Sarah Thompson (Gibson) Humphreys (1830 - 1907)

Born 17 May 1830 in Warren County, Mississippi, USA

Ancestors

Wife of Joseph Alexander Humphreys — married 21 Jun 1853 in Lexington, Fayette, Kentucky, United States

Descendants

Died 31 May 1907 at age 77 in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, USA

There is a biography of Sarah Gibson Humphreys, [IT:Sarah G.

Humphreys: Antebellum Belle to Equal Rights Activist, 1830-1907:IT],

published in the Filson Club History Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2 (April,

1991) by Mary G. McBride and Ann M. McLaurin. This is too lengthy to

copy and is under copyright. I will quote a few brief excerpts from

it: "Although the biography of Sarah Thompson Gibson Humphreys seems

to illustrate the development of a daughter of the planter class from

antebellum belle to equal rights activist, by her own account Sarah

was never intended by circumstances of heredity or education to be a

conventional belle. Descended from a distinguished Southern family,

Sarah was the daughter of Tobias Gibson of Mississippi and Louisiana

Breckinridge Hart of Kentucky. In an undated autobiographical fragment

written late in her life, Sarah described her mother, daughter of

Nathaniel Hart and Susan Preston of "Spring Hill," Woodford County,

Kentucky, as a woman of "masculine intellect, great force of character

and strength of will." Of Tobias Gibson, Sarah wrote:

My father Tobias Gibson came of a long line of clergymen who were the

pioneers of Methodism in the South. My father was a man of accurate

education, of unusual culture and of broad ideas, far in advance of

his time. Although by inheritance a large slave owner he was at heart

opposed to slavery. He was also that anomaly amongst Southern men a

"Woman Suffragist." He believed and taught me to believe that

"taxation without representation" was as unjust to women as to men and

he educated me up to the idea that our advancing civilization would

sooner or later demand not only the political enfranchisement of women

but their equal share in the control of the government.

The family divided its time between its Louisiana sugar plantations

and its home in Lexington, Kentucky. Sarah's earliest memories were of

the suffering of the Indians and the slaves. She described her

mother's naming the town of Houma, Louisiana, in commemoration of the

Indians who lived there and remembered "the straggling Indians of this

tribe who used to come to my mother to exchange their beaded wares for

food and blankets. My child's heart was always touched with sympathy

for them as I listened to my mother's stories of their wrongs,

suffered at the hands of the whites." Sarah felt "tenderest sympathy

for the Negroes; in fact at that early age I so hated slavery of every

kind that I constantly surprised our Negroes by refusing the birds,

squirrels, fawns and young alligators which they brought to me for

pets. I could not bear to see anything caged. ...

Widowed at thirty-three, Sarah was left with three children, aged

nine, five, and four, with a large estate to manage in the midst of a

civil war in which four of her surviving five brothers were actively

engaged. Her younger sister had been sent to France in late 1863 for

the duration of the war while her father struggled to keep his

plantation afloat in occupied Louisiana. She joined him there for a

few months in 1864, for he was convinced that leaving his land meant

losing it. Sarah observed at first hand her father's attempt to work

with the Union commanders in establishing a labor system utilizing the

former slaves whose legal status was still so ambiguous in Louisiana.

The Federal provost marshall provided the Gibsons with a guard, but in

March the Negroes rebelled and sixteen of them left the Gibson

plantations for Tigerville and Houma. Soon after she returned to

Kentucky, Sarah's father-in-law died, and she was left with few

sources of advice and support. ...

Sarah placed no credence whatsoever in the popular idea that men and

women should occupy separate (and probably unequal) spheres:

We need each other. God never intended that we should occupy different

spheres. He did not put women in Venus and man in Mars or Jupiter. We

find ourselves on this earth together--dependent one upon the other.

We are born alike--we die alike. We should live alike.

Sarah cited Biblical scholarship to argue that "God is male and

female," noting that Arabic and Hebrew scholars revealed that the

words for the Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit were always feminine in

the original texts. God thus created "the Almighty [IT:Us:IT]--male

and female and called [IT:their:IT] name Adam--giving both the same

name, being the same person- two in one, yet a unit." When the male

and female Adam did not obey, God performed a second creation in which

Adam was given form and woman created, "so that they might be company

and help for each other." Sarah argued, however, that "only equal

halves make a whole" and that equal rights were thus essential to both

men and women.

Just as she rejected the idea of separate spheres, Sarah denied the

Victorian ideal of the "[IT:womanish:IT] woman." She expressed scorn

for "conservative and conventional society ladies, and our

weak-nerved, weak-kneed and weak-brained" ladies who could do nothing

on their own and needed the protection of men. On an issue such as the

use of firearms, for example, Sarah was contemptuous of women who did

not know how to handle a gun. Some women, believing in chivalry rather

than justice, pictured "men as knights.., wandering over the world

with lance and battle ax in quest of foes to fight for her sweet

sake." Not so, Sarah declared, for "the rustle of angel's wings

possesses no terrors for mortal man. No, my dear sweet womanly women

and lady-like sisters, it don't scare worth a cent." A good Smith and

Wesson pistol is better protection than a pair of angel's wings, Sarah

wrote, and "it is safer to fire a pistol than fly with your wings":

My daughters and myself have lived for years alone in an isolated

country home, both in Louisiana and Kentucky, and enjoyed a sense of

perfect security from the fact that our pistols were always ready and

in reach, and that we knew how to use them, and it was generally

believed that we would use them, which knowledge is in itself a

protection.

Sarah argued that women should carry firearms even if the law did not

sanction it. She concluded that "firearms in the hands of women will

help to civilize our State. ...

http://trees.ancestry.com/rd?f=image&guid=24050a0e-6f02-4160-af77-50ef5ebafd05&tid=19184945&pid=767426073

Sources

Source S-2084246619

Repository: #R-2084255971

Title: 1860 United States Federal Census

Author: Ancestry.com

Publication: Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.Original data - 1860 U.S. census, population schedule. NARA microfilm publication M653, 1,438 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records

Note:

APID: 1,7667::0

Repository R-2084255971

Name: Ancestry.com

Address: http://www.Ancestry.com

Note:

Source S-2084246783

Repository: #R-2084255971

Title: 1870 United States Federal Census

Author: Ancestry.com

Publication: Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.Original data - 1870 U.S. census, population schedules. NARA microfilm publication M593, 1,761 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Record

Note:

APID: 1,7163::0

Source S-2084246895

Repository: #R-2084255971

Title: 1880 United States Federal Census

Author: Ancestry.com and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Publication: Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2010. 1880 U.S. Census Index provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints © Copyright 1999 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved. All use is subject to the limited

Note:

APID: 1,6742::0

Source S-2084255075

Repository: #R-2084255971

Title: 1900 United States Federal Census

Author: Ancestry.com

Publication: Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004.Original data - United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1900. T623, 18

Note:

APID: 1,7602::0