Caroline Gilman: a woman in a man's world

The historic Charlestonian I decided to research is Caroline Howard Gilman (1794-1888). Caroline, (pen name Mrs. Clarissa Packard) was an accomplished writer, poet, and documentary of the Unitarian cemetery in Charleston. 

Caroline Howard Gilman (1820)

Caroline was born on October 8th, 1794 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Boston shipwright Samuel Howard was one of the original participants in the Boston Tea Party. Sadly, both her parents died young and she was raised and educated by her sister Ann Marie White. She developed a great love for writing and poetry and in 1810 when she was sixteen her family secretly submitted one of her poems called "Jephthah's Rash Vow" to be published in a Boston newspaper. She described feeling "as alarmed as if I had been detected in Man's apparel."

Caroline married Samuel Gilman in 1819 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina where he became the pastor of the Unitarian Church from 1819 to 1853. This, however, did not mean an end for her budding writing career. From 1832 to 1842, she published the first American weekly journal for young people called Rose Bud, later the Southern Rose, which circulated all over the country and made her the best-known woman writer of the South.  Other publications include "Recollections of a Southern Matron" in 1837, "The Lady's Annual Register and Housewife's Memorandum Book" in 1838, a manual for housekeepers and "Love Progress in 1840", a domestic novel. She also wrote children's books including  "The Little Wreath of Stories and Poems for Children" in 1847.

Her most popular work was "The Letters of Eliza Wilkinson during the Invasion of Charleston" which documents the British conquest of Charleston in 1780. This work shows that while Caroline was always in support of gender equality, her position on slavery was not quite as progressive. Although she and her husband bought, educated and freed several young black men, she justified slavery in her writing and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Her biographer states that "her prose was of an unaffected and light-hearted character, and her poetry dealt with the beauties of nature and domestic affection, qualities which appealed to the sentiments of the time and which made her one of the most popular women writers of her day" These traits in her writing made Gilman one of the most famous female authors in the South from 1830's to the 1850's.

Caroline's death card

Arguably one of Gilman's most important work, however, is her documentation of the Charleston Unitarian Cemetary's gravestones. Gilman's husband was the pastor of the Unitarian Church and the cemetery, which had been there since the 1770s, was in a state of severe neglect. Gilman was moved by this, and in 1859 she and a few others decided to clean up the cemetery. She writes "Can not some neglected surroundings, where rank growth repels even the footsteps of kindred, be resigned and converted into beauty?... and now around all our sepulchers, as around that of christ's, "there is a garden.". Gilman chose purposely to leave the natural beauty of the cemetery by leaving the trees and vines to make it a sort of garden. While doing this, Gilman went around and transcribed every gravestone carving still visible. This has proven to be a very important piece of writing for the Unitarian cemetery because most of those gravestones are no longer legible. Fortunately, with Gilman's detailed writings, we can still figure out who is buried there and what their gravestone once said.

Overall, Caroline Gilman was a very interesting research topic. She was very much a woman ahead of her time and became a very successful writer in a time where women didn't do that sort of thing. It is very cool that she is buried in our cemetery, the very same cemetery she documented and help reform.