“UP TO FREEDOM”: SLAVERY, EMANCIPATION, AND THE MAKING OF FREEDOM IN HOWARD COUNTY, MISSOURI, 1860 TO 1865
A Thesis
presented to
the Faculty of the Graduate School
University of Missouri-Columbia
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
by
STANLEY D. MAXSON
Dr. LeeAnn Whites, Thesis Supervisor
MAY 2015
The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled
“UP TO FREEDOM”: SLAVERY, EMANCIPATION, AND THE MAKING OF FREEDOM IN HOWARD COUNTY, MISSOURI, 1860 TO 1865
Presented by Stanley D. Maxson a candidate for the degree of master of arts, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance.
Professor LeeAnn Whites
Professor Keona Ervin
Professor Mary Jo Neitz
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the assistance, support, and generosity of many. I would like to thank Dr. LeeAnn Whites for helping this project get on its feet from the start. Her guidance, knowledge, and seemingly tireless assistance over the past two years have been invaluable. The generous support of the University of Missouri Women’s and Gender Department and the Kinder Forum on
Constitutional Democracy made possible the research at the National Archives and
Records Administration in Washington D.C. that this thesis stands upon. Megan
Boccardi deserves special thanks for sharing her research and for introducing me to the value of the Civil War Pensions applications as a historical source. My colleagues have also provided indispensable help every step of the way. Thanks to Sarah Lirely McCune for her guidance through the master’s program, Emma Walcott-Wilson for being a map- maker extraordinaire, and J Matthew Ward for being a true compatriot in courses, conference presentations, and throughout the thesis writing process. None of this would be possible without the assistance of my wife and research partner Ann, who I wish to thank most sincerely for her encouragement, support, and editorial eye.
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ...... ii
List of Tables and Maps ...... iv
Introduction: “Our own peculiar system” ...... 1
Chapter One: “I knew about all of them”: Slavery and the ‘Neighborhood’ in Howard County, c. 1860 ...... 20
Chapter Two: “At the time of freedom, and when Martin went into the Army”: Gendered Emancipation in Howard County, 1863-1865 ...... 54
Chapter Three: “That was my right name”: Slavery and Surnames in Howard County, 1860-1865 ...... 85
Conclusion: Kin and Communities in the Civil War Era ...... 110
Bibliography ...... 114
iii
LIST OF TABLES AND MAPS
Map 1: Free Black Population by Township ...... 29
Table 1: Anatomy of an Abroad Marriage ...... 34
Map 2: Percent of Total Enslaved Persons by Township ...... 40
Table 2: Slave-Dense: White, Slave, and Free Black Populations ...... 43
Table 3: Slave-Sparse: White, Slave, and Free Black Populations ...... 43
Map 3: Enslaved Population by Township ...... 44
Map 4: Enslaved Population by Township (detailed) ...... 45
Map 5: White Population by Township ...... 46
Map 6: Population by Township: Free and Enslaved ...... 47
Table 4: Slave-Dense: Ages of Enslaved by Township ...... 50
Table 5: Slave-Sparse: Ages of Enslaved by Township ...... 51
Table 6: Slave-Dense: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population ...... 52
Table 7: Slave-Sparse: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population ...... 52
Table 8: U.S.C.T. Surnames at the Time of Enlistment ...... 89
iv INTRODUCTION
“Our own peculiar system”1
Life under slavery and the work of making freedom in Howard County were experienced and developed relationally. The social and kinship connections of the enslaved, so crucial in surviving slavery, were essential in navigating a wartime freedom movement, and foundational in making freedom meaningful in the aftermath of Civil
War. The mobility allowed Howard County slaves through hiring out and abroad marriage connected farms and towns in ways that cannot be reduced to the economic calculus of slavery as a system of labor. Slaves themselves linked small farms into a network of social and kinship relationships over and above the intentions and imaginations of their masters. In the chaos of the Civil War routes to freedom were decidedly gendered. In Howard County a strong majority of able-bodied male slaves were recruited into the military and taken to Benton Barracks, St. Louis, while those who could not enlist—the majority women—remained enslaved. Nearly two-thirds of all service eligible males in Howard County enlisted into the military in the spring and summer of 1863. By 1864, nearly one-third of the men in the United States Colored
Troops from Missouri had died.2 Most of those remaining were in poor health, nearly two hundred suffered from disease and malnutrition that, for many, caused permanent bodily damage.
This thesis is an investigation into the social history of slavery and freedom in
1 Quote from a Joint Resolution from the Missouri State Legislature in support of the state’s right to legislate on issues pertaining to slavery. Printed in Laws of the State of Missouri, 1860. 2 Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, ser. 2 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 487.
1 Howard County, Missouri with an eye toward the social and familial relationships of the enslaved, their existence in slavery and their role in making freedom. Located in Central
Missouri with Chariton County to the West and Boone County to the East, Howard
County enjoyed access to the Missouri River below providing rich alluvial soil and access to statewide commerce. With two sizeable towns, Fayette and Glasgow, serving as the urban centers of Howard County, most of the land was rural and devoted to agricultural production of tobacco and hemp. Additionally, Howard County lay at the heart of a string of seven Missouri River counties that held slave populations of at least twenty four percent.3 Historians have often found it convenient to refer to these counties as Little Dixie for the cultural, economic, agricultural, political, and slaveholding similarities they shared with states in the upper and lower south.4 Fundamentally, it was the slave-based antebellum “commercial production of hemp and tobacco that defined
Little Dixie as a distinctive region.”5 By 1860 Howard County had the highest percent of slaves of any county in the state, thirty seven percent.6 Slavery marked the culture and economy of Howard County from the moment migrants from the Upper South first began
3 R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture, and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), xi. Hurt refers to this slave owning region also as Missouri’s “black belt” in reference to the large population of slaves held in theses seven counties, not in reference to the rich, dark soil of the region. 4 Aaron Astor identifies Little Dixie as a region defined economically by slave driven agriculture, as well as politically defending the rights of the slaveholder. The region of Little Dixie was “composed of the Missouri Counties of Callaway, Boone, Howard, Cooper, Chariton, Saline, and Lafayette [that] traversed the Missouri River and formed the backbone of the state’s slave-based hemp and tobacco culture.” Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 13. The region of Little Dixie varies depending on interpretation but the most common, and that used by Astor, comes from Douglas Hurt, Agriculture, and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, ix-xi. Most recently it has been used by Diane Mutti Burke in On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press), 12. Additionally however, Burke alternatively uses the term “Missouri River counties,” the term that I prefer. 5 Robert W. Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri: Little Dixie’s Slave- Majority Areas and the Transition to Midwestern Farming,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 3, (April, 2005), 238-60. 6 Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 310.
2 to settle in the region in droves throughout the early 1820s.7
The importance of the social and kinship relations of enslaved and formerly enslaved black Americans in the Civil War era has been firmly established by scholars of
African American History. Herbert Gutman’s 1976 The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom, 1750-1925 excoriated the theses of historians such as Stanley Elkins and policy makers such Daniel P. Moynihan suggesting that the black family had deteriorated over years of enslavement.8 More recently, Steven Hahn has argued that the kinship and social relations, “struggled for and constructed as slaves” were “constituent elements of slave politics,” foundational in struggling for freedom and shaping life after the Civil
War.9 In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth historicized the concept of family, arguing that family and kinship among African-Americans covered a “whole rainbow of social relationships among people who were not related by blood or marriage.”10 The exchange of property and what Penningroth identifies as the informal slave economy were integral to the process in which “kinship could be created; people could start life as strangers and become family.”11
In a border state region where emancipation was highly gendered by military recruitment, the social relations so formative in the lives of black recruits is all too often relegated to the background of histories quick to explain emancipation as something endowed upon slaves by the Union Army. African American women held fundamental
7 On early settlement in Howard County see, Walter A. Schroeder “Spread of Settlement in Howard County, Missouri 1810-1859,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. LXII, no. 1, (October, 1968). 8 Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1976); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968). 9 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3, 6. 10 Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 86. 11 Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 87.
3 roles in establishing the social ties of kinship in Howard County. As men fought for freedom as soldiers on distant battlefields, women bore the responsibility of making freedom on the very land on which they had labored for slaveholders. This thesis draws from the work of scholars illuminating the social connections of the enslaved in order to reevaluate the role of military service in bringing an end to slavery in Missouri.
As border state, the history of slavery and emancipation in Missouri offers the opportunity to draw critical new insights for historians debating the primary cause that lead to the dissolution of the institution of slavery in the United States. Traditionally, historians have approached this topic from within three camps. Military historians such as James McPherson and Gary Gallagher occupy prominent places in the first camp by emphasizing the role of the Union military as a liberating force and the importance of decisive Union victories on the battlefield.12 James Oakes has recently given new life to the second camp of political historians pointing toward the political acumen of Abraham
Lincoln and the abolition minded Republicans who drafted and supported emancipatory policy.13 Finally, following a Du Boisian model the editors of Freedom: A
Documentary History of Emancipation have published a compelling wealth of primary sources emphasizing the roles of slaves themselves in securing their own freedom.14 In
Missouri, the crucible of war operated in many ways unique from other regions of the
South, changing the meaning of military presence and altering the effectiveness of federal emancipatory policy. In the heavy slaveholding Missouri River counties it was the
12 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988); McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union, (New York: Vintage Books, 1993, orig. pub. 1965); Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 13 James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). 14 Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, ser. 1, vol. 1 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4 enslaved—mostly women—who waged the ultimately devastating campaign against their bondage.
Missouri does not neatly fit the standard rubric of military historians. Arguing for the relevance of the formal battlefield, Gallagher argues that military campaigns “wielded enormous influence over political, economic, and social dimensions of the war.”15
Though Missouri was never a state in rebellion, the Union military maintained a presence in the state from the earliest years of the war. Placing the state under martial law and under the control of the Union Military in August of 1861, John C. Frémont also declared free all slaves of disloyal masters. Frémont’s edict of emancipation was almost immediately countermanded by an anxious President Lincoln eager to maintain the support of Missouri’s slaveholders on the border.16
The Civil War in Missouri is then best understood as a war of occupation where, as the editors of Occupied Women put it, “the home front and battlefield merged, creating a new kind of battlefield and an unanticipated second front.”17 The military did matter in
Missouri, though not in the way anticipated by Gallagher. As a slaveholding border state, the Union military presence in Missouri played as crucial a role in maintaining slavery as it eventually did in its destruction. The struggle for freedom in Missouri was not a struggle waged by the military on the battlefield, but a struggle within the second front, across Missouri’s small farms and towns.
The politics of place similarly undermine political explanations of emancipation in Missouri. As a Union border state Federal emancipation proclamations and legislation
15 Gallagher, Union War, 88. 16 Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 106. 17 LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2009), 3.
5 aimed at the states in rebellion held no bearing in Missouri. Under martial law, there was little for state level politicians to do in favor of the enslaved and the Missouri legislature did not issue an edict of immediate abolition until 1865. Missouri therefore stands as a crucial site for investigating what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “general strike of the slaves,” what the editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project identify as the self-emancipation of the enslaved, and most recently what David Roediger terms the
“broad politics of Jubilee.”18.
Broadly the Civil War era and the political boundaries of Howard County mark the parameters of this thesis. The project has been disciplined locally out of an interest in exploring the workings of slavery, emancipation and the making of freedom at the ground level. My research follows Nancy Bercaw’s observation in Gendered Freedoms, that community studies allow for attention to names, which when encountered enough, can reveal actual people, their lives, and social connections.19 Many of the lives examined in this thesis are exceptional because of the weight they bore in exceptional times, not because they aspired to live in the public eye. Charles Payne similarly challenged historians and journalists in I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, to consider how our research may change if we had the audacity to believe that “people who think they matter, might.”20 Like the works of Bercaw and Payne, this thesis studies the “Big Event,” in this case the Civil War and emancipation, from a bottom-up perspective highlighting the communities and social relations maintained by the enslaved, sustained through the war,
18 David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, (New York: Verso, 2014), 21. 19 Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the Delta, 1861-1875, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003), 14. 20 Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 392.
6 and shaped the making of freedom in the years following emancipation.21
By investigating communities of people, their lives, and their struggles this thesis is a community study of slavery and freedom in Howard County grounded in both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Federal census data including population, agricultural and slave schedules provided valuable information on patterns of slaveholding, slave labor, and population demographics. In Chapter One this data is analyzed and mapped so that the picture of slavery in Missouri is seen at higher resolution at the level of the township. Alongside census data and plat maps, sixty-nine applications for Civil War Veteran and Widow’s Pensions were collected from the
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. providing supplementary data such as testimonies and depositions made by the formerly enslaved.
These, occasionally voluminous sources lend themselves to a more qualitative approach.
Testimonies and depositions made by freedmen and freedwomen to secure their claims to Veteran and Widow’s Pensions illuminate networks within and between farms and families, slave and free. Mapping this data offers a glimpse into the particular physical and social geography of slavery and emancipation in central Missouri. Viewed alongside the age, sex, and skin color recorded by the 1860 slave schedule the experiences of the enslaved yield valuable qualitative testimony with regard to the nature of relationships among and between slave and free persons of Howard County. As a fundamental piece of information included in pension applications, names gathered are examined in the final chapter as historical artifacts marking family, citizenship, and a
21 Payne’s writing on the Civil Rights Movement suggests valuable methodological directions for studies of emancipation. On the movement leading to the Brown decision Payne writes, “the Big Event grew out of a tradition of struggle, that much of the historical initiative was in the hands of the socially obscure, that they were willing to face enormous repressive in order to change their world…” Payne, 392.
7 claim to place for the formerly enslaved.
Organized both thematically and chronologically, Chapter Two occupies the center of this thesis on both accounts by exploring the process of emancipation as it developed in Howard County. More strictly limited to the years 1863-1865, the presence of the United States Army provides additional historical sources in the form of military records including official correspondences, provost marshal papers, and enlistment rolls.
Military records by themselves often emphasize only one aspect of the process of emancipation in Missouri by highlighting the experience of male soldiers and remaining largely silent with regard to their wives, children, mothers and other kin. When enlistment is from a relational perspective, soldiers do not appear solely as isolated men claiming freedom in return for military service. Rather, the question presents itself: how did the enlistment and subsequent removal of able-bodied male slaves shape emancipation for the largely female population that remained? Pension applications are once again useful sources for the testimonies of wives and widows waging their own struggle for freedom outside of military service.
As a study of emancipation, this thesis begins as a study of slavery. The antebellum Missouri State Legislature held slaveholding interest at a premium. The
“Central Clique,” men exclusively from Howard and Saline Counties, controlled the powerful Missouri Democratic party and legislated in the interests of slaveholders. On the eve of the Civil War, “Missouri’s Confederate” and one of the Clique’s “most indefatigable champions,” Claiborne Fox Jackson, was elected governor from his home in Fayette, Howard County.22 The Laws of Missouri passed by the Missouri State
22 Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 81, 88.
8 Legislature provide a profile of the legal apparatus of slavery and the many ways the state sought to control the lives of slaves by defining their social and physical space as well as their mobility. As this study investigates slavery in the specific location of Howard
County, it is worth understanding, even briefly, the legal framework surrounding the institution statewide as it developed and grew.
Racial slavery was first introduced as a system of labor to the territory of Missouri long before statehood. The French Code Noir was established in 1720 to regulate the activities of peoples of African descent across the entire Louisiana Territory. By 1804, the year after the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, fifteen percent of the residents were slaves.23 With the ceding of the Louisiana Territory from
France to the United States in 1803, the nation doubled in size. Though slaves were present in the upper and lower Louisiana Territory, it was not always apparent whether this land would remain open to slave labor after its ceding to the United States. After vociferous debates between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the Congress,
Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay brokered a deal that found overwhelming support from the Northern majority and supported by over half of all Southern congressmen.24
Known as the Missouri Compromise, Maine entered the Union as a free state while
Missouri entered protecting slavery and the 36°30’ parallel divided the future Western territories into slave and free zones.25 In the language of the compromise, all land from the Louisiana Territory “which lies north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north
23 Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 39. 24 Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press), 47. 25 Varon, Disunion!, 46.
9 latitude excluding the state of Missouri, shall forever prohibit slavery (emphasis mine).”26
Missouri became the twelfth slave state of the United States when it was admitted to the
Union in 1821.
The Missouri Territory and the State of Missouri adopted the Black Codes of the
Louisiana Territory in an attempt to shape and define slavery under the new government sovereignty. The newly minted state of Missouri secured the right to legislate on slavery as it saw fit. In the expanding state and nation, questions regarding the institution of slavery inevitably continued to arise. If Missouri would be a slave state, what type of slavery should be practiced in Missouri? What rights, if any, are allowed those enslaved?
What is the legal relationship between the enslaved and the slaveholder, and what rights does the State have within this relationship? These questions, present in Missouri from the earliest moments of statehood were answered, amended, and revised continually for as long as slavery was given legal authority.
Most laws placing restrictions on the lives of the enslaved focused on limiting their mobility, or confining them to a particular social or physical space. Often these laws were not limited to slaves and were written to apply to all persons of color residing or traveling through the state. Aiming to govern the lives of slaves and free blacks, great care was given to produce laws that held implications for both white and black
Missourians. On January 26, 1833 an act was passed prohibiting any slave or free person of color to assemble at “any store, tavern, grocery, grog, or dram shop.”27 With the specific intent to restrict the ability of slaves to assemble in public places, such ordinances also held implications for the white owners of such businesses, who would be
26 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 1, 631.
10 fined “not less than five, nor more than fifty dollars.28 In a precursor to what Blair L.M.
Kelly and other historians identify as the “fundamental illogic” of segregation, the ordinance marking stores and taverns as white only spaces was not based on skin color or citizenship status alone.29 Black Americans were present and welcome in these spaces if they entered in a labor or service capacity. If slaves had a pass from their master, they were admitted. If slaves were employed in the grocery, they were expected to be there.
The illogic of these laws is that they were made to explicitly create all white spaces while simultaneously expecting blacks to be present. By 1847 the Missouri State Legislature took the next step from barring black Missourians from white spaces, to restrict the ability to form black spaces outside the surveillance of whites. An act passed the state legislature prohibiting meetings of “negroes and mulattoes for the purpose of religious worship.” If such meetings were to occur would be conducted under the watchful eye of a sheriff, justice of the peace or other official able to “prevent all seditious speeches, and disorderly and unlawful conduct of every kind.”30
As the issue of slavery and abolition came time and again into the national press and politics, the concerns were felt locally.31 The state of Missouri actively sought to protect the institution of slavery by monitoring the social and physical space of black
Missourians. Free African Americans and slaves who would soon be manumitted became the subject of restrictive legislation in 1842. Slaveholders who had promised their slaves freedom at a future date or age were barred from bringing said slaves into the
28 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 2, 354. 29 Blair L.M. Kelly, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 132. 30 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1847, 103. 31 Melton A. McLaurin provides a fascinating account of how events surrounding the expansion or restriction of slavery in Western Missouri where it bordered the Kansas Territory were covered by both national and local Missouri presses in Chapter Four of Celia, A Slave: A True Story, (New York: Avon Books, 1991), 62-79.
11 state.32 Additionally, free people of color hoping to settle in the state found the borders of Missouri closed to them as they were prohibited from entering on “any steam boat or vessel.”33 If they were found on board any such vessel at any mooring point, they would be held in the county jail for the duration of the ship’s time at landing or until the “vessel shall be ready to proceed to her place of destination.”34 By 1847, the act was strengthened to prohibit all free blacks from emigrating to the state “under any pretext.” 35
Once again, it is interesting to note that this act forbade free blacks from settling in the state while allowing free blacks and slaves to enter in service roles or as their labor demanded.
Like mobility, laws restricting the ability for the enslaved to labor and educate themselves came under direct scrutiny. In 1841 the Missouri legislature issued an act prohibiting slaveholders from hiring a slave “to another slave, or going at large upon hiring of his own time, or acting or dealing as a free person.”36 Similarly, education for all persons of color, whether slave or free, was prohibited in 1847. An Act respecting slaves, free negroes and mulattoes stipulated “No person shall keep or teach any school for the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing, in this state.”37 The act of learning was outlawed by way of legislation prohibiting the act of teaching. Teaching of a political vein was also restricted when speech that could be interpreted as exciting slaves “to rebellion, sedition, mutiny, insurrection, or murder” carried a penalty of up to
32 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1842-1843, 66. 33 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1842-1843, 66. 34 ibid. 35 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1847, 104. 36 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1840-1841, 147. 37 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1847, 103.
12 two years in prison for the first offence, twenty years for the second, and a life term in the penitentiary for the third conviction.38
Over the first four decades of statehood the subject of slavery regularly presented itself to the Missouri State legislature, whether through independent acts, amendments to preexisting ordinances, or most frequently in the incorporation of new towns. As towns were incorporated and granted certain powers of self-governance they often adopted black codes. These incorporations frequently granted the city council or board of trustees the power to establish patrols and prevent the meetings of slaves and free people of color.39
As the subject of slavery reached a fever pitch across the nation, Missouri added its voice to the debate. The year 1857 saw a joint resolution pass both the Missouri
House and Senate calling emancipation “inexpedient, impolitic, unwise, and unjust.”40
This sentiment was again reiterated in 1860 when the Missouri legislature proclaimed
“the exclusive right and privilege to regulate in our own way our own peculiar system.”41
The state legislature regulated their own peculiar system in the following year by prohibiting slaves travel without a pass and raising the penalty for “consulting, plotting, conspiring, or attempting to raise any rebellion of negroes, or mulattoes, bond or free” to punishment by death or life in prison.42 In 1859 the legislature issued a joint resolution calling for the extinguishing of “antislavery fanaticism” and claiming that the sole “right
38 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1836-37, 3. 39 On January 16, 1833, the town of New Franklin, Howard County was officially incorporated and “the board of trustees as aforesaid” granted “ the power and authority to pass by laws and ordinances to…prevent, or restrain, the meeting of slaves.” Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 2, 328. 40 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1857. 41 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1860. 42 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1861.
