Uncovering an early Port City literary journal

Local author John Sullivan ("Pulphead," "Blood Horses") dropped by for lunch the other day with a curio -- a good condition copy of Volume I, Number 1 of The South-Atlantic, "a monthly magazine of Literature, Art and Science," published in Wilmington from 1877 to 1880.

(It's amazing what you can find on eBay.)

The South-Atlantic, which ran to 108 pages octavo, is a cultural landmark. It's almost certainly the first literary journal published in Wilmington, one of the earliest in North Carolina, and it was edited by a woman, Caroline Aiken Jenkins Harris, better known as "Carrie" (1847-1903).

It must have been a lively read. The inaugural issue includes a reminiscence by John Newland Maffitt of Wrightsville Beach, the former Confederate navy captain and blockade runner, and an article about the newly reopened University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill by its president, Kemp P. Battle.

Harris herself would contribute a profile of "Prince Omeroh" (Omar ibn Said), an Islamic scholar from Senegal who was captured in a military conflict and sold into slavery, arriving in North Carolina as the slave of former Gov. John Owen. He lived in Wilmington with members of the Owen family in 1836 and worshiped with a local Presbyterian congregation, where he was a local curiosity for his ability to speak and write in Arabic.

Subscriptions to The South-Atlantic were $3 per year, according to Rowell's American Newspaper Directory.

Harris was a fascinating character in her own right. Born on a plantation in Vance County, she taught "music, drawing, painting and waxworks" at the Wilson Collegiate Institute as a young woman and acted in local amateur theatricals.

In 1874, she married a newspaperman, Cicero W. Harris. By the end of that year, the couple were living in Wilmington, where Harris was associated with the Star (predecessor to the modern StarNews) and the Sun. 

Carrie Harris -- who, in accord with the time, signed herself "Mrs. Cicero W. Harris" -- began contributing to Our Living and Our Dead, a Raleigh-based literary weekly. Among her contributions was a serialized novel, "Margaret Rosselyn," a romantic picture antebellum North Carolina set in her native Vance County. 

Our Living and Our Dead expired in 1876 and Harris launched The South-Atlantic the following November, with herself as editor and publisher. Cicero Harris, who wrote on public affairs, contributed a possibly timely article on "Corrupt Use of Money in Elections."

Local historian James Sprunt wrote that the Harrises "were conspicuous in Wilmington for their literary attainments" and remarked that Carrie "was a woman of most attractive personality and remarkable energy."

The South-Atlantic ran on a shoestring; historian Jane Turner Censer quotes a letter from Harris to Paul Hamilton Hayne, pleading for contribution to the magazine: "I am sure you desire the successful establishment of such an enterprise sufficiently to induce you to give me a few pages of ms. (manuscript) in order to secure their success." The plea must have worked, at least in part; Hayne's account books contain a notation,"Mrs. Harris, $15."

The magazine petered out in 1880; Sprunt blamed the hard economic times. By 1881, Harris was in Baltimore, putting out a revived South-Atlantic for a few issues.

Some surviving copies of The South-Atlantic are on file in the North Carolina Room at the New Hanover County Public Library.

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com.