“UP TO FREEDOM”: SLAVERY, EMANCIPATION, AND THE MAKING OF
FREEDOM IN HOWARD COUNTY, MISSOURI, 1860 TO 1865
A Thesis
presented to
the Faculty of the Graduate School
University of Missouri-Columbia
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
by
STANLEY D. MAXSON
Dr. LeeAnn Whites, Thesis Supervisor
MAY 2015
The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the
thesis entitled
“UP TO FREEDOM”: SLAVERY, EMANCIPATION, AND THE MAKING OF
FREEDOM IN HOWARD COUNTY, MISSOURI, 1860 TO 1865
Presented by Stanley D. Maxson
a candidate for the degree of master of arts,
and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance.
Professor LeeAnn Whites
Professor Keona Ervin
Professor Mary Jo Neitz
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the assistance,
support, and generosity of many. I would like to thank Dr. LeeAnn Whites for helping
this project get on its feet from the start. Her guidance, knowledge, and seemingly
tireless assistance over the past two years have been invaluable. The generous support of
the University of Missouri Women’s and Gender Department and the Kinder Forum on
Constitutional Democracy made possible the research at the National Archives and
Records Administration in Washington D.C. that this thesis stands upon. Megan
Boccardi deserves special thanks for sharing her research and for introducing me to the
value of the Civil War Pensions applications as a historical source. My colleagues have
also provided indispensable help every step of the way. Thanks to Sarah Lirely McCune
for her guidance through the master’s program, Emma Walcott-Wilson for being a mapmaker extraordinaire, and J Matthew Ward for being a true compatriot in courses,
conference presentations, and throughout the thesis writing process. None of this would
be possible without the assistance of my wife and research partner Ann, who I wish to
thank most sincerely for her encouragement, support, and editorial eye.
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................ii
List of Tables and Maps.........................................................................................................iv
Introduction: “Our own peculiar system” ..............................................................................1
Chapter One: “I knew about all of them”:
Slavery and the ‘Neighborhood’ in Howard County, c. 1860 ...............................................20
Chapter Two: “At the time of freedom, and when Martin went into the Army”:
Gendered Emancipation in Howard County, 1863-1865 .......................................................54
Chapter Three: “That was my right name”:
Slavery and Surnames in Howard County, 1860-1865 .........................................................85
Conclusion: Kin and Communities in the Civil War Era .....................................................110
Bibliography .........................................................................................................................114
iii LIST OF TABLES AND MAPS
Map 1: Free Black Population by Township .........................................................................29
Table 1: Anatomy of an Abroad Marriage .............................................................................34
Map 2: Percent of Total Enslaved Persons by Township .....................................................40
Table 2: Slave-Dense: White, Slave, and Free Black Populations .......................................43
Table 3: Slave-Sparse: White, Slave, and Free Black Populations ......................................43
Map 3: Enslaved Population by Township ...........................................................................44
Map 4: Enslaved Population by Township (detailed) ...........................................................45
Map 5: White Population by Township ................................................................................46
Map 6: Population by Township: Free and Enslaved ...........................................................47
Table 4: Slave-Dense: Ages of Enslaved by Township ........................................................50
Table 5: Slave-Sparse: Ages of Enslaved by Township .......................................................51
Table 6: Slave-Dense: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population .................................52
Table 7: Slave-Sparse: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population.................................52
Table 8: U.S.C.T. Surnames at the Time of Enlistment .......................................................89
iv INTRODUCTION
“Our own peculiar system”1
Life under slavery and the work of making freedom in Howard County were
experienced and developed relationally. The social and kinship connections of the
enslaved, so crucial in surviving slavery, were essential in navigating a wartime freedom
movement, and foundational in making freedom meaningful in the aftermath of Civil
War. The mobility allowed Howard County slaves through hiring out and abroad
marriage connected farms and towns in ways that cannot be reduced to the economic
calculus of slavery as a system of labor. Slaves themselves linked small farms into a
network of social and kinship relationships over and above the intentions and
imaginations of their masters. In the chaos of the Civil War routes to freedom were
decidedly gendered. In Howard County a strong majority of able-bodied male slaves
were recruited into the military and taken to Benton Barracks, St. Louis, while those who
could not enlist—the majority women—remained enslaved. Nearly two-thirds of all
service eligible males in Howard County enlisted into the military in the spring and
summer of 1863. By 1864, nearly one-third of the men in the United States Colored
Troops from Missouri had died.2 Most of those remaining were in poor health, nearly
two hundred suffered from disease and malnutrition that, for many, caused permanent
bodily damage.
This thesis is an investigation into the social history of slavery and freedom in
1
Quote from a Joint Resolution from the Missouri State Legislature in support of the state’s right
to legislate on issues pertaining to slavery. Printed in Laws of the State of Missouri, 1860.
2
Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, ser. 2 of Freedom: A Documentary History of
Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 487.
1 Howard County, Missouri with an eye toward the social and familial relationships of the
enslaved, their existence in slavery and their role in making freedom. Located in Central
Missouri with Chariton County to the West and Boone County to the East, Howard
County enjoyed access to the Missouri River below providing rich alluvial soil and
access to statewide commerce. With two sizeable towns, Fayette and Glasgow, serving
as the urban centers of Howard County, most of the land was rural and devoted to
agricultural production of tobacco and hemp. Additionally, Howard County lay at the
heart of a string of seven Missouri River counties that held slave populations of at least
twenty four percent.3 Historians have often found it convenient to refer to these counties
as Little Dixie for the cultural, economic, agricultural, political, and slaveholding
similarities they shared with states in the upper and lower south.4 Fundamentally, it was
the slave-based antebellum “commercial production of hemp and tobacco that defined
Little Dixie as a distinctive region.”5 By 1860 Howard County had the highest percent of
slaves of any county in the state, thirty seven percent.6 Slavery marked the culture and
economy of Howard County from the moment migrants from the Upper South first began
3
R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture, and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1992), xi. Hurt refers to this slave owning region also as Missouri’s “black belt” in
reference to the large population of slaves held in theses seven counties, not in reference to the rich, dark
soil of the region.
4
Aaron Astor identifies Little Dixie as a region defined economically by slave driven agriculture,
as well as politically defending the rights of the slaveholder. The region of Little Dixie was “composed of
the Missouri Counties of Callaway, Boone, Howard, Cooper, Chariton, Saline, and Lafayette [that]
traversed the Missouri River and formed the backbone of the state’s slave-based hemp and tobacco
culture.” Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and
Missouri, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 13. The region of Little Dixie varies
depending on interpretation but the most common, and that used by Astor, comes from Douglas Hurt,
Agriculture, and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, ix-xi. Most recently it has been used by Diane Mutti
Burke in On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (Athens: The
University of Georgia Press), 12. Additionally however, Burke alternatively uses the term “Missouri River
counties,” the term that I prefer.
5
Robert W. Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri: Little Dixie’s SlaveMajority Areas and the Transition to Midwestern Farming,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 3,
(April, 2005), 238-60.
6
Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 310.
2 to settle in the region in droves throughout the early 1820s.7
The importance of the social and kinship relations of enslaved and formerly
enslaved black Americans in the Civil War era has been firmly established by scholars of
African American History. Herbert Gutman’s 1976 The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom, 1750-1925 excoriated the theses of historians such as Stanley Elkins and policy
makers such Daniel P. Moynihan suggesting that the black family had deteriorated over
years of enslavement.8 More recently, Steven Hahn has argued that the kinship and
social relations, “struggled for and constructed as slaves” were “constituent elements of
slave politics,” foundational in struggling for freedom and shaping life after the Civil
War.9 In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth historicized the concept of family,
arguing that family and kinship among African-Americans covered a “whole rainbow of
social relationships among people who were not related by blood or marriage.”10 The
exchange of property and what Penningroth identifies as the informal slave economy
were integral to the process in which “kinship could be created; people could start life as
strangers and become family.”11
In a border state region where emancipation was highly gendered by military
recruitment, the social relations so formative in the lives of black recruits is all too often
relegated to the background of histories quick to explain emancipation as something
endowed upon slaves by the Union Army. African American women held fundamental
7
On early settlement in Howard County see, Walter A. Schroeder “Spread of Settlement in
Howard County, Missouri 1810-1859,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. LXII, no. 1, (October, 1968).
8
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage
Books, 1976); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd
ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968).
9
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from
Slavery to the Great Migration, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3, 6.
10
Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the
Nineteenth-Century South, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 86.
11
Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 87.
3 roles in establishing the social ties of kinship in Howard County. As men fought for
freedom as soldiers on distant battlefields, women bore the responsibility of making
freedom on the very land on which they had labored for slaveholders. This thesis draws
from the work of scholars illuminating the social connections of the enslaved in order to
reevaluate the role of military service in bringing an end to slavery in Missouri.
As border state, the history of slavery and emancipation in Missouri offers the
opportunity to draw critical new insights for historians debating the primary cause that
lead to the dissolution of the institution of slavery in the United States. Traditionally,
historians have approached this topic from within three camps. Military historians such
as James McPherson and Gary Gallagher occupy prominent places in the first camp by
emphasizing the role of the Union military as a liberating force and the importance of
decisive Union victories on the battlefield.12 James Oakes has recently given new life to
the second camp of political historians pointing toward the political acumen of Abraham
Lincoln and the abolition minded Republicans who drafted and supported emancipatory
policy.13
Finally, following a Du Boisian model the editors of Freedom: A
Documentary History of Emancipation have published a compelling wealth of primary
sources emphasizing the roles of slaves themselves in securing their own freedom.14 In
Missouri, the crucible of war operated in many ways unique from other regions of the
South, changing the meaning of military presence and altering the effectiveness of federal
emancipatory policy. In the heavy slaveholding Missouri River counties it was the
12
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1988); McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War
for the Union, (New York: Vintage Books, 1993, orig. pub. 1965); Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
13
James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865,
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).
14
Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, ser. 1, vol. 1 of Freedom: A Documentary
History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4 enslaved—mostly women—who waged the ultimately devastating campaign against their
bondage.
Missouri does not neatly fit the standard rubric of military historians. Arguing for
the relevance of the formal battlefield, Gallagher argues that military campaigns “wielded
enormous influence over political, economic, and social dimensions of the war.”15
Though Missouri was never a state in rebellion, the Union military maintained a presence
in the state from the earliest years of the war. Placing the state under martial law and
under the control of the Union Military in August of 1861, John C. Frémont also declared
free all slaves of disloyal masters. Frémont’s edict of emancipation was almost
immediately countermanded by an anxious President Lincoln eager to maintain the
support of Missouri’s slaveholders on the border.16
The Civil War in Missouri is then best understood as a war of occupation where,
as the editors of Occupied Women put it, “the home front and battlefield merged, creating
a new kind of battlefield and an unanticipated second front.”17 The military did matter in
Missouri, though not in the way anticipated by Gallagher. As a slaveholding border state,
the Union military presence in Missouri played as crucial a role in maintaining slavery as
it eventually did in its destruction. The struggle for freedom in Missouri was not a
struggle waged by the military on the battlefield, but a struggle within the second front,
across Missouri’s small farms and towns.
The politics of place similarly undermine political explanations of emancipation
in Missouri. As a Union border state Federal emancipation proclamations and legislation
15
Gallagher, Union War, 88.
Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of
Kentucky and Missouri, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 106.
17
LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and
the American Civil War, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2009), 3.
16
5 aimed at the states in rebellion held no bearing in Missouri. Under martial law, there was
little for state level politicians to do in favor of the enslaved and the Missouri legislature
did not issue an edict of immediate abolition until 1865. Missouri therefore stands as a
crucial site for investigating what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “general strike of the
slaves,” what the editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project identify as the
self-emancipation of the enslaved, and most recently what David Roediger terms the
“broad politics of Jubilee.”18.
Broadly the Civil War era and the political boundaries of Howard County mark
the parameters of this thesis. The project has been disciplined locally out of an interest in
exploring the workings of slavery, emancipation and the making of freedom at the ground
level. My research follows Nancy Bercaw’s observation in Gendered Freedoms, that
community studies allow for attention to names, which when encountered enough, can
reveal actual people, their lives, and social connections.19 Many of the lives examined in
this thesis are exceptional because of the weight they bore in exceptional times, not
because they aspired to live in the public eye. Charles Payne similarly challenged
historians and journalists in I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, to consider how our research
may change if we had the audacity to believe that “people who think they matter,
might.”20 Like the works of Bercaw and Payne, this thesis studies the “Big Event,” in
this case the Civil War and emancipation, from a bottom-up perspective highlighting the
communities and social relations maintained by the enslaved, sustained through the war,
18
David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, (New York: Verso,
2014), 21.
19
Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the
Delta, 1861-1875, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003), 14.
20
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi
Freedom Struggle, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 392.
6 and shaped the making of freedom in the years following emancipation.21
By investigating communities of people, their lives, and their struggles this thesis
is a community study of slavery and freedom in Howard County grounded in both
quantitative and qualitative analysis. Federal census data including population,
agricultural and slave schedules provided valuable information on patterns of
slaveholding, slave labor, and population demographics. In Chapter One this data is
analyzed and mapped so that the picture of slavery in Missouri is seen at higher
resolution at the level of the township. Alongside census data and plat maps, sixty-nine
applications for Civil War Veteran and Widow’s Pensions were collected from the
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. providing
supplementary data such as testimonies and depositions made by the formerly enslaved.
These, occasionally voluminous sources lend themselves to a more qualitative approach.
Testimonies and depositions made by freedmen and freedwomen to secure their
claims to Veteran and Widow’s Pensions illuminate networks within and between farms
and families, slave and free. Mapping this data offers a glimpse into the particular
physical and social geography of slavery and emancipation in central Missouri. Viewed
alongside the age, sex, and skin color recorded by the 1860 slave schedule the
experiences of the enslaved yield valuable qualitative testimony with regard to the nature
of relationships among and between slave and free persons of Howard County. As a
fundamental piece of information included in pension applications, names gathered are
examined in the final chapter as historical artifacts marking family, citizenship, and a
21
Payne’s writing on the Civil Rights Movement suggests valuable methodological directions for
studies of emancipation. On the movement leading to the Brown decision Payne writes, “the Big Event
grew out of a tradition of struggle, that much of the historical initiative was in the hands of the socially
obscure, that they were willing to face enormous repressive in order to change their world…” Payne, 392.
7 claim to place for the formerly enslaved.
Organized both thematically and chronologically, Chapter Two occupies the
center of this thesis on both accounts by exploring the process of emancipation as it
developed in Howard County. More strictly limited to the years 1863-1865, the presence
of the United States Army provides additional historical sources in the form of military
records including official correspondences, provost marshal papers, and enlistment rolls.
Military records by themselves often emphasize only one aspect of the process of
emancipation in Missouri by highlighting the experience of male soldiers and remaining
largely silent with regard to their wives, children, mothers and other kin. When
enlistment is from a relational perspective, soldiers do not appear solely as isolated men
claiming freedom in return for military service. Rather, the question presents itself: how
did the enlistment and subsequent removal of able-bodied male slaves shape
emancipation for the largely female population that remained? Pension applications are
once again useful sources for the testimonies of wives and widows waging their own
struggle for freedom outside of military service.
As a study of emancipation, this thesis begins as a study of slavery. The
antebellum Missouri State Legislature held slaveholding interest at a premium. The
“Central Clique,” men exclusively from Howard and Saline Counties, controlled the
powerful Missouri Democratic party and legislated in the interests of slaveholders. On
the eve of the Civil War, “Missouri’s Confederate” and one of the Clique’s “most
indefatigable champions,” Claiborne Fox Jackson, was elected governor from his home
in Fayette, Howard County.22 The Laws of Missouri passed by the Missouri State
22
Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of
Southern Identity in the Border West, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 81, 88.
8 Legislature provide a profile of the legal apparatus of slavery and the many ways the state
sought to control the lives of slaves by defining their social and physical space as well as
their mobility. As this study investigates slavery in the specific location of Howard
County, it is worth understanding, even briefly, the legal framework surrounding the
institution statewide as it developed and grew.
Racial slavery was first introduced as a system of labor to the territory of Missouri
long before statehood. The French Code Noir was established in 1720 to regulate the
activities of peoples of African descent across the entire Louisiana Territory. By 1804,
the year after the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, fifteen
percent of the residents were slaves.23 With the ceding of the Louisiana Territory from
France to the United States in 1803, the nation doubled in size. Though slaves were
present in the upper and lower Louisiana Territory, it was not always apparent whether
this land would remain open to slave labor after its ceding to the United States. After
vociferous debates between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the Congress,
Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay brokered a deal that found overwhelming support
from the Northern majority and supported by over half of all Southern congressmen.24
Known as the Missouri Compromise, Maine entered the Union as a free state while
Missouri entered protecting slavery and the 36°30’ parallel divided the future Western
territories into slave and free zones.25 In the language of the compromise, all land from
the Louisiana Territory “which lies north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north
23
Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 39.
Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859, (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press), 47.
25
Varon, Disunion!, 46.
24
9 latitude excluding the state of Missouri, shall forever prohibit slavery (emphasis mine).”26
Missouri became the twelfth slave state of the United States when it was admitted to the
Union in 1821.
The Missouri Territory and the State of Missouri adopted the Black Codes of the
Louisiana Territory in an attempt to shape and define slavery under the new government
sovereignty. The newly minted state of Missouri secured the right to legislate on slavery
as it saw fit. In the expanding state and nation, questions regarding the institution of
slavery inevitably continued to arise. If Missouri would be a slave state, what type of
slavery should be practiced in Missouri? What rights, if any, are allowed those enslaved?
What is the legal relationship between the enslaved and the slaveholder, and what rights
does the State have within this relationship? These questions, present in Missouri from
the earliest moments of statehood were answered, amended, and revised continually for
as long as slavery was given legal authority.
Most laws placing restrictions on the lives of the enslaved focused on limiting
their mobility, or confining them to a particular social or physical space. Often these
laws were not limited to slaves and were written to apply to all persons of color residing
or traveling through the state. Aiming to govern the lives of slaves and free blacks, great
care was given to produce laws that held implications for both white and black
Missourians. On January 26, 1833 an act was passed prohibiting any slave or free person
of color to assemble at “any store, tavern, grocery, grog, or dram shop.”27 With the
specific intent to restrict the ability of slaves to assemble in public places, such
ordinances also held implications for the white owners of such businesses, who would be
26
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 1, 631.
10 fined “not less than five, nor more than fifty dollars.28 In a precursor to what Blair L.M.
Kelly and other historians identify as the “fundamental illogic” of segregation, the
ordinance marking stores and taverns as white only spaces was not based on skin color or
citizenship status alone.29 Black Americans were present and welcome in these spaces if
they entered in a labor or service capacity. If slaves had a pass from their master, they
were admitted. If slaves were employed in the grocery, they were expected to be there.
The illogic of these laws is that they were made to explicitly create all white spaces while
simultaneously expecting blacks to be present. By 1847 the Missouri State Legislature
took the next step from barring black Missourians from white spaces, to restrict the
ability to form black spaces outside the surveillance of whites. An act passed the state
legislature prohibiting meetings of “negroes and mulattoes for the purpose of religious
worship.” If such meetings were to occur would be conducted under the watchful eye of
a sheriff, justice of the peace or other official able to “prevent all seditious speeches, and
disorderly and unlawful conduct of every kind.”30
As the issue of slavery and abolition came time and again into the national press
and politics, the concerns were felt locally.31 The state of Missouri actively sought to
protect the institution of slavery by monitoring the social and physical space of black
Missourians. Free African Americans and slaves who would soon be manumitted
became the subject of restrictive legislation in 1842. Slaveholders who had promised
their slaves freedom at a future date or age were barred from bringing said slaves into the
28
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 2, 354.
Blair L.M. Kelly, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era
of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 132.
30
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1847, 103.
31
Melton A. McLaurin provides a fascinating account of how events surrounding the expansion or
restriction of slavery in Western Missouri where it bordered the Kansas Territory were covered by both
national and local Missouri presses in Chapter Four of Celia, A Slave: A True Story, (New York: Avon
Books, 1991), 62-79.
29
11 state.32 Additionally, free people of color hoping to settle in the state found the borders
of Missouri closed to them as they were prohibited from entering on “any steam boat or
vessel.”33 If they were found on board any such vessel at any mooring point, they would
be held in the county jail for the duration of the ship’s time at landing or until the “vessel
shall be ready to proceed to her place of destination.”34 By 1847, the act was
strengthened to prohibit all free blacks from emigrating to the state “under any pretext.” 35
Once again, it is interesting to note that this act forbade free blacks from settling in the
state while allowing free blacks and slaves to enter in service roles or as their labor
demanded.
Like mobility, laws restricting the ability for the enslaved to labor and educate
themselves came under direct scrutiny. In 1841 the Missouri legislature issued an act
prohibiting slaveholders from hiring a slave “to another slave, or going at large upon
hiring of his own time, or acting or dealing as a free person.”36 Similarly, education for
all persons of color, whether slave or free, was prohibited in 1847. An Act respecting
slaves, free negroes and mulattoes stipulated “No person shall keep or teach any school
for the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing, in this state.”37 The act
of learning was outlawed by way of legislation prohibiting the act of teaching. Teaching
of a political vein was also restricted when speech that could be interpreted as exciting
slaves “to rebellion, sedition, mutiny, insurrection, or murder” carried a penalty of up to
32
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1842-1843, 66.
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1842-1843, 66.
34
ibid.
35
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1847, 104.
36
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1840-1841, 147.
37
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1847, 103.
33
12 two years in prison for the first offence, twenty years for the second, and a life term in the
penitentiary for the third conviction.38
Over the first four decades of statehood the subject of slavery regularly presented
itself to the Missouri State legislature, whether through independent acts, amendments to
preexisting ordinances, or most frequently in the incorporation of new towns. As towns
were incorporated and granted certain powers of self-governance they often adopted
black codes. These incorporations frequently granted the city council or board of trustees
the power to establish patrols and prevent the meetings of slaves and free people of
color.39
As the subject of slavery reached a fever pitch across the nation, Missouri added
its voice to the debate. The year 1857 saw a joint resolution pass both the Missouri
House and Senate calling emancipation “inexpedient, impolitic, unwise, and unjust.”40
This sentiment was again reiterated in 1860 when the Missouri legislature proclaimed
“the exclusive right and privilege to regulate in our own way our own peculiar system.”41
The state legislature regulated their own peculiar system in the following year by
prohibiting slaves travel without a pass and raising the penalty for “consulting, plotting,
conspiring, or attempting to raise any rebellion of negroes, or mulattoes, bond or free” to
punishment by death or life in prison.42 In 1859 the legislature issued a joint resolution
calling for the extinguishing of “antislavery fanaticism” and claiming that the sole “right
38
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1836-37, 3.
On January 16, 1833, the town of New Franklin, Howard County was officially incorporated
and “the board of trustees as aforesaid” granted “ the power and authority to pass by laws and ordinances
to…prevent, or restrain, the meeting of slaves.” Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 2, 328.
40
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1857.
41
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1860.
42
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1861.
39
13 to prohibit slavery in any territory, belongs exclusively to the people thereof.”43 A later
act was issued mandating that this resolution be sent to the executives of every state in
the Union, that it be laid before their respective legislatures, and copies sent each Senator
and Representative of the United States Congress.44 By the time the election of 1860
arrived, the State of Missouri had a strong track record of protecting the rights of the
slaveholder.
This thesis is composed of three chapters, organized by a consideration of both
chronology and theme that touch on the issue of slavery as it was lived and practiced in
Howard County, Missouri. More specifically, all chapters share and develop the central
theme of examining slavery and freedom as experiences that are relational rather than
experiences of isolated individuals. In many ways the social lives of the enslaved
informed the lives of slaves as much as labor or geographic location.
Chapter One explores what small-scale slavery looked like in the specific local of
Howard County, Missouri. As historians Thavolia Glymph, in Out of the House of
Bondage, and Amy Dru Stanley, in From Bondage to Contract, have shown, studies of
emancipation must necessarily be studies of slavery.45 To this end, Chapter One
examines the physical and social geography of slavery across the county in order to more
fully understand both the opportunities and stakes of ending slavery as it existed.
Countywide statistics on slavery are useful in comparing slaveholding regions from
within or across states. For example, it is significant that by 1860 the seven counties that
43
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1849, 667.
Ibid., 668.
45
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation
Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract:
Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
44
14 composed Little Dixie were all ranked in the top ten largest slaveholding counties of the
state.46 However, this tells us more about the unique position of these counties as
compared to the entirety of the state than it does about the counties in and of themselves.
The fact that thirty-seven percent of the people living in Howard County were slaves only
shows a countywide generalization while failing to provide answers in any greater detail.
Chapter One explores Howard County qua Howard County. Were slave holdings spread
equally across the state or were they concentrated in specific areas? How might the high
concentration of slaveholdings in Howard County affect the experience of being enslaved
in said county? To answer specific questions, you need specific information. Chapter
One therefore explores patterns of slaveholding at the local township level.
Cross referencing the 1860 Federal Census and corresponding slave schedules
enables patterns of slaveholding to be visually represented granting a more thorough
picture of where slavery was most prevalent. Mapping the concentration slaveholding at
the level of the township yields a clearer understanding of what types of social networks
developed and were maintained by the enslaved by answering the simple question; who
lived nearby? Men, women, and children, of different ages, abilities, shades of skin, and
relationships with their slaveholders were enslaved in Howard County. Through these
particularities of experience the enslaved formed relationships, acquaintances, kin
networks and communities across and among farms of Howard County. It is from this
setting that the enslaved waged their struggle for freedom long before the nation
embarked on a path leading to a civil war.
Chapter Two builds on the examination of communities in the first chapter and
uses Howard County as a case study to rethink black military enlistment and the process
46
Hurt, 217; Burke, 310.
15 of emancipation writ large in Central Missouri. Two central questions drove the research
of Chapter Two. What would the enlistment of able-bodied slave men look like from the
experience of those enslaved, mostly women who could not or did not enlist? With that
in mind, how does the military service and therefor absence of so many able-bodied men
affect the process of emancipation as it developed on the ground in Howard County?
The Union recruitment of able-bodied enslaved men has come to symbolize the
process of emancipation in the state of Missouri. Chapter Two challenges male-centered
narratives of emancipation by exploring the gendered nature of choices to seize freedom
by means other than military service. Recruiting and arming black soldiers will always
stand as a pivotal moment in the trajectory of emancipation, but its revolutionary imagery
can obscure as much as it reveals. I draw from what Thavolia Glymph has identified as
the “insurrectionist” actions of enslaved women who waged a war for freedom largely
outside of the recognition or aid of the Federal government. Acknowledging that Union
military policy, specifically slave recruitment, gendered the path toward freedom in
Missouri creates space to recognize the role of black women as they translated
proclamations of emancipation into “real or ‘actual’ freedom.”47 The enslaved women of
Howard County made freedom where they stood after military service removed the
majority of able-bodied black men from their communities.
The final chapter stands apart from the prior two chapters in order to explore
themes present throughout but that defy the chronological scope of either. Chapter Three
examines names as useful historical artifacts for analyzing the slaveholding household
and the contested place of the enslaved within it. Surnames of slaves operated in a murky
47
Thavolia Glymph, “DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and Slave Women’s War for Freedom,” The
South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:3, Summer 2013 (accessed September 4, 2013), 495.
16 legal space practically unnecessary as the legal position of the enslaved was the chattel
property of the slaveholder. Developed in counterpoint, names were assumed by
slaveholders and slaves in both senses of the word. Slaveholders assumed the names of
the slaves by taking it for granted that the slaves of their household were known by their
surname. In this sense, the slaves of Thomas C. Boggs were known as Howard Boggs,
and his sister Julia Ann Boggs. 48 Many others remain unnamed in the slave schedule of
the 1860 census. On the other hand, the enslaved assumed names in the sense of actively
taking names on as a choice or statement. Assuming a name in this sense was to endow
oneself with social belonging to kin and to place.
Without diluting the meaningfulness of names, surnames of slaves were often
flexible and situational. As slaves moved from farm to farm or were sold from one
slaveholder to the next, the slaveholder often assumed that the slaves would take their
surname. As examined in the third chapter, this was not always the case. A mother
might remind her child that he was a Prather, even though he was born on the farm of a
man named Pierce who owned both mother and child.49 Similarly, the enslaved might
assume different names among white and black acquaintances or to designate a
connection to a son, husband, wife, or other kin. Names also mark a crucial historical
moment signifying a new relationship between the formerly enslaved and the state. For
48
Deposition of Howard Boggs, 27 March, 1890, in Priscilla Boggs pension claim of Howard
Boggs, (Pvt., Co. G, 65 USCT. Inf., Civil War), XC 832676, Civil War and Later Pension Files;
Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NARA),
[Howard County Pension Collection (hereafter HCPC), Howard Boggs, 2178]. The Howard Count Pension
Collection is a collection of over seventy pension applications made by soldiers and their families who
were enslaved in Howard County. The first citation refers to the physical location of the document at the
NARA, the Howard County Pension Collection citations identify the location of the digital image within
the HCPC. They adhere to the following structure, [HCPC, Name of Veteran, Image Number].
49
Deposition of George Pierce, 19 May, 1892, in Diana J. Williams pension claim of Morrison
Prather, (Pvt., Co. H, 65th USCT. Inf., Civil War), XC 346247, Civil War and Later Pension Files, RG 15,
NARA, (hereafter Civil War Pension Files) in pension claim of Morrison Prather [HCPC, Morrison Prather
2669].
17 many, military enlistment, a marriage ceremony, or an application for pension became
the first officially sanctioned interaction between freedpeople and the federal or state
governments. In these moments men and women declared their name for the first time
and were acknowledged as citizens. It is also in the collection of bureaucratic
information attached to citizenship, including names, that formerly enslaved are rendered
more visible to the eyes of historians. In this sense, pension applications are invaluable
resources for their discussion of names, under slavery and after, while providing
information on the lives of formerly enslaved African Americans in the complexity that
they were lived.
Applications for Civil War Pensions are particularly rich sources in that they often
provide historical information moving in two directions. Among the depositions, sworn
testimonies, occasional letters, affidavits, and one medical examination after another,
pension applications are valuable sources of information on life under slavery and in the
immediate, and occasionally not-so-immediate, aftermath of the Civil War. Pensions are
testaments to the lived experience of those who survived the war and whose life spans the
end of slavery and emancipation. Pensions often richly document the fact that
emancipation was not an event; it was an ongoing structure or process.50 In the wake of
50
In the past decade Civil War Pensions have been recognized as a rich source of information to
supplement published slave narratives. For some of the most recent use of pension applications of former
slaves see, Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South, (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Diane Mutti Burke On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s SmallSlaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press); Donald R. Shaffer, After
the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004);
Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation: Understanding the Civil War, and
Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, (New York: New York University Press, 2008)
Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation,
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 252; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: AfricanAmerican Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012); Leslie A. Schwalm, “’Overrun with Free Negroes”: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in
the Upper Midwest,” Civil War History, vol. 50, no. 2, (June 2004), 145-174; Leslie A. Schwalm,
18 slavery and in application for a pension, formerly enslaved widows and soldiers alike
often had to verify their name as legitimate. The problems that ensued illustrate that
slaves position in society cannot be reduced to their place as an economic unit in the
slaveholding household. Rather the enslaved belonged to layered communities often
related but not reducible to one another.51
The high percentage of enslaved peoples, the wealth of slaveholders and
representative power in the state government, and the presence of two Union recruiting
stations for colored infantry make Howard County an ideal setting for examining slavery
and emancipation in Missouri. Slaves laboring in Howard County on the eve of the Civil
War were familiar with both the land they worked and those around them working land
nearby. Networks of communities and kin maintained streams of communication,
support, and outlets for socializing when time allowed. Relationships integral to
surviving the casual violence and everyday dehumanization of slavery also rose to the
fore in efforts to make a freedom livable in the wake of slavery.
“Between Slavery and Freedom: African American Women and Occupation in the Slave South,” in
Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, ed. LeeAnn Whites and
Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Leslie A. Schwalm, “Surviving
Wartime Emancipation: African Americans and the Cost of Civil War,” Health Legacies: Militirization,
Health and Society, (Spring 2011), 21-27; Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipations Diaspora: Race and
Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Mary
Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations, (New
York: Random House Inc., 2005); Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of
the Household in the Delta, 1861-1875, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003).
51
Nira Yuval-Davis argues it is important to remember that citizenship is not reducible to an
individual’s belonging to a particular state. Rather, citizenship “as a full membership of a political
community with its rights and obligations, is usually multi-layered, composed of local, regional, national,
cross and supranational political communities, as well as often more than one national community.” Nira
Yuval-Taylor, Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, (London: SAGE Publications Ltd.,
2011), 69.
19 CHAPTER ONE
“I knew about all of them”:
Slavery and the ‘Neighborhood’ in Howard County, c. 186052
Howard Boggs met James Chowan for the first time in the late 1850s, across both
the Missouri River and the Howard-Cooper County lines, in the town of Booneville.
Born a slave, Boggs regularly traveled from the small farm of his master located several
miles “back in the country,” for trade or labor in Booneville.53 Born free, Chowan “was
employed as a deck hand on boats running on the Mo river.” While commerce and labor
brought both men to the banks of the Missouri River, they used the opportunity to
establish a new relationship. Passing the time Boggs would share the happenings of
Howard County, and Chowan the news from across the length of the Missouri River.
Perhaps Chowan would bring word of recent legislation from the state capitol in
Jefferson City or even events in St. Louis, where his boat would begin and end its
journeys as the Missouri flowed into the Mississippi River. Whether they engaged in the
exchange of vital news or friendly conversation, Chowan and Boggs connected the farms
of Howard County to Missouri’s largest economic hubs, political centers, and a chain of
small farms not so unlike those with which Boggs was familiar. The meeting of Chowan
and Boggs is then but one illustration of the connections made across the slaveholding
farms of Howard County and the crucial role of mobility in providing the opportunity to
establish and maintain formal and informal relationships.
52
Deposition of Andrew Williams, 20, Jan. 1905, (Pvt., Co. G, 67th USCT Inf., Civil War), app.
320668
Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2036].
53
Deposition of James Chowan, 9 Mar., 1890, in Abner Stapleton in pension claim of Mack
Stapleton, (Pvt. Co. G, 67th USCT Civil War), C 320668, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs,
2194].
20 Mobility itself, often found in the system of hiring slaves and abroad marriages,
was utilized by the enslaved of Howard County to developed social networks across and
among the small farms of their owners.54 Slavery in Missouri was of a smaller scale than
slavery as it operated in the Lower South. However, slavery in Missouri shared many
characteristics of the small-scale slavery pervasive across the Upper South such as greater
mobility for the enslaved, hiring out and abroad marriages.55 Historian Diane Mutti
Burke estimates that fifty-seven percent of slave marriages in Missouri were between
partners who lived on separate farms.56 Similarly, a large portion Missouri slaves were
hired to work for masters who were not their owner. In the town of Rocheport, just
beyond the Howard County line in Boone County to the East, thirty-one percent of slaves
were hired hands working for a master other than their owner.57 This chapter examines
the networks of relationships maintained by the enslaved of Howard County through
quantitative analysis of 1860 census data and through qualitative analysis of depositions
from Civil War pension applications that spoke of neighborhoods and communities.
The bases for social connections in Howard County fell into four broad
categories; geographic proximity, family and kinship, social and labor, and the social
networks of slaveholders. Relationships based on geographic proximity were those that
came into being because both parties lived close to one another, or saw one another on a
daily basis. Relationships founded on family and kinship describe those between
members of the same family or kin group. Social and labor relationships were formed
54
The term “owner” is used throughout this thesis to distinguish the legal category of a
slaveholder who, by power of slave law, owns slaves. The term “master” on the other hand refers to one
who controls the labor of the enslaved, but may not legally hold title over the lives of another human being.
55
For more on slavery in the Upper South and the border states, see; Barbara J. Fields, Slavery
and Freedom on the Middle Ground.
56
Burke, On Slavery’s Border, Table 4, 311.
57
Burke, 108.
21 when two parties were brought together by shared work or through formal and informal
social gatherings such as shared leisure time, attending a church service, or a marriage
ceremony. Finally, the enslaved widened their circle of acquaintances through occasions
provided by the social and business networks of the slaveholder. This occurred when
slaves accompanied slaveholders on social visits to the farms of relatives or friends, when
slaves were hired, sold, or loaned to acquaintances of the slaveholder, or sent across the
county to complete duties in the name of the slaveholder.
These categories were flexible and mutually sustaining. Relationships between
the enslaved were often products of several categories simultaneously, or they began
through one and were strengthened as other categories were added. For example, a
relationship that began largely due to geographic proximity, or the fact that two
individuals lived on adjoining farms was often augmented by opportunities to share labor
or leisure time due to their relative closeness. Slaves also became acquainted with those
on distant farms through duties that required travel. Such was the case when Howard
Boggs traveled to Booneville on errands for his master, and in so doing, became
acquainted with James Chowan.
An outline of this complex network can be pieced together through analysis of
applications for Civil War pensions. In 1862 Congress mandated the U.S. Pension
Bureau with the responsibility of administering pensions for white and black men
disabled in the course of federal military service as well as those applications made by
their survivors, widows, orphans, and other family dependents.58 In the decades that
followed the Civil War veteran’s and dependents obtained pensions “based on the service
58
Regosin and Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation, 2.
22 of over eighty thousand black soldiers and sailors.”59 Almost half of theses pensions
contain at least one “special examination” in which a pension officer actively investigated
the validity of the claim and likelihood of fraud.60 During this process a field investigator
would take sworn depositions, testimonies, and collect other documents such as extant
birth and marriage records, land titles, even personal correspondences in order to evaluate
the claim being made. A report would then be submitted to the U.S. Pension Bureau
headquarters in Washington D.C. where it would ultimately be evaluated. While such
scrutiny lengthened the process of application and made the chances of obtaining a claim
less likely for many, special examinations can provide rich details on slave life, familial
and social relationships, and military service.
This chapter examines seven applications made by the soldiers of the United
States Colored Troops recruited from the farms of Howard County in 1863-1864. Some
of these pensions were claimed by surviving veterans, most, however were claimed by
the widows of soldiers, and in one case the minor children of the soldier. Collectively,
these pensions illuminate networks of kinship, labor, geography, and slaveholding that
the slaves of Howard County commonly referred to as the neighborhood.61 From these
seven pensions, the selected testimonies of nineteen former slaves, one free African
American, and one former mistress illustrate ties between twelve separate slave-owning
households of Howard County. Neighborhood connections, often physically close were
not entirely reducible to their relative geographical proximity. The social connections of
59
Regosin and Shaffer, 3.
As Regosin and Shaffer note, only about one quarter of white Southern Unionists underwent this
type of scrutiny; Voices of Emancipation, 3.
61
For more on slave neighborhoods, see Anthony Kaye, Joining Places; and in Missouri, Burke,
On Slavery’s Border.
60
23 the slaveholder, social and kinship networks of the enslaved, and common labor also
played a role in forming the web like connections of the neighborhood.
The Boggs household, near Fayette in Howard County, Missouri is a fair example
of the average slaveholding farm in Howard County. Listed in the 1860 census, the white
Boggs household was headed by Thomas and comprised of his wife Levinia; two sons
Robert J, and John M; and two daughters, Leona and Nannie. John Wheeler, a nineteenyear-old white laborer and John H Jacobs, a white schoolteacher were also part of the
household unit. Living and working for the white Boggs family were nine slaves, slightly
more than the Howard County’s average holding of seven slaves in 1860.62
As Howard Boggs’ pension file shows, the life of the nine Boggs slaves was rural,
but not without social contact from people outside their community. Geographer Walter
Schroeder has calculated that by 1860 Howard County had a fairly even population
distribution with an average of eight free persons per 160-acre parcels of land.63 Howard
Boggs lived, worked, and rested on land surrounded by slaveholders.64 It follows that
Howard also lived around fellow enslaved. Nearly one in three people in Moniteau
Township, where Howard Boggs lived were slaves.65 In the center of the state, where
slaveholding was more prevalent, Schroeder’s estimate could easily be doubled to sixteen
people per 160-acre parcel when the enslaved population is taken into consideration.66
Though Howard lived on the Boggs farm, he had frequent contact with slaves on
neighboring farms. Both Howard and his sister were born and raised as slaves on the
62
1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Richmond Township, Howard County, Missouri,
Population and Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
63
Schroeder, “Spread of Settlement in Howard County, Missouri 1810-1859”, 23.
64
Deposition of Howard Boggs, 20 Mar., 1890, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs,
2178].
65
1860 Eight Federal Manuscript Census, Moniteau County, Missouri, Slave Schedule.
66
Schroeder includes in a footnote that his estimate does not include the enslaved population
growing “in the better soil districts,” 24.
24 Boggs farm near Fayette and only a few miles from the Missouri River. Moses Porter, a
slave of James Turner who lived “in the same neighborhood,” knew Howard from the
time he “was a boy 11 or 12 years of age.”67 Growing up near one another and being
similar ages, Moses and Howard saw each other frequently, established a friendship and,
when they were able, spent their leisure time in one another’s company. Moses Porter
remembered how frequently they would meet and that they would often go fishing and
hunting together on Sundays.68
Howard Boggs’ pension application contains similar testimonies from former
slaves who lived in and around the Boggs farm. Howard Boggs’ mobility connected the
slaves of the Boggs household to neighboring slaveholding Turner and Patterson
households and the marriage of Julia Ann, Howard’s sister, to Edward Estill also suggests
close interactions with those on the nearby Estill farm. Steve Patterson remembered of
Howard that “we were boys and neighbors” and that he saw Boggs every week.69
Patterson does not elaborate on their weekly visits but it could be that, like Moses Porter,
he frequently spent Sundays with Howard Boggs. Thomas Hughes and John
Brickenridge, later comrades of Howard Boggs in the service of the U.S.C.T. also
remembered being “neighbors in Howard County…prior to the War of the Rebellion”
and knowing Howard Boggs as a boy.70 Beyond local socializing, Howard Boggs’ labor
responsibilities connected the Boggs farm with acquaintances in the nearby river town of
Booneville.
2196].
67
Deposition of Moses Porter, 28 Mar., 1890, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs,
68
Ibid.
Deposition of Steve Paterson, 18 Sept., 1885, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs,
69
2304].
70
General Affidavit of Thomas Hughes and John Brickenridge, 8 Nov., 1887, Civil War Pension
Files, [HCPC, Howard Boggs, 2315].
25 Proximity to the Missouri River and the mobility of the enslaved often provided
the opportunity to further connect with life beyond their local farms and to socialize with
free blacks native to Howard County and those passing through on the Missouri River.
This opportunity came to Howard Boggs when he met James Chowan across the
Missouri River in Booneville. This ability to travel to the riverfront and even cross the
river was not unique to Howard Boggs, however. It can be gathered from the 1844 case
of an escaped slave that free and enslaved African Americans traveled too and from river
towns such as Booneville with enough frequency so as not to arouse much suspicion. In
1844 a man named Charles, held as a slave in Howard County escaped from the farm of
his owner by traveling to Booneville. When his master discovered his absence he had the
steamboat Wapello docked in Glasgow searched. Found empty, the steamboat was
allowed to proceed downriver where Charles, who had forged papers, boarded the
steamboat as a free man bound for St. Louis and paid his fare. Charles made it to St.
Louis before his master learned of the event and there he disappears from the historical
record.71 No doubt, Charles chose to attempt boarding the steamship in Booneville where
there was a lesser chance of someone in his neighborhood recognizing him, reenslaving
him, and administering the ten lashes due to “strolling” slaves, or worse.72
Life for free African Americans, even along the Missouri River, came with limits.
Henry Bruce, a former slave in Chariton County, recalled how he believed that he had
much more mobility as a slave than did the free people of color whom he knew. “With
my master’s horse,” wrote Bruce in his memoir, “I could ride over the county, in fact did
71
72
Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 255.
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1861.
26 whenever occasion demanded it, and without molestation.”73 Free persons of color were
required to have a pass from their guardian in Chariton County. Bruce recounts that if
they were “caught on the public road without a pass” a free black man or woman would
be “subject to arrest by any white man who chose to make it.”74 Bruce added, “in reality
they were no more free than the slave, until the war set both classes free.”75
While only seventy-eight free African Americans lived in Howard County in
1860, this was the second highest number of any county outside of St. Louis, which
boasted 1,865.76 The free black population in Howard County was concentrated in the
North and South central portions of the county in the townships of Prairie and Franklin
(See Map 1). Likely due to prohibitive residential laws barring or establishing taxes on
free people of color seeking to live in cities, only a combined five free blacks lived in the
cities of Fayette and Glasgow. The Howard County Freed Negroes Register corroborates
Bruce’s observations regarding the limited freedom of free blacks. The Register
contained a list of the forty-two slaves manumitted in Howard County between the years
1836 and 1861. Even manumitted freedom was not without its restrictions. Freed slaves
were allowed to remain in the county only after they registered with the county clerk,
who recorded their age, height, weight, skin color, and other physical characteristics.
Manumitted slaves then posted a bond that ranged from three-hundred to seven-hundred
73
H. C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave. Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man, orig.
pub. 1895, (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 78.
74
Bruce, The New Man, 77.
75
Bruce, 79.
76
Only Marion County had more free blacks than Howard County, at 84. The remaining
population of free black in the counties of Little Dixie are as follows, Boone: 53; Callaway: 31; Cooper: 28;
Lafayette: 36 ; Saline: 23.1860 Missouri Census Table, Missouri State Convention, 1861-1863: Office of
the Secretary of State, RG005: Box 1, final folder,
http://www.civilwaronthewesternborder.org/content/1860-missouri-census-table ;
27 dollars. Finally, they could remain “as long as they were of good behavior” and
conducted themselves in ways “proper & right & according to the law.”77
77
Missouri, Howard County, Freed Negroes Register, 1836-1861, C1123, Missouri State
Historical Society, Columbia, Missouri, http://statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri.org/cdm/compoundobject/
collection/amcw/id/8564/rec/17
28 Map 1:
Ra
Roanoke
ndo
lph
Co
unt
y
Ch
ari
ton
Co
un
ty
Free Black Population by Township
Howard County, MO 1860
Prairie
Glasgow
BonneFemme
Chariton
e C
ou
n
ty
Fayette
Bo
on
Richmond
Moniteau
Boons Lick
Population
(per township)
Franklin
0-4
5-9
MISSOURI RIVER
10 - 13
14 - 17
0
2.75
5.5
Miles
18 - 22
23 - 26
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson
1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO
Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County
NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
29 One of the most common ways slaves achieved mobility was by being hired out to
a neighboring farm or through travel privileges granted couples in an abroad marriage.
African Americans used this mobility to enlarge their social network as they became
acquainted with and worked alongside slaves on adjoining farms. Born a slave in
Maryland, Diana J. Williams recalled how she was “nearly full grown” when her Master,
Charley Pierce, brought her to Howard County. It is most likely that Diana was brought
to work as a domestic for Mrs. Pierce as she accompanied her mistress when she visited
friends “thirty five miles north” of where they lived, in the town of Jacksonville,
Missouri. While these trips were made at the leisure of her mistress, Diana was able to
use the opportunity to socialize with slaves across county lines. Near Jacksonville, Diana
“became acquainted” with a certain slave, Morrison Prather. It is unknown how long
Diana and Mrs. Pierce remained in Jacksonville, but they eventually returned to resume
their lives in Howard County. Morrison and Diana would meet again however when
Morrison was hired out to a man named Charley King who “lived a neighbor” to the
Pierce farm.78
While Morrison was “at work with King,” Diana was able to spend more time
with him and, in her words “Morrison Commenced to run with me.” Diana and Morrison
were eventually married in the kitchen of the Pierce household, by a ceremony officiated
by “’Major Hardin,’ a colored minister.” A short time after the marriage, Mr. King came
under financial troubles and his estate was “broke-up.” Diana’s master, Mr. Pierce “took
everything he [King] had” including, perhaps especially, the slaves working on his farm.
78
Deposition of Diana J. Williams, 20 May, 1892, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison
Prather, 2672].
30 In her recollection, Diana adds the significant detail; “we lived together as man and wife
and occupied the same rooms until he enlisted.”79
It is important to reflect on the social connections that led to this marriage and the
central role that movement, forced and voluntary, played in their lives. The connection
between the white Pierce family and their friends in Jacksonville and the forced
movement of their slaves Diana and Morrison led to the initial meeting and reacquaintance of the couple. Similarly, it was likely Charley Pierce’s social ties to King,
the legal owner of Morrison that allowed him to strike a bankruptcy deal with his
neighbor that led to his ownership of Morrison. It is unclear whether Morrison was still a
hired hand at the time he was married to Diana, or the extent to which their relationship
played a role in the business dealings of Mr. Pierce. However, it can be said that even
when owners took the emotional interests of their slaves into consideration, very rarely
did they trump the economic interests of the white household. In the case of Diana J.
Williams and Morrison Prather the chance of their marriage going “abroad” was
minimized when Charley Pierce purchased Morrison from the bankrupt estate of King.
While Morrison and Diana were able to live together, an estimated fifty-seven
percent of marriages between slaves in Missouri were between partners living on separate
farms.80 Indeed, the story of Mack Stapleton and Susan Jackson (Maiden name
Stapleton) tells a more common tale of abroad marriage. Mack and Susan’s relationship
was, in many ways, intertwined with the stories of the families of their owners and
masters. Through their marriage, Mack and Susan connected three of the largest
slaveholding families in Howard County, the Stapletons, the Jacksons, and the Maupins.
79
80
Ibid.
Burke, On Slavery’s Border, Table 4, 311.
31 As slave marriages were not recognized by law and only recognized by owners on a
piecemeal fashion, the ambivalence of the masters’ perspective has filtered down through
their language.81 For many, it was unknown whether Mack Stapleton and Susan Jackson
married by a ceremony, “or just cohabitated in the slave fashion.”82 The distinction was
of secondary importance to their communities as Mack and Susan were “generally
regarded in the neighborhood as husband and wife.”83 Whether this distinction was
meaningful to Mack and Susan is unclear. If they had been married by a ceremony, it
was likely that it would have been officiated by Jack Carol, “an old colored preacher who
very frequently officiated at marriages between slaves.”84 White and black communities
recognized the union of Mack and Susan even though it was not bound to be respected
under law. Certainly, marriage of a “slave fashion” covered enough rhetorical ground to
leave room for the bond of marriage to be broken, by sale or by lease, at the whim or
interest of the master.85
That hiring out and frequent sale were defining features of small-scale slavery
equates to what might be known in today’s parlance as a high turnover rate among farm
laborers. The forced movement of black bodies to and from farms was therefor as crucial
a feature of slavery’s lived experience as labor on said farms. As Andrew Williams
stated in his deposition in the pension case of Mack Stapleton, he may have only had a
single master, but he maintained close contact with slaves from at least five other nearby
81
For more on family dynamics between slaveholders and slaves in Missouri see, Kimberly A.
Schreck, Splitting Heirs unpublished Diss., University of Missouri, Columbia, 2004.
82
Deposition of Jesse Miller, 17 Jan., 1905, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton,
2030].
83
Ibid., [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2031].
84
Ibid., [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2030].
85
For more on slave marriage see Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 79-113, Burke, On Slavery’s
Border, 198-230, Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, 19-50.
32 farms. Indeed because the Williams farm neighbored the Stapleton estate, it is also likely
that Diana J. Williams and her husband Morrison Prather, also knew the Stapletons.
Andrew Williams knew Mack Stapleton’s owner George Stapleton and all the
slaves on the Stapleton land. George Stapleton was known as “’Bully Stapleton” locally
and by Brack, “Big Ben and Mack,” the men who labored as slaves for George.86 It was
Mack, however who was “’hired out’ on the Maupin farm” only about a mile from the
Jackson place.87 At the time, Andrew Williams was also hired out by “old Ben
Williams” and sent to work for “Capt. Sweeny” on a farm adjoining the Jacksons.88 This
was only the beginning of Mack’s itinerate employment as he was “hired out a good deal
in that part of the Co.”89 In this way, Mack living on the Maupin farm, and traveling
from farm to farm as he was hired out, became “acquainted with Susan” his future wife.90
Susan Jackson was what many slaves in Missouri referred to as a “near neighbor” of
Mack as she lived on the farm of her master Cosgrave Jackson adjoining that of the
Maupin’s.91
Table 1 illustrates the anatomy of Andrew Williams’ social relations and how he
came to know Mack and Susan Stapleton. Surnames were only transferred to slaves
when they were sold from one household to another and did not change if they were
simply hired out. In fact, maintaining the surname of the owner, even while working
most immediately with a different master became an important feature of maintaining
ownership over a mobile slave population.
86
Deposition of Andrew Williams, 20 Jan., 1905, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack
Stapleton, 2036].
87
Ibid., [Mack Stapleton 2037].
88
Ibid., [Mack Stapleton 2036].
89
Deposition of Matilda Bly, 20 Jan., 1905, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton,
2040].
90
Deposition of Jesse Miller, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Mack Stapleton, 2030].
91
Ibid.
33 Table 1: Anatomy of an Abroad Marriage
George “Bully”
Stapleton
Ben Williams
(slaveholder)
(slaveholder)
Owner of
Owner of
Andrew Williams
(slave)
Mack Stapleton
(slave)
Hired to
Hired to
Capt. Sweeny
Farm
Maupin Farm
Near Neighbor
Near Neighbor
Cosgrave Jackson
Farm
(slaveholder)
Owner of
Abroad Marriage to
Susan
Jackson/Stapleton
(slave)
Andrew Williams’ deposition provides information concerning the experience of
slavery in Howard County by illuminating interpersonal connections within the
neighborhood and the creation of family units by the enslaved. Often, for those who
chose to marry, being hired to work on adjoining farms became an opportunity meet a
future partner. The results of such unions usually formed an “abroad marriage” where
the partners lived on separate farms, belonged to separate owners, and were allowed
visitation on Saturday and occasionally Wednesday nights. Occasionally, the owner of
one partner agreed to hire or purchase the other partner in a concession to the family unit
34 even though this was not the norm. John Estill for example recalled how his mother,
Mary Ann, was owned by Mrs. Hickman on the Hickman farm while his father, also
named John Estill was held by one, J. R. Estill at the Estill estate. While both lived on
separate farms at the time of their marriage, J. R. Estill purchased Mary Ann after she
married John by ceremony. John and Mary Ann lived together on the Estill farm until
John went off to the army.92
Slave marriages of any kind were not recorded in official county records and
certainly not included in the 1860 slave schedule. Yet marriages between slaves were
common in Howard County and records often were kept in a family Bible. Marriage
ceremonies, if they were conducted at all, often took place in the house of the owner.
Julia Ann, a slave of Thomas C. Boggs was married to Edward Estell in the Boggs house.
It is probable that Edward had been hired to Boggs at a young age as he never claimed
ownership of him, yet he stated that he was “raised” in the Boggs family.93 That Thomas
Boggs saw his nine slaves as an extension of his household is understandable, however,
clear divisions were drawn between family and slaves. Although the Boggs house
provided the venue for the wedding ceremony, and all the white members of the Boggs
family regarded Julia Ann and Edward to be married, they were “living in matrimony as
then customary with slaves.”94 When Mary Ann Hickman and John Estill married in
1851, John’s mistress recorded the date in the family Bible of the white Boggs family.
As his mistress later claimed, she had the “marriage, birth and death records of her
92
Deposition of John Estill, 7 Aug., 1887, Miller Estill in pension claim of John Estill, (Pvt. Co.
B, 67 USCT Civil War), C259433, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill, 1754].
93
Affidavit of Thomas C. Boggs, 1 Nov., 1873, Julia Estell in pension claim of Edward Estell
(Estill), (Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War), C 164940, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Edward Estell,
1494].
94
Ibid.
th
35 former slaves” written in the pages of the Bible, including the names and birthdates of the
four sons and three daughters that were born to Mary Ann and John before the coming of
the Civil War.95 Like so many other able bodied men, John enlisted into the Union Army
in 1864, fought for his freedom and died in service. It is likely that he never met his
youngest daughter Mary, born in the Spring of 1864, whose name was also recorded in
the Estill family Bible. After the war, Mary Ann remarried Sergeant Taylor, in a
ceremony officiated by the minister Jos. Wright. This time, the ceremony was held in the
house of her former mistress.
Acquaintances, kin, family, and partners often found themselves being asked to
provide evidence for the legitimacy of relationships that the government had ignored and
sought to prevent under slavery since Missouri’s formation. Retroactive recognition and
legal protection of formerly enslaved marriages and families came through the witness of
those who had sustained such relationships in slavery. Neighborhood relations, so crucial
to making slavery livable, became the foundation for making freedom meaningful.
The social connections among and between slaveholding farms were also affected
by the demographic make up of the county in which they were situated. Located in the
very heart of the slaveholding Missouri River counties commonly known as Little Dixie,
Howard County was home to one in ten enslaved Missourians by 1860. The county also
had the highest percentage of slaves, thirty seven percent, and the second largest slave
population, 5,886, of any county in the state of Missouri.96 Thirty seven percent of the
residents of Howard County were held as slaves. At the interpersonal level, this means
that for roughly every six free residents of the county, there were four slaves. In order to
95
96
General Affidavit of Mary A. Estill, 12 July, 1887, [HCPC, John Estill, 1707].
Burke, On Slavery’s Border, Table 2, 310.
36 draft a more complete outline of the social relations among Missouri slaves and
slaveholders it is useful to explore the physical geography of slaveholding in townships
across Howard County.
After the Territory of Missouri was established in 1814, Howard County was
quickly organized in 1816.97 While the first settlers were lured to the salt springs of the
Boonslick land in the southwest of the county along the Missouri River in the 1810s and
earlier, settlement exploded in the next decade. In just eleven years after the territorial
government of Missouri issued the first act specifically authorizing the sale of Howard
County land in 1819, seventy-five percent of all county land had been claimed.98 Further
encouraged by Missouri’s statehood in 1821, Howard County became a prime destination
for those farming families and their slaves emigrating from the Upper South.99 During
the greatest period of migration to Howard County the percent increase of whites was
twenty-one percent, while the slave population increased by ninety-eight percent.100 In
the coming decades, the slave population continued to grow, thirty-nine percent by 1840,
thirty-three percent by 1850, and twenty percent by 1860.101
Settlement spread north and east from the Boonslick region of Howard County
where the poor soil, steep sloping hills, and saline water discouraged market based
agricultural production.102 The loess soil being exceptionally deep and fertile in the
northwest and center portions of the county, what would become Chariton and Richmond
97
Schroeder, “Spread of Settlement in Howard County, Missouri 1810-1859,” 10, 9.
