Changing places, trading faces : charting Sarah Hicks Williams journey from Northern womanhood to Southern plantation mistress

Abstract

This project analyzes how Sarah Hicks Williams, a New York native went from exemplifying Northern middle-class domesticity in the 1840s to a North Carolina plantation mistress upon her marriage to Benjamin Williams. This project uses primary source documents, principally Williams’s letters to her parents and a handful of others between the 1840s and 1860s, alongside secondary sources and digital scholarship. Williams wrote to her parents on a variety subjects, primarily focusing on important aspects of womanhood during the mid-nineteenth century. This project charts Williams’s changing views on matters relating to politics, slavery, domesticity, and education. This digital history project used Voyant, a web-based text analysis tool, to visualize and interpret the collection of approximately one hundred letters. The tool allows the user to assemble and visualize large amounts of text, identifying patterns and revealing connections that may be missed with a traditional close-reading approach. Williams’s large corpus of documents, which detail her shifting location and worldview, makes her a valuable case study for the digital humanities.