People today like to blog. They spill forth their innermost thoughts and share them on all forms of social media. In earlier times people did the same thing, only they wrote formal letters. In the 1860s one Richmond pastor wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper and used that forum as a way to call attention to grievous social issues.
The pastor wrote under a pseudonym. He disguised his identity by writing as if he were a young girl working in one of the factories in his town. He gave himself the nom de plume of Struggle. It was an apt name because the working class people of the time found life to be a continuous struggle.
Fred Anderson
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No one knew the identity of the writer and most assumed that the writer actually was a young female. People became alarmed by the content of the letters and they approached the pastor of the town’s Baptist church, asking him what he thought about the issues. He would act concerned but never revealed the secret behind Struggle.
The letters in the Richmond Dispatch told about terrible working conditions in the factories, about the low wages and even complained about the muddy and unsanitary conditions of the streets. It is little wonder that the town of Manchester, Va., had the common nickname of “Dog Town.” It was located just across the bridge to the south of the crown jewel of Southern cities, Richmond. In those times, it was a separate town from the capital city. It was blue-collar working-class before there were blue collars.
William E. Hatcher was a student at the Baptist school, Richmond College, when he was invited to walk from the campus across the bridge into Manchester and preach at Manchester Baptist Church. As a student, he went Sunday after Sunday and preached largely to what he called “rows of well-behaved empty benches.” As he walked back to the campus he would pray that when he was called to his first pastorate, it would be any place on earth other than Manchester.
But when the call came, it was Manchester. He kept serving and preaching and one day a little girl came down the aisle, giving herself to the Lord, and it was like opening a floodgate. People responded and Manchester Baptist Church began to flourish. In 1864 he married Jennie Snead and began to establish his family in Manchester.
William E. Hatcher as a young minister.
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In 1867 he was so moved by everything he saw around him that he began the Struggle letters.
“I am nothing but an humble factory girl but a mighty ambition struggles in my soul,” Hatcher wrote in his first letter. “Don’t despise me (as some do) because I am compelled to earn my bread by working in a cotton factory. Some girls in the factory are mad with me for my speeches. I care not. What suits me, I praise; what annoys, I condemn.”
Over the course of the next few months, “little Miss” Struggle condemned much of the social ills of Manchester. She told of working hours that lasted from 7 in the morning till 8 at night.
“Isn’t this work outrageous. If the oppressed do not cry for mercy how shall they find relief.”
She scoffed at the streets which were no more than “elongated mud pits” and the rickety houses and the leaky roofs of the churches. Little escaped her attention.
Everybody was talking about the Struggle letters and wondering who was the writer. Once when asked what he thought about the mysterious letter writer, Hatcher said: “There are some things about the letters which sound very much like the talk of a factory girl; but then there are other features of the letters that wear the mark of a man correspondent. The fact is I often think they are written by some man.”
Struggle really went to meddling when the letter was published about the habits of some of Manchester’s menfolks. She decried the men who loitered on the streets, “getting home late at night and getting up late in the morning and speaking insultingly to the girls on the street.” She described these loafers as men with “red noses and red eyes.”
People were getting a little nervous about Struggle. Who would be the next person or place under attack? But they couldn’t wait till the next issue of the Dispatch appeared to see the topic of the day.
Little by little, Struggle got results. The town fathers began to order that the streets be paved. The factory owners adjusted the working hours. Some painted their houses. Churches patched their roofs. William E. Hatcher’s writings worked wonders.
At one point Struggle wrote some comparisons between the two neighboring communities on the James River.
“Richmond reminds me of a girl who, poorly raised, by a stroke of good fortune becomes the petted wife of some rich and stupid old bachelor. She decks herself in all the extremes of fashionable folly, assumes lofty flaunting airs and hastens to forget the humility of her origin.”
In comparison to the vain and pompous Richmond, Manchester was pictured as a person with “a broken back and a grey head.”
Struggle tried to shame the Manchester residents into improving themselves. She noted that the town fell below the mark, that their children were not being educated, that their young men aspired to no worthy professions.
Eldridge Hatcher, the minister’s son, noted in his biography of his father that “the letters worked a revolution.”
“The town became dissatisfied with itself and began to brush its straggling locks and to deck itself in clean and attractive attire. It caught a fresh ambition and entered upon a new career.”
In 1910 Manchester was absorbed into Richmond. It has had its ups and downs and ups again. There long has been “the Manchester gang” who keep Dog Town from being totally forgotten. There are areas that are worse than they were in Struggle’s day, but much of it has been leveled and rebuilt as industries and warehouses. And there also are upwardly mobile young professionals who have come to live in some of the condos which have been constructed.
Manchester Baptist Church, later known as Bainbridge Street, held on to the end. When it closed, the members gave its records and even some of its assets to the Virginia Baptist Historical Society. Struggle would have been pleased.
Fred Anderson ([email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies.