Jackson would also have been considered to be a southerner. And, apparently, she self-identified as such, as evidenced by her application for a Southern Fellowship in 1904. Though Kentucky officially fought for the Union (in reality, it was split and spent the war in civil turmoil) and was thought of as part of the West rather than the South until after the Civil War, by the 1890s it had been clearly recast in the minds of nonsouthern Americans as a slaveholding, southern state. Also, as mentioned, Jackson belonged to a family that prided itself on being descended from the first Virginia settlers. Joan Marie Johnson contends that southerners worked to retain their identities while attending northern schools. Surrounded by people with different views and values, and perceiving a need to defend their heritage, they often formed clubs based on their common background. This was especially true for students from border states. It is not clear whether Jackson attempted to shed her roots while in New York or whether she looked to hang on to them. Later in life, she kept close to her hometown of London, returning yearly, and continued to embrace the Kentucky part of her identify. While there is no evidence that she was a member of any sort of southern club, it is possible that she might have been involved in some such formal or informal organization, given her social skills, class, background, and propensity both to join and to lead.34
There is another issue to consider as well. At family gatherings, there is often an unwanted relative, a guest who is ugly and rude and obscene and vile. His presence is dreaded, his absence longed for, and, when he is gone, we prefer not to think about him. In the American family, that guest is race.
The question of race must have been ever present at Columbia during Jackson’s time there, just as it was everywhere and still is. Laws suppressing the rights of African Americans were rising with alarming rapidity in the South. Precursors to the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan were stirring. Two to three African Americans were lynched every week in the South during this time period in horrible and hideous ways and in carnival atmospheres.35 The faux science of eugenics was in its heyday in academic circles, with scientists putting their racist theories into practice through the forced castration of African Americans, immigrants, and “undesirable” poor whites.36 Millions of southern African Americans (and poor whites) were trapped in the poverty of the sharecropper’s life. When we consider that the students at Columbia were largely the grandsons of Union soldiers, we must assume that questions about race and slavery were faced by southerners at the university on a daily basis.
Many southerners still fostered deep prejudice against African Americans.37 The ever-progressive Columbia University admitted black students in small numbers by Jackson’s time, so friction or at least strained relationships were inevitable.38 In addition, Jackson lived just north of Columbia in Harlem, which was predominantly white at the time, but African Americans were starting to move in in large numbers. Jackson undoubtedly had neighbors in New York who looked a lot like her servants back home. While in her dissertation she praised antislavery writers, there is no record of how she felt about her African American neighbors and fellow students in New York. Living in Harlem must have involved some adjustment on her part, to say the least. She had grown up in an atmosphere in which bigotry against African Americans was accepted. Racist violence had occurred regularly in London during her childhood. The local newspaper reported on and condemned some of these acts but treated others (like a nighttime visit from the Ku Klux Klan to a black woman) as though they were funny.39
In addition, there were few female graduate students at Columbia at the time—and so far only one woman had earned a doctorate—so the social cohort available to her would have been limited.40 She was acquainted with women at Barnard College, however, including some in administration. A recommendation letter from the dean of Barnard states that she was “prominent and influential in the graduate student body” and that she “was a woman of executive power.”41 There is no record that Jackson sought companionship outside the college.
Jackson pressed ahead diligently with her doctoral studies. One of her professors, W. P. Trent, had suggested that colonial literature in Pennsylvania was, at the time, a largely unexamined topic, so she chose this subject for her doctoral dissertation.42
At 163 pages, her dissertation is the most extensive single piece of writing we have by Jackson. From it, we learn quite a few things, not only about her subject, but also about her own personality: confident, swift spoken, intelligent, curious, divergent thinking, capable of sharp humor, focused, tolerant but firm in her faith, and persistent. She praises Francis Daniel Pastorius for his 1688 opposition to slavery and admires early Philadelphia for the “variety of peoples and liberality of doctrine”; it is a place “where a man might belong to any or no sect, and yet be regarded as a good citizen.” Speaking of the poet James Ralph, she remarks dryly: “Ralph was one of the race of editors whose morals are not to be dwelled upon.” She writes admiringly of Benjamin Franklin, calling him “far-sighted, sensible and fearless,” and discusses his beliefs without condemnation and with outright respect. Conversely, she labels Paine’s The Age of Reason “an attack upon revealed religion, filled with coarse and vituperative illustrations and written in a wholly irreverent spirit, which gained the author exceeding unpopularity in England and America.”43
The dissertation gives a good sample of Jackson’s writing style. It displays long sentences that are spun out in an almost sermon-like and poetic manner. Jackson is quite conscious of the rhythm and sound of her words. Her writing is high-toned and passionate. She approaches her subject with authority and certainty. This is a style that she displayed throughout her academic career.
Finally, the scope of the work itself provides a final clue to Jackson’s powers of perseverance. This was a prodigious undertaking. She has nine pages of sources listed in her bibliography, roughly totaling two hundred sources. Her primary sources came from many different locations, including New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New Jersey. In 1905, travel to archives required a significant investment of time and money. Such an effort exemplified great determination, focus, energy, and resourcefulness on Jackson’s part.
Dr. Katherine Jackson French. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.
Jackson completed her dissertation in 1905. Though her name was listed in the June 1906 commencement program, she was awarded her degree (with an English major and a comparative literature minor) on February 13, 1906.44
Consider the enormity of this statement: Katherine Jackson was awarded her PhD from Columbia University in 1906. In 1900, three years before Jackson commenced work on her degree, only 204 women in all of the United States held doctorates, 6 percent of a total of 4,000 overall. Moreover, Jackson was, according to her obituary, the first woman from south of the Mason-Dixon Line to earn a doctorate from Columbia University, only the second to do so in the history of the college, and one of the first Kentucky women to earn such a degree from any “standard university.” For this achievement alone, she should be accorded a degree of respectful notoriety. When we add her role as one of the first major ballad collectors in the United States, a century’s worth of disinterest in her becomes all the more puzzling.45
There are possible reasons for the lack of contemporary attention in her home state. For one thing, in 1906, an academically accomplished woman would not necessarily have been deemed admirable by the press or the general public. Then, there is the matter of the southerner (or westerner) “gone north” (or “east”) for her education, again, something that might not have been perceived in a positive way. After the Civil War, resentment of the North grew in Kentucky, which was torn in two by the conflict to begin with; it is unclear whether Jackson’s accomplishments were accepted or resented by the people of London. To complicate matters, after receiving her doctorate, Jackson taught for one year at Bryn Mawr and three at Mount Holyoke,