.

Schwartz's assessment of Taylor's day-to-day experiences, household responsibilities, and interactions with plantation slaves differs little from what has been written by Anne Firor Scott, Catherine Clinton, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Marli F. Weiner, to name a few. Nonetheless, Schwartz's work supports the view that plantation mistresses were anything but ladies of leisure. Rather, they were hardworking domestic managers. In Taylor's case, her life was a never-ending sequence of child rearing, sewing, caring for sick children, and "attend[ing] to sick negroes" (p. 209).

What is unique in this tome is that it is based almost completely on Maria Baker Taylor's own writings. Her diary entries, letters, poems, and essays offer a spiritual self-portrait of a determined woman whose strength came primarily from her Baptist faith. A member of the evangelical planter class, Taylor was the granddaughter of Richard Furman, pioneer denominational statesman, president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, and founder of Furman University. Like her grandfather, Taylor never expressed any doubts about the practice of slavery and believed fully that "'the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures"' (p. 67). Schwartz reveals how an evangelical Baptist background prepared Taylor for the duties of a southern plantation mistress as well as for seeing to the moral and religious lives of plantation slaves. The religious instruction of slaves was solely Taylor's responsibility, and she spent Sunday afternoons reading Scripture to them in the slave quarters.

There can be no doubt that Taylor was an extraordinary woman. In addition to the vast daily responsibilities she shouldered, she educated her own thirteen children and operated a school for her grandchildren and the children of family friends until her death in 1895. Moreover, she was a proficient reader, very familiar with the Bible and well read in Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Dickens. At the age of fifty-nine, Taylor began to write poems and short essays that were published in Baptist newspapers.

While Schwartz does not offer a particularly new interpretation of the life of the southern plantation mistress, her voluminous primary documents offer an unprecedented look at one woman's life through that woman's private writings. From the pen of a deeply religious woman, the prescriptive models of a plantation mistress unfold, and with them a vision of the suffering, sacrifice, and survival of a nineteenth-century southern woman.

Furman University

DIANE C. VECCHIO