13 to prohibit slavery in any territory, belongs exclusively to the people thereof.”43 A later act was issued mandating that this resolution be sent to the executives of every state in the Union, that it be laid before their respective legislatures, and copies sent each Senator and Representative of the United States Congress.44 By the time the election of 1860 arrived, the State of Missouri had a strong track record of protecting the rights of the slaveholder.
This thesis is composed of three chapters, organized by a consideration of both chronology and theme that touch on the issue of slavery as it was lived and practiced in
Howard County, Missouri. More specifically, all chapters share and develop the central theme of examining slavery and freedom as experiences that are relational rather than experiences of isolated individuals. In many ways the social lives of the enslaved informed the lives of slaves as much as labor or geographic location.
Chapter One explores what small-scale slavery looked like in the specific local of
Howard County, Missouri. As historians Thavolia Glymph, in Out of the House of
Bondage, and Amy Dru Stanley, in From Bondage to Contract, have shown, studies of emancipation must necessarily be studies of slavery.45 To this end, Chapter One examines the physical and social geography of slavery across the county in order to more fully understand both the opportunities and stakes of ending slavery as it existed.
Countywide statistics on slavery are useful in comparing slaveholding regions from within or across states. For example, it is significant that by 1860 the seven counties that
43 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1849, 667. 44 Ibid., 668. 45 Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14 composed Little Dixie were all ranked in the top ten largest slaveholding counties of the state.46 However, this tells us more about the unique position of these counties as compared to the entirety of the state than it does about the counties in and of themselves.
The fact that thirty-seven percent of the people living in Howard County were slaves only shows a countywide generalization while failing to provide answers in any greater detail.
Chapter One explores Howard County qua Howard County. Were slave holdings spread equally across the state or were they concentrated in specific areas? How might the high concentration of slaveholdings in Howard County affect the experience of being enslaved in said county? To answer specific questions, you need specific information. Chapter
One therefore explores patterns of slaveholding at the local township level.
Cross referencing the 1860 Federal Census and corresponding slave schedules enables patterns of slaveholding to be visually represented granting a more thorough picture of where slavery was most prevalent. Mapping the concentration slaveholding at the level of the township yields a clearer understanding of what types of social networks developed and were maintained by the enslaved by answering the simple question; who lived nearby? Men, women, and children, of different ages, abilities, shades of skin, and relationships with their slaveholders were enslaved in Howard County. Through these particularities of experience the enslaved formed relationships, acquaintances, kin networks and communities across and among farms of Howard County. It is from this setting that the enslaved waged their struggle for freedom long before the nation embarked on a path leading to a civil war.
Chapter Two builds on the examination of communities in the first chapter and uses Howard County as a case study to rethink black military enlistment and the process
46 Hurt, 217; Burke, 310.
15 of emancipation writ large in Central Missouri. Two central questions drove the research of Chapter Two. What would the enlistment of able-bodied slave men look like from the experience of those enslaved, mostly women who could not or did not enlist? With that in mind, how does the military service and therefor absence of so many able-bodied men affect the process of emancipation as it developed on the ground in Howard County?
The Union recruitment of able-bodied enslaved men has come to symbolize the process of emancipation in the state of Missouri. Chapter Two challenges male-centered narratives of emancipation by exploring the gendered nature of choices to seize freedom by means other than military service. Recruiting and arming black soldiers will always stand as a pivotal moment in the trajectory of emancipation, but its revolutionary imagery can obscure as much as it reveals. I draw from what Thavolia Glymph has identified as the “insurrectionist” actions of enslaved women who waged a war for freedom largely outside of the recognition or aid of the Federal government. Acknowledging that Union military policy, specifically slave recruitment, gendered the path toward freedom in
Missouri creates space to recognize the role of black women as they translated proclamations of emancipation into “real or ‘actual’ freedom.”47 The enslaved women of
Howard County made freedom where they stood after military service removed the majority of able-bodied black men from their communities.
The final chapter stands apart from the prior two chapters in order to explore themes present throughout but that defy the chronological scope of either. Chapter Three examines names as useful historical artifacts for analyzing the slaveholding household and the contested place of the enslaved within it. Surnames of slaves operated in a murky
47 Thavolia Glymph, “DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and Slave Women’s War for Freedom,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:3, Summer 2013 (accessed September 4, 2013), 495.
16 legal space practically unnecessary as the legal position of the enslaved was the chattel property of the slaveholder. Developed in counterpoint, names were assumed by slaveholders and slaves in both senses of the word. Slaveholders assumed the names of the slaves by taking it for granted that the slaves of their household were known by their surname. In this sense, the slaves of Thomas C. Boggs were known as Howard Boggs, and his sister Julia Ann Boggs. 48 Many others remain unnamed in the slave schedule of the 1860 census. On the other hand, the enslaved assumed names in the sense of actively taking names on as a choice or statement. Assuming a name in this sense was to endow oneself with social belonging to kin and to place.
Without diluting the meaningfulness of names, surnames of slaves were often flexible and situational. As slaves moved from farm to farm or were sold from one slaveholder to the next, the slaveholder often assumed that the slaves would take their surname. As examined in the third chapter, this was not always the case. A mother might remind her child that he was a Prather, even though he was born on the farm of a man named Pierce who owned both mother and child.49 Similarly, the enslaved might assume different names among white and black acquaintances or to designate a connection to a son, husband, wife, or other kin. Names also mark a crucial historical moment signifying a new relationship between the formerly enslaved and the state. For
48 Deposition of Howard Boggs, 27 March, 1890, in Priscilla Boggs pension claim of Howard Boggs, (Pvt., Co. G, 65 USCT. Inf., Civil War), XC 832676, Civil War and Later Pension Files; Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NARA), [Howard County Pension Collection (hereafter HCPC), Howard Boggs, 2178]. The Howard Count Pension Collection is a collection of over seventy pension applications made by soldiers and their families who were enslaved in Howard County. The first citation refers to the physical location of the document at the NARA, the Howard County Pension Collection citations identify the location of the digital image within the HCPC. They adhere to the following structure, [HCPC, Name of Veteran, Image Number]. 49 Deposition of George Pierce, 19 May, 1892, in Diana J. Williams pension claim of Morrison Prather, (Pvt., Co. H, 65th USCT. Inf., Civil War), XC 346247, Civil War and Later Pension Files, RG 15, NARA, (hereafter Civil War Pension Files) in pension claim of Morrison Prather [HCPC, Morrison Prather 2669].
17 many, military enlistment, a marriage ceremony, or an application for pension became the first officially sanctioned interaction between freedpeople and the federal or state governments. In these moments men and women declared their name for the first time and were acknowledged as citizens. It is also in the collection of bureaucratic information attached to citizenship, including names, that formerly enslaved are rendered more visible to the eyes of historians. In this sense, pension applications are invaluable resources for their discussion of names, under slavery and after, while providing information on the lives of formerly enslaved African Americans in the complexity that they were lived.
Applications for Civil War Pensions are particularly rich sources in that they often provide historical information moving in two directions. Among the depositions, sworn testimonies, occasional letters, affidavits, and one medical examination after another, pension applications are valuable sources of information on life under slavery and in the immediate, and occasionally not-so-immediate, aftermath of the Civil War. Pensions are testaments to the lived experience of those who survived the war and whose life spans the end of slavery and emancipation. Pensions often richly document the fact that emancipation was not an event; it was an ongoing structure or process.50 In the wake of
50 In the past decade Civil War Pensions have been recognized as a rich source of information to supplement published slave narratives. For some of the most recent use of pension applications of former slaves see, Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Diane Mutti Burke On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small- Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press); Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation: Understanding the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, (New York: New York University Press, 2008) Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 252; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African- American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Leslie A. Schwalm, “’Overrun with Free Negroes”: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest,” Civil War History, vol. 50, no. 2, (June 2004), 145-174; Leslie A. Schwalm,
18 slavery and in application for a pension, formerly enslaved widows and soldiers alike often had to verify their name as legitimate. The problems that ensued illustrate that slaves position in society cannot be reduced to their place as an economic unit in the slaveholding household. Rather the enslaved belonged to layered communities often related but not reducible to one another.51
The high percentage of enslaved peoples, the wealth of slaveholders and representative power in the state government, and the presence of two Union recruiting stations for colored infantry make Howard County an ideal setting for examining slavery and emancipation in Missouri. Slaves laboring in Howard County on the eve of the Civil
War were familiar with both the land they worked and those around them working land nearby. Networks of communities and kin maintained streams of communication, support, and outlets for socializing when time allowed. Relationships integral to surviving the casual violence and everyday dehumanization of slavery also rose to the fore in efforts to make a freedom livable in the wake of slavery.
“Between Slavery and Freedom: African American Women and Occupation in the Slave South,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, ed. LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Leslie A. Schwalm, “Surviving Wartime Emancipation: African Americans and the Cost of Civil War,” Health Legacies: Militirization, Health and Society, (Spring 2011), 21-27; Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipations Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations, (New York: Random House Inc., 2005); Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the Delta, 1861-1875, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003). 51 Nira Yuval-Davis argues it is important to remember that citizenship is not reducible to an individual’s belonging to a particular state. Rather, citizenship “as a full membership of a political community with its rights and obligations, is usually multi-layered, composed of local, regional, national, cross and supranational political communities, as well as often more than one national community.” Nira Yuval-Taylor, Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, (London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2011), 69.
19 CHAPTER ONE
“I knew about all of them”: Slavery and the ‘Neighborhood’ in Howard County, c. 186052
Howard Boggs met James Chowan for the first time in the late 1850s, across both the Missouri River and the Howard-Cooper County lines, in the town of Booneville.
Born a slave, Boggs regularly traveled from the small farm of his master located several miles “back in the country,” for trade or labor in Booneville.53 Born free, Chowan “was employed as a deck hand on boats running on the Mo river.” While commerce and labor brought both men to the banks of the Missouri River, they used the opportunity to establish a new relationship. Passing the time Boggs would share the happenings of
Howard County, and Chowan the news from across the length of the Missouri River.
Perhaps Chowan would bring word of recent legislation from the state capitol in
Jefferson City or even events in St. Louis, where his boat would begin and end its journeys as the Missouri flowed into the Mississippi River. Whether they engaged in the exchange of vital news or friendly conversation, Chowan and Boggs connected the farms of Howard County to Missouri’s largest economic hubs, political centers, and a chain of small farms not so unlike those with which Boggs was familiar. The meeting of Chowan and Boggs is then but one illustration of the connections made across the slaveholding farms of Howard County and the crucial role of mobility in providing the opportunity to establish and maintain formal and informal relationships.
52 Deposition of Andrew Williams, 20, Jan. 1905, (Pvt., Co. G, 67th USCT Inf., Civil War), app. 320668 Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2036]. 53 Deposition of James Chowan, 9 Mar., 1890, in Abner Stapleton in pension claim of Mack Stapleton, (Pvt. Co. G, 67th USCT Civil War), C 320668, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs, 2194].
20 Mobility itself, often found in the system of hiring slaves and abroad marriages, was utilized by the enslaved of Howard County to developed social networks across and among the small farms of their owners.54 Slavery in Missouri was of a smaller scale than slavery as it operated in the Lower South. However, slavery in Missouri shared many characteristics of the small-scale slavery pervasive across the Upper South such as greater mobility for the enslaved, hiring out and abroad marriages.55 Historian Diane Mutti
Burke estimates that fifty-seven percent of slave marriages in Missouri were between partners who lived on separate farms.56 Similarly, a large portion Missouri slaves were hired to work for masters who were not their owner. In the town of Rocheport, just beyond the Howard County line in Boone County to the East, thirty-one percent of slaves were hired hands working for a master other than their owner.57 This chapter examines the networks of relationships maintained by the enslaved of Howard County through quantitative analysis of 1860 census data and through qualitative analysis of depositions from Civil War pension applications that spoke of neighborhoods and communities.
The bases for social connections in Howard County fell into four broad categories; geographic proximity, family and kinship, social and labor, and the social networks of slaveholders. Relationships based on geographic proximity were those that came into being because both parties lived close to one another, or saw one another on a daily basis. Relationships founded on family and kinship describe those between members of the same family or kin group. Social and labor relationships were formed
54 The term “owner” is used throughout this thesis to distinguish the legal category of a slaveholder who, by power of slave law, owns slaves. The term “master” on the other hand refers to one who controls the labor of the enslaved, but may not legally hold title over the lives of another human being. 55 For more on slavery in the Upper South and the border states, see; Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground. 56 Burke, On Slavery’s Border, Table 4, 311. 57 Burke, 108.
21 when two parties were brought together by shared work or through formal and informal social gatherings such as shared leisure time, attending a church service, or a marriage ceremony. Finally, the enslaved widened their circle of acquaintances through occasions provided by the social and business networks of the slaveholder. This occurred when slaves accompanied slaveholders on social visits to the farms of relatives or friends, when slaves were hired, sold, or loaned to acquaintances of the slaveholder, or sent across the county to complete duties in the name of the slaveholder.
These categories were flexible and mutually sustaining. Relationships between the enslaved were often products of several categories simultaneously, or they began through one and were strengthened as other categories were added. For example, a relationship that began largely due to geographic proximity, or the fact that two individuals lived on adjoining farms was often augmented by opportunities to share labor or leisure time due to their relative closeness. Slaves also became acquainted with those on distant farms through duties that required travel. Such was the case when Howard
Boggs traveled to Booneville on errands for his master, and in so doing, became acquainted with James Chowan.
An outline of this complex network can be pieced together through analysis of applications for Civil War pensions. In 1862 Congress mandated the U.S. Pension
Bureau with the responsibility of administering pensions for white and black men disabled in the course of federal military service as well as those applications made by their survivors, widows, orphans, and other family dependents.58 In the decades that followed the Civil War veteran’s and dependents obtained pensions “based on the service
58 Regosin and Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation, 2.
22 of over eighty thousand black soldiers and sailors.”59 Almost half of theses pensions contain at least one “special examination” in which a pension officer actively investigated the validity of the claim and likelihood of fraud.60 During this process a field investigator would take sworn depositions, testimonies, and collect other documents such as extant birth and marriage records, land titles, even personal correspondences in order to evaluate the claim being made. A report would then be submitted to the U.S. Pension Bureau headquarters in Washington D.C. where it would ultimately be evaluated. While such scrutiny lengthened the process of application and made the chances of obtaining a claim less likely for many, special examinations can provide rich details on slave life, familial and social relationships, and military service.
This chapter examines seven applications made by the soldiers of the United
States Colored Troops recruited from the farms of Howard County in 1863-1864. Some of these pensions were claimed by surviving veterans, most, however were claimed by the widows of soldiers, and in one case the minor children of the soldier. Collectively, these pensions illuminate networks of kinship, labor, geography, and slaveholding that the slaves of Howard County commonly referred to as the neighborhood.61 From these seven pensions, the selected testimonies of nineteen former slaves, one free African
American, and one former mistress illustrate ties between twelve separate slave-owning households of Howard County. Neighborhood connections, often physically close were not entirely reducible to their relative geographical proximity. The social connections of
59 Regosin and Shaffer, 3. 60 As Regosin and Shaffer note, only about one quarter of white Southern Unionists underwent this type of scrutiny; Voices of Emancipation, 3. 61 For more on slave neighborhoods, see Anthony Kaye, Joining Places; and in Missouri, Burke, On Slavery’s Border.
23 the slaveholder, social and kinship networks of the enslaved, and common labor also played a role in forming the web like connections of the neighborhood.
The Boggs household, near Fayette in Howard County, Missouri is a fair example of the average slaveholding farm in Howard County. Listed in the 1860 census, the white
Boggs household was headed by Thomas and comprised of his wife Levinia; two sons
Robert J, and John M; and two daughters, Leona and Nannie. John Wheeler, a nineteen- year-old white laborer and John H Jacobs, a white schoolteacher were also part of the household unit. Living and working for the white Boggs family were nine slaves, slightly more than the Howard County’s average holding of seven slaves in 1860.62
As Howard Boggs’ pension file shows, the life of the nine Boggs slaves was rural, but not without social contact from people outside their community. Geographer Walter
Schroeder has calculated that by 1860 Howard County had a fairly even population distribution with an average of eight free persons per 160-acre parcels of land.63 Howard
Boggs lived, worked, and rested on land surrounded by slaveholders.64 It follows that
Howard also lived around fellow enslaved. Nearly one in three people in Moniteau
Township, where Howard Boggs lived were slaves.65 In the center of the state, where slaveholding was more prevalent, Schroeder’s estimate could easily be doubled to sixteen people per 160-acre parcel when the enslaved population is taken into consideration.66
Though Howard lived on the Boggs farm, he had frequent contact with slaves on neighboring farms. Both Howard and his sister were born and raised as slaves on the
62 1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Richmond Township, Howard County, Missouri, Population and Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri. 63 Schroeder, “Spread of Settlement in Howard County, Missouri 1810-1859”, 23. 64 Deposition of Howard Boggs, 20 Mar., 1890, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs, 2178]. 65 1860 Eight Federal Manuscript Census, Moniteau County, Missouri, Slave Schedule. 66 Schroeder includes in a footnote that his estimate does not include the enslaved population growing “in the better soil districts,” 24.
24 Boggs farm near Fayette and only a few miles from the Missouri River. Moses Porter, a slave of James Turner who lived “in the same neighborhood,” knew Howard from the time he “was a boy 11 or 12 years of age.”67 Growing up near one another and being similar ages, Moses and Howard saw each other frequently, established a friendship and, when they were able, spent their leisure time in one another’s company. Moses Porter remembered how frequently they would meet and that they would often go fishing and hunting together on Sundays.68
Howard Boggs’ pension application contains similar testimonies from former slaves who lived in and around the Boggs farm. Howard Boggs’ mobility connected the slaves of the Boggs household to neighboring slaveholding Turner and Patterson households and the marriage of Julia Ann, Howard’s sister, to Edward Estill also suggests close interactions with those on the nearby Estill farm. Steve Patterson remembered of
Howard that “we were boys and neighbors” and that he saw Boggs every week.69
Patterson does not elaborate on their weekly visits but it could be that, like Moses Porter, he frequently spent Sundays with Howard Boggs. Thomas Hughes and John
Brickenridge, later comrades of Howard Boggs in the service of the U.S.C.T. also remembered being “neighbors in Howard County…prior to the War of the Rebellion” and knowing Howard Boggs as a boy.70 Beyond local socializing, Howard Boggs’ labor responsibilities connected the Boggs farm with acquaintances in the nearby river town of
Booneville.
67 Deposition of Moses Porter, 28 Mar., 1890, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs, 2196]. 68 Ibid. 69 Deposition of Steve Paterson, 18 Sept., 1885, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs, 2304]. 70 General Affidavit of Thomas Hughes and John Brickenridge, 8 Nov., 1887, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs, 2315].
25 Proximity to the Missouri River and the mobility of the enslaved often provided the opportunity to further connect with life beyond their local farms and to socialize with free blacks native to Howard County and those passing through on the Missouri River.
This opportunity came to Howard Boggs when he met James Chowan across the
Missouri River in Booneville. This ability to travel to the riverfront and even cross the river was not unique to Howard Boggs, however. It can be gathered from the 1844 case of an escaped slave that free and enslaved African Americans traveled too and from river towns such as Booneville with enough frequency so as not to arouse much suspicion. In
1844 a man named Charles, held as a slave in Howard County escaped from the farm of his owner by traveling to Booneville. When his master discovered his absence he had the steamboat Wapello docked in Glasgow searched. Found empty, the steamboat was allowed to proceed downriver where Charles, who had forged papers, boarded the steamboat as a free man bound for St. Louis and paid his fare. Charles made it to St.
Louis before his master learned of the event and there he disappears from the historical record.71 No doubt, Charles chose to attempt boarding the steamship in Booneville where there was a lesser chance of someone in his neighborhood recognizing him, reenslaving him, and administering the ten lashes due to “strolling” slaves, or worse.72
Life for free African Americans, even along the Missouri River, came with limits.
Henry Bruce, a former slave in Chariton County, recalled how he believed that he had much more mobility as a slave than did the free people of color whom he knew. “With my master’s horse,” wrote Bruce in his memoir, “I could ride over the county, in fact did
71 Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 255. 72 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1861.
26 whenever occasion demanded it, and without molestation.”73 Free persons of color were required to have a pass from their guardian in Chariton County. Bruce recounts that if they were “caught on the public road without a pass” a free black man or woman would be “subject to arrest by any white man who chose to make it.”74 Bruce added, “in reality they were no more free than the slave, until the war set both classes free.”75
While only seventy-eight free African Americans lived in Howard County in
1860, this was the second highest number of any county outside of St. Louis, which boasted 1,865.76 The free black population in Howard County was concentrated in the
North and South central portions of the county in the townships of Prairie and Franklin
(See Map 1). Likely due to prohibitive residential laws barring or establishing taxes on free people of color seeking to live in cities, only a combined five free blacks lived in the cities of Fayette and Glasgow. The Howard County Freed Negroes Register corroborates
Bruce’s observations regarding the limited freedom of free blacks. The Register contained a list of the forty-two slaves manumitted in Howard County between the years
1836 and 1861. Even manumitted freedom was not without its restrictions. Freed slaves were allowed to remain in the county only after they registered with the county clerk, who recorded their age, height, weight, skin color, and other physical characteristics.
Manumitted slaves then posted a bond that ranged from three-hundred to seven-hundred
73 H. C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave. Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man, orig. pub. 1895, (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 78. 74 Bruce, The New Man, 77. 75 Bruce, 79. 76 Only Marion County had more free blacks than Howard County, at 84. The remaining population of free black in the counties of Little Dixie are as follows, Boone: 53; Callaway: 31; Cooper: 28; Lafayette: 36 ; Saline: 23.1860 Missouri Census Table, Missouri State Convention, 1861-1863: Office of the Secretary of State, RG005: Box 1, final folder, http://www.civilwaronthewesternborder.org/content/1860-missouri-census-table ;
27 dollars. Finally, they could remain “as long as they were of good behavior” and conducted themselves in ways “proper & right & according to the law.”77
77 Missouri, Howard County, Freed Negroes Register, 1836-1861, C1123, Missouri State Historical Society, Columbia, Missouri, http://statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri.org/cdm/compoundobject/ collection/amcw/id/8564/rec/17
28 Map 1:
Free Black Population by Township Howard County, MO 1860
y
t R a n n - Roanoke d o u l p h o C o u C n t y n
o
t
i
r
a Prairie h Glasgow C
BonneFemme Chariton
Fayette
y
t
n
u
o
C
e Richmond n
o
o
B Boons Lick Moniteau
Franklin Population (per township)
0 - 4
5 - 9 M I S S O U R I R I V E R 10 - 13
14 - 17
0 2.75 5.5 18 - 22 Miles 23 - 26
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson 1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
29 One of the most common ways slaves achieved mobility was by being hired out to a neighboring farm or through travel privileges granted couples in an abroad marriage.
African Americans used this mobility to enlarge their social network as they became acquainted with and worked alongside slaves on adjoining farms. Born a slave in
Maryland, Diana J. Williams recalled how she was “nearly full grown” when her Master,
Charley Pierce, brought her to Howard County. It is most likely that Diana was brought to work as a domestic for Mrs. Pierce as she accompanied her mistress when she visited friends “thirty five miles north” of where they lived, in the town of Jacksonville,
Missouri. While these trips were made at the leisure of her mistress, Diana was able to use the opportunity to socialize with slaves across county lines. Near Jacksonville, Diana
“became acquainted” with a certain slave, Morrison Prather. It is unknown how long
Diana and Mrs. Pierce remained in Jacksonville, but they eventually returned to resume their lives in Howard County. Morrison and Diana would meet again however when
Morrison was hired out to a man named Charley King who “lived a neighbor” to the
Pierce farm.78
While Morrison was “at work with King,” Diana was able to spend more time with him and, in her words “Morrison Commenced to run with me.” Diana and Morrison were eventually married in the kitchen of the Pierce household, by a ceremony officiated by “’Major Hardin,’ a colored minister.” A short time after the marriage, Mr. King came under financial troubles and his estate was “broke-up.” Diana’s master, Mr. Pierce “took everything he [King] had” including, perhaps especially, the slaves working on his farm.
78 Deposition of Diana J. Williams, 20 May, 1892, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2672].
30 In her recollection, Diana adds the significant detail; “we lived together as man and wife and occupied the same rooms until he enlisted.”79
It is important to reflect on the social connections that led to this marriage and the central role that movement, forced and voluntary, played in their lives. The connection between the white Pierce family and their friends in Jacksonville and the forced movement of their slaves Diana and Morrison led to the initial meeting and re- acquaintance of the couple. Similarly, it was likely Charley Pierce’s social ties to King, the legal owner of Morrison that allowed him to strike a bankruptcy deal with his neighbor that led to his ownership of Morrison. It is unclear whether Morrison was still a hired hand at the time he was married to Diana, or the extent to which their relationship played a role in the business dealings of Mr. Pierce. However, it can be said that even when owners took the emotional interests of their slaves into consideration, very rarely did they trump the economic interests of the white household. In the case of Diana J.
Williams and Morrison Prather the chance of their marriage going “abroad” was minimized when Charley Pierce purchased Morrison from the bankrupt estate of King.
While Morrison and Diana were able to live together, an estimated fifty-seven percent of marriages between slaves in Missouri were between partners living on separate farms.80 Indeed, the story of Mack Stapleton and Susan Jackson (Maiden name
Stapleton) tells a more common tale of abroad marriage. Mack and Susan’s relationship was, in many ways, intertwined with the stories of the families of their owners and masters. Through their marriage, Mack and Susan connected three of the largest slaveholding families in Howard County, the Stapletons, the Jacksons, and the Maupins.
79 Ibid. 80 Burke, On Slavery’s Border, Table 4, 311.
31 As slave marriages were not recognized by law and only recognized by owners on a piecemeal fashion, the ambivalence of the masters’ perspective has filtered down through their language.81 For many, it was unknown whether Mack Stapleton and Susan Jackson married by a ceremony, “or just cohabitated in the slave fashion.”82 The distinction was of secondary importance to their communities as Mack and Susan were “generally regarded in the neighborhood as husband and wife.”83 Whether this distinction was meaningful to Mack and Susan is unclear. If they had been married by a ceremony, it was likely that it would have been officiated by Jack Carol, “an old colored preacher who very frequently officiated at marriages between slaves.”84 White and black communities recognized the union of Mack and Susan even though it was not bound to be respected under law. Certainly, marriage of a “slave fashion” covered enough rhetorical ground to leave room for the bond of marriage to be broken, by sale or by lease, at the whim or interest of the master.85
That hiring out and frequent sale were defining features of small-scale slavery equates to what might be known in today’s parlance as a high turnover rate among farm laborers. The forced movement of black bodies to and from farms was therefor as crucial a feature of slavery’s lived experience as labor on said farms. As Andrew Williams stated in his deposition in the pension case of Mack Stapleton, he may have only had a single master, but he maintained close contact with slaves from at least five other nearby
81 For more on family dynamics between slaveholders and slaves in Missouri see, Kimberly A. Schreck, Splitting Heirs unpublished Diss., University of Missouri, Columbia, 2004. 82 Deposition of Jesse Miller, 17 Jan., 1905, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2030]. 83 Ibid., [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2031]. 84 Ibid., [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2030]. 85 For more on slave marriage see Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 79-113, Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 198-230, Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, 19-50.
32 farms. Indeed because the Williams farm neighbored the Stapleton estate, it is also likely that Diana J. Williams and her husband Morrison Prather, also knew the Stapletons.
Andrew Williams knew Mack Stapleton’s owner George Stapleton and all the slaves on the Stapleton land. George Stapleton was known as “’Bully Stapleton” locally and by Brack, “Big Ben and Mack,” the men who labored as slaves for George.86 It was
Mack, however who was “’hired out’ on the Maupin farm” only about a mile from the
Jackson place.87 At the time, Andrew Williams was also hired out by “old Ben
Williams” and sent to work for “Capt. Sweeny” on a farm adjoining the Jacksons.88 This was only the beginning of Mack’s itinerate employment as he was “hired out a good deal in that part of the Co.”89 In this way, Mack living on the Maupin farm, and traveling from farm to farm as he was hired out, became “acquainted with Susan” his future wife.90
Susan Jackson was what many slaves in Missouri referred to as a “near neighbor” of
Mack as she lived on the farm of her master Cosgrave Jackson adjoining that of the
Maupin’s.91
Table 1 illustrates the anatomy of Andrew Williams’ social relations and how he came to know Mack and Susan Stapleton. Surnames were only transferred to slaves when they were sold from one household to another and did not change if they were simply hired out. In fact, maintaining the surname of the owner, even while working most immediately with a different master became an important feature of maintaining ownership over a mobile slave population.
86 Deposition of Andrew Williams, 20 Jan., 1905, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2036]. 87 Ibid., [Mack Stapleton 2037]. 88 Ibid., [Mack Stapleton 2036]. 89 Deposition of Matilda Bly, 20 Jan., 1905, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2040]. 90 Deposition of Jesse Miller, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2030]. 91 Ibid.
33 Table 1: Anatomy of an Abroad Marriage
George “Bully” Ben Williams Stapleton (slaveholder) (slaveholder)
Owner of Owner of
Andrew Williams Mack Stapleton (slave) (slave)
Hired to Hired to
Capt. Sweeny Maupin Farm Farm
Near Neighbor Near Neighbor Cosgrave Jackson Farm (slaveholder)
Owner of
Abroad Marriage to Susan Jackson/Stapleton (slave)
Andrew Williams’ deposition provides information concerning the experience of slavery in Howard County by illuminating interpersonal connections within the neighborhood and the creation of family units by the enslaved. Often, for those who chose to marry, being hired to work on adjoining farms became an opportunity meet a future partner. The results of such unions usually formed an “abroad marriage” where the partners lived on separate farms, belonged to separate owners, and were allowed visitation on Saturday and occasionally Wednesday nights. Occasionally, the owner of one partner agreed to hire or purchase the other partner in a concession to the family unit
34 even though this was not the norm. John Estill for example recalled how his mother,
Mary Ann, was owned by Mrs. Hickman on the Hickman farm while his father, also named John Estill was held by one, J. R. Estill at the Estill estate. While both lived on separate farms at the time of their marriage, J. R. Estill purchased Mary Ann after she married John by ceremony. John and Mary Ann lived together on the Estill farm until
John went off to the army.92
Slave marriages of any kind were not recorded in official county records and certainly not included in the 1860 slave schedule. Yet marriages between slaves were common in Howard County and records often were kept in a family Bible. Marriage ceremonies, if they were conducted at all, often took place in the house of the owner.
Julia Ann, a slave of Thomas C. Boggs was married to Edward Estell in the Boggs house.
It is probable that Edward had been hired to Boggs at a young age as he never claimed ownership of him, yet he stated that he was “raised” in the Boggs family.93 That Thomas
Boggs saw his nine slaves as an extension of his household is understandable, however, clear divisions were drawn between family and slaves. Although the Boggs house provided the venue for the wedding ceremony, and all the white members of the Boggs family regarded Julia Ann and Edward to be married, they were “living in matrimony as then customary with slaves.”94 When Mary Ann Hickman and John Estill married in
1851, John’s mistress recorded the date in the family Bible of the white Boggs family.
As his mistress later claimed, she had the “marriage, birth and death records of her
92 Deposition of John Estill, 7 Aug., 1887, Miller Estill in pension claim of John Estill, (Pvt. Co. B, 67th USCT Civil War), C259433, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill, 1754]. 93 Affidavit of Thomas C. Boggs, 1 Nov., 1873, Julia Estell in pension claim of Edward Estell (Estill), (Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War), C 164940, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Edward Estell, 1494]. 94 Ibid.
35 former slaves” written in the pages of the Bible, including the names and birthdates of the four sons and three daughters that were born to Mary Ann and John before the coming of the Civil War.95 Like so many other able bodied men, John enlisted into the Union Army in 1864, fought for his freedom and died in service. It is likely that he never met his youngest daughter Mary, born in the Spring of 1864, whose name was also recorded in the Estill family Bible. After the war, Mary Ann remarried Sergeant Taylor, in a ceremony officiated by the minister Jos. Wright. This time, the ceremony was held in the house of her former mistress.
Acquaintances, kin, family, and partners often found themselves being asked to provide evidence for the legitimacy of relationships that the government had ignored and sought to prevent under slavery since Missouri’s formation. Retroactive recognition and legal protection of formerly enslaved marriages and families came through the witness of those who had sustained such relationships in slavery. Neighborhood relations, so crucial to making slavery livable, became the foundation for making freedom meaningful.
The social connections among and between slaveholding farms were also affected by the demographic make up of the county in which they were situated. Located in the very heart of the slaveholding Missouri River counties commonly known as Little Dixie,
Howard County was home to one in ten enslaved Missourians by 1860. The county also had the highest percentage of slaves, thirty seven percent, and the second largest slave population, 5,886, of any county in the state of Missouri.96 Thirty seven percent of the residents of Howard County were held as slaves. At the interpersonal level, this means that for roughly every six free residents of the county, there were four slaves. In order to
95 General Affidavit of Mary A. Estill, 12 July, 1887, [HCPC, John Estill, 1707]. 96 Burke, On Slavery’s Border, Table 2, 310.
36 draft a more complete outline of the social relations among Missouri slaves and slaveholders it is useful to explore the physical geography of slaveholding in townships across Howard County.
After the Territory of Missouri was established in 1814, Howard County was quickly organized in 1816.97 While the first settlers were lured to the salt springs of the
Boonslick land in the southwest of the county along the Missouri River in the 1810s and earlier, settlement exploded in the next decade. In just eleven years after the territorial government of Missouri issued the first act specifically authorizing the sale of Howard
County land in 1819, seventy-five percent of all county land had been claimed.98 Further encouraged by Missouri’s statehood in 1821, Howard County became a prime destination for those farming families and their slaves emigrating from the Upper South.99 During the greatest period of migration to Howard County the percent increase of whites was twenty-one percent, while the slave population increased by ninety-eight percent.100 In the coming decades, the slave population continued to grow, thirty-nine percent by 1840, thirty-three percent by 1850, and twenty percent by 1860.101
Settlement spread north and east from the Boonslick region of Howard County where the poor soil, steep sloping hills, and saline water discouraged market based agricultural production.102 The loess soil being exceptionally deep and fertile in the northwest and center portions of the county, what would become Chariton and Richmond
97 Schroeder, “Spread of Settlement in Howard County, Missouri 1810-1859,” 10, 9. 98 Schroeder, 18, 19. 99 Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 51. 100 Lawrence O. Christensen, “William D. Swinney: Howard County Slaveholder and Entrepreneur,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 4, (July, 2014), 236. 101 Christensen, “William D. Swinney,” 236. 102 Schroeder, 14.
37 Townships, were particularly suited for growing tobacco and hemp.103 It is in these tobacco and hemp production regions, Chariton and Richmond Township that lived the highest percent of slaves by population (see Map, Percent of Total Enslaved Persons by
Township). By 1850, hemp production exceeded nine hundred tons a year in Howard
County making itone of the leading hemp producing counties in the state.104 Similarly, tobacco production soared in Howard County which produced 2.8 million pounds in
1860, the second most of any county in Missouri.105 Tobacco production became so prevalent that B. W. Lewis was able to operate a tobacco manufactury in the City of
Glasgow with a “work and storage area large enough to process 3 million pounds of tobacco annually.”106 By 1851, over 6.7 million pounds of tobacco crossed the docks at
Glasgow, double the amount grown in Howard and accounting for more than one third of all tobacco produced in the entire state. Glasgow had thirteen tobacco stemmeries and manufactories in its vicinity by 1852, making it a central hub for tobacco trade on the
Missouri River.107 Most planters in neighboring counties of Randolph and Macon sold their tobacco in the Glasgow market, and the city of Rocheport, just across county lines at the southeast corner of Howard maintained a similar tobacco based economy.108 The constant attention and physically demanding labor required of tobacco and hemp production required the maintenance of a large labor force operating year-round. 109
103 Schroeder, 14, 15. Hurt, 65. 104 Hurt, 120. 105 1860 Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Missouri, Agriculture Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri. Only Chariton County, immediately North West of Howard produced more tobacco in 1860 and it is likely that most of this tobacco flowed through the river port at Glasgow, situated on the border of Howard and Chariton Counties. 106 Hurt, 96. 107 Christensen, “William D. Swinney,” 238. 108 Hurt, 97. 109 Hurt, 101.
38 Map 2:
Percent of Total Enslaved Persons by Township Howard County, MO 1860
y
t R a n n -
Roanoke d o u l p h o C o u C n t y n
o
t
i
r
a Prairie h Glasgow C
BonneFemme Chariton
Fayette
y
t
n
u
o
C
e Richmond n
o
o
B Boons Lick Moniteau
Franklin Percent (per township)
0 - 11
12 - 16 M I S S O U R I R I V E R 17 - 26
27 - 36
0 2.75 5.5 37 - 46 Miles 47 - 52
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson 1875 Platte Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County Slave Schedule NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
39 While central Missouri’s tobacco and hemp economy was made possible by slave labor, scholars such as Diane Mutti Burke have argued that slavery in Missouri was markedly different from slavery in other parts of the United States. Slavery in Missouri was “often just as cruel and exploitative as anywhere in the South” argues Burke, but slavery in Missouri was set apart by it’s comparatively small-scale.110 In 1860, 114,965 slaves were held in Missouri, while Georgia and Mississippi led the nation by with enslaved populations of over 430,000 each.111 While only one third of the South’s slaves lived on plantations of over fifty or more, only two slaveholders in Howard County claimed more than fifty slaves.112 The difference becomes more disparate when compared to the most heavily populated slave regions of the South. For example, in
Howard County, the average slaveholder held just over seven slaves in 1860 whereas the median slaveholding in Georgetown, “the premier rice-producing district of low country
South Carolina” the median slaveholding unit was 135. 113 Still, slaveholders in Missouri sought to strengthen their system by adopting “flexible economic strategies, such as hiring, [and] granting slaves liberal geographic mobility in order to accommodate their fragile families and communities.”114 Though there were fewer slaves in Missouri than in states across the south, slavery in Missouri remained a system of coercive labor and control.
While the internal trade and frequent hiring of slaves offered opportunities for greater freedom for the enslaved population, it also developed hand in hand with more
110 Burke, 5-6. 111 1860 Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Missouri, Georgia, Mississippi, Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri. 112 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We,12; Hurt, 310. 113 Hurt,12. 114 Burke, 6.
40 nuanced systems of control. Residents of Howard County were enslaved at a higher percent than anywhere in Missouri. In fact, though only ten percent of Missourians were held as slaves, thirty-two percent of Howard Countians were enslaved, equal to the thirty- two percent of all Southerners enslaved.115 Slave patrols, legally established in all slaveholding counties, became a particular concern in Howard County.116 In October of
1853, a mass meeting of white citizens met at the Fayette courthouse for the “purpose of devising means to suppress insubordination among slaves.”117 Rather than subside, concerns regarding the enslaved of Howard only increased as the population grew.118 By
1858, a newspaper editor in Glasgow reported that the enslaved population was “much more restive, disobedient and refractory, than formerly.”119 He furthermore recommended all slaveholders “keep strict control of his slaves and prohibit indiscriminate travel…at night and on Sundays.”120 By 1861 the Missouri Legislature amended the 1855 “act concerning patrols” to enforce just such a suggestion. The amendment stated that all slaves found “strolling about from one plantation to another, without a pass…specifying the length of time said slave shall be absent” and clearly designating the point of origin and destination shall be apprehended. Furthermore, the patrollers were then permitted to administer “any number of lashes” at their discretion,
“not exceeding ten.” If they were taken before a Justice of the Peace, the captured man or woman could receive “any number of lashes… not to exceed twenty.”121
115 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 12. 116 Laws of the State of Missouri 1861. 117 Quoted in Hurt, 251. 118 For a discussion of increasing tension in Missouri as concerns regarding slavery grew nation wide see, Melton Mclaurin, Celia, A Slave, 62-79. 119 Quoted in Hurt, 251. 120 Hurt, 252. 121 Laws of Missouri 1861.
41 Howard County was exceptional in the fact that thirty-seven percent of its population consisted of enslaved peoples, the most of any Missouri county. However, this average is mainly useful for what it tells us about Howard County’s relation to similar counties across Missouri and is less useful in telling us something about the operations and experience of slavery as it existed within Howard County. In his study
“Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri,” Robert Frizzell remarks that the benefits of in-depth analysis of manuscript census schedules at the level of the township reveals locations where slaves were indeed the majority of inhabitants.122 Within the string of slaveholding counties known as Little Dixie, Frizzell identifies a “Missouri
Slave Belt” extending almost eighty miles with a width seldom greater than ten miles.
Just before the Civil War, a traveler could trek overland from “Columbia to a few miles west of Lexington, crossing the river between Glasgow and Arrow Rock, and seldom be out of countryside where slaves composed form two fifths to more than half the population.”123 In the geographic center of this belt sat Chariton and Richmond
Townships of Howard County.
Examining the 1860 slave schedule of Howard County’s ten census tracts, or townships, shows that patterns of slaveholding were hardly uniform across the county.
Instead, the census tracts suggest that two types of townships existed with regards to slaveholding, those that are slave-dense and those that are slave-sparse. 124 This division is telling of how slavery in Howard County developed alongside the agricultural and
122 Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review, 240. 123 Frizzell, 243. Of the nine townships Frizzell identifies with a population of slaves over 41%, three were from Howard County. 124 The 10 polling districts of Howard County fall into two distinct groups with regard to slavery, the heavy slave-owning districts, hereafter referred to as the townships; Chariton Township, Franklin Township, Moniteau Township, Prairie Township, and Richmond Township and the sparsely slave-owning districts, hereafter referred to as the towncenters; Bonne Femme, Boonslick, Fayette, City of Glasgow and Chariton, City of Roanoke and Prairie.
42 market economies of the rural townships and developing town and city centers. In this study, all townships that are understood as slave-sparse had enslaved populations of less than three hundred making up no more than twenty-six percent of the population.
Comparatively, no township that has been designated slave-dense had a population of less than seven hundred while the density of the slave population reaches above fifty percent in both Chariton and Richmond townships.
