The Road to Frogmore has several other couples whose lives and relationships  are interesting and sometimes puzzling.  Take, for instance Austa and Mansfield French, leaders of the original band of “Gideonites,” missionaries, preachers, and teachers who went to South Carolina in March 1862 to work with the newly-liberated slaves.

 

Mansfield was an evangelical Methodist minister whose ministry was often directed at revival preaching and with founding and financing educational institutions.  In Ohio he worked with Ohio Wesleyan University annd Xenia Female College.  He also helped establish Wilberforce University, the oldest African-American private university.

 

During his time in South Carolina, his ministerial efforts extended to improving the living condiions of former slaves and encouraging the creation of African-American military regiments.  At one point he was accused of embezzlement and brought back to Washington DC to stand trial.  He was eventually exonerated of all charges, on the grounds that he was simply too busy “doing good,” to keep track of the money he spent doing so.

 

His wife Austa was a much more formidable lady than her picture would suggest.  She was the mother of seven children and her husband’s ever-helpful right hand.  Yet she found time to pursue a career as an opera singer and as a writer.  In South Carolina she kept busy writing a book that detailed every awful aspect of slavery.  She was known for stopping black women on the street, addressing them as “Oh, My Sister!” and encouraging them to tell her how terribly they had been treated. If she saw a black woman with a light-skinned child, her first greeting was, “He raped you, didn’t he? Tell me all about it!”  The resulting book, Slavery in South Carolina and the Ex-Slaves, is available on the internet.  For its time, it was almost considered to be pornographic in its sexual detail.