Ann Bradford Stokes

From: s3.amazonaws.com

Stokes (1830-1903), an illiterate African American woman born into slavery in Tennessee, served as a “contraband” (escaped slave) nurse on the hospital ship USS Red Rover, the first Union Naval
ship, from January 1863 to October 1864. She also received regular wages of a “first-class boy.”

Notably, she was among the first women to serve as a nurse in the United States Navy and the first to serve on a U.S. military vessel. In 1890, after years of unsuccessful petitions for a pension, Stokes reapplied for a pension based on her 18 months of service in the Navy instead of as a widow of a deceased soldier. Since she was listed as a “boy” while serving on the USS Red Rover, Stokes was granted her a pension of $12 per month (the usual amount awarded to nurses at this time) by the Navy.

Read More

Black Women After the Civil War: African American Women in Postbellum America

By Maggie MacLean 9-14-16

After the Civil War, African American women were promised a new life of freedom with the same rights provided to other American citizens. But the newly freed women in the South had little or no money, limited or no education and little access to it, and racism impacted every area of their lives. The transition from enslavement to freedom was a difficult and frightening one for most black women who emerged from enslavement knowing "that what they got wasn't what they wanted; it wasn't freedom, really."

The Civil War promised freedom to African American women, but as the Confederate Army and slaveowners fleeing from Union troops often took their male slaves with them. The women and children were left behind. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation freed African Americans in rebel states in 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all slaves wherever they were, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population.

Freedmen's Bureau
The Bureau assisted African Americans in finding jobs, land, a home, and an education, as well as obtaining clothing, food, water, and health care. It distributed 15 million rations to blacks and set up a system by which planters could borrow rations to feed freedmen they employed. Its efforts were quickly consumed with the plight of former slaves and the objective of establishing emancipation in the face of strong opposition.

In 1865, Republican congressmen founded the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen's Bureau, to avert mass starvation and suffering of freedwomen and men. The immense social crisis that made the bureau necessary came as a direct result of the Union Army's physical destruction of the South.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, which had offices in 15 Southern states and the District of Columbia, operated from 1865 to 1872 to help manage the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of slaves.

Southern blacks now faced the difficulty Northern blacks had confronted for decades - that of a free people surrounded by hostile whites. Freedman Houston Hartsfield Holloway wrote:

"For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them."

The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, tried to find ways for whites and blacks to live together in a free society, but people in the South saw Reconstruction as a humiliating imposition.

With the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, however, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, participate in politics, purchase the land of their former owners, and seek their own employment. Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves and eroded the gains for which many had shed their blood.

Nicodemus, Kansas
After the Civil War there was a general exodus of blacks from the South. Some emancipated slaves quickly fled from the neighborhood of their owners, while others became wage laborers for them. Benjamin Singleton led an exodus of African Americans from various points in the South to Kansas. Six blacks and two whites ncorporated the Nicodemus Town Company in Kansas in 1877 - the oldest of about twenty towns established predominately for blacks in the West.

Nicodemus, Kansas is located on the plains in the northwest corner of Kansas. The six founders, all from Lexington, Kentucky, named the town Nicodemus after a legendary African slave prince who had purchased his freedom. They envisioned Nicodemus as a place where its settlers would have both political freedom and economic opportunity.

Northern teachers, many of whom were white women, volunteered to provide education and training for the newly freed population. In time, schools from the elementary level through college provided a variety of opportunities, from the rudiments of reading and writing and various types of basic vocational training to classics, arts, and theology.

By 1886 Nicodemus had become a prosperous community surrounded by farms owned by blacks. The town had two newspapers, the Nicodemus Enterprise and Nicodemus Western Cyclone. There was also a drugstore, a bank, schoolhouse, three churches, and a general store, the first two story building in the town.

Kate Drumgoold
Multiple sources estimate that she was born in 1858 or 1859 near Petersburg, Virginia. While Drumgoold was still young, her mother was sold to allow her owner to pay a poor white man to go to the Civil War in his place. Drumgoold's mother left a husband, one son, and 17 daughters behind. Kate later wrote:

We did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me.

When Kate's mother returned to her family after Emancipation, she found her husband remarried, her daughters scattered, and her only son, who had fought for the Confederacy, was now missing.

Kate and her mother reunited as much of the family as possible and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Kate worked as a domestic, battled significant illnesses, and worked toward obtaining an education, which she considered essential to the advancement of African Americans. Her plans to attend school had to be put aside for a few years after she contracted smallpox, but she never wavered in her determination.

"For every time that I saw the newspaper there was some one of our race in the far South getting killed for trying to teach and I made up my mind that I would die to see my people taught."

Kate Drumgoold left Brooklyn and went to Wayland Seminary school in Washington DC and later returned. In 1878 she left again and went to Harpers Ferry for four years at school. She returned again to Brooklyn and began teaching in 1886, fulfilling her dream of teaching African Americans. Her mother passed away on February 28, 1894, but Kate continued to teach for eleven more years until her health began to fail.

On January 20, 1897 a severe illness of some sort struck Kate Drumgoold, and she was forced to quit teaching in March of 1897. Her autobiography ended abruptly soon after, as she prayed for the strength to finish her work.

Mattie J. Jackson
Mattie Jane Jackson was born in January 1847 in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Westley Jackson and Ellen Turner. Despite being enslaved by different owners, her parents had three children together: Sarah Ann, Mattie Jane, and Esther J. After the birth of his youngest daughter, Westley Jackson escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. He settled in Chicago, Illinois and became a minister, but he died before the Civil War.

Mattie Jane Jackson (1847-1910) is known for her 1866 autobiography, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Her Parentage, Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery, Incidents During the War, Her Escape from Slavery: A True Story (1866). Excerpt from that book:

"Two years after my father’s departure, my mother, with her two children, my sister and myself, attempted to make her escape. After traveling two days we reached Illinois. We slept in the woods at night. I believe my mother had food to supply us but fasted herself. But the advertisement had reached there before us, and loafers were already in search of us, and as soon as we were discovered on the brink of the river one of the spies made enquiries respecting her suspicious appearance. She was aware that she was arrested, consequently she gave a true account of herself - that she was in search of her husband. We were then destitute of any articles of clothing excepting our wearing apparel. Mother had become so weary that she was compelled to leave our package of clothing on the way. We were taken back to St. Louis and committed to prison and remained there one week, after which they put us in Linch's trader's yard, where we remained about four weeks. We were then sold to William Lewis."

Six years later, Ellen Turner met and married George Brown and together they had two sons. Brown escaped to Canada around 1855. Turner tried several times to join her husband, but was repeatedly caught and beaten. Brown returned to the United States, changed his name to John G. Thompson, and became a barber in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Her owner grew tired of Turner's constant attempts to escape; he sold her and her children to the captain of a Mississippi River steamboat. When Ellen met Sam Adams and made preparations to marry, the steamboat captain kidnapped the family and sent them to Louisville, Kentucky, where they were sold to different owners.

With the help of the Underground Railroad, Mattie escaped to Indianapolis, Indiana, where her mother and brother reached her several months later. At the end of the American Civil War, Mattie and her mother and brother traveled back to St. Louis, where Turner married Sam Adams.

Shortly after the end of the war, Mattie Jackson's stepfather, who had earlier changed his name to John G. Thompson, located the family and invited Jackson and her half-brother to join him and his wife, Dr. Lucy Susan (Prophet) Schuyler Thompson, a botanical physician and antislavery activist. Mattie was nineteen when she brought her eleven-year-old half-brother to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with his father and stepmother, Lucy Susan Prophet Schuyler Thompson, who had recently lost her only child, a Civil War soldier.

In 1866, Mattie related her life experiences as a slave to her stepmother who went by the title Dr. L.S. Thompson. also published The Story of Mattie J. Jackson to raise money for Mattie's education. Evidence shows she finished her education and moved back to St. Louis, with her mother Ellen and her third husband, Sam Adams.

In 1869, Mattie married William Reed Dyer, a native of Warrenton, Missouri, a Union Army veteran who was employed as a porter on steamboats traveling up and down the Mississippi River. They eventually moved into their own home in the city of St. Louis. Out of their eight children, four sons and a daughter reached maturity. Of their nine children, five would live to maturity. After Ellen Turner Adams' death in May 1893, the Dyers moved to Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, about thirty-five miles from St. Louis, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

SOURCES
Docsouth: Mattie J. Jackson
Wikipedia: Mattie J. Jackson
BlackPast.org: Nicodemus, Kansas
Library of Congress: African American Odyssey
A Slave Girl's Story. Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold
NWHM: Claiming Their Citizenship: African American Women, 1624-2009: The Civil War and Reconstruction Period

Image 1: A freed family on a plantation gathered for a photograph

Image 2: Image: Mustered Out. Little Rock, Arkansas, April 20, 1865. Published in Harper's Weekly, May 19, 1866.
Alfred Waud's drawing captures the exuberance of the African American women and children as the U. S. Colored Troops returned home at the end of the Civil War.

From: civilwarwomenblog.com

Read More

Black Soldiers, Blue Uniforms – Blood On The Snow

By John Walker, 6-3-16

Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville as the Black soldiers made their advance.

As the exhausted Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville, Union General George H. Thomas prepared to launch a devastating, if much delayed, frontal assault.

Although several overzealous Union Army field commanders organized African Americans into ad hoc militia units early in 1862 and several black regiments were mustered into service later that year, it wasn’t until after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, that the federal government began actively recruiting and enlisting black soldiers and sailors.

Emancipation as a Military Strategy
In late 1862, after battlefield reverses slowed white enlistments to a trickle, Lincoln was convinced that emancipation and enlistment of blacks were crucial to winning the war. He initiated one of his most controversial and revolutionary policy directives: slaves in areas still in rebellion would be liberated, free blacks in the North and occupied South would be enlisted, and, eventually, blacks in loyal slave-holding and border states would be enlisted as well. All would serve exclusively under white officers.

The president was treading on extremely sensitive ground—widespread racial discrimination was rampant in the North, and many senior Army officers and large numbers of their men strongly opposed the idea of blacks in uniform. Even after Lincoln made it clear that he expected his generals to comply with his new enlistment policies, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, overall commander in the vast western theater, blatantly hindered recruiting efforts there. Like many Union officers, Sherman was willing to utilize blacks in menial positions such as laborers, teamsters, railroad guards, and cooks, but he steadfastly refused to deploy black regiments alongside white units.

Free blacks in the North had thronged to enlistment offices after the war began but were turned away. Federal law made it illegal for them to serve in the army or in state militias. In May 1861, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, commander at Fortress Monroe, Louisiana, declared escaped slaves “contraband of war” and refused to return them to their owners, instead putting them to work in support roles. Lincoln let Butler’s policy stand. Three months later, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act, which was designed, in effect, to deprive the Confederacy of its huge black labor force.

