WINSTON AND OCTAVIA, A CIVIL WAR LOVE STORY
This is the 150 year old love story between my great-great-grandparents, Winston and Octavia (Bryant) Stephens, set against the backdrop of the St. Johns River in Florida and the Civil War. A love story told purely in their own words through their letters and diaries and the letters and diaries of eight other family members.
My third great-grandfather James William [J.W.] Bryant was born in Boston in 1812. His father was a cotton factor, a middle man between the cotton growers in the South and the Northern manufacturers who use the cotton. He died when J.W. was about twelve. When he was about seventeen, J.W. went to Charlestown, South Carolina, to clerk in the Taft mercantile firm.
In the early 1830s he returned to Boston and in 1836 married Rebecca Hawthorne Hall, the daughter of another Boston merchant family. Their first son William Augustus Bryant was born in Boston in 1837. They then moved, first to Savannah, Georgia, and then to Jacksonville, Florida. They had four more children: Davis Hall, Octavia Louise, Henry Herbert, and George Perham.
In 1852 J.W. bought the Acosta Grant on the St. Johns River in central Florida and founded the town of Welaka, which means laughing waters in the local Indian language. There he settled his immediate family as well as his mother and four siblings.
Winston John Thomas Stephens, my great-great-grandfather and his three brothers were born in Oglethorpe County, Georgia. After his father’s death, Winston’s mother married Lewis Gaines who moved the family to Alabama. Winston and his brother Clarke then moved to Florida. Clarke and his wife Augustina [Tina] and children, Ben and Toady, settled in Welaka. Winston bought a small plantation on the outskirts of town and with a slave force of about ten began to grow cotton.
When Octavia [Tivie] Bryant was about fourteen, twenty-seven-year-old Winston proposed, but her parents felt she was much too young. She was sent to her uncle Richard Parker’s school in Boston for thirteen months. When she returned, she and Winston again began to see each other. In her letters and diaries, Octavia refers to Winston as “Col.” because of his service in the Third Seminole Indian War. Winston’s sister-in-law Tina approved of the relationship and allowed them to meet at her home. Winston’s head slave, Burrell, also helped by carrying notes between them. Octavia’s father was often not in Welaka since work kept him in Jacksonville or in Cuba. When Octavia’s mother realized what was going on she again tried to influence her daughter to break it off, and Tivie reluctantly agreed. Tivie records in her diary:
Feb 18, 1859. In the morning I had the dreaded talk with Mother, she decided me about Col, oh it will be a great sacrifice, but I hope it will be all for the best.
Feb 20, 1859. I went to school in the morning, but not to service in the afternoon, I stayed home and wrote the fatal letter to Col. I cried myself into a severe headache, but went to tea. After tea went almost directly to bed. I never cried so much in my life.
The letter she wrote does not survive, but Winston’s reply does:
Feb 20, 1859
How easy to write the words, "we are free from any engagement" only a little slip of the pen, but oh how much it cost the one to whom those words are sent. You say that your father said he would never forgive you & he would keep such a promise, did he not tell you that if you would be controlled by him untill you are 18 then he would allow you to marry the man of your choice, & do all in his power to make you happy? does he keep one of his promises & not keep the other or does he regard promises as it seems you do, only made to have the pleasure of breaking them, you alas say you have told me you love me & do love me, "oh such love" such as my greatest enemy would offer, smiles & fair promises to my face & cut my throat if a chance offered with my back to him. such has been your love you said you loved me & I thought you too pure in heart and soul to deceive. It was the opinion I had of your character that drew my love towards you but oh how I have ben led astray by your smiles & sweet words of promises. Oh that God may when we both stand before him for judgement forgive you for the great & irrepairable wrong you have done an innocent and unoffending heart. Go to your parents for forgiveness as it seems they are the only ones you care for or would make any sacrifice for, talk of bringing their grey hairs with sorrow to the grave and such as that. what do they care for bringing black locks to the grave much less grey ones. you think it best to part & not make the matter worse, pray tell me how it could be made any worse than it is now when it seems to me you try to write your letter with my hearts blood. Tivie I send you all your letters & other little gifts that were of little Value of them selves but they were treasured for the givers sake. take them and treat them as you have me caress and love them for awhile and then cast them from you as something useless & beneath you but one request I ask & that is read all your letters over carefully & see the extent of the wrong you have done me see upon what I built my hopes and then ask the question and answer it candidly which is the greatest wrong to forsake me or your parents. at least let it be a lesson to you in the future & never trifle with no mans affections. Oh Tivie you call your girlish affection how can you the second time tell me you were deceived in your love for me that was your first excuse now the same old tune. Tivie I must have a wife & if you cant be my wife I must find some one to heal the wound in some degree that you have inflicted. Bacheloring is more unbearable now than before as I could with pleasure do the house hold duties thinking that soon you would discharge said duties but now when I attend them it makes me feel how much I have lost, and oh bitter the pangs it brings to my already breaking heart, but enough you have ordered & I obey as I have done for nearly three years, you refused my last request, that of one more meeting. Tivie if you cant be my wife we must be as strangers. I sent your ring it is broken keep it and look upon it as all the vows you made & it is a fit representation of the heart you discard. Keep it and when you see it say I brought on this wreck the pin cushion you can keep for the old man, farewell, oh how painful the word. I forgive you and may God do likewise & may you never be treated as you have treated me, farewell, farewell.
Winston again wrote her on the next day apologizing for the tone of this letter. He wrote again March 6th, March 12th, April 3rd, April 10th, April 17th, and April 23rd continuing to court her, but he does not appear in Octavia’s diary until they met at a neighbor’s on April 23rd and on the 25th she says they had a long talk. He continues to appear almost daily in her diary and then she wrote:
August 4, 1859. In the afternoon Mother and I were sewing together in the dining room and she asked me if Wins had any idea of eloping with me, & said she judged from appearance that we had renewed the engagement, but she seemed very good humored then & since.
As Winston says in the above letter, Octavia’s father agreed that if she obeyed him until she was eighteen she could do as she wished. On the first of November 1859, two weeks after her eighteenth birthday, she and Winston were married. Their letters show a couple very much in love and a year later their first child Rosa was born.
This Bryant-Stephens collection is housed at the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I transcribed the Civil War portion of the collection. Then with my cousin, Winston Bryant Stephens, and southern historian, Arch Fredric Blakey, we edited, footnoted, and prepared a manuscript which was published as Rose Cottage Chronicles in 1988 by the University of Florida Press. The book is still available through them or Amazon.com. It is also available as an audio book. This blog returns to my original unedited transcription and will present the day by day diary entries and letters of this remarkable family over the next four years.
The first mention of the war comes in June 1861 when Tivie’s brother Willie Bryant writes his first letter from a “Rebel Tent.” So join me in following the lives of Winston and Octavia and several other family members through their own words during the Civil War.