Schroeder, 18, 19.
99
Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 51.
100
Lawrence O. Christensen, “William D. Swinney: Howard County Slaveholder and
Entrepreneur,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 4, (July, 2014), 236.
101
Christensen, “William D. Swinney,” 236.
102
Schroeder, 14.
98
37 Townships, were particularly suited for growing tobacco and hemp.103 It is in these
tobacco and hemp production regions, Chariton and Richmond Township that lived the
highest percent of slaves by population (see Map, Percent of Total Enslaved Persons by
Township). By 1850, hemp production exceeded nine hundred tons a year in Howard
County making itone of the leading hemp producing counties in the state.104 Similarly,
tobacco production soared in Howard County which produced 2.8 million pounds in
1860, the second most of any county in Missouri.105 Tobacco production became so
prevalent that B. W. Lewis was able to operate a tobacco manufactury in the City of
Glasgow with a “work and storage area large enough to process 3 million pounds of
tobacco annually.”106 By 1851, over 6.7 million pounds of tobacco crossed the docks at
Glasgow, double the amount grown in Howard and accounting for more than one third of
all tobacco produced in the entire state. Glasgow had thirteen tobacco stemmeries and
manufactories in its vicinity by 1852, making it a central hub for tobacco trade on the
Missouri River.107 Most planters in neighboring counties of Randolph and Macon sold
their tobacco in the Glasgow market, and the city of Rocheport, just across county lines at
the southeast corner of Howard maintained a similar tobacco based economy.108 The
constant attention and physically demanding labor required of tobacco and hemp
production required the maintenance of a large labor force operating year-round. 109
103
Schroeder, 14, 15. Hurt, 65.
Hurt, 120.
105
1860 Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Missouri, Agriculture Schedule, State Historical
Society of Missouri. Only Chariton County, immediately North West of Howard produced more tobacco in
1860 and it is likely that most of this tobacco flowed through the river port at Glasgow, situated on the
border of Howard and Chariton Counties.
106
Hurt, 96.
107
Christensen, “William D. Swinney,” 238.
108
Hurt, 97.
109
Hurt, 101.
104
38 Map 2:
Ra
Roanoke
ndo
lph
Co
unt
y
Ch
ari
ton
Co
un
ty
Percent of Total Enslaved Persons by Township
Howard County, MO 1860
Prairie
Glasgow
BonneFemme
Chariton
e C
ou
nt
y
Fayette
Bo
on
Richmond
Moniteau
Boons Lick
Percent
(per township)
Franklin
0 - 11
12 - 16
MISSOURI RIVER
17 - 26
27 - 36
0
2.75
5.5
Miles
37 - 46
47 - 52
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson
1875 Platte Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO
Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County Slave Schedule
NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
39 While central Missouri’s tobacco and hemp economy was made possible by slave
labor, scholars such as Diane Mutti Burke have argued that slavery in Missouri was
markedly different from slavery in other parts of the United States. Slavery in Missouri
was “often just as cruel and exploitative as anywhere in the South” argues Burke, but
slavery in Missouri was set apart by it’s comparatively small-scale.110 In 1860, 114,965
slaves were held in Missouri, while Georgia and Mississippi led the nation by with
enslaved populations of over 430,000 each.111 While only one third of the South’s slaves
lived on plantations of over fifty or more, only two slaveholders in Howard County
claimed more than fifty slaves.112 The difference becomes more disparate when
compared to the most heavily populated slave regions of the South. For example, in
Howard County, the average slaveholder held just over seven slaves in 1860 whereas the
median slaveholding in Georgetown, “the premier rice-producing district of low country
South Carolina” the median slaveholding unit was 135. 113 Still, slaveholders in Missouri
sought to strengthen their system by adopting “flexible economic strategies, such as
hiring, [and] granting slaves liberal geographic mobility in order to accommodate their
fragile families and communities.”114 Though there were fewer slaves in Missouri than in
states across the south, slavery in Missouri remained a system of coercive labor and
control.
While the internal trade and frequent hiring of slaves offered opportunities for
greater freedom for the enslaved population, it also developed hand in hand with more
110
Burke, 5-6.
1860 Eighth Federal Manuscript Census, Missouri, Georgia, Mississippi, Slave Schedule, State
Historical Society of Missouri.
112
Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We,12; Hurt, 310.
113
Hurt,12.
114
Burke, 6.
111
40 nuanced systems of control. Residents of Howard County were enslaved at a higher
percent than anywhere in Missouri. In fact, though only ten percent of Missourians were
held as slaves, thirty-two percent of Howard Countians were enslaved, equal to the thirtytwo percent of all Southerners enslaved.115 Slave patrols, legally established in all
slaveholding counties, became a particular concern in Howard County.116 In October of
1853, a mass meeting of white citizens met at the Fayette courthouse for the “purpose of
devising means to suppress insubordination among slaves.”117 Rather than subside,
concerns regarding the enslaved of Howard only increased as the population grew.118 By
1858, a newspaper editor in Glasgow reported that the enslaved population was “much
more restive, disobedient and refractory, than formerly.”119 He furthermore
recommended all slaveholders “keep strict control of his slaves and prohibit
indiscriminate travel…at night and on Sundays.”120 By 1861 the Missouri Legislature
amended the 1855 “act concerning patrols” to enforce just such a suggestion. The
amendment stated that all slaves found “strolling about from one plantation to another,
without a pass…specifying the length of time said slave shall be absent” and clearly
designating the point of origin and destination shall be apprehended. Furthermore, the
patrollers were then permitted to administer “any number of lashes” at their discretion,
“not exceeding ten.” If they were taken before a Justice of the Peace, the captured man
or woman could receive “any number of lashes… not to exceed twenty.”121
115
Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 12.
Laws of the State of Missouri 1861.
117
Quoted in Hurt, 251.
118
For a discussion of increasing tension in Missouri as concerns regarding slavery grew nation
wide see, Melton Mclaurin, Celia, A Slave, 62-79.
119
Quoted in Hurt, 251.
120
Hurt, 252.
121
Laws of Missouri 1861.
116
41 Howard County was exceptional in the fact that thirty-seven percent of its
population consisted of enslaved peoples, the most of any Missouri county. However,
this average is mainly useful for what it tells us about Howard County’s relation to
similar counties across Missouri and is less useful in telling us something about the
operations and experience of slavery as it existed within Howard County. In his study
“Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri,” Robert Frizzell remarks that the
benefits of in-depth analysis of manuscript census schedules at the level of the township
reveals locations where slaves were indeed the majority of inhabitants.122 Within the
string of slaveholding counties known as Little Dixie, Frizzell identifies a “Missouri
Slave Belt” extending almost eighty miles with a width seldom greater than ten miles.
Just before the Civil War, a traveler could trek overland from “Columbia to a few miles
west of Lexington, crossing the river between Glasgow and Arrow Rock, and seldom be
out of countryside where slaves composed form two fifths to more than half the
population.”123 In the geographic center of this belt sat Chariton and Richmond
Townships of Howard County.
Examining the 1860 slave schedule of Howard County’s ten census tracts, or
townships, shows that patterns of slaveholding were hardly uniform across the county.
Instead, the census tracts suggest that two types of townships existed with regards to
slaveholding, those that are slave-dense and those that are slave-sparse. 124 This division
is telling of how slavery in Howard County developed alongside the agricultural and
122
Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review, 240.
Frizzell, 243. Of the nine townships Frizzell identifies with a population of slaves over 41%,
three were from Howard County.
124
The 10 polling districts of Howard County fall into two distinct groups with regard to slavery,
the heavy slave-owning districts, hereafter referred to as the townships; Chariton Township, Franklin
Township, Moniteau Township, Prairie Township, and Richmond Township and the sparsely slave-owning
districts, hereafter referred to as the towncenters; Bonne Femme, Boonslick, Fayette, City of Glasgow and
Chariton, City of Roanoke and Prairie.
123
42 market economies of the rural townships and developing town and city centers. In this
study, all townships that are understood as slave-sparse had enslaved populations of less
than three hundred making up no more than twenty-six percent of the population.
Comparatively, no township that has been designated slave-dense had a population of
less than seven hundred while the density of the slave population reaches above fifty
percent in both Chariton and Richmond townships.
Table 2:
1860 Census District:
Slave-Dense
Total
White Pop.
Total
Slave Pop.
Total Free
Black Pop.
Percent of
Pop. Slave
Chariton Township
1144
1191
1
51%
Franklin Township
1359
1037
26
43%
Moniteau Township
1539
733
11
32%
Prairie Township
1422
866
19
38%
Richmond Township
1177
1269
1
52%
TOTALS
6641
5096
58
43%
1860 Census District:
Slave-Sparse
Total
White Pop.
Total
Slave Pop.
Total Free
Black Pop.
Percent of
Pop. Slave
Bonne Femme Township
939
172
0
15%
Boonslick Township
1078
137
11
11%
City of Fayette
446
160
3
26%
City of Glasgow
762
271
2
26%
160
50
0
24%
3385
790
16
19%
Table 3:
City of Roanoke and
Prairie
TOTALS
1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census,
Howard County, Missouri, Population and
Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of
Missouri.
43 Map 3:
Ra
Roanoke
ndo
lph
Co
unt
y
Ch
ari
ton
Co
un
ty
Enslaved Population by Township
Howard County, MO 1860
Prairie
Glasgow
BonneFemme
Chariton
e C
ou
n
ty
Fayette
Bo
on
Richmond
Moniteau
Boons Lick
Franklin
MISSOURI RIVER
0
2.75
Population
(per township)
5.5
Miles
50 - 300
300 - 1300
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson
1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO
Eigth U.S. Census, Howard Count, Slave Schedule
NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
44 Map 4:
Ra
Roanoke
ndo
lph
Co
unt
y
Ch
ari
ton
Co
un
ty
Enslaved Population by Township
Howard County, MO 1860
Prairie
Glasgow
BonneFemme
Chariton
e C
ou
nt
y
Fayette
Bo
on
Richmond
Moniteau
Boons Lick
Franklin
Population
(per township)
50
MISSOURI RIVER
50 - 299
299 - 699
0
2.75
5.5
Miles
699 - 1037
1037 - 1269
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson
1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO
Eigth U.S. Census, Howard Count, Slave Schedule
NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
45 Map 5:
Ra
Roanoke
ndo
lph
Co
unt
y
Ch
ari
ton
Co
un
ty
White Population by Township
Howard County, MO 1860
Prairie
Glasgow
BonneFemme
Chariton
e C
ou
n
ty
Fayette
Bo
on
Richmond
Moniteau
Boons Lick
Franklin
Population
(per township)
MISSOURI RIVER
160 - 620
0
2.75
5.5
Miles
621 - 1079
1080 - 1539
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson
1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO
Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County
NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
46 Map 6:
ty
Population by Township: Free and Enslaved
Howard County, MO 1860
Ra
ndo
lph
Co
unt
y
Ch
ari
ton
Co
un
Roanoke
Glasgow
Prairie
BonneFemme
Chariton
e C
ou
n
ty
Fayette
Bo
on
Richmond
Boons Lick
Moniteau
Population
(per township)
Franklin
1,500
MISSOURI RIVER
Enslaved
0
2.75
5.5
Miles
Free Black
White
Stan Maxson and Emma Walcott-Wilson
1875 Plat Map - State Historical Society, Columbia, MO
Eigth U.S. Census, Howard County
NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N
47 Eighty seven percent of all slaves (5,096 of 5,886 slaves) and eighty-seven
percent of all slaveholding households (637 of 812), resided in the five sprawling slavedense townships of Chariton, Franklin, Moniteau, Prairie, and Richmond (See Map,
Enslaved Population By Township). From the data gathered in Table 2 and Table 3, it
can be observed that the division between slave-dense and slave-sparse townships is
related to the economies of townships rather than the density of its population. The
Townships of Bonne Femme and Boonslick have substantial white populations but have a
negligible slave population. The poor soils and steep slopes of Boonslick and the “poorer
soils and steeper slopes” of the Bonne Femme Township may have been enough for selfsufficiency but could not support the development of cash crop agriculture.125 This
division represented a geographic and social divide among the inhabitants of Howard
County. As shown on the map of Enslaved Population by Township slave-sparse
townships included all of the city centers as well as two townships with less arable soil.
Even when the white population was much smaller, as seen in the cities of Fayette,
Glasgow, and Roanoke, the percent of slaves also drastically reduced.
The relatively small population of slaves in city centers such as Fayette and
Glasgow does not necessarily mean that slaves had less opportunity to forge social
connections. In fact, work in the tobacco and hemp processing factories may have led to
contact with a greater number of acquaintances than work on rural farms. In one Fayette
factory, William D. Swinney worked “twenty-one boys, four girls, and seven men” all of
125
Schoeder, 14; Robert Frizzell comes to a similar conclusion in “Southern Identity in
Nineteenth-Century Missouri,” arguing that townships with the highest percentage of slaves were marked
by commercial agriculture, mainly “the production of hemp and tobacco for the market.” Frizzell, 245.
Christopher Phillips suggests that because Howard had the highest density of slaves, but produced “no
better than the fifth-greatest amounts of tobacco and hemp of the central river counties.” Phillips,
Missouri’s Confederate, 41. It is unclear what year Phillips makes reference too, but by 1860 Howard
County was producing the second most tobacco and sixth most hemp in the State of Missouri. 1860 Eighth
Federal Manuscript Census, Missouri, Agriculture Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
48 them hired hands.126 In 1850 Swinney recorded that he had hired slaves from thirty-eight
different owners, some of them leasing more than one slave apiece.127 While the
particularly grueling nature of work in tobacco and hemp factories should not be
disregarded, it is worth considering how work in the factories connected the lives of
slaves living on diverse farms spread across the county.
The fact that in Howard County, the average slaveholder held just over seven
slaves is useful in distinguishing the slaveholding trends in Central Missouri than it is in
describing what slavery was like for those who lived within the county itself. More
accurately put this shows that in Howard County, just as many slaves lived on farms with
more than seven slaves, as did those who lived on farms with less than seven slaves. The
average is highly influenced by the majority of slaveholders who lived in slave-dense
townships. Looking at patterns of slaveholding at the township level illustrates the
variety of slaveholding from township to township. In 1860 slaves living in the slavedense townships were likely to live with approximately eight slaves per household while
slaves in slave-sparse townships were more likely to live with fewer than four slaves per
household.
While the number of slaves varied greatly from township to township, the
demographic make up of the slave population did not. Because there was very little
variety between the average ages of slaves across the townships of Howard County it can
be gathered that slaves lived in multi-generational family and kin groups countywide.
The average age in slave-dense townships was only slightly younger than those who lived
in slave-sparse districts. This is evident in more detail by the fact that fifty-seven percent
126
127
Christensen, “William D. Swinney,” 238.
Christensen, 236-237.
49 of the slaves in slave-dense townships were children under the age of sixteen, while only
fifty-two percent of those in slave-sparse townships fit in the same category, the county
average being fifty-three percent. Results were similar for those over the age of fortyfive. Ten percent of slaves in the slave-sparse townships were over the age of forty-five,
while eight percent of those in slave-dense townships were within that category,
matching the county wide average.
Table 4:
Slave-Dense: Age of Enslaved by Townships, Howard County; 1860
Number of
Enslaved <16
Number of
Enslaved >45
Percent of Enslaved
Population 45<>16
Mean
Age
Chariton Township
638 (54%)
96 (8%)
62%
18.7
Franklin Township
589 (57%)
69 (7%)
64%
17.3
Moniteau Township
444 (61%)
53 (7%)
68%
17
Prairie Township
509 (59%)
58 (7%)
66%
17
Richmond Township
702 (55%)
115 (9%)
64%
18.8
Total
2884 (57%)
391 (8%)
65%
17.8
50 Table 5:
Slave-Sparse: Age of Enslaved by Townships, Howard County; 1860
Number of
Enslaved <16
Number of
Enslaved >45
Percent of Enslaved
Population 45<>16
Mean
Age
Bonne Femme
98 (57%)
11 (6%)
63%
16.8
Boon’s Lick
71 (52%)
17 (12%)
64%
20
Fayette Township
82 (51%)
20 (28%)
79%
21.9
137 (51%)
28 (10%)
61%
20
21 (42%)
5 (1%)
43%
21
409 (52%)
81 (10%)
62%
19.9
City of Glasgow and
Chariton
City of Roanoke and
Prairie
Total
1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census,
Howard County, Missouri, Slave Schedule,
State Historical Society of Missouri.
Similarly, the difference between the gender make-up of slave-dense and slave-sparse
townships is not wide enough to suggest a great deal of change in lived experience. Most
slaves in Howard County, regardless of township lived in areas where the number of
males and females approached parity. Of the 5,886 slaves of Howard County in 1860,
fifty-three percent were male and forty-seven percent female. This countywide average
is once again more closely related to the experience of the slave-dense townships where
the overwhelming majority of the enslaved lived. In fact, the percent of males and
females in slave-dense townships is the same as the county average. Tables 5 and 6 show
that the slave-sparse township statistics invert this trend as the census shows theses
populations to be forty-seven percent male and fifty-three percent female.
51 Table 6:
Slave-Dense: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population, Howard Co, 1860
Census District
Total
Male
Percent
Male
Total
Female
Percent
Female
Chariton Township
648
54%
543
46%
Franklin Township
578
56%
459
44%
Moniteau Township
383
52%
350
48%
Prairie Township
450
52%
416
48%
Richmond Township
660
52%
609
48%
Totals
2719
52%
2377
48%
Table 7:
Slave-Sparse: Gender Composition of Enslaved Population, Howard Co, 1860
Census District
Total
Male
Percent
Male
Total
Female
Percent
Female
Bonne Femme
80
47%
92
53%
Boon’s Lick
70
51%
67
49%
Fayette Township
79
49%
81
51%
City of Glasgow and
Chariton
119
44%
152
56%
City of Roanoke and Prairie
27
54%
23
46%
Totals
375
48%
415
52%
1860, Eighth Federal Manuscript Census,
Howard County, Missouri, Slave Schedule,
State Historical Society of Missouri.
52 Slave experience in Howard County varied along the location of enslavement as
well as along the lines of gender, age, and labor. Those who lived in the most productive
agricultural townships lived where two-fifths to one-half of the population were slaves.
Those who lived in the city centers or the poor soil regions of Boonslick and Bonne
Femme lived where slaves composed only one-fifth to nearly one-tenth of the population.
Demographics varied along the lines of race to a much greater degree than along the lines
of gender or age. In fact, slaves countywide tended to live in populations with great
diversity in ages and neared gender parity. Regardless of which township the enslaved
lived and labored, most found opportunities to socialize and forge relationships through
mobility. Even though the city centers of Fayette and Glasgow held relatively small
slave populations, these cities were hubs of commerce and as such destinations for
visitors from across the county. Though the relatively small number of slaves per
slaveholder defined slaveholding in Missouri, enslaved Missourians found opportunities
to form social networks across and between farms and towns. These communities of
shared knowledge, cooperation, and kinship were active at the time of the Civil War, a
vital means of experiencing the conflict, and central to the effort of making freedom
livable.
53 CHAPTER TWO
“At the time of freedom, and when Martin went into the Army”:
Gendered Emancipation in Howard County, 1863-1865128
The day after Christmas, 1863, Cyrus Wilson volunteered for service before
Assistant Provost Marshal John H. Lewis in Fayette, Howard County, Missouri. By
leaving his mark on the enlistment roll, Wilson became the first of many enslaved men in
Howard County to accept a certificate of freedom in return for military service. While
Fayette was the first Union outpost to enlist slaves in Howard County, slave recruitment
had already begun in counties around the state as of May 1863.129 On October 31, 1863
orders were given that all “Colored Regiments raised in Mo will rendezvous at Benton
Barracks” in St. Louis, Missouri.130 Always present in the politics of slave recruitment in
Missouri was the understanding that black recruits, no longer slaves, would be removed
from their local communities. Military enlistment offered a route to freedom for these
men while leaving the women, children, and those not able-bodied, enslaved. The
initiative for a constant, unrelenting, and ultimately devastating challenge to the system
of slavery on the Missouri home front, therefore, came from those who remained.
This chapter chronicles the first wave of emancipation in Howard County, as
able-bodied male slaves seized freedom by enlisting as soldiers in 1863. At the same
time, the focus of the chapter foregrounds the work of enslaved women in making
freedom and maintaining families from a home front still defined by slavery. Freedom
128
Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman to the Commissioner of Pensions, 31 Jan. 1919, in Almeda
Patterson pension claim of Martin Patterson, (Pvt., Co. H, 65th USCT. Inf., Civil War), XC 872495, Civil
War Pension Files, [HCPC, Martin Patterson, 1195].
129
Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 282.
130
Special Orders No. 298, Department of the Missouri, 31 Oct. 1863, vol. 59 DMo, pp. 160-62,
Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7803]; For more on
recruitment see John W. Blassingame, “The Recruitment of Negro Troops in Missouri During the Civil
War,” The Missouri Historical Review, vol. 59, no. 3, (April, 1964).
54 and military service were conjoined opportunities for able-bodied enslaved men. Newly
enlisted soldiers were removed from the war against slavery on their front door and
marched directly to St. Louis where they would await muster to conquer the states in
rebellion. In wartime Howard County, women and those that did not serve confronted
slavery on its own terrain.131
Throughout the early years of the war, slavery in Missouri was often maintained
by the Union military seeking to respect the rights of unionist slaveholders. The most
prominent deviation from this norm came in August of 1861 when General John C.
Frémont, newly appointed head of the Western Department, declared martial law and
proclaimed free all slaves of disloyal masters. Almost immediately, President Lincoln
capitulated to the furious unionist slaveholders of Missouri and ordered Gen. Frémont to
rescind his edict of emancipation. After Gen. Frémont was relieved of his position in
October, the Union military sought to protect the rights of slaveholders in the state by
eschewing involvement with all relations “between the slave and his master.”132 Even
when emancipation returned to the pages of military policy in 1863, the Union army
privileged the households of slaveholders by ignoring the very existence of the
households, the families, and the community networks of the enslaved.
The Union army understood slave enlistment only as it related to the slaveholders
household. Issued by General Schofield on the thirteenth of November 1863, General
Order No. 135 represented the most dramatic shift in military policy regarding slavery in
Missouri since Frémont’s emancipation proclamation. General Order No. 135 eliminated
131
For a concise discussion on tactics used by slave women to fight slavery on the home front see,
Thavolia Glymph, “Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders’ Terrain,” OAH Magazine of History, April 2009, 38,
http://www.oah.org/magazine/ (accessed March 14, 2014).
132
Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, ser. 1, vol. 1 of Freedom: A Documentary
History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 397; 399.
55 the distinction between loyal and disloyal slaveholders and opened military service to “all
able-bodied colored men, whether free or slaves” 133 Most profoundly for the enslaved,
Schofield’s order declared, “all persons enlisted into military service shall forever
thereafter be free.”134 Contrary to the assumptions of Union military policy and the
accounts of slave owners who only saw slave enlistment, this history recognizes that the
slave men were recruited from within communities and families of their own making.135
Union recruitment reached beyond the household of the slave owner to enter the personal
households of the enslaved as well.
It is a common fact of military service that men are compelled to leave their
families and communities when answering the call of duty. What is unique to the
soldiers of the United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.) is not the separation of men and
women; rather, it is this separation within the context of slavery that sets it apart. Unlike
Frémont’s order, slave enlistment gendered the process of emancipation in central
Missouri by granting certificates of freedom to slave men in return for military service
while presenting no comparable opportunity for slave women.
133
General Order No. 135, as quoted in Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 283; Ira Berlin et al., eds.,
The Destruction of Slavery, 397, 409.
134
General Order No. 135, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of
the Union and Confederate Armies, Official Records, Ser. 3, Vol. 3, Part 1, p. 860 (Union Letters, Orders,
Reports), http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/recordView.cfm?Content=124/0863, (accessed, November 11,
2013), (hereafter cited as Official Records). Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 283; for a discussion of Gen.
Schofield as a conservative unionist see Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 405-409. In many ways
General Order 135 expanded upon the policy set by United States Congress in the First and Second
Confiscation acts of 1861 and 1862 respectively. General Order 35 had been issued in September of 1862
by General Samuel R. Curtis, Commander of the Department of the Missouri who would be replaced by
Gen. Schofield by President Lincoln after a conflict arose in Missouri between “antislavery radicals and
Curtis on the one hand and conservative unionists and [Gov.] Gamble on the other.” Berlin et al., The
Destruction of Slavery, 403.
135
Leslie A. Schwalm, “Between Slavery and Freedom: African American Women and
Occupation in the Slave South,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American
Civil War, ed. LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009),
140; see also, Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America, (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press: 2005), 193; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering
during the Civil War and Reconstruction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 120-145.
56 Under General Order No. 135 the female kin of emancipated soldiers were not
even offered protection, much less meaningful emancipation. In Slaves No More, the
editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project suggest that three “interrelated
circumstances” shaped opportunities to create freedom: “first, the character of slave
society; second, the course of the war itself; and third, the policies of the Union and
Confederate governments.”136 More recently, scholars have explored gender as a useful
category of analysis, suggesting that a fourth circumstance; the gender of the enslaved
should be added. Historian Thavolia Glymph writes that, although there was “no
comparable path [enlistment] for enslaved women,” the path toward freedom for black
women “too would have to take the path of war… not as soldiers but still as
insurrectionists.”137 Through the collective effect of individual actions, enslaved women,
excluded by most Union military policies, waged an insurrection for their freedom “by
becoming fugitives or waging war on the home front.”138
The gendered routes toward emancipation are particularly visible in the
slaveholding border states like Missouri where the Emancipation Proclamation had no
legal standing and the Union military heavily recruited able-bodied black men.139 In fact,
the maintenance of slavery in Missouri even after Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation
136
Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation in the Civil war, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5.
137
Thavolia Glymph, “DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and Slave Women’s War for Freedom,”
The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:3, Summer 2013 (accessed September 4, 2013), 501, 495; for the
exclusion of black women in Union policy see also, Schwalm “Between Slavery and Freedom: African
American Women and Occupation in the Slave South,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation,
and the American Civil War
138
Glymph, “DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and Slave Women’s War for Freedom,” 497.
139
For a discussion of Reconstruction in Missouri see Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border;
Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kramer, and Anthony F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage, Revised Edition,
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993, orig. 1980); Kimberly A. Schreck, Splitting Heirs,
unpublished Dissertation., University of Missouri, Columbia, 2004; Schreck, Their Place in Freedom,
unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Missouri, 1993; Megan B. Boccardi, Remembering in Black and
White unpublished Dissertation, University of Missouri, Columbia, 2011. Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is
Black Is True.
57 was, almost paradoxically, central to the Union recruitment of slave men. In an effort to
maintain a stable population from which to recruit after General Order No. 135, the
Union military sought to contain and isolate the enslaved population of Missouri by
preventing the sale of slaves out of state.140 Yet, even this act was tempered by the
military’s singular interest in able-bodied slave men. Days after the issuance of General
Order No. 135, Schofield relaxed the ban by allowing passes for loyal white Missourians
traveling out of state with “female Slaves and males not fit for military duty.”141 Union
recruitment in central Missouri amounted to a great success as nearly sixty-seven percent
of male slaves between the ages of 18 and 45 eligible to serve in Howard County had
enlisted into the military by the summer of 1864.142 With two-thirds of the men away at
war, those slaves who remained in Howard County; the women, the aged, the children,
and the feeble, constituted a population deemed unfit for military duty.
St. Louis became central to the Union policy of aiding refugee men and women
escaping slavery from the lower South at the same time the slaves of Central Missouri
were expected to remain in bondage. Following the First and Second Confiscation Acts
of August 1861 and July 1862, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January of
1863, Benton Barracks located on the outskirts of St. Louis, became a hub for thousands
140
Special Order No. 307 prohibits the military from issuing passes to anyone seeking to take
slaves out of the state of Missouri. Special Orders No. 307, Department of the Missouri, 10 Nov. 1863, vol.
59 DMo, pp. 280-81, Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1 NARA [FSSP
C-7804].
141
Genl. J. M. Schofield to Lt. Col. J. O. Broadhead, 9 Dec. 1863, as quoted in, Berlin et al.,
Destruction of Slavery, 411.
142
Numbers as calculated by Aaron Astor in Rebels on the Border, 126; Astor further calculates
that “By the end of February, more than 3,700 African Americans had enlisted in Missouri, with central
Missouri’s Little Dixie producing a significant portion of the total.” The number of slaves is only
augmented when one notes the numbers that may have gone to Kansas, Illinois, or Iowa to enlist earlier in
the war.”
58 of refugees escaping slavery.143 The Union army organized the movement of refugee
populations up the Mississippi River from Helena Arkansas and Cairo Illinois to settle in
St. Louis. So many refugees made the journey in the Fall of 1863 that in December, the
Union Army was obliged to authorize the Medical Director to provide “medical treatment
and care” for the swelling refugee population in St. Louis and the immediate vicinity.144
By January the Department of the Missouri would be compelled by the sheer numbers of
refugees in St. Louis to create an entirely new commission related to their care. Special
Orders No. 8 named Hospital Chaplain of Benton Barracks the new “Superintendent of
Contrabands” to be “obeyed and respected accordingly.”145 It is due to Missouri’s
peculiar position as a loyal, slave-owning, border state that the majority of recently
arrived freedmen and freedwomen in and around St. Louis were from the Lower South.