When Butler assumed command of Union forces in Louisiana, he faced an imminent attack and appealed to blacks to join his forces. The first units of Butler’s “Corps d’Afrique” were two 500-man regiments—the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, free blacks with black officers and a white commander, and the 3rd Louisiana Native Guards, former slaves with an all-white officer corps. Butler’s acceptance of the 1st Regiment with its black officers intact was unprecedented.

The men who joined the 1st Regiment were the elite of New Orleans black society: doctors, craftsmen, educators, and landowners, some of whom owned slaves themselves. Their ancestors had fought alongside Andrew Jackson against the British. Now, with their city occupied, and after first offering their services to the Confederacy, they joined Butler. On September 27, 1862, he mustered in the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, the first unit of black soldiers officially accepted into the U.S. Army. Butler would be replaced by Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks later that year; Banks strongly opposed the idea of black officers and relegated the Guards to garrison duty while he began purging the units of their black officers by any means he could devise.

Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville as the Black soldiers made their advance.

In 1862, U.S. Senator Jim Lane resigned to accept a commission as a brigadier general and recruiter in his home state of Kansas. Without waiting for authorization, he raised a regiment of blacks, cavalierly assuming that the War Department would approve. Ordered twice to abandon the project, he refused. In January 1863 Lane’s stubbornness paid off when Federal authorities, who had by now passed the Second Confiscation Act and the Militia Act authorizing the president to employ blacks as he deemed necessary, accepted his units into service.

Performance in Battle
The performance of black soldiers in three battles over a two-month period in 1863 erased any lingering doubts as to their worthiness for combat roles and hastened a massive surge in recruitment and enlistment of African Americans. In late May, the 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards advanced as part of Banks’s XIX Corps on the Confederate bastion at Port Hudson, Louisiana. On May 27, they launched an ill-advised frontal assault against the fortified works. Against overwhelming odds, the two regiments mounted several heroic but futile attacks. Their ranks shredded by sustained artillery and musket fire, the black regiments withdrew after suffering horrendous casualties.

Two weeks later, three regiments of raw, virtually untrained blacks, most of whom were runaway slaves who had been laboring in the fields of Mississippi and Louisiana a few weeks earlier, distinguished themselves in the defense of Union positions at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana. Attacked by a numerically superior Confederate force, the blacks fought back ferociously; the battle escalated into a savage hand-to-hand melee that turned into one of the bloodiest small engagements of the war. The three regiments, one of which was issued outmoded muskets just the day before the attack, fought the Confederates but suffered appalling casualties.

On July 18, a state regiment of black volunteers, the 54th Massachusetts, led a Union assault on Battery Wagner in South Carolina, another heavily fortified Rebel outpost. Although the attack failed and the 54th suffered heavy losses, the unit’s bravery in the face of terrible odds was unquestioned.

The conduct of the black soldiers on three separate battlefields did much to change racial stereotypes rampant in the North. People who had ridiculed the idea of putting blacks in uniform now endorsed it. Eight months after Fort Wagner, the 20th U.S. Colored Infantry, raised entirely within the state of New York, paraded through New York City and was cheered by whites and blacks alike. It had been only eight months since the infamous draft riots there.

Fighting for their Freedom
By August 1863, 14 regiments of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) were in the field. The surge in enlistments helped fill the ranks of depleted Union units. By the critical summer of 1864, more than 100,000 blacks were under arms. Unfortunately, the blacks who flocked to the uniform had to deal with limited opportunities for advancement to the officer corps, inadequate training, substandard equipment, lower pay, and inferior medical care. About one in five blacks died from disease, compared with one in 12 whites.

Almost 180,000 African Americans served in the Union Army by war’s end, a little over half coming from the 11 seceded states; 7,122 whites served as officers in USCT units. Black units fought in 449 engagements. On December 15-16, 1864, two black brigades took part in the decisive battle of Nashville, which effectively ended the war in the western theater and was the only major Union victory in which colored units participated.

What had begun as a war to preserve the Union was transformed, in large part owing to military expediency, into a war for black liberation. African American men joined the Union ranks to escape slavery, destroy the Confederacy, prove their loyalty to the United States, and pursue their dreams of freedom and citizenship for themselves and future generations of black Americans.

From: warfarehistorynetwork.com

Read More

Mrs. Keckley, “Contraband” and The Lincolns

By Feather Schwartz Foster, 10-19-15

The Civil War brought out great bitterness. It also brought out great generosity.

Shortly after the Civil war began, runaway slaves were give a unique new name: “Contraband of War.”

Fortress Monroe, near Norfolk, VA, was a crucial center for the Union, since it commanded the Chesapeake Bay, its trade, commerce and defensive position. General Benjamin Butler, a “political” general and Massachusetts lawyer, was in command of Union forces in that area, which was a magnet for the runaways. Technically, they “could not” be freed and “should” be returned to their masters, but Butler, an abolitionist, was not about to permit it. He declared the runaways as “contraband of war”, giving quasi immunity and a sense of growing pride and importance to the once-enslaved.

The Sanitary Commission

Early in the war, the Sanitary Commission was formed in the North. As a precursor to the Red Cross, the organization was devoted to provide money, goods and services for Union soldiers, particularly the wounded.

The idea caught on like wildfire, and hardly a Northern town  was without a chapter. (In the South, there was no structured organization; everyone pitched in however they could.)

Men had organized the Sanitary Commission, but it fell to the women to organize many of their activities: fairs and bazaars, knitting and sewing circles, assembling mess kits and sundries.

Huge sums were raised. Thousands upon thousands of articles – from fully-equipped ambulance wagons to socks and pajamas – were provided to army hospitals.

Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley

Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) was born in Petersburg, VA, a mulatto slave.  At a young age, she discovered a rare talent for sewing and designing ladies fashions and eventually became so adept that she earned enough money ($1200) to purchase her freedom.

As a free woman, she moved to Washington in 1860 and opened a shop, making gowns for the capital’s elite. She had come highly recommended to Mary Lincoln, and began working with the new First Lady the day the Lincolns entered the White House.

“Lizzie” Keckley became an indispensable part of the Lincoln White House.

The relationship between Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Lincoln would steadily deepen. Mrs. K. would not only be engaged as her modiste and personal dresser, but helped nurse Willie and Tad when they were sick, and tended to an ailing (and grieving) Mrs. Lincoln as well. From time to time she even combed the President’s thick and unruly hair. In short, she became indispensable, and the close confidante and companion to the First Lady.

Elizabeth Keckley and Contraband

Free Negroes and former slaves came to Washington in droves during the Civil War. They were usually “disappointed” by freedom.

While the North and South actively supported their wounded, “Contraband” were given little assistance. Where were these poor souls to go? How would they find work and avoid starvation?   They were being ignored and neglected.

Mrs. Keckley had become a prominent figure among the free Negro citizens of Washington, well respected by her community. After witnessing a fund-raising fair in Washington to help wounded Union soldiers, she approached the pastor of her church about forming a society to assist all those “contraband” who needed food, clothing, medical attention and shelter. An organization was formed to collect money and goods, and to distribute them where they could. They named it the Contraband Relief Association.  Once Negroes were accepted as soldiers in the Union Army, it became The Ladies’ Freedmen and Soldiers Relief Association.

It was one of the first organizations established for Negroes to provide care for their own, and set a standard for subsequent charitable groups, uniting assistance among the capital’s Black Churches.  They organized their own fairs and bazaars, lectures and dances.

President and Mrs. Lincoln Contribute

President Lincoln approved a generous personal donation to the Contraband Relief Association.

Lizzie Keckley had had a very brutal upbringing. Her “masters” were cruel; she was subject to beatings, rape and humiliation, yet she rose above it and was proud and self-sufficient. She was not given to beg for favors. Her prominence as dressmaker to the First Lady, and the genuine kindness she received at the Lincolns’ hands was sufficient.

Mary Lincoln was a generous supporter to the Contraband Relief Association.

However, a month after the Contraband Relief Association was formed, she accompanied Mrs. Lincoln on a trip to New York, and took advantage of that time to tell her about her new “organization.” Mrs. L. was delighted to lead off the fund raising drive, and after requesting support from the President, pledged $200 (which would be far more than $2500 today). Mrs. Lincoln’s influence also brought Lizzie in contact with many prominent Northerners who also contributed generously. Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass were included among the subscribers, and even gave lectures on its behalf.

Both Lincolns would make subsequent contributions from time to time.

Mrs. Keckley: A Fall From Grace

“Behind the Scenes” has been reprinted many times – but it was unsuccessful when it was written. It is said that Robert Lincoln arranged to purchase every existing copy to prevent his mother’s embarrassment.

The rupture of the close friendship between the First Lady and her dressmaker began basically over money. After Lincoln’s assassination, Mary Lincoln needed Mrs. Keckley’s near-constant companionship and nurturing, but she could no longer afford to pay her. Mrs. Keckley needed the money. Devoting all her time to the demanding former First Lady left her no time to tend to her business. She lost her customer base.

Elizabeth Keckley lived a long life, but it was mostly in poverty, relying on assistance from some of the charitable organizations she helped to found.

In a effort to support herself, she penned an autobiographical book with a ghost-writer, called Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. In it, she presented an intimate portrait of the Lincolns including private letters from Mrs. Lincoln. This was a total breach of trust and privacy and Victorian morality, and the relationship between the two women was severed. Mrs. Lincoln never spoke of her again except to refer to her as the “Negro historian.” Mrs. Keckley had not intended to harm or humiliate the former First Lady, and indeed was devastated by the broken relationship.

Elizabeth Keckley later spent time as a dressmaking instructor at Wilberforce University, but eventually died at age 89 in poverty, at a Home for Destitute Colored Women, one of the offshoots of the Contraband Relief Association.

Sources:

Fleischer, Jennifer – Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley – Broadway Books, 2003

Keckley, Elizabeth – Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House – Important Books, 2013

About Feather Schwartz Foster
Feather Schwartz Foster is an author-historian who has made more than 500 appearances discussing presidential history. She teaches adult education at the Christopher Wren Association (affiliated with William and; Mary College), and adult Education programs at Christopher Newport University. She has been a guest on the C-SPAN "First Ladies" program. She has written five books.

