Notes

1. "Autumn Days in South Carolina" also appeared in the November 14, 1863 issue of the Anglo-African. The Anglo-African printing is virtually identical to the Standard text. The Anglo-African printing omits a semi-colon at the end of line 18, following "nest," and drops the "r" of "their" in line 29.
2. Clara Barton (1821–1912) pioneered the provision of emergency relief at the front during the Civil War. Working without an organizational affiliation, she began to take urgently needed supplies forward to the Army of the Potomac in the winter of 1861–62. Later in 1862, she assisted casualties and medics under fire. In early April 1863, Barton set out for Hilton Head, South Carolina, ostensibly accompanying her quartermaster brother, David. Senator Henry Wilson, an influential supporter of Barton's activities, had secured the post for David so that Barton herself could pursue her own relief work (Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987], 110–11). During her months on the Sea Islands, she became great friends with reformer Frances Dana Gage. Barton's biographer Elizabeth Pryor argues that Gage's influence on Clara is "impossible to overestimate"; her views on race and gender equality evolved as a result of her friendship, and "she began to view herself as an active proponent of woman suffrage" (120–21). Barton provided relief to troops on Morris Island in the summer of 1863, but General Quincy A. Gillmore dismissed her from the field in September; after a difficult autumn of anxiety and inaction, she left Hilton Head on December 31. Later in life, Barton played a crucial part in establishing the American National Red Cross.
3. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), acclaimed poet and editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post. Gage takes her epigraph from Bryant's poem "The Death of the Flowers," written after the death of Bryant's sister.
4. Gage represents the Roman goddess of grain, harvests, and agriculture with a cornucopia or "horn of plenty."
5. By the time the war began, Ohioan Frances Dana Barker Gage (1808–1884) had established herself as a leading advocate of women's rights and abolition, in the reform press and on the platform. A laudatory biographical sketch in Eminent Women of the Age (1868) describes how she found time "to read, and write for leading journals, and often to speak, too, on temperance, slavery, and woman's rights" while raising a family of eight ([Elizabeth Cady Stanton], "Frances D. Gage," in Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation, by James Parton, et al. [Hartford, CT: Betts, 1868], 383). Gage contributed to journals such as the Ladies' Repository, the Ohio Cultivator, the Lily: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Temperance and Literature, the Saturday Visitor, and the National Anti-Slavery Standard—a mixture of titles linked by her reform agendas and regional affiliations. In the early 1850s Gage also presided over a number of statewide and national women's rights conventions, including the Akron convention of 1851, where Sojourner Truth challenged the patriarchy and delegates' racial prejudices. Gage's recollections of Truth's speech were published in the Standard halfway through the war (National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 2, 1863, [4]).
    
   In 1862 Gage and her daughter Mary joined the Northern mission to educate the freedpeople and prove the moral and economic superiority of free labor on South Carolina's Sea Islands. Gage stayed on Parris Island for over a year, without an official title or salary, as "supervisor" to approximately 500 freedmen, women, and children. During this period, she supplied the New York Independent and the National Anti-Slavery Standard with "South Carolina correspondence." She returned to the North in the winter of 1863 and embarked on a lecture tour to raise relief funds. A week before the National Anti-Slavery Standard published "Autumn Days in South Carolina," the editor urged lyceum organizers to book Gage. "Her usual topic will be 'Home Life among the Freedmen,' and we assure the lecture managers that from the stores of her experience and observation she will present matter of deep interest and importance" (National Anti-Slavery Standard, November 7, 1863, [2]). In as much as it contributed to Gage's public profile, the poem functioned as an advertisement. Gage continued her war work as "an unsalaried agent of the Sanitary Commission" in Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez ([Stanton], "Frances D. Gage," 384–85).
   
6. In an article on the Port Royal experiment, H. G. Spaulding offers words and music for the chorus of this song or a variant. See "Under the Palmetto," Continental Monthly 4 (1863): 188–204.