Seth and Mary Eastman - Mary Henderson

Mary Henderson

Mary Henderson was born in Warrenton, Virginia in 1818 to a family of the elite planter class. She moved with her family to West Point, New York when her father was assigned as a surgeon at the military academy. There she met and married Seth Eastman in 1835 when she was seventeen. As Henderson noted in her novel Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852), she was a descendant of the First Families of Virginia and had grown up in slaveholding society.

In 1841 Seth Eastman was promoted to Brigadier General and appointed commander of Fort Snelling. He and his family lived there for years. This was when Henderson Eastman wrote Dacotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling (1849), which Seth Eastman illustrated. She used her time at Fort Snelling to record and preserve the local culture. Among the legends she collected from the Dakota was a version of the death of the lovelorn Princess Winona. She sent her book to the US Congress in 1849; it is online on Project Gutenberg.

After the Eastmans returned to the East, they lived in Washington, D.C. In the years of tension before the American Civil War, many writers published novels that dealt with each side of the slavery issue. After the stir caused by Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mary Henderson Eastman defended southern slaveholding society by writing what became a best-selling book: Aunt Phillis's Cabin: or, Southern Life As It Is (1852). It sold 20,000–30,000 copies, making it a bestseller and one of the best-known of the anti-Tom novels produced in that period.