From: featherfoster.wordpress.com

Read More

Letter from Charles Francis Adams, Jr. to Abigail Brooks Adams, 8 January 1865

From: masshist.org

Writing across the Atlantic to his family stationed in Europe, Union soldier Charles Francis Adams, Jr., reports here on his new duties commanding an African-American regiment at the Confederate prisoner-of-war hospital in Point Lookout, Md. With his own health nearly broken by a recent bout with malaria, Adams struggles to professionalize his new corps. And, as the conflict winds to a bloody close, Adams reassures his mother that Southern prisoners are receiving adequate treatment from a federal government still capable of "Christian spirit & forbearance." Knowing that "war is cruel in all its parts," Charles was determined to confirm that years of bloodshed had been followed by measures of Northern mercy.

Charles Francis Adams II (1835-1915) was a soldier, businessman, historian, and president of the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1895 until 1915. The son of Charles Francis Adams (1807-1886), the American minister to Great Britain, and Abigail Brooks Adams, he served with distinction as a Union officer during the Civil War. Then Charles entered the railroad industry, rising to the presidency of the Union Pacific Railroad from1884 to 1890. From 1890 to 1915, Adams spoke and wrote widely on historical, educational, economic, and political subjects as an active member of the Harvard Board of Overseers and the Anti-Imperialist League. Adams's works include biographies of Richard Henry Dana and of his father, as well as two key contributions to local history entitled Massachusetts: Its Historians and Its History and Three Episodes of Massachusetts History.

The young cavalryman's path through the war had been an unusual one. He punctuated long months of battle with periods to rest from severe illness, and took a Continental hiatus to visit family. Longing for a career in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry over more predictable genteel skirmishes in the family field of law, Charles reported for duty in Boston in late 1861. His enlistment enraged brother Henry and deeply alarmed their parents. As the cavalryman later confessed in his Autobiography, he was, from the start, an unlikely soldier. He was "not quick, daring, or ready-witted, robust but not muscularly agile." Adams claimed "no personal magnetism" and was, he thought, "rather deficient in mind in time of peril."

The Civil War reshaped Charles as a soldier, historian, and leader. A few miles outside Boston, Adams's commanding officer proved too drunk to guide the handpicked corps of Brahmin rookies, and Charles found himself at the regiment's head. Though he felt "in no way heroic," Adams saw plenty of action. He solicited management tips as a general's aide. He learned to survive on black coffee and half-rotten beef. When winter quarters permitted, Adams holed up in his tent, poring over biographies of British generals who conquered India, soaking up their professional inspiration. After two full years of service, Charles took a quick leave to spend Christmas 1863 in London with Henry and the rest of the family. Then he plunged back in. When Charles suffered on the battlefield, he pulled out rosier memories of Queen Victoria's London and replayed the happy reunion in his mind. "I would like to act it all over again & do not know of one thing I should desire to change from the moment I got up feeling rather blue & that in which Henry put his hand on my shoulder to the last moment where I went to sleep in London," Charles reflected later, on picket in Virginia. "It is all gone now like a dream, but it has left a pleasant track behind it." By January 1865, Adams believed that three years of intermittent conflict had hardened him into, at the very least, an "above average" soldier. At Antietam and Gettysburg, waiting wearily in the deafening dark with his troops; the drone of cannons lulled Charles into a heavy doze.

Another furlough in late 1864, this time to the Adams family farm in Quincy, helped Charles to convalesce from malaria. Like many of his peers, Charles showed signs of difficulty in reconciling the regimen of war with daily life on the Northern home front. At the ancestral home, the same ornaments and paintings lined the walls, and every morning Charles awoke to the excited babble of his nieces and nephews. But Charles, articulating the trauma of the generation of Northern and Southern soldiers who returned to a drastically changed America, already felt like the war had made him a man set apart from society: "I am a solitary, restless stranger visiting the cradle of my [early] life & the grave of my race," he wrote. Again, Charles returned to the now-familiar scene of war, accepting command of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. When Richmond fell, he swept into the desolate city, riding proudly at the head of an African-American regiment.

Back at the American legation in London, Charles's dispatches from the Southern front were shared, discussed, and addressed by family members with greater attention than most. Letters to and from Charles stitched together popular literary quotes, philosophical musings culled from the Harvard recitation drills that all Adams men endured, and snippets of Scripture. One of Charles's final missions before his August 1865 discharge came at the special request of his mother, Abigail, who was horrified by newspaper reports of prisoner abuse and photographs of coffins stacked at Point Lookout. The site, where prisoners more often died from malaria or scurvy than hunger, lacked regular supplies of clean water, and the professional medical staff were few. Point Lookout inmates, who built stoves to heat their tents, suffered from the same illnesses—exhaustion and vitamin deficiency—as did their guards, like Charles.

Acting at Abigail's request, Charles inspected the camp hospital and interviewed prisoners, at least one of whom he remembered capturing three years earlier. Then Charles wrote to reassure his mother that Confederate prisoners of war—enduring a state that he called the "purest form of squalid misery to which God's image is anywhere reduced" in any war—were treated with "liberal" and "Christian" standards of care. The young soldier's mission resonated with the needs of the hour, and also with the social concerns of the day: to provide adequate Christian succor to those in suffering. The rise of Civil War memorial societies, along with professional morticians and sanitary aid commissions, would radically alter American politics within a quarter-century.

Readied for public service by his days of war, Charles Francis Adams moved on, too. That November, he married Mary Hone Ogden, and commenced a prolific career in civil leadership.

Sources for Further Reading:
The Adams Family Papers contains the correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, literary manuscripts, speeches, legal and business papers, and other papers of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Charles Francis Adams, as well as papers of many other Adams family members and incoming correspondence from hundreds of major and minor figures in America and Europe.

Family dispatches about the Civil War era are found in the Adams Family "All Gens." section. Although Charles Francis, Jr., destroyed the bulk of his wartime diary while writing his Autobiography, his papers, pamphlets, and diaries, are held here.

Adams, Charles F., Jr. Charles Francis Adams by His Son. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900.

----. Charles Francis Adams, 1835-1915: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.

----. Massachusetts: Its Historians and Its History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893.

----. Richard Henry Dana: a Biography. Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1890.

----. Three Episodes of Massachusetts History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892.

Ford, Worthington C., ed. A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920.

---. "Charles Francis Adams (1838-1915)." Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 53 (1918):776-780.

Gillispie, James M. Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2008.

Perkins, Elliot, John A. Abbott, and Thomas B. Adams. "Three Views of Charles Francis Adams, II." Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., 72 (1960):212-237.

Read More

Discovering "Blind Tom," The Slave Turned Civil War-Era Pop Star

By Jeffery Renard Allen, 9-10-14

Several years ago I encountered the story of Thomas Greene Wiggins in the pages of Oliver Sacks’ wonderful study of unusual neurological case studies, An Anthropologist on Mars. Born a slave in Georgia in 1849, Wiggins was one of the first African-American classical performers and composers, a well-known and widely celebrated cultural phenomenon from 1858 when he first began giving stage recitals on the piano, through the 1870s and 1880s when his popularity waned. Under the stage name “Blind Tom,” he gave mind-blowing “exhibitions” where he performed interpretations of pieces by venerated composers such as Mozart, Bach, Chopin, and Liszt, while also engaging in far less conventional musical spectacle. He conjured up imitations on his piano of natural and man-made phenomena such as rainstorms and sewing machines, playing and singing three songs at once in different keys, and inviting members of the audience to test his powers of memory with their own original compositions, newly heard tunes that he would reproduce note for note before venturing off on his own variations and improvisations.

I was especially struck by Sacks’ description of Wiggins’ stage performances, his “exhibition,” as the showmanship, imitations, and other tricks seemed so far ahead of their time, deserving comparison to 20th-century performers like Roland Kirk and Jimi Hendrix, among others. I decided to find out all I could about this forgotten musical pioneer. A good year after reading Sacks, I was lucky enough to be rewarded with a fellowship to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers where I could begin to research Wiggins in earnest, having by then decided to use Wiggins as the basis of a novel, which carried the simple working title Tom. (Well, initially I thought Wiggins would be a principal character in a novel with three independent story lines like some of Faulkner’s novels or Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood. Then another fellow at the center told me, “Cut the pretense. Just write about Blind Tom.” It took two years of starts and stops to figure out that she was right.)

A contemporary of fellow virtuosos such as Liszt and Rubinstein, Wiggins was by some accounts the highest-paid pianist of the 19th century, earning more than $100,000 annually during the period of his greatest popularity. In 1860, he performed for President James Buchanan at the White House. At the start of the Civil War, he was such a draw and respected figure that President Abraham Lincoln gave serious consideration to the idea of enlisting him in the service of the Union. And other noted contemporaries had much to say about him. Mark Twain speculated that Wiggins was a kind of “angel” who derived his musical abilities from supernatural forces. Praising the military strategies of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Ulysses S. Grant remarked, “Forrest fights the way Blind Tom touches the keys.” Willa Cather reviewed a Blind Tom recital for her college newspaper and was so impressed by his playing that she called him a “human music box.” She would go on to model the character of Blind D’Arnault after Wiggins in her celebrated novel My Antonia. Wiggins remained a public figure even after his retirement from stage, the constant subject of rumor and speculation about his fate and whereabouts. His “death” often made the headlines, with reports of him having been struck down by some affliction or claimed by a catastrophe.

But these were only the historical facts about a performer named “Blind Tom.” Who was the actual person, Thomas Greene Wiggins? This person is far harder to know and understand because the reputed firsthand reports about him are informed by the racial prejudices of the time. Added to this, Wiggins himself had remained largely silent during his life. He gave no interviews. He dictated no letters, essays, or narratives. This silence cost him. His owner and manager arranged for him to give concerts with proceeds going to the Confederacy. Because he either could not or would not speak on his own behalf, a Cincinnati court ruled not long after the close of the Civil War that he was incapable of managing his own affairs and so appointed his “owner,” Gen. Thomas Neil Bethune, a newspaper publisher and propagandist for secession, as his legal guardian. Two decades later, when Wiggins was in his late twenties, Bethune’s daughter-in-law sued for and was awarded custody of him.

How to explain Wiggins’ silence? Was he so completely unaware of his place in the world and incapable of understanding his plight that he had no reason to speak? One writer opines such, suggesting that Wiggins was fortunate because his blindness and mental incapacities saved him from knowing that he was either a Negro or a slave.

Such assumptions about Wiggins’ mental capacities have raised doubts about his musical abilities and deemed him unworthy of serious study by experts in the field. And during those rare instances where music historians choose to write about him, they do so only to hold him up for ridicule and quick dismissal as a serious artist. In his important survey The Great Pianists: From Mozart to the Present, Harold C. Schonberg speaks highly of some of Wiggins’ American contemporaries, calling them “fine and sincere musicians [who] quietly started to raise the standards of piano playing, and of music making in general.” But when he gets to Wiggins, Schoenberg engages in snide and vicious musical scapegoating: “[T]here was one celebrity who for a while attracted more attention than all of them put together—the curious and pathetic Blind Tom.” For Schoenberg, Wiggins was a “mental defective” who “could not do a fiftieth of the things credited to him. As a matter of fact, he could not do anything except play back a few tunes he knew.”

