Many of the former slaves who renewed their vows and those who married for the first time remained together for years. Among these were Israel Jefferson of Virginia, who was married for about thirty-five years;38 Elbert Head of Georgia, for over forty years until his wife’s death;39 and Cato Carter of Alabama, for forty-seven years until his wife’s death. The Carters had thirteen children.40 Moreover, several marriages lasted well over fifty years. For example, Carey Davenport was married for more than sixty years;41 Sarah Felder, for about fifty-nine years;42 Henrietta Gooch, for fifty-seven years;43 and Wesley Burrell, for fifty-three years until the death of his wife.44 Numerous children were usually born to these unions.
While many blacks remained married for years, others were married numerous times. Some of these unions were also of short duration and painful. Elsie Ross remembered, “I married a low, no ’count nigger and I don’t want to talk about him. I dunno why I evah picked him. I wuz crazy at de time, I guess, and thought dat I wuz in love.” She lived with him for about one year, but when he beat her, Elsie “left him on de spot.” She never returned to live with him, nor did she marry another man.45 Similarly, Manda Boggan “uped an’ married de sorriest nigger in de whole county.” Once he died, she made the mistake of marrying “another nigger who turnt out ter be as sorry as de fust one.”46 Betty Bormer separated from her first husband after five years. She waited twelve years to remarry but then had even worse luck than the first time, for she and her husband separated after only two years. However, persistency paid off. Betty married a third time, and this marriage lasted forty-one years.47 In reference to her first husband, Annie Coley remarked, “Dat wus the meanest niggah dat ever lived. He would slip up behin’ me when I was wukin’ in the fiel’ an beat me.” Annie left him and took her three children to live with her brother. She remained single for a long time but then made the mistake of marrying Charlie Ashmore, “a mean niggah too.” After twelve years, Ashmore left her and went to Georgia. However, for Annie, as for Betty Bormer, the third time was the charm. Annie eventually settled into a lasting union with Harry Coley.48 Sadly, Malindy Smith was even less fortunate than either Bormer or Coley. With much bitterness on the question of marriage, she informed her interviewer, “I’s been married four times an separated from all four my husbands. De Devil owed me a debt an paid it off in sorry men. They was so mean to me I couldn’t stay with ’em.”49
AN UNIDENTIFIED BLACK COUPLE DURING RECONSTRUCTION.
Courtesy of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History
Although the vast majority of marital problems occurred because some couples were not compatible, other problems developed due to the failure of some husbands and wives to grasp the real nature of marriage in the early years of freedom. For example, a young couple in Beaufort, South Carolina, went to Chaplain Woodworth, who married them. The groom paid his dollar and got his certificate. However, only a day or two later, the groom returned, apparently disappointed. He demanded that the chaplain take back the certificate and give back his dollar, “ ‘cause he didn’t like that woman nohow.” When the chaplain told him that he could not back out and must stick to his bargain, the man was dumbfounded. In another case, Woodworth married Mingo and Rachel. It was not long before a concerned Mingo returned to his office and informed the chaplain that “I want either a paper to make her come and lib wid me, or to have her pit in jail, or I wants a pass to marry another wife.” When the chaplain asked which he would prefer, Mingo replied, “Well, you might as well give me the pass, I reckon.” An exasperated Mingo was told that he must go to the Freedmen’s Bureau to get the affair settled.50 Also, when Mary Gladdy’s grandfather got mad at his wife, he “picked up his feather bed and toted it all the way from Macon to Lochapoka!” He then told everyone that “he was done with grandma and was going to live with [his son] Adam.” After only a few weeks, he returned home, “still toting his feather bed.”51
Although most freedmen rushed to renew their marital vows, some instead used the situation to rid themselves of unwanted spouses. The parents of Mollie Dawson of Tennessee, for example, separated soon after emancipation, and both married other partners.52 George Weathersby recalled, “After de surrender my pa and ma never tried to live together no mo.”53 “De day when freedom rung out, our pappy went one way, and our mammy went another way,”54 Mattie Williams remembered. When Primus Magee’s father found out that couples who had been married as slaves had to get a license for the marriage to be considered legal after emancipation, he refused to remarry the woman he had taken in slavery. Furthermore, according to Magee, “a heap ob ‘em quit dat way. I reckon they felt free sho’ nuf, as dey wuz freed from slavery an’ from marriage.”55
Some couples were so determined to separate that not even pregnancy or the possibility of a nasty custody battle could prevent them from doing so. Despite the fact that Rose Williams was pregnant, she left Rufus, her husband, immediately after freedom. When she was asked if she ever remarried, Rose replied, “Never! No sar! One ‘sperience am ’nough fo’ dis nigger.” Apparently, Rose quickly ended the relationship with Rufus because her master had forced her into it and she had always resented it. The emotional toll of the forced marriage remained with Rose for more than fifty years. She said, “Dere am one thing Massa Hawking does to me what I can’t shunt from my mind.”56 In another example, Madison Day and Maria Richard had lived together as husband and wife for seven years and had three children together. However, upon emancipation, they refused to legalize their marriage. Both each claimed the children and an unpleasant custody battle ensued, in which the Freedmen’s Bureau heard and rendered a decision. Custody was granted to Madison Day, the father.57
AN UNIDENTIFIED BLACK FAMILY DURING RECONSTRUCTION.
Courtesy of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History
Some blacks chose never to marry. Lizzie Atkins, for example, did not marry because her lover was killed during the Civil War. “I‘se never did see another man that I ever wanted so I just stayed at home and took care of my old mother and father.” Nevertheless, she thought that she would have been better off if she had married “because times sure have been hard on the poor old negro since he was freed.”58 For James Brooks, “women [were] too much trouble. Want too much ‘ttention. I couldn’t be bothered wid ’em.”59 Lizzie Polk never exchanged marital vows because “I was working too hard to have time to flirt. Anyway, if I had to work, I would rather work for myself than for a may.”60
Blacks regarded the twin institutions of marriage and family as sacred. Thus, by 1870, a large majority lived in two-parent households, 61 There were several reasons why blacks found marriage appealing. Undoubtedly, many married for love, as was the case for Maggie Jackson: “I didn’t marry John ‘cause I wanted to leave home. I married him ’cause I loved him and he loved me.”62 Blacks also considered marriage to be morally right. Moreover, it established the legitimacy of children and helped blacks gain access to land titles and other economic opportunities. Black soldiers in particular wanted to formalize marriages because they feared that their women and children would have no legal claims in the event that they were killed.63 Furthermore, church membership often required legalized marriage. Susan Grant explained that she and Aaron Grant as well as several other couples were living together when their preachers “told them that the[y] must get married and that they, as did many others, got up in church and were married.” A friend of Susan and Aaron Grant, Judith Swinton, explained that after the war churches “compelled the members who were living together as man and wife but not married to have these ceremonies performed.”64 In fact, the First African Baptist Church of New Orleans, after the abolition of slavery, declared: “Any persons wishing to become members of this church who may be living in a state of illegitimate marriage should first procure a license and marry.”65
Since marriage conformed to the laws of civil society, the enforcement of legal marriage was therefore a matter of concern for the entire community. A Freedmen�
�s Bureau agent, J. E. Eldredge, reported from Bladenboro, North Carolina, that “the Colored people of this place are trying to make their colored brethren pay some respect to themselves and the laws of the country by making them pay some respect to the marriage bond.” Blacks in Bladenboro targeted one case in particular. A black man had promised on four different occasions to marry a woman whom he had lived with for a year. However, he continually put her off. As a result, the Bureau agent noted, “the colored men of this place appointed a committee to wait on him and see if they could not influence him to do better but no satisfaction could be obtained.”66 In another case, a group of blacks at a contraband camp enthusiastically supported the expulsion of a black minister who refused to marry his mistress from the camp. Shortly thereafter, the couple died of smallpox. Upon their deaths, there was no mourning among blacks at the camp, for their demise, observed the officer in charge, “was looked upon by the Negroes as a direct and swift application of retributive justice.”67
REUNION WITH LOST LOVED ONES
To the newly freed blacks, the work of emancipation would be incomplete until the families dispersed by slavery were reunited. Some freedmen set out on their own to find lost relatives. One journalist from the North reported encountering a black man in September 1865 who had walked more than six hundred miles from Georgia to North Carolina in the hope of finding his wife and children from whom he had been separated by sale.68 Sarah Jane Foster, a Northern white teacher of freedmen in the vicinity of Charleston, wrote: “One woman here has exerted herself to find her four children at great expense, though dependent on her own labor altogether.”69 Many advertised in black newspapers in efforts to locate lost loved ones. A typical plea for help appeared in the Nashville Colored Tennessean: “During the year 1849, Thomas Sumple carried away from this city, as his slaves, our daughter, Polly and son.... We will give $100 each for them to any person who will assist them... to get to Nashville, or get word to us of their whereabouts.”70
Sometimes blacks solicited the aid of whites or other blacks in the hope of tracking down family members. Unfortunately, when giving descriptions, some failed to take into account the fact that many of the lost children were now adults. Such was the case when Elizabeth Botume reported that she came across an old slave woman in Central Georgia who had been sold away from Virginia some thirty or forty years earlier. The woman left a daughter in Virginia whom she had not heard from since their forced separation. Upon learning that Botume had traveled through the region, the old woman wanted to know if she had seen her “little gal.” “With tears streaming down her face, she told me what a ‘store she set by that little child’,” noted Botume. “She begged me to look out for her when I went back. She was sure I should know her, she ‘was such a pretty little gal.’ ” Botume concluded that “it was useless to tell her the girl was now a woman, and doubtless had children of her own.”71
Unfortunately, a large number of freed blacks were unable to find lost loved ones, although there were some successes. A former slave recounted the stories of dozens of children who searched throughout the South after the Civil War for parents sold “down the river” and of parents who searched equally desperately for their children. Lizzie Baker’s family tried to get some news of her brother’s and sister’s whereabouts after the war, as her mother “kept ‘quiring ’bout ‘em as long as she lived and I have hoped dat I could hear from ’em. Dey are dead long ago I recons, and I guess dare aint no use ever expectin‘ to see ’em.”72 Another former slave, Mattie Curtis, recalled that after the war her parents “tried to find dere fourteen oldest chilluns what was sold away, but dey never did find but three of dem.”73 Fortunately, others had better luck. Laura Redmoun advertised “roun’ in the papers and found my mammy and she came and lived with me.”74 After exhaustive efforts, Kate Drumgold found her children alive.75 After the war, Charles Maho, a former slave who had been sold away from his wife and daughter in Virginia in the late 1850s to a Mississippi cotton planter, set out for Richmond to find them. When he finally reached the city, he was disheartened to learn that his wife had been dead for years. But he did locate his daughter, and the two shared an apartment while he worked in a tobacco factory to support them. Olmstead Scott, from Virginia, was another former slave who was sold in 1860 to a planter in Florida. After the war, Scott saved money so he could return to Richmond and try to reunite with family members. He arrived there in 1869 and found his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, and his brother and sister, but he discovered that his parents had died before the war.76 Another freedman who traveled throughout the South for twenty years looking for his wife finally found her in a refugee camp.77
One former slave recalled the joyous moment when his mother located him after the war. He couldn’t believe it was she. “Then she took the bundle off her hand [sic] and took off her hat, and I saw that scar on her face. Child, look like I had wings!”78 Equally exciting was the reunion of Chaplain Garland H. White of the Twenty-eighth U.S. Colored Infantry with his mother. White had initially been a slave in Richmond but was sold to Robert Toombs, a lawyer in Georgia, when he was a small boy. After the war began, White’s mother came across Toombs in Richmond with troops from his state. When she asked him where his body servant Garland was, Toombs informed her that Garland had escaped to Canada and was probably living somewhere in Ohio. The mother continued to inquire about one Garland White of Ohio until some of the