Elizabeth Allston Pringle was one of the most famous Southern authors of the early twentieth century, best known for her books A Woman Rice Planter, published in 1913, and Chronicles of Chicora Wood, published posthumously in 1922. Born in 1845, she was the daughter of Robert F. W. Allston, a gentleman rice planter of Georgetown District, South Carolina. In 1870 she married a former Confederate cavalryman, John Julius Pringle, and was widowed in 1876. Thereafter she spent most of her remaining years managing two beautiful, isolated rice plantations on the Pee Dee River, principally the Allston plantation called Chicora Wood.
Dr. James E. Kibler, an author and literary historian, noted that Mrs. Pringle’s story may have been part of the inspiration for Margaret Mitchell’s famous heroine in Gone with the Wind, observing in his book The Classical Origins of Southern Literature:
With the strength and grit of a better Scarlett O’Hara, Mrs. Pringle superintended two large rice plantations until her death in 1921. She vowed not to lose her family land and move to the city, and she didn’t. Margaret Mitchell knew her story from her papers deposited at the South Carolina Historical Society and from her two books … Her works reveal Mrs. Pringle to be a classically educated traditionalist living in an increasingly anti-traditional time. The focus of her life and work might best be described as faith and family, neither very popular today with those who shape public opinion.[1]
Like Scarlett O’Hara, Elizabeth Allston Pringle, called Bessie, had rebellious, selfish, and temperamental tendencies, but partly thanks to the discipline and Christian example of her beloved father, she eventually overcame what she described as her “poor, intense, self-willed nature.” Her poignant, unusual love story was not an obsessive one like Scarlett’s, but it was just as passionate.
The two books Mrs. Pringle authored were autobiographical and made her story well-known, yet they left us with something of an unfinished tapestry, with some parts less detailed than others, particularly her marriage and early widowhood. Surviving in her family papers at the South Carolina Historical Society are letters she wrote during the war years of 1861 to 1865, diaries she kept during that time and for several years following, and a small collection of letters and diary entries written after her husband’s death in 1876. These manuscripts, most of which have never been published, are the heart of a new book, Bessie in Love and War. They illuminate aspects of her life which were not so richly explored in her published works, and are supplemented by extracts from her books and unpublished family papers which serve to create a fuller narrative. Although nearly half of Chronicles of Chicora Wood is devoted to her experiences throughout the War Between the States and its aftermath, her letters of this period, as well as diary entries not included in her memoir, offer added details, and a more immediate record of her life during this traumatic period. Most of the better known photographs of Mrs. Pringle are those of her as an elderly woman, but this new book features never before published photographs of a youthful Bessie and her handsome husband.
As recorded in Chronicles, she first met her future husband on a train bound for Charleston in 1862, and after being introduced to him by her older sister Della, Bessie found herself the main object of his attention. In 1863, she experienced a few more encounters with John Julius Pringle, and one with his younger brother Poinsett, whose physical beauty left her awestruck. While on furlough, Poinsett paid a visit to the Allston house in Charleston (now known as the Nathaniel Russell House), and Bessie was so tongue-tied in his presence that her mother chided her after he left and asked to know what was wrong, to which she replied, “Mamma, he was so beautiful that I was paralyzed! I never saw anyone so beautiful in my life.” Sadly, Bessie later noted in her memoir that “all this charm and beauty of mind and body was snuffed out” when Poinsett was mortally wounded in a cavalry fight in Virginia in 1864.
In May 1863, at the age of eighteen, Bessie graduated from a women’s college near Columbia and joined her family at Croly Hill, a house in Darlington District where her mother and sister had taken refuge while Mr. Allston tried to keep Chicora Wood operational. At Croly Hill, Bessie would again encounter John Julius Pringle, who was on a brief furlough from the Charleston Light Dragoons. On the day of his departure, Bessie and her mother saw him off at the train station, and there something happened that was to be of supreme importance in her life. She wrote in Chronicles:
When he shook hands with me and said good-by, the look in his eye was a revelation and declaration of devotion that seemed to compass me and seal me as forever his, near or far, with my own will or without it. From that moment I knew that no other man could be anything to me. It was so strange that in absolute silence, with not a second’s prolonging of the hand-pressure necessary to say a proper, conventional good-by, my whole life was altered; for up to that moment I had no idea that he was devoted to me.
Bessie’s feelings for John Julius Pringle became so strong that they frightened her, and she resisted his attentions for several years before finally accepting his proposal of marriage. Bessie’s father died in 1864, leaving behind a debt-ridden estate. Facing many financial difficulties after the war, Mrs. Allston opened a school for girls at her house in Charleston in early 1866, and Bessie assisted her as a teacher. She began to enjoy the social life of the city, accompanying her mother’s young pupils to parties and other events as a chaperone. John Julius Pringle came to see her in the city several times, but Bessie treated him with coolness.
Mrs. Allston closed her school in 1869, and she and her family returned to Chicora Wood. In August of that year, Bessie told her mother that she was determined to apply for a position as a music teacher in Union, South Carolina, but these plans were never carried out. She had somehow overcome her fears and hesitance about John Julius Pringle, and that same month, they became engaged.