Of course, a “mental defective” would be of interest primarily to medical professionals like Oliver Sacks who specialize in studies of the brain. Sacks views Tom as one of a hundred or so “documented” savants, noting that savants “do not seem to develop as normal talents do. They are fully-fledged from the start. Savant talents, further, have a more autonomous, even automatic quality than normal ones. They do not seem to occupy the mind or attention fully and do not seem to connect, as normal talents do, to the rest of the person. All this is strongly suggestive of a neural mechanism different from that which underlies normal talents.” What this all means ultimately for Sacks is that savants are incapable of imagination and creativity. “Creativity has to do with inner life—with the flow of ideas and strong feelings. Creativity, in this sense, was probably never possible for Blind Tom.”

In deeming Wiggins an abnormal talent, Sacks is not all that far from those 19th-century observers who thought “Blind Tom” was under the control of supernatural forces, “either God or the Devil,” a notion that gave many white people who attended Wiggins’ concerts a palatable explanation for why a black person could play the piano, an instrument requiring skill and refinement, qualities that they believed black people did not possess, proof found in the black person’s penchant for the common “Negro” instruments of violin, drums, and banjo. And the whites in the audience believed that it was these same supernatural forces that enabled Wiggins to play the piano far better than any of them would ever be able to play their parlor piano forte. (Every good middle-class home had one.) Indeed, the supernatural justification was an idea of such lasting credibility that magician Harry Houdini chose to debunk it in his 1924 diatribe titled Houidini: A Magician Among the Spirits as part of his ongoing effort to reveal natural causes for paranormal claims. Wiggins’ ability to reproduce unfamiliar compositions note for note is for Houidini nothing more than an incredible feat of memory. In the end, what interests Houidini is not Blind Tom the musician, but Blind Tom the magician, the charlatan, a creator of musical illusion as opposed to music itself.

With the exception of Eileen Southern’s seminal 1971 study The Music of Black Americans: A History, African-American scholars by and large have shown little interest in Wiggins given their focus on folk idioms like the spirituals, ragtime, and the blues. (Of course, Wiggins’ apparent support of the Confederacy hardly makes him a suitable candidate for celebration and canonization, however much one sympathizes with him as a victim of white racism.) Amiri Baraka is the only noted black writer who has tried to evaluate the compass and range of Wiggins’ talent, using a 1999 recording by John Davis, a white pianist and collector of Blind Tom memorabilia based in Brooklyn, who travels the country giving recitals of Wiggins’ compositions, as the basis for his judgments. In his linear notes to the CD John Davis Plays Blind Tom, Baraka writes, “Listening to Wiggins’ compositions dispels immediately the canard that he is merely imitating. Though the pieces he played reflect the Romantic European concert ‘classics’ of the period, the careful balance of the form, the delicacy and lyric grace of even the most impressionistic passages, the skillful use of arpeggio, crescendo, the movement of the work from the lightest piano to roaring forte, mark Wiggins’ compositions as the thoughtful musings and deliberate organization of sound that can only reflect a humanity and creativity ironically much more developed than the Yahoos who unquestioningly accepted his characterization as ‘less than human.’”

The scholar who has single-handedly done the most to give Wiggins his rightful place in musical history as both a recitalist and composer is the late Geneva Southall, an African-American pianist and musicologist who taught at the University of Minnesota. Southall devoted her academic career to unearthing every scrap of information she could about Wiggins, research that she compiled into a three-volume biography published between 1979 and 1999. It is Southall’s contention that Tom’s owner, Gen. Bethune, and his manager, Perry Oliver, conspired to create the character of Blind Tom the “idiot savant” as a gimmick to draw people to his concerts. Oliver went so far as to engineer the publication of a promotional biography, which depicted Blind Tom as a “natural genius” who had never received any musical instruction and who never needed to study or practice. In painstaking detail, Southall brings to light the true facts about Wiggins the musician. He had extensive musical training in European classical tradition throughout his career, starting with his mistress Mrs. Bethune, a piano teacher. He practiced daily. As well, this supposedly natural and untutored “genius” received endorsements from respected musicians and music instructors. Likewise those who reviewed him in the press were astounded by his performances, notwithstanding the occasional negative review. Wiggins’ ability to reproduce unfamiliar songs on stage went hand in hand with a musical memory encompassing more than seven thousand compositions, an astonishing number far surpassing any other performer in recorded history, including Mozart, who is reported to have had a memory of 5,000 compositions.

To show that Wiggins was more than a mere imitator, Southall points out that he penned hundreds of compositions, several of which were best-sellers. Such is the neglect that these compositions have never been collected, let alone interpreted by others on stage or in recording, with the noted exceptions of Davis and Southall. Southall gave numerous recitals featuring the material and she was first in recording some of them, a recording which has never found general release to the public and is only available on a single tape housed at the University of Minnesota library.

Despite the excellent musicology and unearthing of facts, Southall’s biographies left me no closer in understanding Wiggins the man. This person remained silent to me. How would I tell his story? How would I represent his consciousness, the mode and manner of his thinking? What would he sound like when he spoke? With so much undecided, for the longest time I avoided listening to the Davis and Southall recordings because I feared that their interpretations would too heavily shape the sound of Wiggins’ music I was attempting to construct in my head and on paper. Then too, I had no way of gauging the accuracy of the compositions themselves since parties other than Wiggins had transcribed them. When I finally decided to have a listen, I found the recordings unremarkable and uninteresting. Wiggins’ compositions show the influence of the great European classical composers on the one hand, and on the other those sentimental motifs and conventions that defined American instrumental music at the time. Based on this small sheath of compositions, one would be hard put to make the case for Wiggins as a great composer.

But the listening did make one thing clear. The nature of Wiggins’ genius, the range of his creativity and imagination, was expressed in performance, not in composition. Blind Tom the artist, the maker, found his métier on stage. In the same way that Wiggins’ voice and thoughts were denied to me, ultimately his music was denied, the virtuosity and vitality of his performing self, because all I had about these performances were the words of others.

As I see it, on stage Wiggins was fully in line with the changing same of African-American musical expression although he never played “black” music. Black people in America have always taken “European” instruments and made them “sing.” Conversely, we make our voices sound like instruments, machines, and phenomenon from the natural world through the use of grunts, hollers, chants, and moans. And in dance the black body does things bodies are not supposed to be capable of. Little wonder that Wiggins would whirl on the stage, that Monk would do his weird steps at the piano. Perhaps it is not hyperbole when James Monroe Trotter states in his 1881 study Music and Some Highly Musical People that Wiggins was “unquestionably and conspicuously the most wonderful musician the world has ever known.” Here was a blind black slave who could play anything and do anything on stage, who could demonstrate the “infinite plasticity” that Stanley Crouch wisely says characterizes African-American music. Wiggins took the format of the recital and pulled it every which way, making it part dance, oratory, song, all the while playing the piano against the classical grain and making it sound like something other than a piano and making it do what no piano is supposed to do.

One no doubt has to be aware of the historical and cultural particulars that in part made Wiggins who he was as musician and performer, but one can also see him as an artist ahead of his times, a shortcut to modernity tragically trapped in an almost feudal era that had yet to invent an idiom that could allow for the full expression of his genius. Wiggins points ahead not only to great pianists like Art Tatum — interestingly enough, Tatum was born in 1909, one year after Wiggins died — and Oscar Peterson, but also to many other great African-American instrumentalists of the 20th century who would make lasting contributions to musical art by refusing to rigidly categorize their practice, and who would instead, as Miles Davis famously put it, “Play what the day recommends.” That is, Wiggins’ approach to singing and the piano was syncretic, a combining of modes and traditions, a moving beyond what’s there rather than a staying within accepted and set forms and genres. The rigid categories of ethnic and cultural specificity which so often define music — conventional versus experimental, religious versus secular, popular versus art, classical versus jazz, European versus African-American, etc. — reflect the rigid and arbitrary categories that so often categorize people according to pseudo-biological notions of race, especially in the 19th century.

Could it be that Wiggins’ blindness did indeed afford him a barrier from racism since his inability to see color, to see skin, saved him from buying into the false notions and prescriptions of race? On this level at least biology worked in his favor. White people were invisible to him. He had no reason to believe what they said about him, and he had no reason to speak to them or explain himself.
Where nature and fate withheld sight from him, Wiggins himself made the decision to hold his own tongue, to remain silent. Interesting that the few statements attributed to him come in the form of refusals. He turned down requests for hymns by saying, “Tom doesn’t play church music.” On one occasion, his manager took him out to the street to have his shoes blacked by a band of African-American boys, only for Wiggins to walk away, saying, “Tom won’t have his shoes blacked by no niggers.” The greatest refusal of all came in the form of a self-imposed retirement from public performance after he had been giving recitals for more than two decades. Wiggins simply refused to go on stage to play. During his retirement, journalists would come knocking at his residence with inquiries about “Blind Tom.” Wiggins would respond, “Blind Tom doesn’t live here.”

However they appear on the surface these refusals are rife with ambiguity. Wiggins’ unwillingness to play “church music” might be read as a rejection of Christianity hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness. Perhaps he refused to have his shoes blacked by “niggers” in a show of solidarity with fellow African-Americans who were also under the thumbs and boots of white people. He stopped giving concerts because he would no longer allow white people to profit from his body. And during his retirement he refused to recognize and answer to the name “Blind Tom” as this name represented a character that white people had constructed for their own enrichment and comfort.

His protest took the form of these low-keyed refusals. And they took the form of silence. Cut off from his parents and siblings, and dependent on white people for his daily survival, silence was the only means of agency available to him. In place of words he let his hands and feet do the talking and used his voice as an instrument, leaving white people to read these displays of physical and vocal dexterity any way they wanted. He did not seek their recognition or acceptance or praise. What he gave them for a time was performance, a making in the moment that they could not categorize or control. What he refused to give them was the self behind the act.

Wiggins returned to the stage in 1903 during the well-paying vaudeville era. His health quickly declined, his physical woes forcing him into complete retirement in 1905. He died in New York City three years later, in 1908, the same year that the vociferous Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight, boxing champion of the world. (Wiggins died in June, Johnson won the championship in December.) Johnson’s victory signaled the start of the New Negro era, a political and cultural movement that would reach its peak in the 1920s with the Harlem Renaissance.

