Caroline's war

'If you men will not defend your country’s flag, I will!’

Hello! Welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This is the first of a new series about the ‘back stories’ of the twelve members of the group before they moved to Cambridge in the 1870s and 1880s. This month’s post is about Lady Caroline Lane Reynolds Slemmer Jebb, who was born plain Caroline Reynolds in Milford, Delaware, USA, on 26 December 1840. She was the youngest of four children of John Reynolds, an English-born clergyman ordained in the American Protestant Episcopal Church, and his wife, Eleanor (née Evans) an heiress from Perkiomen, Pennsylvania. The family moved from state to state due to Reverend Reynolds’ preaching work and Caroline, always known as ‘Carrie’, left school at fourteen. Two years later she married Lieutenant Adam J. Slemmer of Norristown, Pennsylvania. She went with him when his company moved to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, where their son Albert ‘Bertie’ was born, then in autumn 1860 Slemmer was posted to Fort Barrancas overlooking Pensacola Bay in Florida. The Unites States Army was on edge during the winter of 1860-61 as Confederate troops began to organize in the secessionist Southern states. This is what happened when Caroline encouraged her husband to make a stand.

Source: R. Baxter Blair, Hart American history series (Chicago, IL: Denoyer-Geppert Co., 1917) A15. Map Credit: Courtesy of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress.