Page 5 - 2022-bfw-white-fomm3e-HS.indd

P. 5

1865–1877
A Social Revolution
service — remained largely the same. In freedom, black people had the right to learn to 325
read and write, and they eagerly pursued education. For those who had been enslaved,
the first years of freedom involved a transition — from slave households to independent
households and from slave labor to free labor — that constituted a social revolution.

Freedom and Family
Freedpeople’s struggles to create independent and functional families gave meaning
to their freedom. Under slavery, masters had exercised significant control over slave
families. With freedom, black people gained control over their families, even as they
tried to remake them. Often the first step was to reunite those who had been separated
before the war. One government official observed that “the work of emancipation was
2
incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.”
The war itself also had separated families. As individuals fled to Union lines and trav-
eled with Union armies or enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops, they lost touch with
parents, spouses, children, and relatives who were themselves sometimes scattered.
A Missouri official reported that after black men had enlisted in the military, their
wives and children had been “driven from their masters[’] homes,” and court records
3
indicate that women separated from children sought help to get them back. In short,
wartime conditions had made it increasingly hard to hold black families together.
After the war, thousands of freedpeople traveled great distances at signifi-
cant material and emotional costs, seeking lost and displaced family members. One
middle-aged North Carolina freedman who had been sold away from his wife and chil-
4
dren traveled almost six hundred miles on foot to try to find them. People inquired
for missing relatives at former plantation homes, contraband camps, churches, and
government agencies. Others wrote letters, and those who were not literate asked for
help from teachers, preachers, missionaries, and government officials. Many took out
ads in black newspapers.
Most searches were unsuccessful, owing to time and distance, death, and diffi-
culties that were simply insurmountable, given the lack of records. Family members
who did find one another expressed relief and joy. Reunited after having been sold
apart twenty years earlier, husband and wife Ben and Betty Dodson embraced, and
Ben shouted, “Glory! glory! hallelujah.” In some cases, people did not recognize one
another after such a long absence. One former slave woman, sold away as a child, could
identify the woman standing before her as her mother only by a distinctive facial scar. 5
Sometimes new family ties had replaced old ones. Many forcibly separated part-
ners and spouses over time had come to believe they would never see each other again,
and they formed new attachments. For them, reunions were heartrending. Some chose
their former spouse; others, the new one. One woman gave each of her two husbands
a two-week test run before settling on one. Many men stayed with and supported one
6
wife while continuing to support the other. Others remained torn between two loves.
One freedman wrote to his first wife, “I thinks of you and my children every day of my

10_whitefomm_3e_21015_ch09_322_365.indd 325 8/13/20 4:26 PM

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10