Where Johnson had fists (and defiant words and transgressive ways, habits of being) to fight the white world, Wiggins had only himself, a self he could withhold from the public, a mouth that would not speak, a tongue that refused to tell. In the end, Wiggins does not give himself up to any medical professional, biographer, or novelist for that matter. In his refusal to speak, “Blind Tom” remains beyond the purview of all who seek to tell or claim his story.
***
Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999); a story collection, Holding Pattern (Graywolf, 2008); and the widely celebrated novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His latest novel, Song of the Shank, is in stores now.

From: buzzfeed.com

Read More

Dr. Platt H. Skinner – Early Educator, Advocate, and Abolitionist

By Reid Dunlavey, Feb 2012

Conducting research on forgotten events and people that have impacted disability history can be difficult and at the same time very rewarding. This is the case in regards to a little known educator named Platt H. Skinner. In 1858 Skinner opened his “School for the Instruction of the Colored Deaf, Dumb and Blind” in what is today Niagara Falls, New York near the Suspension Bridge that crossed the border to Canada. How Skinner arrived in Western New York is an interesting story in itself, being chased from his first school in Washington, D.C. as it went up in flames. Some believe his abolitionist views led to his forced migration to the north and to his decision to establish his new school close to a known escape route to freedom for runaway slaves.

Platt H. Skinner’s arrival in Niagara Falls is a benefit for conducting research on the person, his school and activities in the region. While he was here he and his students published a newspaper called The Mute and Blind. The papers have articles on various topic including religion, health and a focus on the abolitionists of his time. Skinner also gives a detailed account of his time in the District of Columbia and his travels north to New York. They are a wealth of information, but using the newspapers can be risky considering the bias of the author. One of the best resources, and the most gratifying, I found while conducting research on Skinner was an 1858 published “Semi-Annual Report.” It was tucked away at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Research Library and was even a surprise to the librarians that it was in their holdings. The report offers details of the founding, financing, and the future of the school. Skinner makes his guidelines for admission clear on the first page; the children must be black and have “deaf ears and a mute tongue, or blind eyes.” This was the case for the nine children at the school by 1858.

In many ways the report is a fundraising tool for Skinner’s school but it is also a ledger for donations to the school in the form of cash and provisions. This ledger will be the next resource for further research on Skinner. He was known for traveling, with students in tow, to raise funds by giving lectures and demonstrating the skills he had taught the children. The ledger lists these demonstrations and lectures, as well as donations, which were given throughout southern Canada from Windsor, Ontario to just outside on Montreal, Quebec. The next step in the research will be to mine the locations visited by Skinner in Canada to try to determine if he recruited any students from these visits and to discover any new information on the educator.

From: museumofdisability.org

Read More

Dr. P.H. Skinner: Controversial Educator of the Deaf, Blind and Mute, and Niagara Falls, New York Abolitionist (Article excerpt)

By Boston, Michael

Many Americans who worked to abolish the institution of slavery are unknown or forgotten. Some of them were "conductors" of the celebrated Underground Railroad. Some supported the abolition movement with financial contributions. Others secretly, and sometimes openly, taught fugitives and free blacks how to read and write, often to the displeasure of their communities. Collectively, they were the force that demanded that their elected representatives end slavery. Without their courage and persistence, slavery might have lasted much longer.

P. H. Skinner (or: Dr. Platt Henry Skinner) was one of those unsung individuals, who was vehemently opposed to slavery and expressed his views vocally and in print. Moreover, evidence indicates he may even have participated in Underground Railroad activities in Niagara Falls, New York, one of the final stations on the journey to freedom. Nonetheless, most sources documenting Skinner's activities underscore his role as an educator and a controversial figure.

We first encounter Skinner in 1856 in Washington, D. C., when he appeared in Washington with five children who were deaf, blind or mute. He had brought these children with him from Canada via New York State. They were the children of fugitive slaves and had been born in Canada. When he came to Washington, Skinner had plans for establishing a school for deaf, blind and mute children. He let his ideas be known, and he attracted the attention of Amos Kendal, a journalist, businessman and Democratic politician, whose wife was deaf. Kendal, who was about seventy when he met Skinner, had been a key member of President Andrew Jackson's cabinet. Kendal helped Skinner to acquire "a house and two acres, helped him set up a board of directors, and introduced a bill in Congress, which rapidly passed, incorporating the Columbian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, and providing an allowance of $150 a year for each local child admitted. To make the public aware of the school, Skinner or Kendal announced in an advertisement in The National Era, a local Washington newspaper, that Friday afternoon of each week would be set apart for the reception of visitors at the Institution. They also invited their friends. Other advertisements to make the public aware of the school were also published from time to time.

A few months after the school opened, a washerwoman of one of Kendal's friends, who had a son in Skinner's school, complained to her employer that her son had been badly cared for and neglected. Her employer informed Kendal, and Kendal and another board member immediately went to the school. The school's door was locked and the children that were there did not know how to unlock it. Kendal and the board member knocked the door down and entered the school. There they observed that the children had indeed been neglected, and two of them lay on a pallet, moaning. The children appeared to have been suffering from heat exhaustion. It is not clear if Skinner was in error, but he appeared to be responsible. Kendal sued in court and obtained custody of the five children Skinner had brought from New York, while the other children were temporarily returned to their parents until Kendal found a new school principal and building.

Skinner, however, protested and put up a strong fight, arguing that his students were not badly cared for or neglected, and that he was being persecuted, not only due to a misunderstanding, but also because he was a northerner and an abolitionist who taught and practiced equality at his school. He allowed black children to eat at his table with him, and he taught black and white mute and blind children together in his school on equal terms.

The fact that Skinner was raising equality issues in Washington should be understood fully in the context of the times. Up until 1850, the domestic slave trade was practiced extensively in Washington, and indeed the city was a major slave-trading center. …

From: questia.com

Read More

Harriet Tubman USA: Underground Railroad "Conductor", Nurse, Spy, 1820/1821 - 3-10-1913

From: civilwar.org

Perhaps one of the best known personalities of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman was born into slavery as Araminta Ross, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, sometime in 1820 or 1821. As a child, Tubman was “hired out” to various masters who proved to be particularly cruel and abusive to her. As a result of a head injury caused by one of these men, she suffered from seizures and “visions” for the rest of her life, which she believed were sent from God.

In 1840, Tubman’s father was freed as a result of a stipulation in his master’s will, but continued to work for his former owner’s family. Although Tubman, her mother, and her siblings were also supposed to be freed, the law was ignored and they remained enslaved. Tubman married a free black in 1844, and changed her first name from Araminta to Harriet.

In 1849, Tubman became seriously ill with complications from her head injury, and her owner decided to sell her, but could not find a buyer. After her owner’s sudden death, the family began selling off all of the slaves. Not wanting to have her family separated, Tubman was determined to escape. A first attempt, in which Tubman was accompanied by her brothers, was aborted when they had second thoughts. Tubman decided to try again on her own, and she escaped via the Underground Railroad into Pennsylvania.

Tubman settled in Philadelphia and was able to support herself doing odd jobs. But in 1850, word came that her niece and her two children were to be sold. Tubman was determined to help, and went back to Maryland. With the assistance of her brother-in-law, Tubman was able to bring her niece and the two children back safely to Philadelphia. This was the first of many trips that Tubman would make to lead family members and others to freedom. On one expedition, Tubman contacted her husband in the hopes that he would follow her to Pennsylvania, but he had remarried and preferred to remain in Maryland.

Over the course of 11 years, Tubman rescued over 70 slaves from Maryland, and assisted 50 or 60 others in making their way to Canada. During this time, her reputation in the abolitionist community grew, and she became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and John Brown. She also moved her base of operations to Auburn, New York, closer to the Canadian border. Tubman conducted her last rescue mission in November 1861, as the Civil War enveloped the nation.

Tubman offered her services to the Union Army, and in early 1862, she went to South Carolina to provide badly needed nursing care for black soldiers and newly liberated slaves. Working with General David Hunter, Tubman also began spying and scouting missions behind Confederate lines. In June of 1863, she accompanied Colonel James Montgomery in an assault on several plantations along the Combahee River, rescuing more than 700 slaves. Her deed was celebrated in the press and she became even more famous.

With the end of the war, Tubman returned to Auburn, NY and married a Civil War veteran. Although her service in the Union Army was much publicized, she had great difficulty in getting a pension from the government, but was eventually awarded a nurse’s pension in the 1880s. She did not stay idle in her later years, taking on the cause of women’s suffrage with the same determination she had shown for abolition.

Tubman established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged on a property adjacent to her own. After undergoing brain surgery to try to alleviate the symptoms from the head injury that had plagued her since childhood, and being essentially penniless, Tubman was forced to move into the home herself in 1911. She died there on March 10, 1913, surrounded by family and friends. She was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

Read More

Paddlewheelers And Hospital Ships

From: minecreek.info

When Robert Fulton designed the first working steamboat in 1807, he probably didn't realize that his invention would lead to one of the most interesting innovations of the Civil War. Steamboats revolutionized river travel during the 1800s: for the first time, people were able to travel up and down America's mighty waterways under motorized power, rather than relying on muscle or the wind. Steamboats became the fastest and most efficient way to transport people and goods up and down the United States rivers. St. Louis, Missouri, a major port on the Mississippi River, had more than 3,000 steamboat arrivals in 1850 alone.

When the Civil War erupted, control of the country's rivers became more important than ever. Both the Confederate and Union armies had flotillas of boats they used as floating barracks, supply ships, and gunboats for fighting against artillery units.

Contrabands to Freedom
For many runaway slaves in the South, the best chance for freedom was to get on board a Union boat like Red Rover as it steamed up or down the Mississippi River. These slaves were called "contraband," and many ships hired them to serve as cabin boys, carpenters, laborers, cooks, stewards, crewman, and nurses. Working on board Red Rover had many advantages, one being the pay: the ship's records show that several chambermaids were paid$20 a month for their work. In comparison, the base pay for infantrymen in the Union army was only $13 a month.

Confederate Paddlewheelers
The Confederate paddlewheeler Red Rover was on the Mississippi River near St. Louis when it was captured by a Union gunboat. The Confederates tried to sink Red Rover to put it out of use, but the Union was able to dredge it and repair it for service. And although the Union was desperate for more gunboats to patrol the Mississippi and its tributaries, it decided to try something new with the Red Rover, the army refitted Red Rover as a floating hospital.

Transporting wounded soldiers by boat was nothing new for either army, but it was usually a pretty terrible experience for soldiers who were already paddlewheelers—pros and cons:

One reason paddlewheelers became so prevalent during the 1800s was that they were ideally suited to river travel: most paddleboats had a draft of no more than 6 or 7 feet, and some had as few as 4 feet, which meant they were able to steam up and down the wide, shallow rivers of the American West much better than any deep-hulled boats. The problem with them, however, was that their flat hulls were very difficult to maneuver if the weather or water got rough, since steering a paddlewheeler was very much like steering a giant box.

