CHAPTER IV.
INSPIRED BY HIGH IDEALS.
What motive led this young woman of only twenty-six, surrounded by wealth, by culture, and every circumstance that made her not only acceptable but desirable in the highest circles of society, to abandon all—home and friends and money and the pleasures which her position in the social world brings—for a life of the most arduous toil among a barbarous, if not a savage people, whose skin, unlike hers, was black and whose habits and customs were thought to be repugnant and repelling to those of refinement? She had been fully appraised, too, of the physical dangers that lay in wait for any one who would condescend to prostitute their powers of mind in the instruction and elevation of the Negro race, at the hands of the whites of the South. Her position between the fire of social ostracism on the one hand and the fagot on the other was one not to be envied. It would have daunted the courage of any woman made of weaker stuff, but being of sterner material and obsessed with a sense of duty in a just cause, such a sense of duty as led both the blue and the gray to do and die in the cause which each conceived to be right, Martha Schofield set a star for herself and determined to go to it even if she was forced to wade through blood and fire in doing so.
Beginning her first labors on Wadmalaw Island, between Charleston and Beaufort, in South Carolina, Miss Schofield suffered every inconvenience and privation of frontier life. Aside from the annoyance and hindrances placed in her way by the few scattered white settlers in sympathy with the Order of the Ku Klux Klan, life was made unsafe by many diseases that flourish in this climate.
The enrollment in her school consisted of the children of the 1,500 Negroes who had followed Sherman in his march to the sea. She had the assistance of only one person, a white woman.
She set to work not only to educate an army of Children but the duty of clothing and feeding the naked and starving, of which there were many, fell to her lot.
It is beyond the reach of the imagination of the present generation to adequately comprehend the hardships endured by her at the time of which we write. October 24, 1865, she wrote in her diary as follows:
“This morning I took my bread to school to watch; when light enough I made it up and sent it half-mile away to be baked in the only stove in the village. We distributed clothing for 102 today.”
But for the aid of the Society of Friends and the Abolitionists who supplied food and clothing to her for free distribution, hundreds would have died from starvation and thousands have gone as naked as were the custom of some of the Negroes when captured in Africa and brought to this country as slaves.
Under the conditions which Miss Schofield created an immense amount of suffering was dissipated. Not only the Negroes but she herself, faced starvation at one time for several weeks. This occurred when the steamer from Philadelphia, laden with a cargo of groceries, clothing, shoes and books, ran aground and remained motionless for thirty-one days. During this time Miss Schofield set the Negroes to work gathering oysters and acorns. With these and a few boxes of crackers, which she had hidden away for just such an emergency, she originated a kind of porridge that prevented actual starvation. “The crackers,” she writes in her diary “had to be broken up in fine parts so as to remove the worms from them.”
The same tale of poverty and almost inconceivable hardships followed her from Wadmalaw to Edisto in 1866 and on to the Island of St. Helena in 1867. But these were things to be expected and to be born patiently as long as she had strength and health. But these gave away right here at St. Helena in the second year of her immigration to South Carolina. It was here that malarial fever, with which this section has been infected ever since it was settled, attacked her, and for quite a long time her life was despaired of. “This illness,” she writes, “occasioned hemorrhages of the lungs, from which all hope of recovery was abandoned by my friends.”
It was at this very critical period in her career that those flighty and fashionable friends in the North, some of them her nearest relatives, urged her with all their might to give up the undertaking in the South and return to her home. It was very much against the will and desires of her own people as well as against the wishes of her best friends that she sacrifice her time and life in the interest of any race or cause, and she was told so before the instinct to engage in social welfare work had totally possessed her. They now drew a picture of a frail sickly woman with one foot in the grave and the other lifted up to follow, and asked her if such a feeble body even though possessed of ample means to employ teachers, had the power to direct the work so necessary to be done. She was urged to get out of the business in order to make room for some one stronger than she, who still had the strength to carry to completion the noble undertaking set in motion by her.
But Martha Schofield answered with these words: “As long as there is life in me to work, I shall work. The coast may not be the place but I will yet find the place.”
And she did.
So in 1868 she went to Aiken, S. C, and started work again after losing her health and all her personal income. Assisted by an auxiliary branch of the “Freedman’s Commission,” a charitable organization composed of two dozen ladies, of Germantown, Pa., she soon was able to begin work on a scale of some promise.
In 1870 the United States Government, through the “Freedman’s Bureau,” took official recognition of the necessity for the kind of work being done by her by having a small frame house erected for her. This house still stands.