soldiers in her son’s regiment overheard her. Shortly thereafter, the soldiers found White and told him, “Chaplain, here is a lady that wishes to see you.” He turned and followed them until he came upon a group of black women. Of the occasion, White wrote, “I cannot express the joy I felt at this happy meeting of my mother and other friends.”79 Another freedman who ended up in Illinois after the war surprised his family by returning home to Roxboro, North Carolina. His overjoyed parents had not seen him in several years. The father “had a few days previously remarked that he did not want to die without seeing his son once more.” The son recalled that he “could not find language to express my feelings. I did not know before I came home whether my parents were dead or alive.”80 In another story, one soldier recalled that some men “cried while others laughed to hide the tears” when they witnessed a black woman reunite with her lost daughter, who had been sold away ten years earlier.81
On some occasions the Freedmen’s Bureau helped former slaves obtain information about missing relatives. In May 1867, Hawkins Wilson, in Texas wrote to the Bureau seeking assistance in finding his sisters, whom he had not seen in twenty-four years. He sought the aid of the Bureau because “I have no other one to apply to but you and am persuaded that you will help one who stands in need of your services as I do—I shall be very grateful to you, if you oblige me in this matter.” He informed the Bureau that one of his sisters, Jane, belonged to Peter Coleman in Caroline County. Wilson also provided the name of his sister’s husband, her owner, and his area of residency as well as the names of his sister’s three children at the time he left. Next, he did the same for his other two sisters, Martha and Matilda. Finally, Wilson alerted the Bureau about his Uncle Jim and Aunt Adie and their oldest son Buck, who all belonged to Jack Langley. With much emotion and anticipation, Wilson asserted, “These are all my own dearest relatives and I wish to correspond with them with a view to visit them as soon as I can hear from them.”82 In addition, Milly Johnson, a freedwoman in North Carolina, solicited the assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau to locate her five children. 83 And John Allen of Austin, Texas, enlisted the aid of the Bureau in finding his two children, whom he left in Batesville, Arkansas, in 1859. Allen’s daughter Rachel was just nine years old at the time, and Benjamin, his son, was two years younger. Despite the fact that Allen had not heard from them since their separation, he was “anxious” to know if they were still alive and wanted them again “under his charge and protection.”84
As were the cases when black parents searched for family members on their own, placed advertisements in black newspa
pers, and solicited the aid of individuals, results were often either disappointing or mixed. Hawkins Wilson’s kinfolk probably were never found. Likewise, John Allen probably never reunited with his two children. However, Milly Johnson located her daughter Anna, found information about two of her children but received no word about the others.
If freed blacks knew exactly where their family members had relocated, Freedmen’s Bureau agents routinely arranged transportation to facilitate reunions. Willis Love, for instance, a black bricklayer “of good character,” successfully petitioned the Bureau for assistance. Agents were assured by Love that he would support his children, but he could not afford the fare for their passage to Atlanta to join him.85 Marcia Johnson was also able to solicit help from the Bureau to rejoin her husband. She had “walked, worked, and scuffed along from West Point, Mississippi” in efforts to reach Tarboro, North Carolina, where her husband resided. She was now in Raleigh, some forty miles away, “but now that all her means and strength are exhausted she can go no further.”86
Some former slaves experienced complications with the law in attempting reunions, but others experienced complications of the heart when they found themselves having to choose one spouse over another. As slaves, they had started second families after being forced into separations assumed to be permanent, whether because of the sale of one mate or because of an escape. Robert Washington, for example, had escaped to the North from South Carolina before the war. When he returned to Charleston in 1870 to claim his wife, Lucretia, and their children, he found that Lucretia had taken another husband. He went to court to win her back, but the magistrate who heard the case, T. J. Mackey, ruled against him. In Mackey’s opinion, Washington should have had enough interest in Lucretia to have returned to Charleston long before he did.87
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