In bad shape: the boats were loud, dirty, and rarely had the supplies or personnel necessary to treat illness or injury. Transport ships usually picked up wounded soldiers at the port closest to the battle, brought them to the nearest friendly hospital, and dropped them off. Not a lot of medicine was being practiced on these ships, and the conditions were difficult.

Neither the Union nor Confederacy had ever created a complete hospital aboard a steamship before, and Red Rover was refitted with innovations never before found on a ship, all designed to help the sick and wounded. It had separate operating and amputation rooms, and the windows were covered with gauze to keep cinders and smoke from the smokestacks away from the know your slang patients. Rooms at the back of the ship had open walls to allow for better air circulation, and patients who had contagious diseases were put in these, as well as on several separate floating barges attached to the back of the ship. This helped keep the spread of very contagious diseases, such as measles and typhus, from infecting everyone on board. Red Rover also carried enough medical and food supplies for two hundred patients and the entire crew for up to three months—everything the hospital staff needed was on board, making the ship completely self-sufficient if it needed to be.

And while Red Rover was remarkable as the first complete floating hospital, what was more amazing was her crew: it consisted not only of the first women serving in the U.S. armed forces, but also the first African-American women hired by either side.

Red Rover's reputation as a hospital with conveniences, comfortable accommodations, and very caring medical staff grew quickly; so quickly, in fact, that fleet commander Charles Henry Davis had to issue an order to limit the number of patients being sent to the ship—it seemed like every sick or injured soldier wanted to be cared for on Red Rover. The order apparently didn't work all the time, since the ship's log shows that many patients came on without papers, or simply under the verbal approval of particular doctors or high-ranking officials.

Red Rover transported and cared for soldiers throughout the war, shuttling from port to port on the Mississippi River. Most of its hospital duties came to an end after the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863, which gave the Union control over most of the waterways and marked the end of most of the river action on the western front. For the rest of the war, Red Rover was primarily used to transport supplies.

Civil War Facts & Trivia

*The women who served as nurses on Red Rover are credited with officially being the first women to serve on board a naval vessel. In most accounts, the nuns who served on Red Rover are given the credit for being the first U.S. naval nurses, even though the ship's records show that the contraband women were hired outright after being welcomed on board, making them the first paid women naval employees.

*From the end of the Civil War to 1908, women were not allowed to serve in the navy.

*The majority of Red Rovers crew was African-American: at one point, black sailors and crew outnumbered white crew by two to one. It wasn't until 1865 that white crewmen outnumbered black crewmen.

Read More

HARRIET TUBMAN IS DEAD

“I  GO  TO  PREPARE  A PLACE  FOR  YOU”
THE   LAST   WORDS   SHE   UTTERED.
_______________

__
From: AUBURN  CITIZEN, TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 1913

BORN   IN SLAVERY NEARLY 100 YEARS AGO
________________

She Rendered Wonderful Service To The Cause Of The
Abolitionists And Her “Underground Railroad” Had A

Record Of Never Running A Train Off The Track or

Losing A Single Passenger--Too Feeble To Withstand

Pneumonia—A  Sketch  Of  Her Career.      

     Harriet Tubman Davis, Aunt Harriet, died last night of pneumonia at the home she founded on South Street Road near here.  Born lowly, she lived a life of exalted self – sacrifice and her end closes a career that has taken its place in American history. Her true services to the black race were never known but her true worth could never have been rewarded by human agency.

       Harriet’s death was indeed the passing of a brave woman. There was no regret but on the contrary she rejoiced in her final hours.  Conscious within a few hours of her final passing she joined with those who came to pray for her and the final scene in the long drama of her life was quite as thrilling as the many that had gone before.

        Yesterday afternoon when the trained nurse, Mrs. Martha Ridgeway of Elmira, and Dr. G. B. Mack had decided that her death was but the question of a few hours, Harriet asked for her friends, Rev. Charles A. Smith and Rev. E. U. A. Brooks, clergyman of the Zion A. M. E. Church. They with Eliza E. Peterson, national superintendent for temperance work among colored people of the W.C.T.U., who came here from Texarkana, Tex., to see Harriet, and others, joined in a final service which Harriet directed.  She joined in the singing when her cough did not prevent, and after receiving the sacrament she sank back in bed ready to die.

LOVE TO ALL THE CHURCHES

          To the clergyman she said “Give my love to all the churches” and after a severe coughing spell she blurted out in a thick voice this farewell passage which she had learned from Matthew:  “I go away to prepare a place for you, and where I am ye may be also”.  She soon afterward lapsed into a comatose condition and death came at 8:30 o’clock last evening. Those present when she died included Rev. and Mrs. Smith and Miss Ridgeway, the colored nurse.

         Two grandnieces of Harriet, Miss Alida Stewart and Miss Eva Stewart, were in Washington attending the inaugural and had not returned to Auburn.  Harriet ‘s nephew, William H. Stewart and his son, Charles Stewart, were in attendance during the final hours.

          Harriet’s age was unknown. Born a slave of slave parents her lowly origin did not become a matter of sufficient moment to demand chronicling until it was too late to obtain other than a vague story of her childhood.

          Today, more-than half a century after John Brown said”  “I bring you one of the bravest and best persons on this continent” when he presented Harriet to Wendell Phillips, a glance over her remarkable career shows that the hero of Harper’s Ferry might well be quoted in selecting Harriet Tubman’s epitaph.

FIRST MARRIED IN 1844

          Harriet was first married to John Tubman, the marriage taking place in 1844.  She became separated from her husband at the time of the Civil War when she was active in the violation of the fugitive slave law.  Her husband died during this period. A number of years ago she married Nelson Davis of this city.

          Harriet Tubman-Davis, or “Aunt Harriet” as she was familiarly known to Auburnians, died in the modest institution she founded here several years ago under the name of The Harriet Tubman Home For Aged and Indigent Negroes.  The building is located out on South Street Road and the property on which it is located adjoins a place that was given to Harriet by William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State.  The place had been deeded to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and among the leading colored people who is interested in it is Bishop G.R. Harris, D.D. of Salisbury, N.C., one of the most prominent Zion A.M.E. clergymen.  Booker T. Washington, on his visit here two years ago, considered a visit to Harriet Tubman as the most important duty he had here on that occasion.  It had been Aunt Harriet’s hope that her home in Auburn would receive support on a par with that extended to Hampton and Tuskegee, but her hopes were not realized. Up to the last, however, Harriet labored faithfully for her Home and spent much of her time about town seeking local aid for her charges.

EXACT AGE NOT ESTABLISHED      

            Her age has never been established, but it is known that she was over 90 years and possibly was even more than 95 years.  To a reporter, who met her some time before she was finally compelled to remain at the Home. She replied to the questions of her age:  Indeed I don’t know, Sir.  “I am somewhere’s about 90 to 95.  I don’t know when I was born, but I am pretty near 95”.  She was in the office of the Superintendent of Charities F. J. Lattimore  at the time, and her mind was unusually clear.

MEDAL FROM QUEEN VICTORIA

           It is no exaggeration to say that Harriet Tubman, as she is best known, furnishes a career of self sacrifice that, in her services to the Negro race, does not fall far short of the brilliancy of Joan of Arc, Grace Darling or Florence Nightingale.  She has been honored by thousand and exalted personages have been equally eager to pay homage with humble folk that she labored for. She was a friend of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, John Brown, Gerrit Smith, Seward, Lincoln and others connected with the Anti-Slavery period.  One of the treasured possessions that she leaves behind is a small medal given her by Queen Victoria.

HER UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

          Her premier claim to recognition rests in the wonderful manner in which she operated for 15 years the Underground Railway by which she personally conducted 300 runaway slaves safely into Canadian territory.  Her shrewdness in doing  this work was nothing short of marvelous.  She made no less than 19 trips down into the Southland in her dangerous work, and this in the face of the fact that her own eyes beheld in every railroad station and post office the placards of the State of Maryland which offered $12,000 reward for her body, dead or alive; while a reward of $40,000 additional was offered by an association of Southern planters whose slaves she was spiriting away to freedom.

           Fortunately for Harriet she was unable to read so that her very ignorance probably was her salvation, because she proceeded in simple faith to carry out her plans without the strategy that might have been observed had she known that her life was in constant danger.  Indeed her instinctive knowledge that danger was near when such proved to be true, caused her friends, both negro and white, to believe that she was divinely inspired.  The prices set on her head were high but nobody ever succeeded in capturing Harriet, although she had many narrow escapes and one occasion hid herself and six fugitives slaves in “potato holes” dug in the fields, the runaways covering themselves completely with dirt.  The Eliza crossing–the ice episode of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not more thrilling than many of the escapes in which Harriet figured.

          In later years Harriet’s wonderful career was recognized by several friends and one, a daughter of one of the professors of Auburn Theological Seminary, collected the facts that were then available concerning Harriet Tubman and made the aged Negress the heroine of the book: Harriet, The Moses of Her People.

HER WIT WAS SHARP

            Harriet’s sharp wits maintained their edge in later years.  In a visit to Rochester just prior to the death of the late Susan B. Anthony  the latter presented Harriet as the “Conductor” of the Underground Railway.  Harriet promptly declared.  “Yes, ladies I wuz de conductor ob de Underground’ Railway an “ I kin say what mos’ conductors can’t say—dat I nebber run my train off de track an’ I nebber los’ a passenger”.

BORN IN SLAVERY IN MARYLAND

          Harriet was born in slavery, her parents being Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green.  Her birthplace was on an estate in Dorchester County, Maryland, and the time has been fixed as in the decade of 1815 – 1825. In later years her relatives became known under the name of Stewart and have borne that name for over 60 years. Harriet took her parents and brothers to Canada but came to Auburn with her kinsmen when the Civil War settled for all times the question of slavery. As a child Harriet was known as “Araminta” but later was called “Harriet” and lived on a plantation near Cambridge, Md. Those who tried to obtain a definite date for her birth when her career was being studied 30 years ago decided that 1814 was the year, but Harriet herself did not believe that she was so close to rounding a century when she talked with the reporter.

SKULL FRACTURED AT 12 YEARS

          As a child of six years she was apprenticed to a weaver but was turned to work in the fields.  When she was about 12 years of age she was struck on the head by a metal weight thrown by an angry overseer at a fleeing insubordinate slave. The blow resulted in a fracture of Harriet’s skull and caused her to be subject to periodic fits of insensibility during her life.  This injury was largely relieved after the Civil War when she submitted to an operation at the Massachusetts General Hospital. There, despite the fact that the use of anesthesia had come into general use, Harriet insisted that the operation go on without ether, and it is recorded on good authority that the task was accomplished by the surgeons.   In her youth Harriet’s injury had caused her to be unfitted for high class labor and she was put to work driving oxen, carting, plowing and hard manual labor.  This developed her physically so that in time, her strength became so great that she did more work than a male slave and her market value stood at the current rate paid for a first class male, $150.

