During the beginning of the Reconstruction period in Beaufort, South Carolina, a division in the Republican party grew. This political division pitted William C. Morrison and Robert Smalls, heroes of the Planter, against each other. This division in the Republican party was heated and even violent at times and involved some big names in Beaufort history. Reconstruction Era Park Ranger Eric Ellis discusses how this division began and how it played out and impacted the Republican Party of Beaufort’s Reconstruction period. 

Originally from Jacksonville, Eric Ellis joined the US Navy after high school serving in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. After the Navy, Eric attended school at New Mexico State University, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in History and his Master of Arts in Public History and 19th c. US History. After graduation Eric took a position with New Mexico Historic Sites as an Interpretive Ranger. In 2023, Eric accepted a position as a historian for the National Park Service at the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park. In his time with the Park Service, Eric focused his research on Black Landownership during the Reconstruction period and completed research on a variety of topics on the Reconstruction period for the park and park partners.  

This presentation is part of the ongoing collaboration, Historically Speaking, between the Beaufort County Historical Society, and the BCPL’s Beaufort District Collection.

In this talk, I’ll present part of the coda of Paper Heroines, where I study Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (1902) and Elizabeth Hyde Botume’s First Days Amongst the Contrabands (1893) together, side-by-side. Through this diptych, I’ll demonstrate how and why we ought to read women relief workers—and their life writing—in conversation and in community with one another. When we do, we’re able to recover stories of Black women’s lives that have been overlooked or dismissed for too long. 

Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society, and Vice President of Organizational Matters for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She has published more than a dozen articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century women writers. Her book—Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838–1902 (University of South Carolina Press, 2026)—studies the ways women documented their own and one another’s lives in diaries and biographies, focusing especially on the intersection of gender and race. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported this research with a 2023 Summer Stipend. She is completing two new books: Laura Matilda Towne, Abolitionist: Penn School Diaries, 1862–1864 and Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Lives: A Cultural Biography.

This presentation is part of our ongoing collaboration, Historically Speaking, between the Beaufort County Historical Society and the BCPL’s Beaufort District Collection