Table 2:
1860 Census District: Total Total Total Free Percent of Slave-Dense White Pop. Slave Pop. Black Pop. Pop. Slave Chariton Township 1144 1191 1 51% Franklin Township 1359 1037 26 43% Moniteau Township 1539 733 11 32% Prairie Township 1422 866 19 38% Richmond Township 1177 1269 1 52% TOTALS 6641 5096 58 43%
Table 3:
1860 Census District: Total Total Total Free Percent of Slave-Sparse White Pop. Slave Pop. Black Pop. Pop. Slave Bonne Femme Township 939 172 0 15% Boonslick Township 1078 137 11 11% City of Fayette 446 160 3 26% City of Glasgow 762 271 2 26% City of Roanoke and 160 50 0 24% Prairie TOTALS 3385 790 16 19%
1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Howard County, Missouri, Population and Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
43 Map 3:
Enslaved Population by Township Howard County, MO 1860
y
t R a n n - Roanoke d o u l p h o C o u C n t y n
o
t
i
r
a Prairie h Glasgow C
BonneFemme Chariton
Fayette
y
t
n
u
o
C
e Richmond n
o
o
B Boons Lick Moniteau
Franklin
M I S S O U R I R I V E R Population (per township)
0 2.75 5.5 50 - 300 Miles 300 - 1300
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson 1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO Eigth U.S. Census, Howard Count, Slave Schedule NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
44 Map 4:
Enslaved Population by Township Howard County, MO 1860
y
t R a n n - Roanoke d o u l p h o C o u C n t y n
o
t
i
r
a Prairie h Glasgow C
BonneFemme Chariton
Fayette
y
t
n
u
o
C
e Richmond n
o
o
B Boons Lick Moniteau
Franklin Population (per township)
50
M I S S O U R I R I V E R 50 - 299
299 - 699
699 - 1037 0 2.75 5.5 Miles 1037 - 1269
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson 1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO Eigth U.S. Census, Howard Count, Slave Schedule NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
45 Map 5:
White Population by Township Howard County, MO 1860
y
t R a n n - Roanoke d o u l p h o C o u C n t y n
o
t
i
r
a Prairie h Glasgow C
BonneFemme Chariton
Fayette
y
t
n
u
o
C
e Richmond n
o
o
B Boons Lick Moniteau
Franklin
Population M I S S O U R I R I V E R (per township)
160 - 620
0 2.75 5.5 621 - 1079 Miles 1080 - 1539
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson 1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
46 Map 6:
Population by Township: Free and Enslaved Howard County, MO 1860
y
t R a n n - Roanoke d o u l p h o C o u C n t y n
o
t
i
r
a
h
C
Glasgow Prairie
BonneFemme
Chariton Fayette
y
t
n
u Richmond o
C
e
n
o
o
Boons Lick B
Moniteau
Population Franklin (per township)
M I S S O U R I R I V E R 1,500
Enslaved
0 2.75 5.5 Free Black Miles White
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson 1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
47 Eighty seven percent of all slaves (5,096 of 5,886 slaves) and eighty-seven percent of all slaveholding households (637 of 812), resided in the five sprawling slave- dense townships of Chariton, Franklin, Moniteau, Prairie, and Richmond (See Map,
Enslaved Population By Township). From the data gathered in Table 2 and Table 3, it can be observed that the division between slave-dense and slave-sparse townships is related to the economies of townships rather than the density of its population. The
Townships of Bonne Femme and Boonslick have substantial white populations but have a negligible slave population. The poor soils and steep slopes of Boonslick and the “poorer soils and steeper slopes” of the Bonne Femme Township may have been enough for self- sufficiency but could not support the development of cash crop agriculture.125 This division represented a geographic and social divide among the inhabitants of Howard
County. As shown on the map of Enslaved Population by Township slave-sparse townships included all of the city centers as well as two townships with less arable soil.
Even when the white population was much smaller, as seen in the cities of Fayette,
Glasgow, and Roanoke, the percent of slaves also drastically reduced.
The relatively small population of slaves in city centers such as Fayette and
Glasgow does not necessarily mean that slaves had less opportunity to forge social connections. In fact, work in the tobacco and hemp processing factories may have led to contact with a greater number of acquaintances than work on rural farms. In one Fayette factory, William D. Swinney worked “twenty-one boys, four girls, and seven men” all of
125 Schoeder, 14; Robert Frizzell comes to a similar conclusion in “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri,” arguing that townships with the highest percentage of slaves were marked by commercial agriculture, mainly “the production of hemp and tobacco for the market.” Frizzell, 245. Christopher Phillips suggests that because Howard had the highest density of slaves, but produced “no better than the fifth-greatest amounts of tobacco and hemp of the central river counties.” Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 41. It is unclear what year Phillips makes reference too, but by 1860 Howard County was producing the second most tobacco and sixth most hemp in the State of Missouri. 1860 Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Missouri, Agriculture Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
48 them hired hands.126 In 1850 Swinney recorded that he had hired slaves from thirty-eight different owners, some of them leasing more than one slave apiece.127 While the particularly grueling nature of work in tobacco and hemp factories should not be disregarded, it is worth considering how work in the factories connected the lives of slaves living on diverse farms spread across the county.
The fact that in Howard County, the average slaveholder held just over seven slaves is useful in distinguishing the slaveholding trends in Central Missouri than it is in describing what slavery was like for those who lived within the county itself. More accurately put this shows that in Howard County, just as many slaves lived on farms with more than seven slaves, as did those who lived on farms with less than seven slaves. The average is highly influenced by the majority of slaveholders who lived in slave-dense townships. Looking at patterns of slaveholding at the township level illustrates the variety of slaveholding from township to township. In 1860 slaves living in the slave- dense townships were likely to live with approximately eight slaves per household while slaves in slave-sparse townships were more likely to live with fewer than four slaves per household.
While the number of slaves varied greatly from township to township, the demographic make up of the slave population did not. Because there was very little variety between the average ages of slaves across the townships of Howard County it can be gathered that slaves lived in multi-generational family and kin groups countywide.
The average age in slave-dense townships was only slightly younger than those who lived in slave-sparse districts. This is evident in more detail by the fact that fifty-seven percent
126 Christensen, “William D. Swinney,” 238. 127 Christensen, 236-237.
49 of the slaves in slave-dense townships were children under the age of sixteen, while only fifty-two percent of those in slave-sparse townships fit in the same category, the county average being fifty-three percent. Results were similar for those over the age of forty- five. Ten percent of slaves in the slave-sparse townships were over the age of forty-five, while eight percent of those in slave-dense townships were within that category, matching the county wide average.
Table 4:
Slave-Dense: Age of Enslaved by Townships, Howard County; 1860
Number of Number of Percent of Enslaved Mean
Enslaved <16 Enslaved >45 Population 45<>16 Age Chariton Township 638 (54%) 96 (8%) 62% 18.7
Franklin Township 589 (57%) 69 (7%) 64% 17.3
Moniteau Township 444 (61%) 53 (7%) 68% 17
Prairie Township 509 (59%) 58 (7%) 66% 17
Richmond Township 702 (55%) 115 (9%) 64% 18.8
Total 2884 (57%) 391 (8%) 65% 17.8
50 Table 5:
Slave-Sparse: Age of Enslaved by Townships, Howard County; 1860
Number of Number of Percent of Enslaved Mean
Enslaved <16 Enslaved >45 Population 45<>16 Age Bonne Femme 98 (57%) 11 (6%) 63% 16.8
Boon’s Lick 71 (52%) 17 (12%) 64% 20
Fayette Township 82 (51%) 20 (28%) 79% 21.9 City of Glasgow and 137 (51%) 28 (10%) 61% 20 Chariton City of Roanoke and 21 (42%) 5 (1%) 43% 21 Prairie Total 409 (52%) 81 (10%) 62% 19.9 1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Howard County, Missouri, Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
Similarly, the difference between the gender make-up of slave-dense and slave-sparse townships is not wide enough to suggest a great deal of change in lived experience. Most slaves in Howard County, regardless of township lived in areas where the number of males and females approached parity. Of the 5,886 slaves of Howard County in 1860, fifty-three percent were male and forty-seven percent female. This countywide average is once again more closely related to the experience of the slave-dense townships where the overwhelming majority of the enslaved lived. In fact, the percent of males and females in slave-dense townships is the same as the county average. Tables 5 and 6 show that the slave-sparse township statistics invert this trend as the census shows theses populations to be forty-seven percent male and fifty-three percent female.
51 Table 6:
Slave-Dense: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population, Howard Co, 1860 Total Percent Total Percent Census District Male Male Female Female Chariton Township 648 54% 543 46%
Franklin Township 578 56% 459 44%
Moniteau Township 383 52% 350 48%
Prairie Township 450 52% 416 48%
Richmond Township 660 52% 609 48%
Totals 2719 52% 2377 48%
Table 7:
Slave-Sparse: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population, Howard Co, 1860 Total Percent Total Percent Census District Male Male Female Female Bonne Femme 80 47% 92 53%
Boon’s Lick 70 51% 67 49%
Fayette Township 79 49% 81 51% City of Glasgow and 119 44% 152 56% Chariton City of Roanoke and Prairie 27 54% 23 46% Totals 375 48% 415 52%
1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Howard County, Missouri, Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
52 Slave experience in Howard County varied along the location of enslavement as well as along the lines of gender, age, and labor. Those who lived in the most productive agricultural townships lived where two-fifths to one-half of the population were slaves.
Those who lived in the city centers or the poor soil regions of Boonslick and Bonne
Femme lived where slaves composed only one-fifth to nearly one-tenth of the population.
Demographics varied along the lines of race to a much greater degree than along the lines of gender or age. In fact, slaves countywide tended to live in populations with great diversity in ages and neared gender parity. Regardless of which township the enslaved lived and labored, most found opportunities to socialize and forge relationships through mobility. Even though the city centers of Fayette and Glasgow held relatively small slave populations, these cities were hubs of commerce and as such destinations for visitors from across the county. Though the relatively small number of slaves per slaveholder defined slaveholding in Missouri, enslaved Missourians found opportunities to form social networks across and between farms and towns. These communities of shared knowledge, cooperation, and kinship were active at the time of the Civil War, a vital means of experiencing the conflict, and central to the effort of making freedom livable.
53 CHAPTER TWO
“At the time of freedom, and when Martin went into the Army”: Gendered Emancipation in Howard County, 1863-1865128
The day after Christmas, 1863, Cyrus Wilson volunteered for service before
Assistant Provost Marshal John H. Lewis in Fayette, Howard County, Missouri. By leaving his mark on the enlistment roll, Wilson became the first of many enslaved men in
Howard County to accept a certificate of freedom in return for military service. While
Fayette was the first Union outpost to enlist slaves in Howard County, slave recruitment had already begun in counties around the state as of May 1863.129 On October 31, 1863 orders were given that all “Colored Regiments raised in Mo will rendezvous at Benton
Barracks” in St. Louis, Missouri.130 Always present in the politics of slave recruitment in
Missouri was the understanding that black recruits, no longer slaves, would be removed from their local communities. Military enlistment offered a route to freedom for these men while leaving the women, children, and those not able-bodied, enslaved. The initiative for a constant, unrelenting, and ultimately devastating challenge to the system of slavery on the Missouri home front, therefore, came from those who remained.
This chapter chronicles the first wave of emancipation in Howard County, as able-bodied male slaves seized freedom by enlisting as soldiers in 1863. At the same time, the focus of the chapter foregrounds the work of enslaved women in making freedom and maintaining families from a home front still defined by slavery. Freedom
128 Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman to the Commissioner of Pensions, 31 Jan. 1919, in Almeda Patterson pension claim of Martin Patterson, (Pvt., Co. H, 65th USCT. Inf., Civil War), XC 872495, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Martin Patterson, 1195]. 129 Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 282. 130 Special Orders No. 298, Department of the Missouri, 31 Oct. 1863, vol. 59 DMo, pp. 160-62, Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7803]; For more on recruitment see John W. Blassingame, “The Recruitment of Negro Troops in Missouri During the Civil War,” The Missouri Historical Review, vol. 59, no. 3, (April, 1964).
54 and military service were conjoined opportunities for able-bodied enslaved men. Newly enlisted soldiers were removed from the war against slavery on their front door and marched directly to St. Louis where they would await muster to conquer the states in rebellion. In wartime Howard County, women and those that did not serve confronted slavery on its own terrain.131
Throughout the early years of the war, slavery in Missouri was often maintained by the Union military seeking to respect the rights of unionist slaveholders. The most prominent deviation from this norm came in August of 1861 when General John C.
Frémont, newly appointed head of the Western Department, declared martial law and proclaimed free all slaves of disloyal masters. Almost immediately, President Lincoln capitulated to the furious unionist slaveholders of Missouri and ordered Gen. Frémont to rescind his edict of emancipation. After Gen. Frémont was relieved of his position in
October, the Union military sought to protect the rights of slaveholders in the state by eschewing involvement with all relations “between the slave and his master.”132 Even when emancipation returned to the pages of military policy in 1863, the Union army privileged the households of slaveholders by ignoring the very existence of the households, the families, and the community networks of the enslaved.
The Union army understood slave enlistment only as it related to the slaveholders household. Issued by General Schofield on the thirteenth of November 1863, General
Order No. 135 represented the most dramatic shift in military policy regarding slavery in
Missouri since Frémont’s emancipation proclamation. General Order No. 135 eliminated
131 For a concise discussion on tactics used by slave women to fight slavery on the home front see, Thavolia Glymph, “Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders’ Terrain,” OAH Magazine of History, April 2009, 38, http://www.oah.org/magazine/ (accessed March 14, 2014). 132 Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, ser. 1, vol. 1 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 397; 399.
55 the distinction between loyal and disloyal slaveholders and opened military service to “all able-bodied colored men, whether free or slaves” 133 Most profoundly for the enslaved,
Schofield’s order declared, “all persons enlisted into military service shall forever thereafter be free.”134 Contrary to the assumptions of Union military policy and the accounts of slave owners who only saw slave enlistment, this history recognizes that the slave men were recruited from within communities and families of their own making.135
Union recruitment reached beyond the household of the slave owner to enter the personal households of the enslaved as well.
It is a common fact of military service that men are compelled to leave their families and communities when answering the call of duty. What is unique to the soldiers of the United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.) is not the separation of men and women; rather, it is this separation within the context of slavery that sets it apart. Unlike
Frémont’s order, slave enlistment gendered the process of emancipation in central
Missouri by granting certificates of freedom to slave men in return for military service while presenting no comparable opportunity for slave women.
133 General Order No. 135, as quoted in Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 283; Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, 397, 409. 134 General Order No. 135, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Official Records, Ser. 3, Vol. 3, Part 1, p. 860 (Union Letters, Orders, Reports), http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/recordView.cfm?Content=124/0863, (accessed, November 11, 2013), (hereafter cited as Official Records). Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 283; for a discussion of Gen. Schofield as a conservative unionist see Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 405-409. In many ways General Order 135 expanded upon the policy set by United States Congress in the First and Second Confiscation acts of 1861 and 1862 respectively. General Order 35 had been issued in September of 1862 by General Samuel R. Curtis, Commander of the Department of the Missouri who would be replaced by Gen. Schofield by President Lincoln after a conflict arose in Missouri between “antislavery radicals and Curtis on the one hand and conservative unionists and [Gov.] Gamble on the other.” Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 403. 135 Leslie A. Schwalm, “Between Slavery and Freedom: African American Women and Occupation in the Slave South,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, ed. LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 140; see also, Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 2005), 193; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 120-145.
56 Under General Order No. 135 the female kin of emancipated soldiers were not even offered protection, much less meaningful emancipation. In Slaves No More, the editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project suggest that three “interrelated circumstances” shaped opportunities to create freedom: “first, the character of slave society; second, the course of the war itself; and third, the policies of the Union and
Confederate governments.”136 More recently, scholars have explored gender as a useful category of analysis, suggesting that a fourth circumstance; the gender of the enslaved should be added. Historian Thavolia Glymph writes that, although there was “no comparable path [enlistment] for enslaved women,” the path toward freedom for black women “too would have to take the path of war… not as soldiers but still as insurrectionists.”137 Through the collective effect of individual actions, enslaved women, excluded by most Union military policies, waged an insurrection for their freedom “by becoming fugitives or waging war on the home front.”138
The gendered routes toward emancipation are particularly visible in the slaveholding border states like Missouri where the Emancipation Proclamation had no legal standing and the Union military heavily recruited able-bodied black men.139 In fact, the maintenance of slavery in Missouri even after Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation
136 Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation in the Civil war, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5. 137 Thavolia Glymph, “DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and Slave Women’s War for Freedom,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:3, Summer 2013 (accessed September 4, 2013), 501, 495; for the exclusion of black women in Union policy see also, Schwalm “Between Slavery and Freedom: African American Women and Occupation in the Slave South,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War 138 Glymph, “DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and Slave Women’s War for Freedom,” 497. 139 For a discussion of Reconstruction in Missouri see Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border; Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kramer, and Anthony F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage, Revised Edition, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993, orig. 1980); Kimberly A. Schreck, Splitting Heirs, unpublished Dissertation., University of Missouri, Columbia, 2004; Schreck, Their Place in Freedom, unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Missouri, 1993; Megan B. Boccardi, Remembering in Black and White unpublished Dissertation, University of Missouri, Columbia, 2011. Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True.
57 was, almost paradoxically, central to the Union recruitment of slave men. In an effort to maintain a stable population from which to recruit after General Order No. 135, the
Union military sought to contain and isolate the enslaved population of Missouri by preventing the sale of slaves out of state.140 Yet, even this act was tempered by the military’s singular interest in able-bodied slave men. Days after the issuance of General
Order No. 135, Schofield relaxed the ban by allowing passes for loyal white Missourians traveling out of state with “female Slaves and males not fit for military duty.”141 Union recruitment in central Missouri amounted to a great success as nearly sixty-seven percent of male slaves between the ages of 18 and 45 eligible to serve in Howard County had enlisted into the military by the summer of 1864.142 With two-thirds of the men away at war, those slaves who remained in Howard County; the women, the aged, the children, and the feeble, constituted a population deemed unfit for military duty.
St. Louis became central to the Union policy of aiding refugee men and women escaping slavery from the lower South at the same time the slaves of Central Missouri were expected to remain in bondage. Following the First and Second Confiscation Acts of August 1861 and July 1862, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January of
1863, Benton Barracks located on the outskirts of St. Louis, became a hub for thousands
140 Special Order No. 307 prohibits the military from issuing passes to anyone seeking to take slaves out of the state of Missouri. Special Orders No. 307, Department of the Missouri, 10 Nov. 1863, vol. 59 DMo, pp. 280-81, Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1 NARA [FSSP C-7804]. 141 Genl. J. M. Schofield to Lt. Col. J. O. Broadhead, 9 Dec. 1863, as quoted in, Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 411. 142 Numbers as calculated by Aaron Astor in Rebels on the Border, 126; Astor further calculates that “By the end of February, more than 3,700 African Americans had enlisted in Missouri, with central Missouri’s Little Dixie producing a significant portion of the total.” The number of slaves is only augmented when one notes the numbers that may have gone to Kansas, Illinois, or Iowa to enlist earlier in the war.”
58 of refugees escaping slavery.143 The Union army organized the movement of refugee populations up the Mississippi River from Helena Arkansas and Cairo Illinois to settle in
St. Louis. So many refugees made the journey in the Fall of 1863 that in December, the
Union Army was obliged to authorize the Medical Director to provide “medical treatment and care” for the swelling refugee population in St. Louis and the immediate vicinity.144
By January the Department of the Missouri would be compelled by the sheer numbers of refugees in St. Louis to create an entirely new commission related to their care. Special
Orders No. 8 named Hospital Chaplain of Benton Barracks the new “Superintendent of
Contrabands” to be “obeyed and respected accordingly.”145 It is due to Missouri’s peculiar position as a loyal, slave-owning, border state that the majority of recently arrived freedmen and freedwomen in and around St. Louis were from the Lower South.
By January 1864, black soldiers recruited most heavily from central Missouri, joined the refugee population at Benton Barracks while their wives and children, by and large, did not.
Strategically, slave recruitment in Missouri was concentrated in the counties that claimed the highest number of slaves. Known to many historians as “Little Dixie,” nearly thirty percent of Missouri’s slaves lived in the seven counties of Callaway, Boone,
Howard, Cooper, Chariton, Saline, and Lafayette which occupied the fertile grounds along the banks of the Missouri River.146 In 1860, the five largest slave populations in
143 For a discussion of the grouping of fugitives and black soldiers at Benton Barracks see, Leslie Schwalm, Emancipations Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 77-80. 144 Special Orders No. 339, Department of the Missouri, 12 Dec. 1863, vol. 59 DMo, pp. 255-56, Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7805]. 145 Special Orders No. 8, Department of the Missouri, 9 Jan. 1864, vol. 59 DMo, pp. 314-16, Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7806]. 146 Aaron Astor identifies Little Dixie as a region defined economically by slave driven agriculture, as well as politically defending the rights of the slaveholder. The region of Little Dixie was
59 Missouri were from the counties of Little Dixie, with St. Louis a close sixth.147 Regularly, these counties also had a higher density of slaves compared to the overall population. In a late November 1863, Col. William Pile testified before the American Freedmen’s Inquiry
Commission and identified the “central portions of the state” as a ripe region for Union recruiting purposes.148 An advocate for slave enlistment, Pile believed that, given the proper military support, he could provide five hundred black recruits a week from the
Missouri River Counties. “I could do it, give me the ropes,” he testified to the
Commission.149 Col. Pile was speaking from his experience scouting the slave owning heart of Missouri located in the center of the state. With an enslaved population of 5,886,
Howard County had the second largest number of slaves in Missouri by 1860.150
Moreover, Howard County had the greatest percentage of slaves as part of its overall county population of any county in Missouri.151 In 1860, slaves constituted thirty-seven percent of Howard County residents. In other words, for roughly every six free residents of the county, there were four slaves, a ripe recruiting ground for the Union indeed.
After Cyrus Wilson became the first enslaved man to enlist in the Howard County town of Fayette in late December of 1863, rumors reached the ears of citizens in the nearby town of Glasgow. Worried and irate to hear of the recruitment of enslaved men, slaveholders of Glasgow brought their questions and concerns before Captain Telemann at the local Union outpost. In the face of this immediate public disapproval, Cpt.
“composed of the Missouri Counties of Callaway, Boone, Howard, Cooper, Chariton, Saline, and Lafayette [that] traversed the Missouri River and formed the backbone of the state’s slave-based hemp and tobacco culture.” Rebels on the Border, 13. 147 The five counties of Little Dixie with the greatest populations of slaves in 1869 were, in order from least to greatest; Cooper, Callaway, Saline, Boone, Howard, Lafayette. Burke, On Slavery’s Border, Table 2, 310. 148 Berlin and others, The Black Military Experience, Doc. 87, p. 232. 149 Ibid., 233. 150 Burke, Table 2, 310. 151 Ibid.
60 Telemann sent an urgent telegram to Brigadier General Odon Guitar hoping to compel an official response. Cpt. Telemann inquired about a “recruiting officer appointed for
Colored Vols” and “parties enrolling Negroes” in Fayette, noting that it was causing
“much excitement” in the town of Glasgow. Furthermore, perhaps most importantly
Telemann reported, “citizens object that it is done.”152
Men and women, enslaved and free of Glasgow saw the possibility of slave recruitment with the very advent of slave recruitment policy in other portions of the state in the Spring of 1863. Tension built in the community long before actual enlistments occurred in Howard County. Earlier that month, as the military started recruiting able- bodied male slaves in neighboring Boone County, a citizen reported that it set off a
“stampede of negroes” whereby any “love for the union” felt among white citizens of
Columbia evaporated into “manifest opposition.”153 It is unclear from the record whether this reported “stampede of negroes” consisted of the number of enslaved men willing to enlist or whether enslaved women were accompanying them to the Union encampment as well. Either way, the actions of slaves emancipating themselves struck fear in the hearts of white Columbians. An officer of the 9th Missouri State Militia (M. S. M.) reported that any action aimed to mollify destitute conditions of slaves was met with derision from white citizens. Furthermore, anyone who did not actively participate in stopping male slaves from enlisting was “branded as a d=mn abolitionist and an enemy.”154 The white population feared the self-emancipatory actions of the enslaved.
152 Captain John Telemann to Brigadier General Odon Guitar, 28 unknown, 1863. Odon Guitar Collection (1825-1908), C1007, State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri, Columbia, http://statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/amcw/id/2859/rec/15, (accessed November 11, 2013). 153 Stephen O’Connor to Major General Schofield, 7 Dec. 1863, O-111 1863, Letters Received, ser. 2593, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-133]. 154 Ibid.
61 Col. William Pile testified of similar incidents in other Little Dixie counties where
“rebels and rebel sympathizers…especially in Calloway, Ordway [sic?], Cooper and
Howard counties” as well as an “infestat[ion] by bushwhackers and midnight marauders” prevented the provost marshal in those areas from safely “enlisting colored troops.”155
Furthermore, Pile spoke of slave owners in Calloway and Howard Counties “arming themselves and procuring ammunition, to intimidate the negroes from coming in to enlist…that several have been shot during the last ten days …attempting to make their way to some military post” to enlist.156 Despite the opposition of slaveholders, enslaved men enlisted into the army with or without the consent of their masters.
In the early years of the Civil War in Missouri, the Union army found itself a crucial factor in maintaining slavery by repeatedly returning slaves seeking refuge from their masters. Frémont’s attempt to declare all slaves of disloyal masters free in 1861 notwithstanding, Missouri’s location as a slaveholding Union state was maintained under the force of martial law. Upon being appointed commander of the newly formed
Department of the Missouri in November of 1861, General Henry W. Halleck issued
General Order No. 3 urging his provost marshals across the state to avoid “all interference” with matters between the enslaved and their masters when possible.157
Furthermore, in an effort specifically aimed at preventing enslaved men and women from seeking protection at Union camps, General Order 3 “required the unconditional exclusion of all unauthorized persons” from army camps.158 Later in 1862, Halleck
155 Berlin and others, The Black Military Experience, Doc. 87, 232-233. 156 Ibid., 234. For a discussion of the Southern Sympathizers and Rebels of Little Dixie, see Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border; Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 157 Gen. Halleck, quoted in Ira Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 399. 158 Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 399.
62 remained concerned with respecting the rights of slaveholders by issuing General Order
No. 46 from the Head Quarters of the Department of the Missouri stating that “It does not belong to the military to decide upon the relation of master and slave.”159
Union military acquiescence to the demands of the slaveholders in the loyal slaveholding border states often constituted the active maintenance of slavery rather than some benign noninterference. In August of 1862, Captain J. C. McGuinniss in Moniteau
County, just across the Missouri River from Howard was reprimanded for even asking what was to be done with a “’negro woman locked up in a home’ by ‘certain privates and non=commissioned officers.’” It is probable that the enslaved woman was being employed as a cook or personal servant of the soldiers, though the record is incomplete.
Regardless, the circumstance offered the opportunity to remind the soldiers of Central
Missouri that slaves were property of masters and they did not belong in army camps, full stop. The soldier’s request for instructions on the matter was, according to Captain
Lucian J Barnes, “entirely unnecessary,” if the master was loyal, the woman should be immediately released and she had no choice in the matter.160
Remarkably, questions of interpreting the Confiscation Acts did not always hinge on issues of the master’s loyalty. Rather, the problem with interpreting the Second
Confiscation act in the slave-owning heart of occupied Missouri was frequently spatial as well as political. In mid-April 1862 General Halleck assumed field command and placed most administrative duties of the Department of the Missouri in the hands of General
Schofield, commander of the Missouri State Militia. The passing of the Second
Confiscation Act in July, left officers of the Union Army, like Capt. McGuinniss, and
159 Captain Lucian J. Barnes to Captain J. C. McGuinniss, 26 Apr. 1862, vol. 234/524 DMo, p. 23, Letters Sent, ser. 3162, District of Central Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 205, NARA [FSSP C-7109]. 160 Ibid.
63 citizens of Missouri clamoring for information on how such orders would be interpreted under the authority of General Schofield.161 While the First Confiscation Act limited the definition of contraband to those specifically employed in the rebel war effort, the Second included a major expansion including slaves of all disloyal masters.
Brigadier General Ben Loan stationed in Jefferson City, understood the Second
Confiscation act to grant protection to slaves fleeing disloyal masters and taking refuge within the lines of the army but questioned where such lines stood in a loyal slaveholding border state. Assuming that the loyalty of masters could be “clearly established by competent Evidence,” most likely the testimony of the enslaved, the complicity of the
Union army in maintaining slavery in Missouri placed Brig. Gen. Loan in a troublesome situation.162 Ostensibly, the entire state had been within the lines of the Union army since
Gen. Frémont declared martial law in 1861, and yet so too was slavery. In Missouri, there simply weren’t Union lines to cross. Seeking a concrete definition of Union lines to provide the topographical division between slave and free territory, Brig. Gen. Loan to prosed two possible solutions. First, perhaps the “lines of the army” were represented in
Missouri by the provost marshal offices scattered across the state. Concerned that many provost marshals, located as many were in the heart of slave-owning communities, would be overwhelmed by appeals from local slaves, Brig. Gen. Loan conceived of a second interpretation. He posited, “suppose such slaves escape from disloyal masters in Howard or Boone County and claim protection of the Military” in Cole County, would they then
161 Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 402. 162 Brigadier General Benjamin F. Loan to Major General S. R. Curtis, 5 May 1863, vol. 225/525 DMo, p.449, Letters Sent, ser. 3372, District of Central Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 217, NARA [FSSP C- 7127].
64 be considered “escaped” and due refuge “as is contemplated by the order?”163 Just how far from the land of their owner would a slave have to travel, how many lines of territory would they have to cross to have legitimately escaped slavery? It would be safe to assume that Brig Gen. Loan had previously experienced both local slaves and slaves from other counties traveling to the state capitol and asserting their freedom.
Territory became a problem because the slaves of Missouri refused to conform to the Union policymakers and slaveholders’ “dreams of what slaves should be.”164 The
Union army was eager to protect the prerogatives of loyal slaveholders. More generally, the military sought to avoid placing itself between masters and slaves, a relationship understood to fall within the purview of the slaveholding household rather than the jurisdiction of the state. If the lines of the army marked a geopolitical division between slavery and freedom in the state of Missouri, they came under scrutiny only because
African American men and women refused to play the role expected of slaves.
By December 1863 slave enlistment came to Howard County and it was met with dissent among the free white population. Into the spring of 1864, slaveholders of Little
Dixie sought to maintain control of their households, including slaves, despite Union efforts to recruit from their ranks. In February 1864, a petition signed by one hundred and seventy-eight men, misleadingly described as being “men of all parties and from all sections of the State” was submitted to the Maj. Genl. Rosencrans, Commander of the
Department of the Missouri complaining that the large number of slaves who had left their masters were “wandering about: many of them out of employment, and in a destitute
163 Ibid. 164 Thavolia Glymph, “Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders’ Terrain,” OAH Magazine of History, April 2009, 38, http://www.oah.org/magazine/ (accessed March 14, 2014).
65 condition.”165 The petition continued to ask that the military “force every colored man who is suitable for service, and who has left his owner, to enlist.”166 No signatures from
Howard County endorsed the letter accompanying the petition signed by seventy-seven members of the Missouri State Legislature. In point of fact, only three signatures are from representatives hailing from the seven counties commonly referred to as Little
Dixie; W. J. Jackson of Callaway; W. W. Todd and William Slade of Boone.167 Though there was support for recruiting able-bodied enslaved men in parts of the state of
Missouri, it was a rare sentiment in the heavy slaveholding counties of Central Missouri.
In light of this, perhaps Telemann was seeking explicit orders from his superior or simply deferring to a higher authority on new and controversial measures when he sent his telegram to Genl. Guitar regarding the chaos over slave recruitment in Glasgow.
Guitar’s response to Telemann would do little to quell the excitement and objections of the citizens of Glasgow as Union recruitment of able-bodied black men continued throughout the state.168 The troublesome recruiting officer mentioned in Telemann’s telegram was John H. Lewis. After Cyrus Wilson, Lewis enlisted almost seventy more slave men in Fayette within the next five days.169 By the end of January 1864, more than
165 Robert Bailey Jnr. et al. to Maj. Genl. Rosencrantz, 13 Feb. 1864, quoted in Berlin et al., eds., The Black Military Experience, ser. 2, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1862-1867, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), doc. 95, p. 250. 166 Ibid. 167 Robert Bailey Jnr. et al. to Maj. Genl. Rosencrantz, 13 Feb. 1864, B-126 1864, Letters Received, ser. 2593, Dept. of the MO, RG 393 Pt. 1 [FSSP C-152]. 168 Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Glasgow Recruiting Station, January 1864-March 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.10], http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF.asp#cat3, (accessed, September 14, 2013), (hereafter Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Glasgow). 169 Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Fayette Recruiting Station, December 1863-April 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.8], http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF.asp#cat3, (accessed, September 14, 2013), (hereafter Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette).
66 175 slaves would come before Lewis for a physical examination, have their names recorded on the enlistment book, and be sent to St. Louis where most would be mustered into the ranks of the U.S.C.T.170
Lewis, already besieged by a belligerent white population, found that he also had to be concerned with troublesome recruiters. Days after he began to enlist willing slave men from Howard County, Lewis wrote to Genl. C. W. Marsh, Assistant Provost Marshal
General in St. Louis, complaining of men roaming around the county and conning enslaved men into service. He reported of roving white men getting male slaves drunk and telling them that the government was paying slaves three hundred dollars “as soon as they are enlisted.” When the slave men were sufficiently “under such influence,” their names were taken down as willing to enlist.171 Furthermore, the roaming bands of vigilante recruiters were under the assumption that they would receive “two Dollars for every slave they can induce to enlist as a soldier.”172 The irony of this assumption being that someone would be getting paid, but it would be the masters of these enlisted men who would receive a three hundred dollar bounty, not the enslaved men. The recruiters probably expected to receive a two dollar cut from the master’s bounty of each man they hoodwinked into service.
Even when enlisted with the greatest regard for military protocol, many questions remained. Lewis recognized that in a county such as Howard, “A large number of slaves…will enlist, and I am enlisting them as fast as I can do so properly” [emphasis
170 Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette. 171 John H. Lewis to Colonel C. W. Marsh, 1 Jan. 1864, L-31 1864, Letters Received, ser. 2786, Provost Marshal General, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-201]. 172 Ibid.
67 mine].173 He lamented the paltry state of provisions allotted to slaves in Howard county noting that most of the men enlisted have been “poorly provided, with clothing, and many are very poorly shod.”174 The matter of shoes was of particular importance, as the men enlisted would almost immediately be expected to leave the county and travel to St. Louis to await muster at Benton Barracks. In the cold of January, Lewis recognized that “if they have to walk to the Rail Road, twenty five miles from this post, through the snow and cold more or less of them will suffer.”175 Seemingly resigning himself to the fact that he would be unable to secure shoes for the thousands of feet of these enlisted men, he asked for transportation and instructions on how to procure such transportation. As the ranks of the Union camp swelled in Fayette, Lewis further asked if he could allow
“colored recruits” to use army blankets since many were suffering from the cold. In the mean time Lewis also complained of having to purchase “rations and cooking utensils” by signing personal loans himself as his repeated requests for provisions had not been answered.
While Union military policy regarding the enlistment and welfare of the enslaved generally excluded women, children, and unable-bodied enslaved men, African American women continually pressed the Army for services. Both the Union military and slaveholders understood that recruiting able-bodied slave men marked a new willingness by the government to involve itself in the relationship between masters and slaves, previously avoided. However, this is only a partial picture of the consequences of slave recruitment. Enlistment removed able-bodied men from the communities and families of the enslaved, as well as from the household of slaveholders. As men made the decision
173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid.
68 to enlist they often did so in conversation with their wives, family and other kin. Lewis reported from Glasgow that the “number of slaves living around the Federal Camp at this place, who are not willing to enlist, and who also are not willing to go home” were proving to be a dire strain on military resources.176 Many men who were “selected by the examining surgeon, as unfit for soldiers,” simply refused to return home and remained in camp.177 Lewis was silent on whether women and children joined those the military deemed “unfit” gathering around the Union camp, although accounts such as Diana
Williams’ show that some women, at least, managed to visit even if they could not remain.
The experience of Diana Williams and her husband Morrison Prather of Howard
County provide a glimpse into the consequences of enlistment on family and community relations and an interesting object lesson for the gendered characteristics of wartime emancipation in Central Missouri. When Special Examiner Jesse Jeffrey interviewed
Diana about the enlistment of her husband she stated emphatically, “He did not run away he just went to the courthouse here in Fayette and enlisted and I went there to see him most everyday while he staid there.”178 Special Examiner Jeffrey was from the pension office and in 1892; he was taking Williams’ deposition in order to adjudicate her application for a Civil War widows pension in the name of her former husband. When
Jeffrey inquired about Diana’s earlier statement that her husband, Prather, had worked for
“Mr. Pierce until the war came on and until he run away and went into the army,” he had
176 Ibid. 177 Ibid. 178 Deposition of Diana J. Williams, 20 May, 1892, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2672].
69 touched upon a distinction pregnant with meaning.179 The matter was clear to Diana
Williams, Morrison Prather might have figuratively “run away” from the household of their master, but he never ran away from his wife or enslaved community.
Diana Williams may have physically returned to the farm of Charley Pierce but in her daily visitations to her husband she was constructing and practicing her identity as a free woman. Diana went to the courthouse with her husband Morrison when he enlisted, she visited him everyday until he and the other enlisted men were sent to St. Louis, then she went home to the farm of her master. Morrison Prather went to the courthouse, in
Fayette, the county seat of Howard County, as a man, a husband, and a soon to be father.
For the first time in his life, Prather was recognized as such by the Federal government of the United States.180
Prather and his fellow enlisted men were taken to Benton Barracks in St. Louis where they would receive training and await formal muster into the ranks of Company H,
Regiment 65, U.S.C.T. After Private Prather and his company had been gone for about a month, he returned from St. Louis to see his wife Diana.181 Although she could not recall the date of her husband’s enlistment, she did know that it was in mid-winter, and the weather had warmed by the time he was able to visit.182 Prather returned with a fellow enlisted soldier, George Turner, whose wife was also in the neighborhood. The two soldiers came from Benton Barracks planning on taking their wives back to St. Louis with them. George and his wife soon returned to St. Louis but Diana was pregnant at the
179 Ibid., [HCPC, Prather 2673]. 180 Morrison Prather enlisted at Fayette, MO. on January 12, 1864 alongside Aaron and Jerry Prather, relationship unknown; Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette. 181 Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2673]. 182 Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2673-2674].
70 time and was “’too heavy’ to undertake the journey.”183 Thirty years later, Diana was still living in Fayette and had not seen Mrs. Turner or her husband since that day, although she heard that they remained living in St. Louis after the war.184
Perhaps knowing that separation was the order of enlistment, Prather returned to see his wife bearing a picture he had commissioned of himself. His son, George Prather later had it enlarged and presented it at the time of his deposition, “the picture of a
Colored Soldier in uniform.”185 Morrison had come to take Diana with him out of
Howard County to St. Louis. She remained to give birth to their child and he was able to stay with her “only a few days.”186 Morrison left Diana with his picture, the image of soldier clothed in the uniform of the United States Army. “Then he went back” Diana recalled, “I never saw him any more.”187
Morrison Prather’s furlough visitation was the last time Diana Williams and her husband saw one another. The fact that the couple managed to remain in contact as much as they did after Morrison returned to St. Louis is in large part due to the efforts of Diana.
After leaving Fayette, Morrison and Diana maintained correspondence through letters as
183 It should also be noted that Diana Williams claims in her deposition that she had given birth to two children prior to her marriage to Morrison Prather. It is not stated whether these children remained in her care at the time Prather returned from Benton Barracks although children, young and unborn, would have certainly factored into her decision to travel to St. Louis or remain. Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2675]. 184 Ibid. 185 Deposition of George R. Pierce, May 19, 1892, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2668-2669]. After the Examiner questions George Pierce swearing under the name George Prater, and later Prather, George told how he went by the name Prater, his fathers name as he understood it to be spelled. Later in life he was informed that legally, he was George Pierce, changing his name would require money that he did not have to spare. 186 Jacqueline Jones suggests that “for women, the welfare of their children was often the primary consideration in determining an appropriate course of action once they confronted—or created—a moment ripe with possibilities.” In the case of Diana Williams, the physical constraints pregnancy put on her mobility literally kept her from leaving for St. Louis with her husband. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; Black Women Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1985), 45. Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Prather 2673]. 187 Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2673].
71 often as they were able. As Diana could not read or write, she found someone who was able to pen her letters, perhaps clandestinely, to her husband and to read her husband’s words of encouragement.188 Diana remembered that she received letters from Morrison marked “from Macon City Mo, Benton Barracks, and New Orleans.”189 Diana gave birth to their child George, “in the spring the weather was beginning to get quite warm” and she sent a letter to tell Morrison.190 Morrison responded and asked Diana “to take good care of his little one until he could get home.”191 Not long after their hopeful exchange,
Diana remembered, “I got letters from him saying he was sick, then there was a long time that I did not hear from him, then I got a letter from his brother Aaron Prather now dead, informing me of my husband’s death.”192 Diana, late in her pregnancy was unable to leave the farm of her owner and travel to St. Louis with Morrison and the Turners.
Although they tried at every moment to maintain contact the war would forever separate
Diana and her son George from Morrison Prather at the very moment of their freedom.
Diana Williams returned to the farm of Charley Pierce, and in her words she lived there
“until the slaves were freed and stayed with him about two years after the war was over.”193 It was there that she would continue the practice of making freedom.
At the worst, military enlistment and refugee policies excluded women from the protection of the army. At best, they continued to ignore that slave men were recruited from larger communities, or assumed such communities were within the purview of
188 Not all slave women were so fortunate, an officer at Benton Barracks, St. Louis, reported to Brig. Gen. Pile in February of 1864 that owners “refused to let [the wives] go to the Post Office to get their letters, and if any one comes to them and brings them letters and reads them to them he is shure to whip them for it.” Quoted in Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 288. 189 Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2674]. 190 Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2675]. 191 Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2675]. 192 Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2674]. 193 Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2672].
72 slaveholders. For Union officers such as John H. Lewis, the calculus may have seemed simple at first. Enlist able-bodied slave men and issue them freedom papers in return.
The larger community of the enslaved refused to be ignored and the many women such as
Diana Williams who gathered around the Union camp in Fayette forced a reevaluation of
Union policy as Lewis petitioned for more supplies. Freedom for the black soldiers of
Howard County and their enslaved kin was understood as having consequences for their family and kin relations within the slave household. Freedom for the black soldier of
Missouri was always understood with the backdrop of their wives, children and other kin still enslaved. As the numbers of freedmen and freedwomen swelled around Union camps, pushing the limits of Lewis’ supplies he began the long road of reckoning with the slave community surrounding his Fayette outpost.