            In 1844 Harriet’s owner was a kind man and she was allowed to marry a free Negro, John Tubman. Soon afterward, however, her owner died and she became the property of a minor son and in turn she was placed in charge of a Doctor Thompson, guardian for the minor.  The sale of slaves was ordered in settling the estate, and then Harriet conceived the great  idea of liberation.  She resolved to break her own shackles and one night stole away, following the North Star as her guide. By day she hid and by night she traveled, ever Northward until she reached Philadelphia where the good Quakers befriended her.  Establishing herself as a free negress her work of liberating other slaves began.

BIG REWARD FOR HER CAPTURE

          In December, 1850, she visited Baltimore where she secretly met her sister and two children who were fugitives and brought them to Philadelphia. The next year she went  “down  into Egypt” to get her husband, but he had married another negress and at this point their ways parted forever. Instead of taking her husband to freedom she took a party of fugitives and her success and their gratitude caused her to devote her life to this work.  She established a headquarters at Cape May, N.J., and in the fall of 1852 disappeared from her usual haunts to reappear in a few weeks with nine fugitives. Then The Fugitive Slave Law drove her from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York into Canada, her only refuge.  With Thomas Garrett, the well known Quaker abolitionists of Wilmington, Del., she aided in freeing over 3,000 slaves, her personal conduct taking 300 of them into Canada.  Through Garrett she met leaders in the Anti-Slavery movement and soon had established her Underground Railway, stations being located in every abolitionist center wherein fugitives were concealed and fed by day and aided on their way to Suspension Bridge and Canada by night.

          Journey followed journey to the South and Harriet’s depredations became so great among the slaves that the Legislature of Maryland was forced to act and a reward of $12,000 was put on her head while slave owners privately banded together and put up $40,000 for her capture. Detectives everywhere North and South were on the watch for her and she had many narrow escapes, but a divine providence seemed to watch over her.  Many times she sat huddled in Southern railway trains while the cars used by the “niggers” were placarded inside and out, with rewards for her capture, persons actually shoved her aside to read the bills. Harriet in her ignorance nor knowing the import of the signs. On one occasion she went back to her own home and found a former overseer, who knew her well coming down the street. Her ready wit had caused her to prepare for such an emergency. On entering the town she purchased two chickens, which she tied together, and as she carried them along the highway she was unsuspected. When about to be confronted by her former overseer, she allowed one of the chickens to escape and giving chase created a laugh but eluded close inspection and probable discovery. She laughed last.  Her remarkable career is filled with such incidents and that a complete volume on her life has not been written leaves a peculiar vacancy in Abolitionists bibliography.

FREED MOTHER AND FATHER

       In 1857 Harriet made one of her most important trips South and brought away to freedom her mother and father. They were conducted by Underground to Auburn, an important “station” where the coming Secretary of State for Lincoln, Seward resided. Out on South Street, where William H. Seward’s mansion is, that kind gentleman sold to Harriet on easy terms a plot of ground where she built a home for her fugitive slave parents.  It was in this house that Harriet spent many years, and she lived long enough to see her last ambition gratified in the foundation on adjoining premises of the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes.

    One time, however, she broke off active participation in its behalf, because , as she explained to the writer: “Went I gabe de Home over to Zion Ch’ch w’at you s’pose dey done? Why, dey make a rule dat nobody should cum in widout a hundred dollars.  Now I wanted to make a rule dat nobody shouls cum in ‘nless dey didn’t hab no money. W’ats de good of a Home if a pusson w’at wants to git in has to have money?”.

          SCOUT ARMY NURSE AND SPY

Harriet’s possessions at one time included many letters and documents of interest to the historian.  They included letters from the most prominent abolitionists and generals of the Federal Army during the wartime period.

             It must be said that Harriet Tubman was probably the only woman who served through the war as scout, army nurse, and spy, taking her life in her hands many times in the last capacity. She was proud of the fact that she had worm “pants” and carried a musket, canteen and haversack, accoutrements which she retained after the war and left as precious relics to her colored admirers.  When the war broke out she did not wait for the Emancipation Proclamation but began at once forcible to free slaves. In 1863, when it was decided to use Negro troops, Harriet was instantly alert to become a nurse for a regiment, and when the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts marched away from Boston, the event now commemorated by the bronze tablet of Col. Robert Gould Shaw and his men opposite the State House on Boston Commons, Harriet followed a few days later with a commission in her pocket from governor Andrew. She cooked for colonel Shaw and dined with him too, on certain occasions, and when she was not acting cook, she was turned loose as escaped “contraband” to browse around in the enemy’s lines, only to reappear soon with valuable news of the Confederate movements.

          On one occasion she informed Major General Hunter at Hilton Head of mines planted in the river  and several gunboats sent to the scene removed a lot of torpedores that would certainly destroyed an expedition about to pass over that dangerous ground.  Harriet went to Fort Wagner after that famous charge was made there and aided in burying the black soldiers and their White officers, and in nursing the injured.  Her success as a nurse, especially her ability to cure men of dysentery by means of native herbs, became so well known to the army surgeons that she was transferred by the War Department to Fernandina, Fla. which in 1863-65 was a military base, as in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

SHE DREW A PENSION

          Her services were subsequently recognized by Congress which issued a pension, which during the past 7 years owing to the efforts Hon. Sereno S. Payne, leader of the House and a resident of Auburn, was increased, yet  she died in poverty,  all her money having been expended as fast as acquired in aiding indigent Negroes.

          Among Harriet’s affects are papers indicating her intimate friendship with men and women of prominence before and after the War. She lived for a time at the home of Emerson in Concord, then with the family of William Lloyd Garrison, and visited the Alcott’s,  the Whitneys,  Mrs. Horace Mann and Phillips Brooks.                              

                   A letter written by Wendell Phillips to an Auburn lady in June 16, 1868, says regarding Harriet Tubman: “The last time I ever saw John Brown was under my roof when he brought Harriet Tubman to me saying. “Mr. Phillips, I bring you one of the best and bravest persons on this continent – General Tubman, as we call her. The famous leader of Ossawatommie narrating to  Boston’s famous preacher, the career of Harriet and concluding for himself, said: “ In my opinion there are few captains, perhaps few colonels, who have done more for the colored race than our feerless and sagacious friend, Harriet.”

A TREASURED PASS

        Letters from such important personages are found in abundance among Harriet’s belongings and there are tributes from Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Queen Victoria, John  Brown, Seward, Phillips, Generals Baird, Gilmore, Hunter, Montgomery, Saxton, Surgeon General Barnes, etc. etc.

        One of her most treasured “passes”, most of which are hardly decipherable owing to wear and tear in service during the war, and now dim with age, is the following issued to her by Maj. Gen. David Hunter of Port Royal near Hilton Head, S.C. headquarters of the Department of the South in 1863 at a time when carte blanche privileges were conferred only upon the most trusted persons in the service of the Federal government. The pass reads:

         “Pass the bearer, Harriet Tubman, to Beaufort and back to this place, and wherever she wishes to go; and give her free passage at all times, on all government transports. Harriet was sent to me from Massachusetts by Governor Andrew at Boston and is a valuable woman. She has permission, as a servant of the government, to purchase such provisions from the Commissary as she may need.

David Hunter

"Major General Commanding”

          In Auburn there has grown up a wealth of anecdotes about Harriet that illustrate her unique character. None is better known, perhaps, than her adventure with the late Anthony Shimer. In this Harriet has been generally conceded to have been an innocent pawn by clever swindler who mulcted the  Auburn miser of $2,000. A Negro named Stevenson had come to Auburn in 1873 with a story that another Negro, Harris, had come from the vicinity of Charleston, S.C., with a hoard of $5,000 in gold which he had found  during  the war and had concealed and which he dared not to exchange for the more convenient greenbacks in the South because the government would seize the gold. The Negro, it was said, would gladly change his gold for greenbacks and after some interest had been stirred in Seneca Falls the people who like to obtain much for little in Auburn began to warm up to the proposition.        

          Through the late John Stewart, a brother of Harriet Tubman, the latter was

interested in the matter and she called upon many prominent citizens. They advised her not to have anything to do with the offer but she had faith in it and finally after Shimer had heard of the proposition through one Thomas, a Seneca Falls Negro, he accepted as corroborative the stories told by Harriet.  Shimer knowing that gold bore a premium of 12% at the time, agreed to give $2,000 in greenbacks for $2,000 in gold, and a party consisting of Shimer, Charles O’Brien, then cashier of the City Bank, Harriet Tubman and her husband, her brother, John Stewart, and the man Stevenson started out to make the exchange in the seclusion of a forest in the South and of the county. They drove to Fleming Hill expecting to find the representative of the owner of the gold there, but he was not there so they drove on to Poplar Ridge where they got out and put up at the tavern.  Then the man Stevenson explained that the transaction was of such a secret character that only himself and Harriet could meet the mysterious stranger with the gold and Shimer easily handed over his money to Harriet who departed with Stevenson.  They were to return as soon as the gold had been passed for the greenbacks.

          After due time had passed and they failed to return the party became suspicious for the first time and started out to search for the missing pair with the $2,000.  Stevenson was never seen again.  Harriet was found bleeding and gagged, her clothing torn and making her way along as best she could.  She was taken back to the tavern where she told a story that was generally accepted as a romance.  It was apparent that the man Stevenson and his pal, Harris, were swindlers and that having taken Harriet alone to a secluded place they had forcibly taken the money from her…Harriet, however, narrated a story that included hypnotism and ghosts to account fro the loss of the money and her injuries, and Shimer, who was the “goat” probably for the first time in his life, almost suffered heart disease at his loss.  He attempted in his characteristic manner to hold Harriet and her brother responsible for his loss, charging that they had “borrowed” the money from him.  He was never able to collect the money.

          Harriet leaves very little property, and so far as known her possessions include the seven acres, little brick house and, barns on the place out on South Street road where she lived so many years.

Funeral Arrangements Incomplete

          The arrangements for the funeral were incomplete at a late hour this afternoon.  Rev. Charles A. Smith and Rev. E. U. A. Brooks are in charge of the matter and expect to complete the arrangements late today.

Courtesy of the Seymour Library, Auburn, New York

AUBURN CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1913.