In April1870, Bessie married into a cosmopolitan family dominated by her husband’s widowed mother, Jane Lynch Pringle, a native of New York. Bessie was twenty-five at the time of her marriage, and the bridegroom was twenty-eight. They would reside at White House, the Pringle family plantation, for most of their married life, mainly out of economic necessity. The young Mrs. Pringle was extremely happy with her husband, but there were three shadows on that happiness: a domineering mother-in-law, her husband’s unrelenting, exhaustive struggles to earn a livelihood as a planter, and Bessie’s miscarriage in 1871.
In the summer of 1876, John Julius Pringle left home to attend the Democratic Party convention in Columbia, which nominated General Wade Hampton as governor to end the carpetbagger regime. Pringle traveled to Charleston after the event, and at some point just before or during his stop there, he fell ill with malaria, and died on August 21st. Bessie was on Pawley’s Island when she learned of her husband’s illness. A cousin came to bring the urgent news and take her to Charleston, but John Julius Pringle was already dead by the time she left. He had passed away at the home of Bessie’s married sister, and there his body was placed in an “ice coffin” with a glass window over the face.
When Bessie arrived in Charleston, some family members tried to keep her from seeing her dead husband, but she protested and asserted her right to see him, and they relented. She wrote to her mother:
Oh Mamma, how I wish you could have seen him … oh the relief, the comfort, as I lifted the blanket which covered the temporary coffin and gazed down through the glass. My whole being broke into a smile and I murmured ‘oh death where is thy sting.’ He was beautiful with a beauty not of this world. A look of supreme happiness and peace such as I have never seen on his face in life. My darling, my darling as he always soothed and comforted me in life and comforted me in death. I felt it would be an insult to him to cry and mourn in his presence.
Many years later, Bessie explained in a letter to a friend how this last look at her husband changed her forever:
Then and there I held communion with the great loving heart of the man I loved, and his spirit calmed and filled mine as it had never succeeded in doing before, his brave and faithful soul permeated mine, his strong courage passed into me, and from that hour my nature was changed—I was not afraid of anything …
Despite her newfound courage, Bessie confided in her mother that “the years ahead look dark.” In her grief, she yearned over her husband’s “life of labor and anxiety and mortification for the past three or four years,” which she believed had caused his early death. In her widowhood, she hardly knew what to do with herself, and missed her beloved terribly, but her diaries reveal that she found consolation and strength in God, and learned to be grateful for the short happiness she had known. She recorded in one of her unpublished diaries:
No woman ever was blessed with a purer more perfect love than I have been and I thank God for it with all my heart. Writing this is such a relief to me, I cannot talk to anyone as I can write knowing it is for no human eye. I feel as if was writing to my beloved.
After her husband’s death Bessie helped her mother plant at Chicora Wood, and later, she would manage its operations, as well White House Plantation, which had formerly belonged to her mother-in-law.
In her widowhood, although her life was not without its pleasures and pursuits of personal interests (including travel and art studies), Bessie lived what one biographer called “a strenuous and sacrificial life.” She generously gave of herself to her family, her friends, her community, and her country. Among other pursuits, she served as State Vice-Regent for the Mount Vernon Ladies Association from 1903 to the time of her death in 1921. This organization, founded in the 1850s by another extraordinary South Carolina woman, Anne Pamela Cunningham, was dedicated to the restoration and preservation of George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon.
In early December 1921, shortly after returning to Chicora Wood from Mount Vernon, Bessie began to suffer serious heart problems. According to one of her obituaries, two days before her death, she sent for her pastor, the Rev. J.E.H. Galbraith, the rector of Prince Frederick’s Parish Church, and for William A. Guerry, the bishop of South Carolina, who happened to be in the area. She passed away in the early morning hours of Monday, December 5. Her funeral took place the afternoon of that same day at Prince Frederick’s Church, and the next day, her body was taken to Charleston, where she was buried next to her husband at Magnolia Cemetery.
Mrs. Pringle’s writings, especially her unpublished letters and diaries, touchingly reveal how a girl who often considered herself inept, ill-natured, and useless, matured into a much-loved woman of exceptional ability, talent, and wisdom. Literary historian Dr. Anne M. Blythe called her written record “the chronicle of a woman changing, a woman developing strength, learning fortitude, and growing in courage.”[2] More importantly, she also grew spiritually, and it was this spiritual strength and understanding that gave her courage and enabled her to persevere through many ordeals and sorrows. In her sunset years, looking back on her life’s “stormy path,” Bessie saw how God had used all these trials to mold her into a person of deep faith and usefulness—a process she considered the central struggle and goal of her life.
The story of her sufferings and struggles during and after the war resonated with many readers when her books were published in the early twentieth century, but Dr. Kibler has noted that it still has significance for readers of today. The lessons of her life, he wrote, “can give courage to any and all, irrespective of time and place … Her message was that despite adversity, one soldiers on.” [3]
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[1] Kibler, Classical Origins, 228.
[2] Blythe, Yours from the Wilderness, 4.
[3] Kibler, Classical Origins, 237.
Great story.