Jennie Holton Fant

Jennie Holton Fant is a South Carolina native, writer, and librarian who served for a decade on the staff of Duke University Libraries. She has published articles in Charleston Magazine, View, Charleston Place, Sporting Classics, Preservation Progress, Duke Library Magazine, and the State and Post and Courier newspapers, and she has served on a variety of editorial staffs. She lives in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. “Visitors see what residents no longer notice. In Jennie Holton Fant's collection, The Travelers' Charleston we encounter scenes of life in the metropolis of slavery completely absent in the reportage of Charlestonians. Indeed in John Benwell's account (that includes a visit to a free black organizing a school for slaves) we see the mechanisms used to repress views sympathetic to African Americans and opinions critical of the slave system. Yet politics is not the whole matter here. The fabric of the city, the contents of kitchen gardens, the diversions of Charlestonians of every caste, the architecture, the street hucksters (including drawings of peanut vendors), the conversations of the elite tables and street corner—they’re all here. While some of the sources—John Lawson, Josiah Quincy Jr., Harriet Martineau—are familiar to students of southern history, others are not, and the eloquence of John Davis, the acid of Margaret Hunter Hall, and the dispassionate acuity of John Stuart make these pages as pleasurable as they are informative.”—David S. Shields, Carolina Distinguished Professor, University of South Carolina “Jennie Holton Fant has given us an illuminating selection of visitors’ accounts of Charleston and the Lowcountry. Seen by many as a place of curiosity, these writings reveal outsiders’ impressions of slavery, architecture, politics, and daily life, revealing a complex portrait of an often contradictory city: simultaneously beautiful and ugly, elegant and coarse, charming and menacing.”—Maurie McInnis, vice provost for Academic Affairs, University of Virginia