AT CHURCH OF ZION
__________

BODY OF HARRIET TUBMAN DAVIS WILL LIE IN STATE.
____________

MANY MEN OF PROMINENCE

WILL OFFICIATE, Including Auburn

Minister Who Had Known Her Over 50 Years
      _____________________    

          Rev. E.U.A. Brooks and Rev. Charles A. Smith, who have taken charge of the arrangements for the funeral of Harriet Tubman Davis, completed the details last night and announced them as follows: The public services will be held at 3’o’clock tomorrow afternoon in the Zion A.M.E. Church in Parker Street. At 11 o’clock   tomorrow morning there will a service at the Harriet Tubman Home at which the persons connected with the place will pay their formal tribute to the woman who founded the institution. Rev. Mr. Brooks will have charge of the services as master of ceremonies, and he will be assisted by Rev. J.C. Roberts of Binghamton, presiding elder for this district and Rev. J.W. Brown of Rochester, Rev. R.F. Fisher of Ithaca and probably by Rev. Charles A. Smith of Auburn.

          The last had known Aunt Harriet for over 50 years and he was a member of the fighting Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the first Negro regiment organized in the Civil War, which started out with Col. Robert Gould Shaw and distinguished itself in the famous engagement of Fort Wagner.  After Shaw fell dead in the trenches Harriet Tubman was assigned by Colonel Montgomery to assist in nursing the Fort Wagner victims, and Mr. Smith became acquainted with the famous Negress.

          The Board of Trustees and the Board of Women Managers of Harriet Tubman Home will attend the funeral. The following are expected to attend: Bishop G.L. Blackwell of Philadelphia, presiding of the Board of Trustees, Bishop Alexander Walters of Washington, vice president; Rev. E.S. Bailey of Syracuse, Rev. J.W. Brown of Rochester, Rev. R.F. Fisher of Ithaca, Rev. John G. Lee of Rochester,  Rev. L.L. Thomas of Binghamton, Rev. James E. Mason of Rochester, and Rev. Charles A. Smith, William Freeman, John Lewis and Henry T. Johnson of Auburn. The Ladies’ Board is composed of Sarah F. Ross of Auburn, president, Mrs. Frank Leggett, vice president, Mrs. Henry T. Johnson and Mrs. E.U.A. Brooks, secretaries, Mrs. James Dale, Treasurer, and the following: Mrs. J. Stout, Mrs. R. Hawkins of Geneva, Mrs. J. Reed and Mrs. M. Ridgeway of Elmira, Mrs. I Belcher of Ithaca, Mrs. P. Gibbs of Rochester and Mrs. C.F. Matthews, Mrs. C.G. Cannon, Mrs. E.P. Cooper, Frances Brown and Mrs. C.A. Smith of Auburn.


AUBURN DAILY ADVERTISER, TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 1913

DEATH OF AUNT HARRIET

“MOSES OF HER PEOPLE”
_____________________

 Famous Heroine of Slave Days Died at Tubman Home, Last Night---

Was Pure African Type---Led Her People  From Bondage---

Last Words Were:  “I Go to Prepare a Place For You”---

Claimed Gift of Strange Power.

 _____________________

     Death came last night to end the sufferings of Mrs. Harriet Tubman Davis, better known as “Aunt Harriet” a national character at The Harriet Tubman Home in South Street. “Aunt Harriet” has been ill with pneumonia for nearly a year and her death was not unexpected.  Her exact age is not known but it is thought she is 99 years old. She has bravely battled against sickness and her fight, like all the others was a gallant one. She was conscious up to within two hours of her death and conversed intelligently with those about her in the afternoon.

     All her life “Aunt Harriet” has been on the battlefield. When a young girl she was a slave and battled against the lash of the overseer, then when she escaped from the plantation she battled against hunger, strangers, and her way through wilderness of a new country, then her battle was waged against the slave owners of the South and a price was upon her head, then in the great war she served as a nurse and a spy. When the war was over, she was forced to battle to save her home which was to be sold on a mortgage foreclosure. At last she was taken to the home which she established and when it seemed as though she might rest at last, sickness came and her battle for life was renewed.  For more than a year she battled against pneumonia and last night still defiant, still battling, she succumbed to her victor, death.

     There is not a woman in the United States today whose career can be compared with that of the old slave. Her name is a side light in the national history.  She has fought on the battlefield beside the men, she has entered the enemy’s lines as a spy… There are gathered Rev. Charles A. Smith the chaplain of the Home, Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Martha Ridgeway, the old nurse who had attended to “Aunt Harriet’s” wants since last October.  The end came at 8:40 o’clock last evening.

        There will be a meeting of the Board of Managers of the Tubman Home this afternoon to decide on the arrangements for the funeral which will be held either Thursday or Friday afternoon.

     There are in Auburn a number of colored people who are distantly related to “Aunt Harriet” among them are Charles Stewart, Alida Stewart, Clarence Stewart, Dora Thompson, Mrs. Edward Robinson, Eva Stewart, Alfred Winslow, Mrs. Mary Gaskin and Mrs. Henry Lucas. These survivors are mostly grandnieces and grand nephews.  She had no children.  Her brothers however had large families.

     The arrangements for the funeral were practically made by “Aunt Harriet” some time ago and her wishes will be carried out. There are probably few of the present generation who know much concerning the life or existence of this forgotten old slave.

     Yet at one time there was a price of $40,000 placed on her head because as the “Moses of her people” as she was known, during the Civil war, she made 19 perilous trips between the free states of the North and the slave-holding states of the South and led more than 400 fellow slaves, including men, women and children, out of bondage.

Story is Dramatic  
Of all the stories of the ante-bellum days that of the experiences of Harriet Tubman is one of the most dramatic…She was naturally shrewd and blunt of speech, but her simplicity and ignorance in many cases caused her to be imposed upon. For years her household here consisted of several old black people and some forlorn and wandering women. From the effects of a blow which she received in childhood she had a stupid, half-witted look, but she also had a pair of sharp, black eyes and a ready wit that enabled her to get out of many difficulties.

      Her maiden name was Armita Ross, but her given name was changed to Harriet.  She had not a drop of white blood in her veins. Her father was a slave imported from Africa.  Her parents were Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green, both slaves, but married to each other. She had ten brothers and sisters, three of whom she rescued from slavery during the Civil war. She also rescued her father and mother through the “underground railway.”  She was married about the year 1844 to a freed slave. His name was John Tubman.  There were no children by this union. Her last master, a Dr. Thompson, who was also the owner of Aunt Harriet’s father, died in the year 1849. Two years later she escaped from slavery, she returned and found her husband married to another woman.  Harriet  also married again. Her second husband was a colored of Auburn by the name of Nelson Davis. She then became known as Harriet Tubman Davis, but more familiarly as Harriet Tubman, the name she bore during the time of her activity in the South.

       As a child she lived with a master whose fortune was slowly waning.  She saw her two older sisters sold and carried away, weeping and lamenting, to be separated forever on earth from their parents and brothers and sisters. Harriet was then suffering from a wound which affected her brain all her life. This wound often caused fits of somnolency, during which she had wonderful visions. This wound was received at the plantation where she was raised. A two pound iron weight, thrown at a runaway slave, hit Harriet on the head. With a return to health she became endowed with superhuman physical strength, this enabled her to perform labors that today would seem impossible for a woman. Her strength made her a great help in the fields. Often while at work, though, she would drop off into one of her dreams and even the overseer’s lash did not seem to awaken her.

       This dreaming led her into experiencing religion. A firm determination was also born. This determination she said was to free the slave…walking by night, hiding by day and using all her cunning to obtain food, she passed, after a long and weary travel, the line which separated the land of bondage and the land of freedom. She was alone, her kindred were in slavery and none of them had the courage to dare what she had dared.  Unless she could liberate her relatives she could never see them again or even know what had become of them.  Harriet soon made friends and obtained work in the North. She toiled ceaselessly and saved her wages until she had enough money, to make a trip to the South so that she could save her brothers, sisters and parents and perhaps help to free others.

     One dark night she suddenly appeared at the door of a cabin back in Maryland. How she came no one knew, but she appeared as a “Moses” in the night. Through the wilds of a sparcely settled country she led several parties of her fellow slaves to the North where there was safety and freedom.  In nineteen trips she brought away more than 400 slaves.  The slave holders of the South became enraged at her actions and offered $40,000 reward for her capture, dead or alive. The fugitive slave parties were taken through New York State and across the suspension bridge into Canada. On the Canada shore, led by Harriet, they shouted sang and prayed, thanking the Lord for their deliverance. Many of these fugitives later became prosperous farmers.

     Harriet rescued Charles Nalle, a fugitive slave from Virginia, from a mob in Troy, N.Y., on April 27, 1859, and took him across the line into Canada. During the four years of the war Harriet drew for herself but twenty days rations.  She nursed thousands of sick soldiers and treated them with strange medicines made of roots and herbs.

     At General Hunter’s request she went with several gunboats up the Combahee river, an expedition to lift the Confederate torpedoes, to destroy railways, bridges and shut off every other means Confederate army had of obtaining supplies. At her request Colonel Montgomery, one of John Brown’s men was appointed to command the expedition. 800 negroes were carried down to Beaufort by these boats. Harriet often went to the Confederate lines as a spy and brought back valuable information. These were perilous trips and grave proof of her remarkable bravery, she was several times under fire, but always escaped unhurt.

     She was befriended by William H. Seward, Gerrit Smith, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and other distinguished men of the time and was an aide and admirer of the famous John Brown.

     Since the Civil war she has resided in a small house on the outskirts of the city and during the last few years in the Tubman home which she founded in South street.

     Harriet’s first home in this city was purchased from General Seward who was then in the senate. To this house she removed her parents and took care of them until their death. It was to raise money to pay for this house that she made a trip to Boston in 1859. She there met Governor Andrews who urged her to serve the Union cause as a nurse, spy and scout.  She left her little home in this city, placing her parents in the care of friends and again returned to the South.  She risked her life hundreds of times without receiving a cent of compensation.

     When at last she returned to Auburn she found her home a place of desolation. It was about to be sold to satisfy a mortgage which she was unable to pay. Efforts of Secretary Seward to have her pensioned were to no avail though she secured a pension some years later through the efforts of Congressman Sereno E. Payne. This pension was $20 per month. Later a small amount of money was raised through the sale of a little book which contained the story of her life, written by Sarah H. Bradford and published through the liberality of prominent Auburn men. The Tubman home was the culmination of a movement which started in 1896. The dream of “Moses” for herself and her people was at last realized.      

Articles after Tubman’s death are reprinted & retyped for readers to analyze and critique the accuracy, language, and terminology provided during the early twentieth century. Slight omissions are due to the aging process of the articles.  

From: harriettubman.com
                 

Read More