History Behind the Story: Matilda Thompson and Rufus Saxton Get in Union

When Philadelphian Matilda Thompson arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina to teach in 1862, she fit right in. She had grown up in a staunchly abolitionist family and had herself been fervent against slavery since she was in her teens. She was soon befriended by fellow teacher and Pennsylvanian Laura Towne, who nicknamed her “Tilly.” Because she was pretty as well as principled, the Union Army bachelors were soon attentive to her.

General Rufus Saxton. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

General Rufus Saxton, who served as the military governor of the Department of the South from 1862 to 1865, was headquartered in Beaufort—he lived in a house that had belonged to the Heyward family, eminent planters in the Low Country. Saxton, a Massachusetts man, was a passionate abolitionist. He oversaw the formation of a black regiment and navigated the two tumultuous land sales in the Sea Islands. The effort of struggling for the rights of former slaves wore on him. His wartime photograph shows a man who looks both kindly and weary. Edward Philbrick, the Boston engineer who became an enlightened cotton planter on St. Helena Island, who knew Saxton well enough to invite him to dinner, observed more than once that Saxton seemed “blue” over his duties and his situation.

But he was capable of cheer, too. On January 1, when the Emancipation Proclamation was read in Beaufort, to great ceremony and celebration, Saxton held a dinner. Among the guests was Laura Towne, who brought fellow teachers Nelly Winsor and Tilly Thompson with her. After dinner, Towne wrote, they sat in the General’s parlor, where the General and his captains “amus[ed] themselves decking out Nelly and Tilly with scarfs and swords. …the General gave his yellow scarf to Tilly, his red one to Nelly, thus letting Miss Thompson rank Nelly. They retained these scarfs all the evening.”

This flirtation evidently lit a spark, because by spring, melancholy Rufus Saxton had even more reason for cheer. On March 11, 1863, he led Matilda Thompson down the aisle of the St. Helena Church in Beaufort, bringing them into union in more ways than one.

Quotes are from Laura Towne, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-1884 (Cambridge, 1912), p. 99, https://archive.org/stream/cu31924074445267/cu31924074445267_djvu.txt.