William Channing Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment: A Profile

Today's post was written by a great-grandson of William Channing Gannett, Michael Ross Gannett, Jr. who has graciously shared his research with us. Last revised: 10 February 2021-gmc.

Andover-Harvard Divinity School

When William Channing Gannett (1840-1923) debarked on March 9, 1862 from Steamer Atlantic in Beaufort’s harbor he was in the company of 52 other volunteering teachers and missionaries who had been invited by Freedmen’s Societies in Boston, New York and Philadelphia to teach and supervise “contrabands of war”, as newly freed slaves were first called, on nearby Sea Island plantations. Cotton plantation aristocracy had fled their Beaufort town homes immediately after Confederate forts on Hilton Head and St Helena islands were easily defeated by Commodore Dupont’s Union cannons on November 7, 1861. Those stately town homes were then occupied by the officers of thousands of occupying Union troops. Beaufort had became a bustling military Civil War cantonment. 

Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase had been requested by Military Governor Gen Rufus Saxton to devise plans for managing more than 10,000 former cotton plantation slaves, whose numbers grew as they fled toward the coast, out of reach from Confederate entanglements.  Chase had emerged as the mainspring of anti-slavery influence under the councils of President Lincoln. He instructed Pierce that in his work he would prepare the Negroes “for self-support by their own industry”. This was called the Port Royal Experiment.

Chase chose Boston attorney Edward Pierce to head up the Port Royal Experiment. On arrival Gannett allied himself with fellow Bostonian Edward Philbrick; they were assigned to John Fripp’s plantations on the east end of St Helena Island, Philbrick as a plantation superintendent. Gannett, and Harriet Ware, also from a prominent Boston family and eight years his senior, made quick work at Coffin Point and Pine Grove to start up schools. By mid-May Gannett was asked by Pierce to write the first Report Card for their students, detailing names of scholars and their levels of aptitude and learning, and which was filed as part of Pierce’s progress report sent to Chase just six months after the Port Royal Experiment was conceived.

 

Placing Gannett “in context” will help to appreciate the role he had volunteered for. He was not yet 22 years of age on arrival in Beaufort. He graduated Harvard College at 20 and had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He started and soon abandoned studies at Harvard Divinity School, undecided on his career. His father Ezra Stiles Gannett (ESG) was a Unitarian minister since 1820, when he joined William Ellery Channing, the most prominent Unitarian of his day, as his assistant. By 1860 ESG was planning the relocation of Channing’s old Federal Street congregation to Arlington Street opposite Boston Common, and was its minister. Gannett, whose mother died when he was six, grew up under his father’s household, which was more than a clergyman’s private domain. Boston’s “Brahmins” were ESG’s friends and associates. Young Gannett became an avowed abolitionist, having been inculcated with emancipationist theories from early exposure to speeches of William Lloyd Garrison and others.

By June 1862 at Coffin Point Gannett concluded his time and talents were better placed in assisting field-hands to do their work in growing cotton and becoming self-sufficient than in teaching their children their letters. On July 1^st1862 he took up Superintendency of 11 small plantations at the west end of St Helena. Philbrick’s Unitarian contingent held that large scale Federal assistance such as the outright granting of lands the negroes had long occupied should be abandoned. Gannett wrote “Let the laws of labor, wages, competition etc. come into play- and the sooner will habits of responsibility, industry, self-dependence and manliness be developed.” This was a complicated period when Gideonite volunteers were actually government employees under military authority, when negroes were conscripted into the army depriving plantations of farmhands, when non-payment or slow payment of negro wages was a thorny issue, when controversy arose over methods of disposal of seized plantations lands was ever shifting, and during which time the negroes’ best interests were hotly debated in a Congress largely focused on war.

By early 1863 Gannett joined in Philbrick’s scheme to advance free-versus-slave labor theories on 7000 Coffin Point plantation acres; Philbrick purchased those lands at auction with a Boston investor group. Gannett was honorably discharged from army service so he could undertake this course for negro free-enterprise. After two one-year contract periods Gannett, however, decided Philbrick and he were no better than former plantation masters where profit from cotton was the motive. He did not renew his expired contract after December 31, 1864 and moved to Savannah where he lived out his last six months in the South as Agent for New England Freedmen’sSociety and a coordinator for finding local teachers and homes for emancipated slaves fleeing the devastation of Sherman’s March to the Sea in one of the final tumultuous stages of the Civil War. 

Gannett returned North and published an article entitled “The Freedmen at Port Royal”*, traveled a year in Europe with his father and pursued a degree at Harvard Divinity School. His letters written to his father and aunt Kate and sister Kate from St Helena Island remain untranscribed and unpublished today, yet two PhD theses were written on his life and he figures prominently in many accounts of the Port Royal Experiment. His distinguished career in the ministry and public service spanned 40+ years in the mid-west and Rochester, N.Y.

Sources:

Burton, Orville Vernon. Penn Center: A History Preserved, University of Georgia Press, [2014].

 

Dabbs, Edith M. Sea Island Diary: A History of St. Helena Island, Reprint Co., 1983.

 

Dougherty, Kevin, The Port Royal Experiment: A Case Study in Development, University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

 

Gannett, Michael Ross, Sr. Gannett Descendants of Matthew and Hannah Gannett of Scituate, Massachusetts. Privately printed, 1976.

 

*Gannett, William Channing, "The Freedmen at Port Royal," North American Review, No. CVIII, pp.1-28, July, 1865, Boston.

 

Letters from Port Royal written at the time of the Civil War, edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson, W.B. Clarke Co., 1906.
 

Ochiai, Akiko. "The Port Royal Experiment Revisited: Northern Visions of Reconstruction and the Land Question," New England Quarterly 74.1 (2001): 94-117

 

"The Original Gideonites: List of the First Teachers who Traveled to Port Royal South Carolina from New York, March 2, 1862" https://www.drbronsontours.com/facts-port-royal-experiment/  Accessed 10 February 2021
 

Pease, William H. "Three years among the freedmen: William C. Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment," Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1957. 

 

Rose,Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment, Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.

 

Towne, Laura M. Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina 1862-1884 edited by Rupert Sargent Holland, Riverside Press, [1912]. 

 

Vigilante, David. The Port Royal experiment: forty acres and a mule: a unit of study for grades 8-12, 

National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, c1991.
 

The Sea Islands of South Carolina map above is from Letters from Port Royal (1906), pp. [xii-xiii].