The records of five different recruiting offices in central Missouri show that between late November 1863 and the spring of 1864 a steady stream of 1,051 black men; the overwhelming majority enslaved, joined the Army and were emancipated in return.194
Like Morrison Prather, these men understood the community-based nature of enlistment.
Try as military policy might, these men could not simply be taken out of their communities and made free with no consideration of their relations at home. Just three months passed after John H. Lewis recruited the first slave in Fayette, when he found himself sending an urgent telegram to the offices of Brig. Gen. Odon Guitar.
194 The number of men who enlisted in the recruiting stations mentioned are as follows, Fayette: 194, Glasgow: 174, Booneville: 200, Mexico: 199, Tipton: 284. The story of recruiting in Boonville is remarkable both for being the earliest Union Outpost to enlist slaves in the Missouri River Counties, and for the incredible number of recruits. Two hundred enslaved men enlisted in Booneville in the four days between November 26 and 30 alone. Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives Fayette, December 1863-February 1864, [F1893.8]; Glasgow, January 1864-March 1864 [F193.10]; Boonville, November 1863 [F1892.2]; Mexico, November 1863-January 1864 [F1895.9]; Tipton December 1863-February 1864 [F1896.11]; Tipton February 1864-April 1864 [F1896.12], http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF.asp#cat3, (accessed, September 14, 2013).
73 “To Genl O Guitar Some Negroes, who were enlisted in this county & sent to St. Louis have come back to Boone-ville & crossed in Howard with some white soldiers & are hauling off Tobacco from their former owners taking their wives & children &c is this to be allowed[?] John H. Lewis”195
The very men, once recruited as slaves by Lewis, were now returning as soldiers.
It is possible that Morrison Prather was among this group of soldiers. Diana recalled that her husband came in early spring and Lewis reports the Glasgow uprising as occurring in
March. If Lewis initially thought of these men as slaves he was now witnessing their return as freemen and newly minted soldiers with their own understanding of freedom and their own agenda. Lewis’ conception of freedom while a valuable opportunity for able-bodied men remained only a partial freedom in the eyes of the U.S.C.T.
Lewis’ telegraph calls dramatic attention to the actions of soldiers claiming the freedom of their “wives & children” who remained in bondage. Implicit in this is the question of the role of the U.S. Army in preserving or destroying slavery the loyal border state of Missouri. It is likely that the many “objecting” citizens of Glasgow represented by Telemann’s message months earlier were concerned about this very sort of event at the first news of slave enlistment. While the community relations of the enslaved was, at least at first, invisible to the Union Army bent on utilizing the labor of able-bodied black men, slaveholders of Howard County found it much harder to ignore the implications for the enslaved women and children who remained to wage the campaign for freedom.
195 John H. Lewis to Odon Guitar, 6 March, 1864. Odon Guitar Collection (1825-1908), C1007, State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri, Columbia, http://statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri.org/, (accessed November 11, 2013). The telegram has been included in the manner that it has been transcribed by the State Historical Society of Missouri in an effort to remain as true to the original document as possible. Punctuation that has been added is clearly marked in brackets.
74 By the time the Union military began recruiting male slaves, the Missouri State
Militia operated as the principal military force in the state. Composed of local white
Missourians, the M. S. M. was less favorable in their actions toward the enslaved than earlier Federal troops composed of soldiers from free Northern states.196 If the 4th
Cavalry M. S. M. did in fact aid the furloughed men of the U.S.C.T. to cross the Missouri
River and retrieve their families from the land of their owners, this was largely an anomaly, and a punishable one at that.
The fact remains that the Union Army simply did not recognize the household and familial relations of the U.S.C.T. as the soldiers themselves did. In the ensuing investigation into Lewis’ telegram a Capt. Vansickle of the 4th Cav. of the M. S. M. was accused conducting frequent forays across the river into Howard County. Also among the charges were accusations of bringing away “female slaves for the purposes of prostitution.”197 Furthermore, he was alleged to be of ill-repute and in the “habit of playing cards, allowing and taking personal liberties with the men of his Company”198
Given the testimony of Diana Williams, it is likely that the charges of soliciting prostitution were false indictments misidentifying the wives and sweethearts of the
U.S.C.T. as prostitutes in order to smear the reputation of Capt. Vansickle and gain restitution for damages.199 Such comparisons were not uncommon as a commander in
Macon County complained of the growing numbers of slaves of both sexes “crowding”
196 Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, 403. 197 Captain James H. Steger to Colonel G. H. Hall, 12 Mar. 1864, vol. 226 DMo, pp. 35-36, Letters Sent, ser. 3372, District of Central Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 217, NARA [FSSP C-8760]. 198 Ibid. 199 For a discussion of the sweethearts of black soldiers being mistaken as prostitutes and a discussion of sex work and ex-slave women see Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, 42, 114-15; for a broader discussion of wives of soldiers see also, Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America, 191-200.
75 the Union camp with the pithy statement, “prostitution is worse that slavery.”200 Eight days after the men of the U.S.C.T. claimed their wife and children Thomas Boggs of
Fayette, owner of Howard Boggs and his sister Julia Boggs-Estill were awarded full restitution for the value of his “property taken or destroyed by certain Colored soldiers.”201 The households protected by Union policy were the households of slaveholders, not the enslaved.
By the summer of 1864, nearly forty percent of male slaves in Missouri had enlisted in the Union Army.202 In the heavy slaveholding counties such as Howard the number is reported to be nearly sixty-seven percent of the able-bodied enslaved men.203
In early August 1864 it was reported to the Secretary of War that the “recruiting of colored troops in Missouri may be regarded, for the present as virtually closed.”204 By the informed estimations of the judge advocate of the Army, the Union had recruited so many able-bodied black men from the region that the number remaining might only fill a single additional regiment. Furthermore, the resistance put up by slaveholders, specifically in counties such as Howard, where the “high price of labor, & the extraordinary efforts made to retain them in agricultural pursuits” it was unlikely that any more men would volunteer without compulsion.205 Superintendent of the Organization of
Missouri Black Troops, Genl. William A. Pile estimated earlier in May that nearly “3,000
200 Captain Albert Brockman to Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk, 28 May 1864, vol. 288/688 DMo, p. 132, Telegrams Sent, ser. 3534, District of North Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 226, NARA [FSSP C-7808]. 201 Unknown Asst. Adj. Genl. to Thomas Boggs, 12 March, 1864, Letters Sent, ser. 2571, vol. 15, p. 217, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-181] 202 Berlin et al., Slaves No More, Table 1. “Black Soldiers in the Union Army and Black Male Population of Military Age in 1860, by State,” 203. 203 Astor, Rebels on the Border, 126; J. Holt to Hon. E. M. Stanton, 5 Aug. 1864, quoted in Berlin et. al., The Black Military Experience, doc. 96, p. 251. 204 J. Holt to Hon. E. M. Stanton, 5 Aug. 1864, quoted in Berlin et. al., The Black Military Experience, doc. 96, p. 251. 205 Ibid.
76 to 4,000 able-bodied black men yet remain in Missouri…but the time to enlist them has gone by.”206
Regardless of the number of men who were removed from the community, it was largely the female population who remained that engaged in the relentless pursuit of freedom on the home front. Soldiers asserted their masculinity by fighting and if they returned home empowered and claiming their wives and families.207 By October, 1864, an Army medical board concluded that “more than a third of three Missouri black regiments—the 62nd, 65th, and 67th U.S. Colored Infantry—had perished since enlistment, mostly from various undiagnosed diseases.”208 An additional two hundred were discharged due to medical reasons and the state of those remaining was regarded as poor.
Those who remained met struggles on the home front. The fact that women who remained were submitted to systemic and occasionally fatal abuse at the hands of their masters is unfortunately not remarkable. The fact that this abuse was communicated to the offices of provost marshals or sent to the front lines of the formal war is, on the other hand, a testament to the will of the enslaved and their refusal to submit to the violence of slavery.
With the single-minded desire for able-bodied male labor, the Union military did not intend to extend protection, much less emancipation to slave women as part of the recruiting policy. Nevertheless, slave women availed themselves of the presence of the
Union military at every opportunity. In response to losing valuable labor through Union recruitment, many slaveholders violently vented their anger and frustration on those who
206 Brig. Genl. Wm. A. Pile to Brig. Genl. L. Thomas, 21 May, 1864, quoted in quoted in Berlin et. al., The Black Military Experience, doc. 96, 251. 207 For more on masculinity and black enlistment see Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 12-13. 208 Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, 487.
77 remained, often enslaved women, as a calculated retaliation to stymie slave enlistment.
In 1860, Bennett Brown managed a farm with the labor of eighteen slaves.209 During the spring of 1864, eight of his male slaves joined the Union Army and left Howard County.
Furious and likely desperate at the prospect of starting a planting season with only a fraction of the labor necessary, Bennett retaliated by deliberately targeting the families of the newly enlisted soldiers. Betsy Ann Brown, sister to one and cousin to seven of the enlisted slaves formerly owned by Bennett Brown presented the first opportunity for reprisal. Accusing Betsy Ann of lying and of placing an “unclean spoon to a plate” at mealtime, Bennett Brown tied a rope around Betsy Ann’s neck, “knocked her down, tied her hands and feet,” and with the help of his son and an enslaved man, proceeded to beat her. With her master’s foot on her throat and his son’s hands pulling the rope around her neck Betsy Ann lost consciousness and her body was left “senseless on the floor.” When
Betsy Ann regained consciousness Bennett Brown kicked her again and told her to “get up and go to work.” After an unspecified amount of time, Betsy Ann was able to stand, however she did not return to work, instead she ventured to the nearest Union military camp under the fear that “her master would come finish the work that he had begun.”
Since her brother and cousin had left with the army, Betsy Ann Brown continued to wage the long war at home by refusing to complete the day-to-day tasks of servitude such as fetching pails of water, cleaning dishes, and setting the table for mealtime. It is a testament to the extent Betsy Ann Brown had begun to assert control over her own life
209 1860 United States Census, Eighth Federal Census, Richmond Township, Howard County, Missouri, Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
78 that Bennett Brown lashed out in such a fit of violence to reconstruct his mastery.210
Even this, in the end, could not prevent Betsy Ann Brown from making her own freedom.
Betsy Ann left the man who laid claim to her body and her labor and limped into the provost marshal office in Mexico, Missouri. She demanded that the Army would recognize her autonomy in the same way it recognized the personhood of her brother and enlisted cousins.211 With a “disfigured face…the mark of a rope around her neck…hardly able to walk,” Betsy Ann refused to submit to the violent disciplines of slavery. She made clear, Bennett Brown, was her master no more.
That accounts such as this are not rare stands as a testament to the will of enslaved women to translate the absence of enlisted men into an opportunity for freedom on the home front. The material record of these abuses remain in the archives to this day because of enslaved women’s struggle to make freedom where they stood, where the stakes were highest and future most unsure. Many women such as Betsy Ann Brown, brought their appeals to the local provost marshals. Still more found opportunities to send word of their struggles to enlisted men serving in the army.
In the absence of able-bodied men, masters turned to slave women to fill the labor shortage. Almeda Patterson, a slave of James Patterson, sent word to her husband that she was “compelled to do outdoor work, -such as chop wood, husk corn &c.” More tragically, Martin Patterson of 2nd Missouri Volunteers of African Descent learned that “
210 For a discussion of the use of violence in response to slave resistance see; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 211 John Eckstein to Lt. John D. Campbell, May 9th, 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, Reel, F1614, Frame #: 0479, File: 9779, Missouri, Missouri State Archives, http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF, (February, 2-10-14).
79 one of his children has been suffered to freeze, and has sinc died.”212 Similarly, William
Brooks, also a slave of Howard County, received word from his wife and child that their master, Jack Sutter required them “do the same work that he formerly had to do, such as chopping wood, splitting rails &c.”213 The labor of those unable to escape slavery through military service took on new significance within the slaveholding household.
When masters exercised their prerogative to commit acts of violence against their slaves, they found their actions checked by the determination of slave women slowing down labor, appealing to local provost marshals, and finding the means to maintain communication with the enlisted men of their family and community.
The accounts of Betsy Ann Brown, Almeda Patterson, and William Brooks are by no means singular to Howard County, as similar accounts are recorded throughout the state.214 Historians have found some of the most eloquent and moving documentation of a black enlisted man’s relationship with his family who remained in bondage from the letters of Spotswood Rice, a former enslaved man of Howard County.215 Rice’s literacy almost certainly made him an anomaly, however, more interesting is that his narrative is often used to illuminate a relational connection between enlisted men and their families.
In focusing on Spotswood Rice’s undoubtedly moving narrative, historians are apt to miss the glaring fact that the onus of success for these types of communications rested overwhelmingly on the shoulders of enslaved women, not enlisted men.
212 William P. Deming to The Headquarter of the Department of Missouri, as quoted in Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, Doc. 91, 243. 213 Ibid. 214 For further examples of the experiences of relatives of the slave men who enlisted in the Union army see Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 294-297; Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 410- 411. 215 Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, Doc. 299A, 299B, 299C, p. 659-691.
80 The challenges of maintaining communication with a loved one in the military was almost certainly more costly, uncertain, and dangerous for enslaved women who remained on the home front than their husbands, brothers, and fathers who had one of the worlds largest bureaucracies enabling them to write and send letters at their fingertips.
Writing from Benton Barracks, Rice penned two letters, one to his daughters and the other to their mistress. To his daughters he wrote from his heart, “I have not forgot you and that I want to see you as bad as ever…be assured that I will have you if it cost me my life.”216 That Patterson and Brooks were writing in the earliest days of black enlistment and Rice was writing in September shows the immediate and sustained concern soldiers had for the freedom of their kin at home. By late 1864 “the treatment, which the families of colored soldiers are receiving at the hands of their masters” was mentioned in an official military report as stifling further black enlistment.217
General Order 135 is best understood as gendering emancipation in Missouri by granting freedom to able-bodied enslaved men while ignoring the circumstances and demands of the communities from which the soldiers themselves were enlisted. Still, the soldiers abroad and those women who remained had a similar fight, the fight to create and shape the meaning of freedom. When Missouri passed a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery on January 11, 1865, the time for recruiting able-bodied enslaved men had long since passed and those that remained joined the women on the home front in securing autonomy and control for black families and communities.
In fact, the former master of Spotswood Rice, B. W. Lewis Sr., wrote to his friend
General Clint B. Fisk, from Glasgow of Howard County that “so many of the negroes
216 Ibid., Doc. 299A, 659. 217 William A. Pile to a Missouri Congressman, quoted in Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, Doc. 94, 248.
81 have left we have concluded it is not worth while to undertake to recruit from those remaining.”218 In the nearby county of Callaway, individuals sought to impress into service those black men who originally refused enlistment in order to assist with the fight for freedom on the home front. A roving band of soldiers, probably of the M. S. M., sought out newly emancipated black men to compel into military service. If they could not be convinced by word they chose to do so by threat. Freedmen were told to raise one hand and, after so doing, were informed that they are now “sworn into the service and will be immediately shot if he dont go along with the crowd.”219 The anonymous informant from Callaway stressed the obligations that familial relations placed on the freedmen. The emphasis of the letter was not that slaves were being illegally conscripted, rather that the men who remained in the county were predominantly “men with large families who are left to starve for want of some one to procure subsistence.”220
That the majority of military records regarding the recruitment of black soldiers ignore the relational consequences of enlistment remains a hurdle for historians today.
Able-bodied black male recruitment in Missouri has long become a stand-in for emancipation. As a consequence, women such as those of Glasgow, hauled off with the tobacco of their former owners, are devoid of agency. The main objective of the military record is to record the information requisite for a large military bureaucracy. When
James Day enlisted at Tipton the military recorded only the information it deemed essential; “James Day… claimed to have been the slave of John R. White a citizen of
218 B. W. Lewis Sr. to General C. B. Fisk, 16 March 1865, Unentered Letters Received, ser. 2594, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7810]. 219 Anonymous to General Clinton B. Fisk, 22 Mar. 1865, Letters Received, ser. 3537, District of North Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 226, NARA [FSSP C-219]. 220 Ibid.
82 Howard County.”221 Beyond this, and a cursory physical description, one must rely on other sources for a more complete understanding of emancipation in Missouri. What the army record fails to show is that beyond his status as a slave, James Day was a husband and an expecting father.
It is unknown whether James’ wife, Eliza Day, five to six months pregnant, travelled with her husband James across the Missouri River from Howard to Moniteau
County in order to reach the recruiting office in Tipton.222 Travel to a distant recruiting office could be dangerous, especially if passing through land of hostile slaveholders.
Some recruits reported of hiding during the day and traveling at night.223 However,
Eliza’s role in James’ decision to enlist should not be understated. Having suffered the loss of their first son, Scott, in infancy a few years prior, one can imagine the hope that
Eliza’s current pregnancy and James’ emancipation represented for the couple. The war brought opportunities for freedom and James and Eliza seized them with brave and hopeful tenacity. Like Morrison Prather and his wife Diane Williams, James Day fought for freedom by enlisting into the Union Army while Eliza Day remained on the home front to forge a space for their new family while her husband was away. Although Eliza would give birth to their second son while James was away in the army, absence at the birth of his child was not the only price freedom would require of James. After just eight months of service in the Army, James died of disease digging trenches in Morganza,
221 Enlistment papers of James Day, Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Tipton Recruiting Station, February 1864-April 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.8], http://www.sos.mo.gov, (accessed, September 14, 2013). 222 Our first record of Eliza Day comes from Boonville where she filed for her widows pension in December of 1864, a month prior to the Missouri Emancipation Proclamation being signed into law. United States Civil War Widows and Other Dependents Pension Files, s.v. Eliza Day Pension Claim for James Day, (Pvt., Co. G, 65th USCT, Inf., Civil War), p. 1, Fold3.com. (accessed, October 12, 2013). 223 Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 283.
83 Louisiana.224 The pension applications of Diana Williams, Eliza Day, and countless other freedwomen testify to their continued struggles after their husbands enlisted to emancipate themselves and their families when Union policy and the will of slaveholders, sought to preserve their bondage.
At the height of black enlistment the Assistant Provost Marshal in Fulton,
Missouri summarized the predicament of recruitment better than most. In a rare moment of clarity, Asst. Provost Marshal Hiram Cornel sought the answer to a question repeatedly posed to him, most likely by the enslaved and free alike; “What are we to do with the women and children?”225 If not for the collective acts of those women, children and unable-bodied men who refused to respect the demands of servitude expected by both masters and the Union military, recruitment would not have marked the tectonic shift between slavery and freedom that it has come to stand for.
224 Just over eight months after James and Eliza shared their final goodbyes; James died of scurvy as a soldier of the 65th United States Colored Infantry at the army hospital in Morganza, Louisiana. It is possible that the vagaries of wartime emancipation played a role in the death of Eliza’s second born son, Montgomery “in infancy” in 1865. It is also worth noting that the death rate of the 65th infantry was astonishingly high. Eliza Day Pension Claim for James Day, Fold3.com, p. 14-15. 225 Capt. Hiram Cornell to Col. J. P. Sanderson, 28 Mar. 1864, quoted in Berlin et. al, The Black Military Experience, doc. 298, p. 688.
84 CHAPTER THREE
“That was my right name”: Slavery and Surnames in Howard County, 1860-1865
In 1822, a blue-eyed boy was born to a woman held as a slave by Dr. Samuel T.
Crews of Howard County, Missouri. It was only the year before that Missouri, a slave territory, was admitted into the Union and became a slave state. Missouri would protect the rights of the slaveholder by ensuring that the status of the child would follow the status of the mother, whether free or slave. As such it came to be that this child was born unto the world a slave. Dr. Crews looked on the newborn, brought to life on his newly settled land in Howard County and as if taking an inventory, named him Howard
Crews.226 His first name, a mark of place, signified the geographic location of the newborn’s birth, Howard, from Howard County. Then, even though Howard’s slave status followed that of his mother, he was given the surname of a free man, his owner.
Crews became the child’s last name, shorthand for ‘This child belongs to Dr. Samuel T.
Crews.’ Long after the death of Howard Crews and indeed the death of slavery in
Missouri, Howard’s son provided testimony that he had “heard it stated” that Howard was not only the slave of Dr. Crews, but that he was also the son of the man who owned him.227 This paper investigates the surnames of Howard County residents, slave and free, as particularly useful historical artifacts to critically examine the slave-owning household and the place of the enslaved within it. Given the intimacies of slave labor, household production, and family life in Central Missouri, names operated to locate the enslaved within the household of their owner. At the same time, names also offered opportunities
226 Deposition of Lewis H. Crews, 19 Mar., 1921 Lewis Crews pension in claim of Howard Crews, (Pvt. Co. H., 65th USCT Civil War), cert 542048, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2792]. 227 Deposition of Lewis H. Crews, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2792].
85 for the enslaved to test the boundaries of the slave-owning household as they made space by and for themselves.
Names can be used to designate both physical and social place.228 In this sense, the naming of Howard Crews illustrates the extent that slavery was intertwined with the physical and social geography of central Missouri. On the one hand, Howard, named after the county of his birth, illustrates the nexus of slavery and place. Historians have remarked on central Missouri’s particular brand of slavery as notable for its small-scale.
Less slaves, more slaveholders, led to a slave society where slave-holding was more obtainable and more common for the average yeoman farmer. 229 On the other hand, a slave given the last name of his owner illuminates the extent slavery, especially in
Missouri, was intimately related to the household. The Crews surname can therefore be understood to mark both the physical space of the Crews farm and a particular social place within the Crews household.