By January 1864, black soldiers recruited most heavily from central Missouri, joined the
refugee population at Benton Barracks while their wives and children, by and large, did
not.
Strategically, slave recruitment in Missouri was concentrated in the counties that
claimed the highest number of slaves. Known to many historians as “Little Dixie,”
nearly thirty percent of Missouri’s slaves lived in the seven counties of Callaway, Boone,
Howard, Cooper, Chariton, Saline, and Lafayette which occupied the fertile grounds
along the banks of the Missouri River.146 In 1860, the five largest slave populations in
143
For a discussion of the grouping of fugitives and black soldiers at Benton Barracks see, Leslie
Schwalm, Emancipations Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 77-80.
144
Special Orders No. 339, Department of the Missouri, 12 Dec. 1863, vol. 59 DMo, pp. 255-56,
Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7805].
145
Special Orders No. 8, Department of the Missouri, 9 Jan. 1864, vol. 59 DMo, pp. 314-16,
Special Orders, ser. 2625, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7806].
146
Aaron Astor identifies Little Dixie as a region defined economically by slave driven
agriculture, as well as politically defending the rights of the slaveholder. The region of Little Dixie was
59 Missouri were from the counties of Little Dixie, with St. Louis a close sixth.147 Regularly,
these counties also had a higher density of slaves compared to the overall population. In a
late November 1863, Col. William Pile testified before the American Freedmen’s Inquiry
Commission and identified the “central portions of the state” as a ripe region for Union
recruiting purposes.148 An advocate for slave enlistment, Pile believed that, given the
proper military support, he could provide five hundred black recruits a week from the
Missouri River Counties. “I could do it, give me the ropes,” he testified to the
Commission.149 Col. Pile was speaking from his experience scouting the slave owning
heart of Missouri located in the center of the state. With an enslaved population of 5,886,
Howard County had the second largest number of slaves in Missouri by 1860.150
Moreover, Howard County had the greatest percentage of slaves as part of its overall
county population of any county in Missouri.151 In 1860, slaves constituted thirty-seven
percent of Howard County residents. In other words, for roughly every six free residents
of the county, there were four slaves, a ripe recruiting ground for the Union indeed.
After Cyrus Wilson became the first enslaved man to enlist in the Howard County
town of Fayette in late December of 1863, rumors reached the ears of citizens in the
nearby town of Glasgow. Worried and irate to hear of the recruitment of enslaved men,
slaveholders of Glasgow brought their questions and concerns before Captain Telemann
at the local Union outpost. In the face of this immediate public disapproval, Cpt.
“composed of the Missouri Counties of Callaway, Boone, Howard, Cooper, Chariton, Saline, and Lafayette
[that] traversed the Missouri River and formed the backbone of the state’s slave-based hemp and tobacco
culture.” Rebels on the Border, 13.
147
The five counties of Little Dixie with the greatest populations of slaves in 1869 were, in order
from least to greatest; Cooper, Callaway, Saline, Boone, Howard, Lafayette. Burke, On Slavery’s Border,
Table 2, 310.
148
Berlin and others, The Black Military Experience, Doc. 87, p. 232.
149
Ibid., 233.
150
Burke, Table 2, 310.
151
Ibid.
60 Telemann sent an urgent telegram to Brigadier General Odon Guitar hoping to compel an
official response. Cpt. Telemann inquired about a “recruiting officer appointed for
Colored Vols” and “parties enrolling Negroes” in Fayette, noting that it was causing
“much excitement” in the town of Glasgow. Furthermore, perhaps most importantly
Telemann reported, “citizens object that it is done.”152
Men and women, enslaved and free of Glasgow saw the possibility of slave
recruitment with the very advent of slave recruitment policy in other portions of the state
in the Spring of 1863. Tension built in the community long before actual enlistments
occurred in Howard County. Earlier that month, as the military started recruiting ablebodied male slaves in neighboring Boone County, a citizen reported that it set off a
“stampede of negroes” whereby any “love for the union” felt among white citizens of
Columbia evaporated into “manifest opposition.”153 It is unclear from the record whether
this reported “stampede of negroes” consisted of the number of enslaved men willing to
enlist or whether enslaved women were accompanying them to the Union encampment as
well. Either way, the actions of slaves emancipating themselves struck fear in the hearts
of white Columbians. An officer of the 9th Missouri State Militia (M. S. M.) reported that
any action aimed to mollify destitute conditions of slaves was met with derision from
white citizens. Furthermore, anyone who did not actively participate in stopping male
slaves from enlisting was “branded as a d=mn abolitionist and an enemy.”154 The white
population feared the self-emancipatory actions of the enslaved.
152
Captain John Telemann to Brigadier General Odon Guitar, 28 unknown, 1863. Odon Guitar
Collection (1825-1908), C1007, State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri, Columbia,
http://statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/amcw/id/2859/rec/15, (accessed
November 11, 2013).
153
Stephen O’Connor to Major General Schofield, 7 Dec. 1863, O-111 1863, Letters Received,
ser. 2593, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-133].
154
Ibid.
61 Col. William Pile testified of similar incidents in other Little Dixie counties where
“rebels and rebel sympathizers…especially in Calloway, Ordway [sic?], Cooper and
Howard counties” as well as an “infestat[ion] by bushwhackers and midnight marauders”
prevented the provost marshal in those areas from safely “enlisting colored troops.”155
Furthermore, Pile spoke of slave owners in Calloway and Howard Counties “arming
themselves and procuring ammunition, to intimidate the negroes from coming in to
enlist…that several have been shot during the last ten days …attempting to make their
way to some military post” to enlist.156 Despite the opposition of slaveholders, enslaved
men enlisted into the army with or without the consent of their masters.
In the early years of the Civil War in Missouri, the Union army found itself a
crucial factor in maintaining slavery by repeatedly returning slaves seeking refuge from
their masters. Frémont’s attempt to declare all slaves of disloyal masters free in 1861
notwithstanding, Missouri’s location as a slaveholding Union state was maintained under
the force of martial law. Upon being appointed commander of the newly formed
Department of the Missouri in November of 1861, General Henry W. Halleck issued
General Order No. 3 urging his provost marshals across the state to avoid “all
interference” with matters between the enslaved and their masters when possible.157
Furthermore, in an effort specifically aimed at preventing enslaved men and women from
seeking protection at Union camps, General Order 3 “required the unconditional
exclusion of all unauthorized persons” from army camps.158 Later in 1862, Halleck
155
Berlin and others, The Black Military Experience, Doc. 87, 232-233.
Ibid., 234. For a discussion of the Southern Sympathizers and Rebels of Little Dixie, see
Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border; Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri
During the American Civil War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
157
Gen. Halleck, quoted in Ira Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 399.
158
Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 399.
156
62 remained concerned with respecting the rights of slaveholders by issuing General Order
No. 46 from the Head Quarters of the Department of the Missouri stating that “It does not
belong to the military to decide upon the relation of master and slave.”159
Union military acquiescence to the demands of the slaveholders in the loyal
slaveholding border states often constituted the active maintenance of slavery rather than
some benign noninterference. In August of 1862, Captain J. C. McGuinniss in Moniteau
County, just across the Missouri River from Howard was reprimanded for even asking
what was to be done with a “’negro woman locked up in a home’ by ‘certain privates and
non=commissioned officers.’” It is probable that the enslaved woman was being
employed as a cook or personal servant of the soldiers, though the record is incomplete.
Regardless, the circumstance offered the opportunity to remind the soldiers of Central
Missouri that slaves were property of masters and they did not belong in army camps, full
stop. The soldier’s request for instructions on the matter was, according to Captain
Lucian J Barnes, “entirely unnecessary,” if the master was loyal, the woman should be
immediately released and she had no choice in the matter.160
Remarkably, questions of interpreting the Confiscation Acts did not always hinge
on issues of the master’s loyalty. Rather, the problem with interpreting the Second
Confiscation act in the slave-owning heart of occupied Missouri was frequently spatial as
well as political. In mid-April 1862 General Halleck assumed field command and placed
most administrative duties of the Department of the Missouri in the hands of General
Schofield, commander of the Missouri State Militia. The passing of the Second
Confiscation Act in July, left officers of the Union Army, like Capt. McGuinniss, and
159
Captain Lucian J. Barnes to Captain J. C. McGuinniss, 26 Apr. 1862, vol. 234/524 DMo, p. 23,
Letters Sent, ser. 3162, District of Central Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 205, NARA [FSSP C-7109].
160
Ibid.
63 citizens of Missouri clamoring for information on how such orders would be interpreted
under the authority of General Schofield.161 While the First Confiscation Act limited the
definition of contraband to those specifically employed in the rebel war effort, the Second
included a major expansion including slaves of all disloyal masters.
Brigadier General Ben Loan stationed in Jefferson City, understood the Second
Confiscation act to grant protection to slaves fleeing disloyal masters and taking refuge
within the lines of the army but questioned where such lines stood in a loyal slaveholding
border state. Assuming that the loyalty of masters could be “clearly established by
competent Evidence,” most likely the testimony of the enslaved, the complicity of the
Union army in maintaining slavery in Missouri placed Brig. Gen. Loan in a troublesome
situation.162 Ostensibly, the entire state had been within the lines of the Union army since
Gen. Frémont declared martial law in 1861, and yet so too was slavery. In Missouri,
there simply weren’t Union lines to cross. Seeking a concrete definition of Union lines to
provide the topographical division between slave and free territory, Brig. Gen. Loan to
prosed two possible solutions. First, perhaps the “lines of the army” were represented in
Missouri by the provost marshal offices scattered across the state. Concerned that many
provost marshals, located as many were in the heart of slave-owning communities, would
be overwhelmed by appeals from local slaves, Brig. Gen. Loan conceived of a second
interpretation. He posited, “suppose such slaves escape from disloyal masters in Howard
or Boone County and claim protection of the Military” in Cole County, would they then
161
Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 402.
Brigadier General Benjamin F. Loan to Major General S. R. Curtis, 5 May 1863, vol. 225/525
DMo, p.449, Letters Sent, ser. 3372, District of Central Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 217, NARA [FSSP C7127].
162
64 be considered “escaped” and due refuge “as is contemplated by the order?”163 Just how
far from the land of their owner would a slave have to travel, how many lines of territory
would they have to cross to have legitimately escaped slavery? It would be safe to
assume that Brig Gen. Loan had previously experienced both local slaves and slaves from
other counties traveling to the state capitol and asserting their freedom.
Territory became a problem because the slaves of Missouri refused to conform to
the Union policymakers and slaveholders’ “dreams of what slaves should be.”164 The
Union army was eager to protect the prerogatives of loyal slaveholders. More generally,
the military sought to avoid placing itself between masters and slaves, a relationship
understood to fall within the purview of the slaveholding household rather than the
jurisdiction of the state. If the lines of the army marked a geopolitical division between
slavery and freedom in the state of Missouri, they came under scrutiny only because
African American men and women refused to play the role expected of slaves.
By December 1863 slave enlistment came to Howard County and it was met with
dissent among the free white population. Into the spring of 1864, slaveholders of Little
Dixie sought to maintain control of their households, including slaves, despite Union
efforts to recruit from their ranks. In February 1864, a petition signed by one hundred
and seventy-eight men, misleadingly described as being “men of all parties and from all
sections of the State” was submitted to the Maj. Genl. Rosencrans, Commander of the
Department of the Missouri complaining that the large number of slaves who had left
their masters were “wandering about: many of them out of employment, and in a destitute
163
Ibid.
Thavolia Glymph, “Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders’ Terrain,” OAH Magazine of History,
April 2009, 38, http://www.oah.org/magazine/ (accessed March 14, 2014).
164
65 condition.”165 The petition continued to ask that the military “force every colored man
who is suitable for service, and who has left his owner, to enlist.”166 No signatures from
Howard County endorsed the letter accompanying the petition signed by seventy-seven
members of the Missouri State Legislature. In point of fact, only three signatures are
from representatives hailing from the seven counties commonly referred to as Little
Dixie; W. J. Jackson of Callaway; W. W. Todd and William Slade of Boone.167 Though
there was support for recruiting able-bodied enslaved men in parts of the state of
Missouri, it was a rare sentiment in the heavy slaveholding counties of Central Missouri.
In light of this, perhaps Telemann was seeking explicit orders from his superior or
simply deferring to a higher authority on new and controversial measures when he sent
his telegram to Genl. Guitar regarding the chaos over slave recruitment in Glasgow.
Guitar’s response to Telemann would do little to quell the excitement and objections of
the citizens of Glasgow as Union recruitment of able-bodied black men continued
throughout the state.168 The troublesome recruiting officer mentioned in Telemann’s
telegram was John H. Lewis. After Cyrus Wilson, Lewis enlisted almost seventy more
slave men in Fayette within the next five days.169 By the end of January 1864, more than
165
Robert Bailey Jnr. et al. to Maj. Genl. Rosencrantz, 13 Feb. 1864, quoted in Berlin et al., eds.,
The Black Military Experience, ser. 2, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1862-1867,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), doc. 95, p. 250.
166
Ibid.
167
Robert Bailey Jnr. et al. to Maj. Genl. Rosencrantz, 13 Feb. 1864, B-126 1864, Letters
Received, ser. 2593, Dept. of the MO, RG 393 Pt. 1 [FSSP C-152].
168
Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Glasgow Recruiting Station, January 1864-March 1864,
Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops
Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.10],
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF.asp#cat3, (accessed, September 14, 2013), (hereafter
Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Glasgow).
169
Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Fayette Recruiting Station, December 1863-April 1864,
Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops
Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.8],
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF.asp#cat3, (accessed, September 14, 2013), (hereafter
Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette).
66 175 slaves would come before Lewis for a physical examination, have their names
recorded on the enlistment book, and be sent to St. Louis where most would be mustered
into the ranks of the U.S.C.T.170
Lewis, already besieged by a belligerent white population, found that he also had
to be concerned with troublesome recruiters. Days after he began to enlist willing slave
men from Howard County, Lewis wrote to Genl. C. W. Marsh, Assistant Provost Marshal
General in St. Louis, complaining of men roaming around the county and conning
enslaved men into service. He reported of roving white men getting male slaves drunk
and telling them that the government was paying slaves three hundred dollars “as soon as
they are enlisted.” When the slave men were sufficiently “under such influence,” their
names were taken down as willing to enlist.171 Furthermore, the roaming bands of
vigilante recruiters were under the assumption that they would receive “two Dollars for
every slave they can induce to enlist as a soldier.”172 The irony of this assumption being
that someone would be getting paid, but it would be the masters of these enlisted men
who would receive a three hundred dollar bounty, not the enslaved men. The recruiters
probably expected to receive a two dollar cut from the master’s bounty of each man they
hoodwinked into service.
Even when enlisted with the greatest regard for military protocol, many questions
remained. Lewis recognized that in a county such as Howard, “A large number of
slaves…will enlist, and I am enlisting them as fast as I can do so properly” [emphasis
170
Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette.
