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"My parents were free Negroes and were considered in comfortable circumstances when I was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1853," said Martha Lowery.
"My maternal grandfather was one of the leading lawyers of Charleston about one hundred years ago. After I finished school, under private tutors, I was sent to the Charleston Institute, where I finished the classical course, and soon I began teaching Negro pupils in Charleston.
"My ancestors came to Charleston from the West Indies and they have never been slaves. They have always been known as a high spirited people. In the fall of 1873, I began to teach Negro girls at Sumter. At the same time and place, Irvine E. Lowery began teaching the boys. We naturally had kindred interests and being thrown together in educational work, we ultimately fell in love, and were married in 1875.
"When we completed work at Sumter we went the next year to Summerville, and taught there. It was while we were there, that Mr. Lowery (we had both been members of the Methodist Episcopal Church for some years) was made an elder in the church and we quit the school room. He held pasorates at Anderson, Spartanburg, Charleston, Summerville, Cheraw and Columbia. In 1876 we moved to Columbia permanently, my husband having been chosen by the church to write the annual church conference reports.
"For twenty-eight years he did that work, preaching only occasionally, and his reports were published in The State and The
Record and The Charleston News and Courier, as well as in minor state newspapers. During all this time we were about as well known and appreciated by the white folks as we were by the Negroes. If we ever had enemies we were unaware of it. Mr. Lowery died in Columbia in 1926, and many leading white folks attended his funeral. Many of them yet befriend me.
"As we zoomed through practically all our business life to the parting at the grave, I did not fail to note many historic incidents along the road. Slavery in the United States ended with the stroke of President Lincoln's pen January, 1863, but neither the ignorant slaves or their masters yet seemed to realize just what it all meant. At that time only very old white men were in the state. The plantations, as general rule were operated by Negro overseers and Negro hands, and administered by the white women. That was the condition up to mid-summer of 1865.
"By that time the government, a so called carpet bag government, backed by troops had a backing known as Freedmen's aid and government was by ex-slaves and white men, mostly from the North. I have always thought that if the ex-slaves had been advised at that time and lead by South Carolina white men a great deal of the reconstruction confusion would have been avoided. As it was there was too much graft in it, and far too little interest.
"When the white planters and business men did return a change in administration begin to be apparent, but it worked so slowly that it was lost sight of for an approximate decade. The campaign in 1876 and resulting diplomacy ended the carpetbag regime, and it was brought about mostly by ex-slaves. I have in my scrapbook, a clipping which contains a quotation from a speech of Governor Wade Hampton at Auburn, New York, in June, 1877, soon after his election as governor.
"The clipping quotes the governor as follows: 'I say to you men of New York, as I say at home, I owe my election to the colored men of South Carolina. Thousands of them voted for me, knowing that I had been a good friend of their race, and knowing, too, that I was the first man, after the war to recommend that they should be given the right of suffrage. I have never changed my mind on that subject, and I am satisfied they shall always be dealt with in all respects as citizens of South Carolina.
"The 1876 campaign was between General Hampton and Governor Chamberlin, a so called carpetbagger, who ruled by the federal bayonet right, and the carpetbag outfit made a tremendous effort to poll all the black vote, but Negroes generally know much more than they were given credit for and they refused to be lead as sheep to the slaughter, and a vast majority of them voted for their friend, General Hampton. At that time there was plenty signs that the leadership of the South intended to make full citizens of the Negroes and live in accord with them.
"For years now, the Negro has only voted in national elections in many states, and he generally voted almost unanimously for the Republican candidate. That was so, in fact up to 1932, in that year many of the Negroes broke away from bias and voted for Mr. Roosevelt. Seeing the valor and common touch of the President during his first term, the Negroes voted at least 85 per cent for him, and we have high hope that ultimately all will work out so that the black race will come into its own rights in its pursuit of happiness.
"Mr. Lowery and I were married in 1875, the same year that he was elected an elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church and I have said that we had many kindred wishes. Ours was a sweet, delightful, life of service to our race and to the community we were born, reared and lived in. I have three sons living. They all followed in their father's footsteps, by finishing school at Claflin University, Orangeburg, S. C., and one of them went to New York to study. Two others went to Chicago. For a time they sent some money to Mr. Lowery and me. But they soon married Northern women and now, they send nothing.
"I manage to live with a family who has known me for nearly fifty years and I have always been able to pay for my living. My one regret is that my children whom we educated and started out in life, do not take more interest in me now. Of course I would be independently comfortable, if I had been the grasping kind years ago. Then too, my grandfather left property and money for me in Charleston, but other members of the family succeeded in beating me out of my share.
"It was a most pleasant thrill that I extracted about 1855, when my husband and myself visited Boston. He spoke to a vast audience at Faneuil Hall and won much applause. I addressed a large audience of women at another location not far from Old South Church, and we came back to South Carolina with many keepsakes and trophies of value. I found there as I have found here, that the very best people of any community, urban or rural, are people who are doing all they can to get hatred out of their system.
"We told folks wherever we went that we were proud of our fine old, historic state of South Carolina. We admitted that South Carolina had sometimes made mistakes, but we asked where was the state or individual that hadn't. And that is my philosophy now, and I am hoping for better days here and hereafter. My faith in God is firm and sometimes I can almost see over the gulf that separates the living and the dead. Columbia is now a big modern city, twice as big as it was when I first saw it.
"You ask what I think of public men, past and present. Well, I think that God has the right Moses at hand when the emergency comes, be it what it may. I think he raised up Abraham Lincoln for that awful emergency in 1860-65. I think he raised up Woodrow Wilson for that world disaster in 1917. I think he raised up Franklin D. Roosevelt for the economic disaster that has so lately flared in our land. And I think the whole nation is on the way to a better day."