Given the flexibility of small-scale slavery in Missouri, naming customs used by slaveholders and slaves developed in counterpoint. Household surnames marked all forms of property, both colloquially among townspeople, and formally as recorded in the census. The land owned by Samuel T. Crews was known as the Crews farm and the enslaved men and women owned by Samuel T. Crews were known as the Crews slaves.
However, unlike real estate demarcated by fences and then designated by name, the names of people, given their humanity, are hardly static. Individuals can be known by
228 For more on movement and mobility in studies of the Civil War Era see, Yael A. Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 229 Aaron Astor writes of the direct relationship between small-scale slavery and the influence of slavery in central Missouri as “dispersed smallholdings simply indicated a higher number of slaveholders and, more important, white family members living in households headed by slaveholders.” Astor, Rebels on the Border, 21.
86 multiple as well as variations of single names across different circumstances and social contexts. Evidence shows that masters gave their surnames to the enslaved in order to designate their location within the slave-owning household as labor producing chattel property. Independently, for the enslaved, the flexibility of names tested the parameters of the slave-owning household by marking places for themselves, their families, and communities.
Within the specific context of Missouri slaveholding the uses of names are not entirely reducible to what historians commonly identify as resistance, either of the everyday variety, or of revolutionary practice.230 Rather, the significance of a name lies in their place making. Customs of naming under slavery including carrying multiple, often situationally specific names and the act of choosing ones own name, stretched the bounds of the slave-owning household. Through taking, employing, and declaring their names African Americans “asserted their right to exist.” and made a place of their own within a system that valued their labor over their humanity.231
As former slave Eliza Ann Wilcoxson lucidly observed, it was quite common for masters and mistresses of central Missouri to mark their slaves with their own last name.
In Howard County, stated Wilcoxson, “the colored people took the name of the old master and mistress.”232 Peter Finch, the brother-in-law of Howard Crews, corroborated
Eliza Ann Wilcoxson’s observation when he was asked to explain why his sister Jane
230 Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 1, (Fall 2003): 116. Walter Johnson’s notion of “enslaved humanity” offers the starting point for this analysis. 231 Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander, ‘We Shall Independent Be’: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States (Boulder: University Press of Colorado), 5. I am indebted the framework provided by the editors and contributors to this anthology. 232 Deposition of Eliza Ann Wilcoxson, 9 Aug, 1893, Eliza A. Wilcoxson in pension claim of Frank Hughes, (Pvt. Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), app. 380534, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Frank Hughes, 3031]. Further analysis of the enlistment papers of the United States Colored Troops from Howard County may suggest that masters passed on their surname with greater regularity than mistresses.
87 Frakes, her husband Howard Crews, and Finch himself were all known by different names. He remarked simply, “the way these different names came into the same family was that they belonged to different men.”233 Slaveholder’s customs of naming in Howard
County often denied enslaved brothers, sisters, parents, and occasionally wives and husbands the public recognition of their kinship relations by giving primacy instead to the names of slave-owning households.234 Social space in the ideology of slavery did not include a place for the families of the enslaved.
One only has to go as far as the enlistment rolls of Howard County’s two Union recruiting stations for colored troops to gain an appreciation for how prevalent this custom was. One hundred and ninety-four slaves visited the Union provost marshal office in Fayette and enlisted from December 26, 1863 to mid April, 1864.235 One hundred and fifty, or seventy-seven percent, of these shared a surname with their owner.
The enlistment rolls of the Glasgow recruiting station show a remarkable similarity. Of one hundred and fourteen slaves who enlisted at Glasgow, eighty-seven had the same surname as their owner, seventy-six percent. These records show that at the moment of
233 Affidavit of Peter Finch, 19 Oct, 1913, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2420]. 234 See also pension claims of Mack Stapleton, Deposition of Annie Hughes, 1 Mar., 1905, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC 2056]; Frank Hughes, Deposition of Eliza Ann Wilcoxan, 9 Aug., 1893, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC 3031]; Howard Crews, Affidavit of Peter Finch, 19 Oct, 1913, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC 2420], Lewis Morrison, Deposition of Cary Morrison, 12 Aug, 1897, Carey Morrison in pension claim of Lewis Morrison (Alias Lewis Ramsey), (Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 451994, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Lewis Morrison, 3005], and John Smith, Mrs. Arzalia Smith to Commissioner Winfield Scott, 19 Apr., 1926, Arzalia Smith in pension claim of John Smith (Alias John Caldwell), cert. 512420, (Pvt. Co. I 65th USCT Civil War), Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Smith, 3661]. 235 Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Fayette and Glasgow Recruiting Station, December 16, 1863—April 16, 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.8], http://www.sos.mo.gov, (accessed, September 14, 2013). Enlistment Papers.
88 enlistment a strong majority of slaves in Howard County shared a surname with the slave-owning household prior to emancipation.236
Table 8:
Enlistment Total Share Surname with Different Surname than Station Enlisted Owner Owner Fayette 194 151 (72%) 43 (28%) Glasgow 173 137 (74%) 36 (26%)
Historians Herbert Gutman and Leon Litwack have explored the politics of names for enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans as presenting opportunities to affirm kinship relations. In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom Gutman finds that after emancipation, former slaves frequently took a prior “owner’s name” rather than the name of their most recent owner. This is explained as occurring for two basic reasons.
First, the name of a former owner (though not necessarily the most recent) often related
“an immediate slave family (or an individual) to a slave family of origin.”237
Concurrently, Gutman argues that these names “served to shape a social identity independent of slave ownership” in post emancipation society.238 Leon Litwack shared this second conclusion by writing that the act of taking or making public, a name different from the most immediate owner, “reflected a deeply felt familial consciousness” among the formerly enslaved.239 While Gutman and Litwack illuminate crucial social claims to family, they overlook the extent to which names are also a claim to place.
236 Elizabeth Regosin notes does suggest an alternative, that slaves were simply assigned a surname by the recruiting officer filling out the enlistment papers. Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 55. Even if this was the case, it suggests the cultural assumption of white Missourians that slaves would share a surname with their owner. 237 Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 252. 238 Gutman, 230. 239 Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 249. Both Gutman and Litwack draw sources on a wide variety of states. However, neither examine names within
89 If the purpose of claiming a name in emancipation was, as Gutman suggests, to show a relation to a family origin, this origin was spatial as well as social. Testimonies made by former slaves as they applied for Civil War pensions show that families denied a common name under slavery were often additionally separated by space as a product of abroad marriages. Noting that many historians feel compelled to point toward the opposite, Elizabeth Regosin reminds us that many slaves did, in fact, take the name of their most recent owners. Rather than nostalgia for slavery, Regosin suggests that we might understand former slaves’ choice as their “assumption of the names they had long recognized as their own or to which they felt entitled.”240 Quoting a former slave from
Mississippi who stated, “Our plantation (I always calls it ‘ours’ ‘cause being a Fant nigger makes me a Fant too) wus a great big one,” Regosin illustrates the claims former slaves felt entitled to make on their master’s name.241 The claim is twofold. As Regosin correctly observes, first the former slave is claiming a right to the Fant name.
Simultaneously, however, a claim over the Fant land, “Our plantation” is also being articulated.
In the ideology of slavery, the social place of the enslaved was within the household of the slaveholder, but no part of the physical household belonged to the enslaved. Howard Crews was not alone in receiving a name inspired by his master’s surname and his place of birth. Thomas Boggs, one of the “most successful and
specific regional contexts. The states that appear in Gutman, are Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, as well as British Ship Registers removing Black loyalists following the American Revolutionary War. The states that appear in Litwack are Texas, Mississippi, and South Carolina. 240 Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 68. 241 Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 68.
90 prominent farmers,” named a newborn child Howard Boggs for the very same reason.242
It took constant effort to maintain a marked separation within the Boggs household between the free Boggs family and the enslaved Boggs families. Born sometime between
1834 and 1837 to enslaved parents, Howard Boggs was raised on the Boggs farm.
Master Thomas Boggs and his wife happened to have two sons roughly the same age as
Howard. The young master Robert recalled how he and Howard were “raised together” as children. With age, the prescribed social roles of slave and free children hardened within the household of Thomas Boggs. Marks of difference began to develop throughout their childhood. Traditional rites of passage, from youth to adulthood such as baptism were withheld from Howard, though presumably not from Robert. Howard
Boggs recalled that “he was never baptized nor any slave child was baptized” on the farm of Thomas Boggs.243
With time, the stark realities of the slave-owning household, and Howard’s vulnerable place within it added more visceral and traumatic reminders of his slave status. A series of separations finalized the distinction that Howard had a place in the
Boggs household as a slave, but not as a member of a family. Howard’s mother, also owned on the Boggs farm passed away when he was four years old. Just four years later, when Howard was eight, he was separated from his father who was sold away from the
Boggs farm to a slave trader, never to see him again.244 The final sale came at the age of seventeen when Howard Boggs himself was also sold, reportedly for the sum of one
242 History of Howard and Cooper Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National Historical Company, 1883), 487. 243 General Affidavit of Howard Boggs, 21 Feb., 1908, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs 2286]. 244 General Affidavit of Howard Boggs, 21 Feb., 1908, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs 2286].
91 hundred dollars “for every year he was old,” a huge profit for Thomas Boggs.245
According to Harrison A. Tresler, the 1860s were “the golden age of slave values” in
Missouri. In Platte County, “stout, hemp breaking” men were frequently sold from
“$1200 to $1400,” while most put the normal limit at $1500. Still, Tresler reports that in the neighboring county of Boone, the highest valuation placed on a male slave in the
1850s was $1600.246 When a slave trader offered Thomas Boggs an opportunity to profit off the sale of Howard Boggs, the decision was economic. Though the parents of
Howard Boggs created a family, a name of their own was withheld. In its place was the name Boggs, a public recognition of the household of their owner.
Surnames were given as signs of ownership able to signal possession of mobile property, in this case slaves, frequently moving between and among farms for leased labor and sale.247 However, used among themselves, the enslaved often developed multiple names signaling their presence in overlapping communities. On a farm neighboring the Boggs property, Eliza Ann Wilcoxson recognized that the name she went by often depended on the person she was talking too.248 Some slaves of Howard County were known by different names to white and black acquaintances. As Wilcoxson later explained to the Pension Bureau, her son’s “real + full name was George Franklin
Hughes.” As was common, Eliza Ann and her children were known under the name of
245 Ibid. 246 Harrison A Trexler, “The Value and the Sale of the Missouri Slave,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 8, no. 2, (January, 1914), 71-74. 247 Harrison A. Trexler remarks that due to the combined and frequent effects of runaway slaves, financial depression of the owner, restrictions placed on bringing slaves into the state, and natural increase of Missouri’s slave population “quite a local negro exchange flourished.” Trexler, “The Value and the Sale of the Missouri Slave,” 79. 248 General Affidavit of Annie Hughes, 24 Aug., 1897, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs 2292].
92 their current master, H.H. Hughes.249 Wilcoxson recalled how “the colored people called him [her son] George Franklin and the white people called him Frank.”250 While Eliza
Ann did not provide any further explanation, her testimony does illuminate a certain insider-outsider mentality present among the residents of Howard County. We cannot know which of these names was preferred by her son, but that he was known by two names, one full and one abbreviated remains significant. Interpreting George Franklin’s experience solely as a laborer within the framework of the household runs the danger of collapsing his experience as a member of multiple communities. While everyone is given a name, George Franklin’s experience suggests that slaves exercised at least some level of choice over how they were known on an everyday basis, and by close acquaintances.
George Franklin’s multiple names suggest that names were an opportunity for the slaves to test the boundaries of the white household by giving and using names in a manner of their own making. Elisabeth Regosin wrote of the northern missionary
Elizabeth Hyde Botume’s puzzling experience taking down the names of ex-slave school children in the South Carolina Sea Island freedmen’s school. Botume recounted how many school children “invented new names with ‘much ingenuity’ and then changed them daily.”251 Of further surprise to Betume was a family of nine brothers and half- brothers, each with a different surname. Whatever the reasons for the differentiation among surnames in the family, Regosin concludes that they did not correspond neatly with the assumptions of how names should operate in white society. Naming practices among slaves may have still been outward signs of familial identity, though not
249 Hughes would later rise to the ranks of Major in the 9th Missouri Infantry, C.S.A., History of Howard and Cooper Counties, Missouri. 250 Eliza Ann Wilcoxson in pension claim of Frank Hughes, [HCPC, Frank Hughes, 3031]. 251 Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 57.
93 necessarily according the “traditional assumptions of family and familial identity,” such as patrilineal descent, prevalent in free white society.252
Even after she married, Eliza Ann Wilcoxson of Howard County, Missouri was known by the last name Hughes. Likewise, her husband Alexander was made to keep the surname of his then owner—Wilcoxson.253 Though Alexander and Eliza Ann may have belonged to each other in matrimony, slavery demanded a physical and symbolic separation. They were living on separate farms, belonged to separate households, and known by different last names. This however lasted only as long as their enslavement.
Eliza Ann went by the Hughes name up to the time of the war, before taking the name of her husband, Wilcoxson, in the years to follow.254 Eliza Ann displayed an acute understanding of the significance of names under slavery, was compelled to change her name at first convenience, and spoke lucidly about her names throughout her application for a Civil War pension in the name of her son.
The Civil War and the end of slavery brought new opportunities for former slave men and women to change their names, though often this occurred by different means.
For some men, enlisting into the service of the United States army in late 1863 brought the most immediate opportunity to shed the names given to them by their masters.
However, less than one quarter of the enlisted men recorded in the Union offices of
Fayette and Glasgow enlisted with surnames different from their masters. This suggests that more commonly, if former slaves were to change their name, it occurred after their recruitment. Such was the case of Ephraim Windsor of Co. B 56th Regiment, United
252 Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 54. 253 Deposition of Eliza Ann Wilcoxson, 9 Aug., 1893, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Frank Hughes, 3034]. 254 Ibid.
94 States Colored Troops, who enlisted under the name of his owner but assumed the name
Hawkins, taken from his father, Peter Hawkins sometime during or after the war.255 As a common first interaction with the government, marriage offered another opportunity to assume a new name for men and women alike. Arzelia Smith’s husband enlisted as John
Caldwell, under his master’s name but chose to be married under his father’s name, John
Smith.256
The fluidity of names and the rate with which they changed affected all the enslaved, men and women. While Arzalia and John Smith found mutual opportunity in marriage to adopt a new name, often it was the wife who would take on the husband’s surname. Between being bought and sold to separate owners, women and men commonly had a number of prior names, although, it could be predicted that this was more common for women whose name changed more frequently with marriage.257 Isabel Herne was known by the name of her former husband, Johnson, when she married her husband
George Herne. Her maiden name “and slave name was Belle Herne” as that was the surname held by her father. The former wife of the deceased soldier, Charles Robertson also stated her multiple names and that she had “been known as Martha Lynch, Martha
255 Deposition of Stephen Hawkins, 31 Aug., 1908, Mary Hawkins in pension claim of Ephraim Hawkins (Alias Ephraim Windsor) (Pvt. Co. B, 56th USCT Civil War), Cert. 814941, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Ephraim Windsor, 3065]. 256 Mrs. Arzalia Smith to Commissioner Winfield Scott, 19 Apr., Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, John Smith, 3661]. 257Declaration for Widow’s Pension, 13 Aug.,1890, Isabel Herne in the pension claim of George Herne, (Pvt., Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), Cert. 312414, Civil War Pensions [George Herne 2436]; also Pension Claim of Russell Lewis who was married to Dilsy Lewis, “Dilsy Jackson, maiden name.” Russell Lewis to Bureau of Pensions, Department of the Interior, 4 Feb., 1898, (Pvt. Co. F, 67th USCT Civil War), Civil War Pensions, Cert. 779913 [Russell Lewis 2165]. Pension Claim of Richard McBane also includes examples of his first and second wife changing their name, Sarah White became Sarah McBane, and Ann Farrow became Ann Roberson after she married Richard, who had then changed his name to Richard Roberson. Declaration for Widow’s Pension, 7 July, 1890, Sarah McBaine, Annie McBaine in pension claim of Richard McBaine (Alias Richard Roberson), (Pvt. Co. D, 62nd USCT Civil War), Cert. 677152, Civil War Pensions, [Richard McBane, Alias Roberson 2535, 2554].
95 Embree, Martha Robertson, and Martha Creson.”258 It is quite probable that some of these names were used simultaneously, though not entirely interchangeably as she encountered different communities. During her life, Martha Creson’s name changed four times, the first two occurring under slavery as she was sold from the Lynch to the Embree household and the third and fourth times, with marriage.
Multiple names held benefits and disadvantages. On the one hand, multiple names allowed African American women a more flexible signifier of their family relations and history. Violet Taylor for instance was known by the name Taylor after her marriage to her husband. However she was also known “and sometimes goes by the name of Violet Hickerson.”259 The pension examiner interpreted this to be because she
“belonged in slavery to a Mr. Hickerson.” While this was true, the examiner most likely misinterpreted the meaning for Violet. In a letter written in her own hand, and signed
“Violet Hickersan” she explains that she had two sons in the Army, “Dennis Hickersan and George Hickersan.” Violet never heard from either of them again after they left for
Benton Barracks. Violet was eighty-two at the time she penned this letter to the
Commissioner of Pensions in Washington D.C. Even though she wrote the letter herself, the Pension Examiner assigned to her case described her as being “so ignorant and deaf that I doubt whether I succeeded in making her understand” her privileges.260
In the wake of the Civil War former slaves and masters alike struggled with the residue of slavery. A widow or a mother applying for a pension under the name of her
258 General Affidavit of Martha Creson, filed 26 May, 1893, Martha Creson in the pension claim of Charles Robertson, (Pvt. Co. E, 68th USCT Civil War), Widow app. 552031, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Charles Robertson, 3153]. 259 General Affidavit of Violet Taylor, 31 October, 1894, Violet Taylor in pension claim of Dennis Hickerson, (Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War), Civil War Pension Files, C 502049, [HCPC, Dennis Hickerson, 1804]. 260 Report of Special Examiner M. M. Brower, 28 Sept., 1900, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Dennis Hickerson, 1863].
96 late husband or son had the double responsibility of establishing the “right” or “correct” name of the soldier as well as her own. Very few former slaves who applied for a Civil
War pension avoided receiving some level of scrutiny in attempts to verify their true name. Frequently, these investigations began after a sibling or parent who went by a different name than the soldier or claimant made testimony. The Pension Bureau struggled to establish which names should be considered false, and which names were
“correct.” The Civil War had brought an end to slavery, but freedom it would seem was something entirely different. Freedom had to be made. In choosing their own last name, frequently after shedding that of their former owner, freemen and freewomen were collectively making this freedom at the level of the individual. Though significant, claiming a new name was not always a simple process.
Claimants applying for a pension found that the burden of proof rested with themselves. It was a common experience to have round after round of sworn affidavits and testimonies made simply to establish identity under multiple names. Eliza Ann
Wilcoxson for example was asked multiple times by pension agents and attorneys to establish her identity as well as that of her son who served in the army. Having lost her son’s enlistment papers in a house fire, Eliza Ann did not know whether he enlisted as
Frank Hughes, or George Hughes, or as Wilcoxan. When it came time for her son
George Franklin to enlist, he could have logically and rightly chosen from any of the three. Given Eliza Ann’s testimony, it might have been the freedom to choose that really mattered to her son. Challenged by a pensions application bureaucracy searching for a single correct name, former slaves struggled because the assumptions of the pension
97 bureau did not make room for their lived experience.261 When asked a final time to establish her “correct name and the correct name of the soldier,” Eliza Ann responded with a stern letter. She reminded the bureau that this was the “second or third time I have given you this evidence for gracious don’t send for this same evidence again.”262
Aliases and “correct” names brought challenges to many former slaves as government bureaucracy developed under the assumption that most citizens would possess one given name if a man, and perhaps an additional maiden name if a woman.
Financial consequences were also a frequent variable when choosing a name. George
Pierce, son of Morrison Prather and Diana Williams recalled that even though he was born on the Pierce farm, his mother always taught him that his “right name” was Prather, or Preter as he liked to spell it.263 George Pierce recalled that his “mother always called him Prather” but he was “generally called Pierce” as he was born on the Pierce farm.264
It is possible that Morrison Prather had been hired out to the Pierce household in
Richmond Township as no Prather’s were recorded in the Howard County slave schedule of 1860.265 Also, at the time of enlistment, Morrison and the two other Prather men, Jerry and Aaron who signed up for the Army on January 10, 1864 “claimed to have been the slave of Isaac N. Prather, a citizen of Nodoway County,” Missouri.266 This would explain why Morrison Prather was never known by the name Pierce. However, since Diana
261 Elizabeth Regosin corroborates this finding. She writes, “complications within the pension process often arose because pension officials treated former slaves’ surnames as if they operated according to free society’s assumptions about family, familial relationships, and family names.” Regosin, Fredom’s Promise, 59. 262 Eliza Ann Wilcoxson to W. A. Fast esq., 22 Oct., 1892, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Frank Hughes, 3027]. 263 Deposition of George Pierce, 19 May, 1892, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2668-2669]. 264 Ibid. 265 1860 United States Census, Eighth Federal Census, Richmond Township, Howard County, Missouri, Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri. 266 Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette.
98 belonged to the Pierce household, as custom would have it, so too would her new born son, George.
