Series 2 Edward Williams Family Papers

The Williams Family Papers contain the diaries, correspondence and a small number of miscellaneous paper of Quaker teachers who lived in Mississippi and Texas in the post-Civil War Period. The diaries, 1869 and 1871-1873, of Edward Williams include accounts of removing to the South to teach freedmen and his December 1871 meeting with American Satanta andBig Tree, Kiowa chiefs who were incarcerated in the penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. The correspondence, largely to family in Ohio, describe daily life and schools. By 1874, the letters reflect increasing financial and social pressures as the new structure for public school cut pay to teachers and limited free education to age 14. By 1876, Edward Williams wrote that their situation and that of African Americans in Texas were "surrounded by uncertainties." The papers are organized in three groups: Journals, Correspondence, and Miscellaneous Papers.