By reminding George that he was a Prather, not a Pierce Diana recognized his place within to a family beyond the scope of the slaveholding household. Diana was making the space for a Prather family by claiming a name that was outside the bounds of what could be owned by Charley Pierce. In knowing this, Morrison’s choice to enlist as
“Prather” may have had less to do with the fact that it was the surname of his master in
Nodaway County, and more to do with the newborn child, George, who he left for the army. Serving with Company H, of the 65 Regiment U.S.C.T., Morrison Prather died in
Port Hudson, Louisiana by the end of the year 1864.267 Diana heard by a letter sent by
Morrison’s brother Aaron, serving in the same regiment.
Diana, it would seem didn’t consider herself to be a Pierce either, even though she was owned by and labored for the Pierce household. She was born a slave in Maryland and recalled being “nearly full grown when I was brought to this part of the Country.”268
It is unknown whether Diana was brought with Charley Pierce as he moved from
Maryland, but is more likely that she was brought and sold to the Pierce household.
George recalled how his mother “went by her fathers name of Brooks, Diana Brooks,” for as long as he could remember.269 Diana did not adopt the name Williams until ten-to- eleven years after Morrison Prather’s death when she married John “Spot” Williams in
Howard County.
267 Child’s Declaration for Pension, 23 Apr., 1887, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2634]. 268 Deposition of George R. Pierce, 19 May, 1892, Civil War Pensions, [Morrisson Prather 2668]. 269 Ibid.
99 If given names could not be changed, enslaved African Americans found flexibility in how they addressed each other and presented themselves. Growing up after the Civil War, George moved to Arkansas to “work Railroading.” When he returned after about four months of work a Mr. Belts, likely his employer, informed him that if he wished to go by the name Preter instead of Pierce, George would have to pay a fee.
Perhaps, George was able to use his father’s name, Prather or Preter in Arkansas. Slavery had ended the white Pierce household’s claim to the lives and labor of Diana and her son
George. But in Howard County, if George wanted to work under his legal name, it would be Pierce, not Prather that was recognized by the state. In the end, George told Mr. Belts that as he did not have sufficient disposable income to legally change his name, he “liked the name of Pierce just as well.”270
As pension applications were often made through corresponding by written letter between the pension bureau and personal attorneys hired by the claimant, spelling became an additional barrier for establishing a legal name.271 The examples of Eliza
Wilcoxsan/Wilcoxson, Violet Hickerson/Hickersan, George Prather/Prater/Preter establish the regularity with which simple differences in pronunciation, levels of literacy, and the flexibility of the nineteenth century written word delayed the application process.
In each case, pension applications were stalled for weeks as the Bureau attempted to establish the correct name, including spelling, of the claimant. One particularly interesting pension claim is that of Miller Estill et. al., minor children of John Estill. In this claim, Mary Estill, the former mistress of the parents of the claimants testified as to
270 Deposition of George R. Pierce, 19 May, 1892, Civil War Pensions ,[HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2669]. 271 Elizabeth Regosin refers to this as the “precariousness of stepping from the oral to the written world.” Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 65.
100 the dates of their marriage and the birth of their children from the dates recorded in the
Estill family Bible. While Mary Estill’s name is spelled Estill, each member of the enslaved family is spelled Estelle. It is unknown whether this was a clerical error, but this is improbable given the fact that the same clerk or attorney would have written the names of the former mistress and former slaves. It is also likely that the clerk copied the names directly from the Bible as Mary Estill brought it to the hearing. Not to mention the fact that they all lived in or near the small town of Estill Station, named of course after the slaveholding Estill family.
The Pension Bureau however continued its struggle to ascertain the correct spelling of the name as the claimants, filing as minor children of Mary Ann and John
Estill, signed documents with multiple variations in spelling. An affidavit establishing the signature of Frank Estill was signed “Frank Estelle.”272 A similar affidavit was signed by his siblings to wit, “Miller Estill, Bessie Estill, Mary Estill.” 273 As these signatures appear in multiple handwritings and without marks it can be assumed they were also written individually. Furthermore, the name of the final sibling, Wilgus which appears separate as he was living in Chicago, Illinois, and was written with a third variation, “Wilgus Estille.”274 The extent of Wilgus’ literacy is unknown and the affidavit was only read aloud to him and cannot be considered his signature.
Nevertheless, the three variations of Estill continued to cause confusion until it was
272 Frank Estelle Certification of Signature, 30 May, 1887, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill, 1729]. 273 Miller Estill, Bessie Estill, Mary Estill, John Estill, Certification of Signature, 7, May, 1887, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill, 1727]. 274 Deposition of Wilgus Estille, 27 May, 1887, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill, 1723].
101 finally established in the case report that “The correct spelling of the name is Estill.”275
At that point, the case envelope which had the name of John Estelle written in blue ink was marked out and replaced by Estill, written in red.276
While the experience of losing a husband and a father at the time of freedom was not unique, there were exceptional cases of success experienced after freedom in Howard
County. Interestingly enough, Cyrus Wilson, the first slave to enlist into the United
States Army in Howard County, became one of freedom’s greatest beneficiaries after the war. He was not born in Missouri like Howard Crews or Boggs, but like so many other slaves of central Missouri, he moved with the household who owned him. Cyrus Wilson was brought to the newest slave state in the United States by a family named Wilson, as they migrated from Kentucky. On the 8th day of August 1831, a bill of sale was drawn up between William G. Wilson and Charles Hughes in Howard County. At the age of five
William Wilson sold to “Charles, and his heirs, &c, a negro boy slave for life named C y r u s.”277 Named only Cyrus, the young boy became known as one of the Hughes slaves with the signing of the contract. Frequently shortened, Cyrus recalled, “while a slave I went by name of Cy Hughes.”278
As one of the Hughes slaves, Cyrus was part of the same social network composed of small slaveholding households and slaves as Howard Boggs, Howard
275 Report of Special Examiner Geo M Swann, 15 Aug. 1889, Civil War Pension Files [John Estill 1745]. 276 Case Envelope, 30 Jan., 1882—9 Apr. 1883, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill, 1735]. 277 Report of Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman, Certificates of Search, 17 March, 1925, Hannah Wilson in the pension claim of Cyrus Wilson, (Pvt. Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 1216277, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC Cyrus Wilson, 1947]. Oddly enough, “Samuel C. Major” was the sole witness who signed the bill of sale. It is likely that this is the same “Sam Major” who sold the casket to Jane and Lewis Crews at the death of Howard Crews, see Howard Crews pension. Deposition of Paul Crews, 4 May, 1921, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2773]. 278 Affidavit of Cyrus Wilson, 22, Apr. 1899, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2089].
102 Crews, and Eliza Wilcoxsan who frequently saw each other at work on adjoining farms.
In fact, this was a small enough community for the man who signed as witness to the
1831 Bill of Sale for Cyrus, Samuel C Major, to be the same Sam Major, “old man from
Fayette” who sold the casket Howard Crews would eventually be buried in. Though
Charles and his wife Elisabeth Hughes are not listed in the 1860 Howard County slave schedule, there are a number of Hughes households listed. All resided in the heaviest slaveholding regions of the county, Richmond and Chariton Townships. Over half of the population in these districts were enslaved African Americans. In fact, it was on the neighboring Kingsbury farm that Cyrus first met Ann Kingsbury, the two would later take up together as husband and wife. The Kingsbury place was on the bottomland near the Missouri River, about three miles from the town of New Franklin.279 The farm of
Charles Hughes was close to the land of Thomas Boggs, “and in the neighborhood somewhere of Dr. Kingsbury.”280
Jane Granville, formerly Jane Kingsbury, recalled Ann Kingsbury fondly. When
Jane’s mother died, Ann took her in and raised her.281 It is possible that this is where
Cyrus’s life long nickname, “Uncle Cy” originated, as Cyrus took up with Ann
Kingsbury and it became that they were “married, that is, married in slave time, in the slave way.”282 Though they never had any children, Cyrus and Ann had an abroad marriage and Cyrus visited every Wednesday and Saturday night, as was customary.283
By the end of the year 1863, the Wednesday and Saturday night visitations came to an end as Cyrus Hughes enlisted into the United States Army and received his certificate of
279 Deposition of Jane Granville, 17 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files [Cyrus Wilson 2020] 280 Ibid. 281 Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2021]. 282 Ibid. 283 Ibid., [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2020].
103 freedom. When asked for his name and the name of his master, he did not say Cyrus
Hughes, nor C y r u s, he answered with his childhood name and became Cyrus Wilson once more.
Interestingly enough, Cyrus Wilson also claimed to be the slave of Elisabeth
Hughes, rather than Charles Hughes at the moment of enlistment. Ann remained at the
Kingsbury place and during the war years Jane remained “in the same house, and sleeping on the same bed with her.”284 In her own words, Jane “was not big enough in slavery to have a husband” and did not marry till they all came back from the army”285 but after she “got free” she was “big enough to hoe corn and to plow.”286 It was in this way that Jane was with Ann when she died in 1864 shortly after Cyrus left in the army.
Later in life, Jane was unable to state how Ann came to die but she saw her body and
“saw them put her in a pine box…and then they put the box in a wagon, and took her to the grave.”287 While the depositions included in Cyrus Wilson’s claim for a Civil War veteran’s pension are inconclusive, it is likely that Cyrus heard of Ann’s death by letter sent to him in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or that he returned briefly to Howard County.288
No matter the case, Cyrus Wilson met his life partner, Hannah Bird in a Union military hospital in Baton Rouge.
Hannah met Cyrus for the first time in the hospital where she worked, “washing dishes, doing the washings, cleaning the rooms, and keeping things clean.”289 Though she did not recall how exactly they first met, she did remember that she was a free
284 Ibid. 285 Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1994]. 286 Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2020]. 287 Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2021]. 288 Deposition of Hannah Wilson, 15 Apr. 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2005] Hannah Wilson states “I never did see Ann. I heard about her, because when we was down in Louisiana, some of them wrote to him [Cyrus] and said Ann was dead.” 289 Deposition of Hannah Wilson, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1998].
104 woman, and that when he came to visit her as she worked in the army hospital, he was not sick, but he was in the army and carried a gun.290 In Louisiana, Hannah was known as Hannah Bird, Hannah Calwell or Caldwell, and Hannah Richardson.291 Bird was her maiden name, the surname of her father George and her mother Mandie.292 Under slavery, she was owned by a man named Caldwell. Reuben Richardson was the father of her first child, a son named William Richardson. Hannah was pregnant with William around the time that Hannah met Cyrus Wilson, as he visited her at the Hospital, Hannah and Reuben split apart. It seems that the separation was mutual as Reuben “didn’t want to help me [Hanna] to take care of the boy.”293 Reuben left Baton Rouge and as Hannah puts it “I didn’t have no use for him, and he didn’t have no use for me.”294 Cyrus asked if she wanted to come back to Missouri with him. She said yes and they were married,
Hannah Bird became Hannah Wilson. William Richardson would always keep the name of his father, even as he grew up as a son in the Wilson home.295
Cyrus once again moved to Missouri, not as a boy held as a slave, but this time as a husband, stepfather, and freeman. Cyrus and Hannah Wilson returned to Howard county as a new family in search for land and a life together. Jane Kingsbury, still on the property of the Kingsbury’s at first “didn’t know who Cy Wilson was.” It wasn’t until
290 Ibid. 291 Report of Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman, 26, Apr. 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1937]. 292 Deposition of Hannah Wilson, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1997]. 293 Ibid. [2001]. 294 Ibid. 295 Deposition of William Richardson, 15 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2007]. Transcribed from the deposition, “Q-What name do you go by here? A-Will, and William Richardson. I never went by the name, Wilson. … I always, for a fact, made my home with Cyrus Wilson.”
105 later that she came to find out; everyone was talking about Cy Hughes.296 Wilson was the name of the household that moved Cyrus from Kentucky, to Missouri. It is possible that this was the name of his father, or mother, also owned by the Wilsons. If nothing else, Wilson was a name that marked a place of origin. When Cyrus was sold to Hughes he had no last name, he was transferred to the Hughes household and his childhood history erased under the Hughes name. Taking the name Wilson could be seen as a case against rootlessness. Despite being shipped from one place to the next, and sold from one household to the other, Cyrus Wilson had history. He had lived on the Wilson farm, he had been born in Kentucky.
Beyond his survival of the war, what marks Cyrus Wilson’s experience as exceptional among those able-bodied male slaves who enlisted into the Union Army was his ability to purchase his own land in the wake of the war years. Upon returning to
Howard County, Cyrus went to the Kingsbury place, where Ann had been living and buried, and where Jane remained. “Jin, this is my wife,” Jane explained she was introduced to Hannah Wilson for the first time, explaining that Cyrus “always called me
Jin.”297 She also recalled in her deposition in the pension case of Hannah Wilson that
Kingsbury had “given some of his slaves land, built them houses, and rented land to other, and furnished them with teams.”298 It is likely that the allocation of land
Kingsbury provided became vital assistance in freedmen and women’s transition from
296 Deposition of Jane Granville, 16 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson,1993]. 297 Ibid. 298 Ibid.
106 slavery to freedom. While many slaveholders rented out land to their former slaves, it was rare that such land was sold to the freedmen and freedwomen.299
Cyrus and Hannah Wilson maintained a mélange of occupations after returning to
Howard County. It is probable that the first land Cyrus worked following the war was leased to him from the Kingsburys. Near the Kingsbury place, Cyrus and Hannah had their first child together and named him George Washington Wilson. They were living on a small pasture, cleared by Cyrus. This became known as the “Cy” pasture.
Although, Cyrus cleared the land and it commonly became known under his name, he did not own the plot. It wasn’t until three years later that Cyrus and Hannah had saved enough to purchase some property in Boonville, a town just down the Missouri River.300
According to George Washington Wilson, Cyrus made money by traveling across
Howard and Cooper counties with his wagon, buying and selling furs. His mother
Hannah worked mostly as a laundress in Booneville where she did washing and ironing.
The work was toilsome and George Washington remembered her monetary contributions to the family as she “washed until she is broke up now from it.”301 As George
Washington grew older, he remembered his father mostly “did wood and sawing,” most likely in the mills at Booneville, but “he worked over the river in the harvest a great deal, anything to make an honest living.”302 Cyrus and Hannah Wilson also became members of the Morgan Street Baptist church in Boonville “where uncle Cy was a local jack-leg
299 Robert Frizzell notes that in 1870, very few African Americans owned real estate, “In Chariton Township, seven of the eighty-one black heads of household owned real estate, and ten owned personal property. In Richmond Township, eight of the ninety-six black household heads owned real estate, and thirty-nine owned personal property.” Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review, 258-259. 300 Deposition of George Washington Wilson, 16 Apr. 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson. 2010]. 301 Ibid. 302 Ibid.
107 preacher of that church.”303 He also occasionally preached at a “white folks church” in
Mt. Pleasant.304
Cyrus, Hannah, George and William had established a substantial amount of property and real estate by the time Cyrus passed away in 1924. The first to enlist, Cyrus was among the last of the former slaves who enlisted into the ranks of the U.S.C.T. At his death, a short obituary ran in the Booneville newpaper under the headline “UNCLE
CY WILSON DIES AT 98 YEARS—Well Known Old Colored Man Served for 35
Years as Slave—Was in Army.”305 Seven years earlier, Cyrus had drawn up a last will and testament bequeathing his entire estate “real and personal” to his “beloved wife
Hannah B. Wilson.”306 While it is not stated in her claim for a pension following the death of Cyrus, it is possible that Hannah retained her maiden name as her middle name after marriage. Hannah B. Wilson, B for Bird. In the event that Hannah remarried after
Cyrus had passed away, his estate would pass in “equal parts” to Hannah, his “only child,
George W. Wilson,” and his “step son, William Richardson, share and share alike.”307
Under slavery, the names of slaves existed in a grey area. Legally the surnames of slaves were practically superfluous except for establishing a belonging to the slave owning household. Socially, the enslaved found names to be convenient sites from which to challenge the expectations of the slave-owning household by marking their own space within the household. Prior to the Civil War, this occurred when the enslaved utilized different names when in different situations or around different groups of people.
303 Deposition of Jane Granville, 16 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson,1993]. 304 Ibid. 305 Newspaper Clipping, UNCLE CY WILSON DIES, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1943]. 306 Report of Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman, Civil War Pension Files, [Cyrus Wilson 1949]. 307 Ibid.
108 In this sense names were more flexible before the Civil War, especially for those who sought pension applications. Regardless of free or slave status, names were imbued with power, the power to mark ownership, or the power to self-identify as an individual or as a member of a willfully chosen family. For the formerly enslaved of Howard County, the task of making room for personal autonomy and self-determination continued after the economic system of slavery came to an end. For many, this work involved disowning the names of former owners and claiming a name that recognized their individuality, their family, and their freedom.
109 CONCLUSION
Kin and Communities in the Civil War Era
Slavery in Howard County, Missouri was not a monolithic experience.
Differences based on gender and age produced as much variety in lived experience as did differences in types of labor and interests of the slaveholder. The authors of Slaves No
More, aptly described emancipation as a “varying, uneven, and frequently tenuous process” and this thesis does not attempt to do justice to every variation and contingency of experience. 308 However, it has sought to interrogate slavery, emancipation, and freedom in Howard County through asking specific questions. What were the patterns of slaveholding in Howard County on the eve of the Civil War and how did this affect the social lives of the enslaved? What were the routes taken by enslaved men and women of
Howard County toward emancipation and how were they part of a similar project of making freedom? What effect did the Civil War and emancipation have on black families and communities maintained under slavery and how did these relationships, in turn, shape freedom?
Slavery as it was mobilized, lived, and experienced in Howard County cannot be fully explained without an examination of the social lives of the enslaved. In 1860,
Howard County was at the geographical center of Missouri’s slaveholding river counties, was home to the second greatest number of slaves and had the highest percentage of slaves by population. As such, it is an ideal place to begin inquiries into what slavery looked like in Missouri at a local level. Examining the patterns of slaveholding at the
308 Ira Berlin and others, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation in the Civil war, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5.
110 level of the township shows that slaveholding was not evenly distributed across the county. Rather, slaves were concentrated in the regions where cash-crop agriculture was most profitable and prevalent. Indeed, slaves were actually a slim majority in regions with the best soil such as Richmond and Chariton Townships, while regions of poor soil and refuse land such as Bonne Femme and Boonslick Townships were home to even fewer slaves than the city centers of Fayette and Glasgow.
This demographic data on slavery can be as useful for showing the ways in which slaveholding remained fairly constant across townships as well as the ways it varied.
Maps of Howard County slave holdings clearly show that where a person lived played a large role determining the type of community they lived in. Great variation can be found in the number of enslaved living in regions of market based agricultural production, city centers, and yeomanry farming for self-sufficiency. On the other hand, these maps show that the gender and age composition across townships show much less variation, and almost reach parity in some slave-dense and slave-sparse townships. Slaves of Howard
County built their social networks around those who were geographically close, those who they socialized with and labored beside, and those who they were brought into contact with through the slaveholder’s business and family dealings. When the Civil War and the opportunity for enlistment and emancipation came, it operated with the backdrop of these social networks.
This thesis argues that enlistment and emancipation are therefore best understood relationally within the context of slave neighborhoods and communities. Men enlisted alongside men who they worked alongside. Some wives also went with husbands at the time of enlistment, visiting them as long as they remained at the courthouse. Many of the
111 able-bodied men who enlisted understood their service through its impact on those they left behind. Enlistment gendered emancipation in Howard County by removing the majority of able-bodied enslaved men from the county to serve their term in the Union
Army, many never returned. Making wartime freedom was therefor a task taken up by the female slaves of Howard County. Many women used the presence of the Union
Army, especially the provost marshal offices in Glasgow and Fayette to check the violence and authority of their masters. Some women were able to maintain a correspondence with loved ones in the military in order to claim protection from abusive masters, and petition for essential goods for survival.
If emancipation was not a solitary act, neither was the project of making a life in freedom. Names have always been political signifiers of place and belonging and this was true in slaveholding Howard County as much as anywhere else. Long before emancipation, names held social power as master’s assumed that their slaves would adopt the name of owner’s household. Slaves, in turn, assumed flexible names, answering to more than one surname, or choosing which one to take or pass to their children. In freedom, many formerly enslaved changed their surname to claim belonging to family, to a place, and to demand recognition of citizenship. The assertion of a freely chosen name brought benefits and challenges. Assuming a name linked individuals with lineages, to places and were public affirmations of personal histories. At the same time, expanding government bureaucracies increasingly using names as the primary source of identification for record keeping failed to accommodate the multiple names of former slaves.
112 Yes, slavery was varied, emancipation tenuous, and the process of making a life after freedom brought many unanticipated challenges for the formerly enslaved of
Missouri. Acknowledging that freedom, emancipation, and even slavery in Missouri were often lived and experienced through social relationships of kin and community is one way of bringing clarity to the tumultuous era of the Civil War. The social ties of kinship and community for the enslaved were tacitly ignored or actively denied by slaveholders, unacknowledged by military necessity, and foreign to the traditional assumptions framing the federal bureaucracy administering postwar aid. These relationships were central to the lives of former slaves in the transition from slavery to freedom and they were maintained with tenacity.
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Theses and Dissertations:
Boccardi, Megan B. Remembering in Black and White. unpublished Diss. University of Missouri, Columbia. 2011
Schreck, Kimberly A. Splitting Heirs. unpublished Diss. University of Missouri, Columbia, 2004.
Schreck, Kimberly A. Their Place in Freedom. unpublished MA Thesis. University of Missouri, Columbia. 1993.
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