John H. Lewis to Colonel C. W. Marsh, 1 Jan. 1864, L-31 1864, Letters Received, ser. 2786,
Provost Marshal General, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-201].
172
Ibid.
171
67 mine].173 He lamented the paltry state of provisions allotted to slaves in Howard county
noting that most of the men enlisted have been “poorly provided, with clothing, and many
are very poorly shod.”174 The matter of shoes was of particular importance, as the men
enlisted would almost immediately be expected to leave the county and travel to St. Louis
to await muster at Benton Barracks. In the cold of January, Lewis recognized that “if
they have to walk to the Rail Road, twenty five miles from this post, through the snow
and cold more or less of them will suffer.”175 Seemingly resigning himself to the fact that
he would be unable to secure shoes for the thousands of feet of these enlisted men, he
asked for transportation and instructions on how to procure such transportation. As the
ranks of the Union camp swelled in Fayette, Lewis further asked if he could allow
“colored recruits” to use army blankets since many were suffering from the cold. In the
mean time Lewis also complained of having to purchase “rations and cooking utensils”
by signing personal loans himself as his repeated requests for provisions had not been
answered.
While Union military policy regarding the enlistment and welfare of the enslaved
generally excluded women, children, and unable-bodied enslaved men, African American
women continually pressed the Army for services. Both the Union military and
slaveholders understood that recruiting able-bodied slave men marked a new willingness
by the government to involve itself in the relationship between masters and slaves,
previously avoided. However, this is only a partial picture of the consequences of slave
recruitment. Enlistment removed able-bodied men from the communities and families of
the enslaved, as well as from the household of slaveholders. As men made the decision
173
Ibid.
Ibid.
175
Ibid.
174
68 to enlist they often did so in conversation with their wives, family and other kin. Lewis
reported from Glasgow that the “number of slaves living around the Federal Camp at this
place, who are not willing to enlist, and who also are not willing to go home” were
proving to be a dire strain on military resources.176 Many men who were “selected by the
examining surgeon, as unfit for soldiers,” simply refused to return home and remained in
camp.177 Lewis was silent on whether women and children joined those the military
deemed “unfit” gathering around the Union camp, although accounts such as Diana
Williams’ show that some women, at least, managed to visit even if they could not
remain.
The experience of Diana Williams and her husband Morrison Prather of Howard
County provide a glimpse into the consequences of enlistment on family and community
relations and an interesting object lesson for the gendered characteristics of wartime
emancipation in Central Missouri. When Special Examiner Jesse Jeffrey interviewed
Diana about the enlistment of her husband she stated emphatically, “He did not run away
he just went to the courthouse here in Fayette and enlisted and I went there to see him
most everyday while he staid there.”178 Special Examiner Jeffrey was from the pension
office and in 1892; he was taking Williams’ deposition in order to adjudicate her
application for a Civil War widows pension in the name of her former husband. When
Jeffrey inquired about Diana’s earlier statement that her husband, Prather, had worked for
“Mr. Pierce until the war came on and until he run away and went into the army,” he had
176
Ibid.
Ibid.
178
Deposition of Diana J. Williams, 20 May, 1892, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison
Prather, 2672].
177
69 touched upon a distinction pregnant with meaning.179 The matter was clear to Diana
Williams, Morrison Prather might have figuratively “run away” from the household of
their master, but he never ran away from his wife or enslaved community.
Diana Williams may have physically returned to the farm of Charley Pierce but in
her daily visitations to her husband she was constructing and practicing her identity as a
free woman. Diana went to the courthouse with her husband Morrison when he enlisted,
she visited him everyday until he and the other enlisted men were sent to St. Louis, then
she went home to the farm of her master. Morrison Prather went to the courthouse, in
Fayette, the county seat of Howard County, as a man, a husband, and a soon to be father.
For the first time in his life, Prather was recognized as such by the Federal government of
the United States.180
Prather and his fellow enlisted men were taken to Benton Barracks in St. Louis
where they would receive training and await formal muster into the ranks of Company H,
Regiment 65, U.S.C.T. After Private Prather and his company had been gone for about a
month, he returned from St. Louis to see his wife Diana.181 Although she could not recall
the date of her husband’s enlistment, she did know that it was in mid-winter, and the
weather had warmed by the time he was able to visit.182 Prather returned with a fellow
enlisted soldier, George Turner, whose wife was also in the neighborhood. The two
soldiers came from Benton Barracks planning on taking their wives back to St. Louis
with them. George and his wife soon returned to St. Louis but Diana was pregnant at the
179
Ibid., [HCPC, Prather 2673].
Morrison Prather enlisted at Fayette, MO. on January 12, 1864 alongside Aaron and Jerry
Prather, relationship unknown; Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette.
181
Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC,
Morrison Prather, 2673].
182
Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2673-2674].
180
70 time and was “’too heavy’ to undertake the journey.”183 Thirty years later, Diana was
still living in Fayette and had not seen Mrs. Turner or her husband since that day,
although she heard that they remained living in St. Louis after the war.184
Perhaps knowing that separation was the order of enlistment, Prather returned to
see his wife bearing a picture he had commissioned of himself. His son, George Prather
later had it enlarged and presented it at the time of his deposition, “the picture of a
Colored Soldier in uniform.”185 Morrison had come to take Diana with him out of
Howard County to St. Louis. She remained to give birth to their child and he was able to
stay with her “only a few days.”186 Morrison left Diana with his picture, the image of
soldier clothed in the uniform of the United States Army. “Then he went back” Diana
recalled, “I never saw him any more.”187
Morrison Prather’s furlough visitation was the last time Diana Williams and her
husband saw one another. The fact that the couple managed to remain in contact as much
as they did after Morrison returned to St. Louis is in large part due to the efforts of Diana.
After leaving Fayette, Morrison and Diana maintained correspondence through letters as
183
It should also be noted that Diana Williams claims in her deposition that she had given birth to
two children prior to her marriage to Morrison Prather. It is not stated whether these children remained in
her care at the time Prather returned from Benton Barracks although children, young and unborn, would
have certainly factored into her decision to travel to St. Louis or remain. Deposition of Diana J. Williams,
Civil War Pension Files, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2675].
184
Ibid.
185
Deposition of George R. Pierce, May 19, 1892, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison
Prather, 2668-2669]. After the Examiner questions George Pierce swearing under the name George Prater,
and later Prather, George told how he went by the name Prater, his fathers name as he understood it to be
spelled. Later in life he was informed that legally, he was George Pierce, changing his name would require
money that he did not have to spare.
186
Jacqueline Jones suggests that “for women, the welfare of their children was often the primary
consideration in determining an appropriate course of action once they confronted—or created—a moment
ripe with possibilities.” In the case of Diana Williams, the physical constraints pregnancy put on her
mobility literally kept her from leaving for St. Louis with her husband. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow; Black Women Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, (New York: Basic
Books, Inc., 1985), 45. Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Prather 2673].
187
Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2673].
71 often as they were able. As Diana could not read or write, she found someone who was
able to pen her letters, perhaps clandestinely, to her husband and to read her husband’s
words of encouragement.188 Diana remembered that she received letters from Morrison
marked “from Macon City Mo, Benton Barracks, and New Orleans.”189 Diana gave birth
to their child George, “in the spring the weather was beginning to get quite warm” and
she sent a letter to tell Morrison.190 Morrison responded and asked Diana “to take good
care of his little one until he could get home.”191 Not long after their hopeful exchange,
Diana remembered, “I got letters from him saying he was sick, then there was a long time
that I did not hear from him, then I got a letter from his brother Aaron Prather now dead,
informing me of my husband’s death.”192 Diana, late in her pregnancy was unable to
leave the farm of her owner and travel to St. Louis with Morrison and the Turners.
Although they tried at every moment to maintain contact the war would forever separate
Diana and her son George from Morrison Prather at the very moment of their freedom.
Diana Williams returned to the farm of Charley Pierce, and in her words she lived there
“until the slaves were freed and stayed with him about two years after the war was
over.”193 It was there that she would continue the practice of making freedom.
At the worst, military enlistment and refugee policies excluded women from the
protection of the army. At best, they continued to ignore that slave men were recruited
from larger communities, or assumed such communities were within the purview of
188
Not all slave women were so fortunate, an officer at Benton Barracks, St. Louis, reported to
Brig. Gen. Pile in February of 1864 that owners “refused to let [the wives] go to the Post Office to get their
letters, and if any one comes to them and brings them letters and reads them to them he is shure to whip
them for it.” Quoted in Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 288.
189
Deposition of Diana J. Williams, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2674].
190
Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2675].
191
Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2675].
192
Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2674].
193
Ibid., [HCPC, Morrison Prather, 2672].
72 slaveholders. For Union officers such as John H. Lewis, the calculus may have seemed
simple at first. Enlist able-bodied slave men and issue them freedom papers in return.
The larger community of the enslaved refused to be ignored and the many women such as
Diana Williams who gathered around the Union camp in Fayette forced a reevaluation of
Union policy as Lewis petitioned for more supplies. Freedom for the black soldiers of
Howard County and their enslaved kin was understood as having consequences for their
family and kin relations within the slave household. Freedom for the black soldier of
Missouri was always understood with the backdrop of their wives, children and other kin
still enslaved. As the numbers of freedmen and freedwomen swelled around Union
camps, pushing the limits of Lewis’ supplies he began the long road of reckoning with
the slave community surrounding his Fayette outpost.
The records of five different recruiting offices in central Missouri show that
between late November 1863 and the spring of 1864 a steady stream of 1,051 black men;
the overwhelming majority enslaved, joined the Army and were emancipated in return.194
Like Morrison Prather, these men understood the community-based nature of enlistment.
Try as military policy might, these men could not simply be taken out of their
communities and made free with no consideration of their relations at home. Just three
months passed after John H. Lewis recruited the first slave in Fayette, when he found
himself sending an urgent telegram to the offices of Brig. Gen. Odon Guitar.
194
The number of men who enlisted in the recruiting stations mentioned are as follows, Fayette:
194, Glasgow: 174, Booneville: 200, Mexico: 199, Tipton: 284. The story of recruiting in Boonville is
remarkable both for being the earliest Union Outpost to enlist slaves in the Missouri River Counties, and
for the incredible number of recruits. Two hundred enslaved men enlisted in Booneville in the four days
between November 26 and 30 alone. Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Union Provost Marshal Papers,
Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State
Archives Fayette, December 1863-February 1864, [F1893.8]; Glasgow, January 1864-March 1864
[F193.10]; Boonville, November 1863 [F1892.2]; Mexico, November 1863-January 1864 [F1895.9];
Tipton December 1863-February 1864 [F1896.11]; Tipton February 1864-April 1864 [F1896.12],
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF.asp#cat3, (accessed, September 14, 2013).
73 “To Genl O Guitar
Some Negroes, who were enlisted in this county & sent to St.
Louis have come back to Boone-ville & crossed in Howard with some
white soldiers & are hauling off Tobacco from their former owners taking
their wives & children &c is this to be allowed[?]
John H. Lewis”195
The very men, once recruited as slaves by Lewis, were now returning as soldiers.
It is possible that Morrison Prather was among this group of soldiers. Diana recalled that
her husband came in early spring and Lewis reports the Glasgow uprising as occurring in
March. If Lewis initially thought of these men as slaves he was now witnessing their
return as freemen and newly minted soldiers with their own understanding of freedom
and their own agenda. Lewis’ conception of freedom while a valuable opportunity for
able-bodied men remained only a partial freedom in the eyes of the U.S.C.T.
Lewis’ telegraph calls dramatic attention to the actions of soldiers claiming the
freedom of their “wives & children” who remained in bondage. Implicit in this is the
question of the role of the U.S. Army in preserving or destroying slavery the loyal border
state of Missouri. It is likely that the many “objecting” citizens of Glasgow represented
by Telemann’s message months earlier were concerned about this very sort of event at
the first news of slave enlistment. While the community relations of the enslaved was, at
least at first, invisible to the Union Army bent on utilizing the labor of able-bodied black
men, slaveholders of Howard County found it much harder to ignore the implications for
the enslaved women and children who remained to wage the campaign for freedom.
195
John H. Lewis to Odon Guitar, 6 March, 1864. Odon Guitar Collection (1825-1908), C1007,
State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri, Columbia,
http://statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri.org/, (accessed November 11, 2013). The telegram has been included
in the manner that it has been transcribed by the State Historical Society of Missouri in an effort to remain
as true to the original document as possible. Punctuation that has been added is clearly marked in brackets.
74 By the time the Union military began recruiting male slaves, the Missouri State
Militia operated as the principal military force in the state. Composed of local white
Missourians, the M. S. M. was less favorable in their actions toward the enslaved than
earlier Federal troops composed of soldiers from free Northern states.196 If the 4th
Cavalry M. S. M. did in fact aid the furloughed men of the U.S.C.T. to cross the Missouri
River and retrieve their families from the land of their owners, this was largely an
anomaly, and a punishable one at that.
The fact remains that the Union Army simply did not recognize the household and
familial relations of the U.S.C.T. as the soldiers themselves did. In the ensuing
investigation into Lewis’ telegram a Capt. Vansickle of the 4th Cav. of the M. S. M. was
accused conducting frequent forays across the river into Howard County. Also among
the charges were accusations of bringing away “female slaves for the purposes of
prostitution.”197 Furthermore, he was alleged to be of ill-repute and in the “habit of
playing cards, allowing and taking personal liberties with the men of his Company”198
Given the testimony of Diana Williams, it is likely that the charges of soliciting
prostitution were false indictments misidentifying the wives and sweethearts of the
U.S.C.T. as prostitutes in order to smear the reputation of Capt. Vansickle and gain
restitution for damages.199 Such comparisons were not uncommon as a commander in
Macon County complained of the growing numbers of slaves of both sexes “crowding”
196
Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, 403.
Captain James H. Steger to Colonel G. H. Hall, 12 Mar. 1864, vol. 226 DMo, pp. 35-36, Letters
Sent, ser. 3372, District of Central Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 217, NARA [FSSP C-8760].
198
Ibid.
199
For a discussion of the sweethearts of black soldiers being mistaken as prostitutes and a
discussion of sex work and ex-slave women see Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, 42, 114-15; for a
broader discussion of wives of soldiers see also, Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War
America, 191-200.
197
75 the Union camp with the pithy statement, “prostitution is worse that slavery.”200 Eight
days after the men of the U.S.C.T. claimed their wife and children Thomas Boggs of
Fayette, owner of Howard Boggs and his sister Julia Boggs-Estill were awarded full
restitution for the value of his “property taken or destroyed by certain Colored
soldiers.”201 The households protected by Union policy were the households of
slaveholders, not the enslaved.
By the summer of 1864, nearly forty percent of male slaves in Missouri had
enlisted in the Union Army.202 In the heavy slaveholding counties such as Howard the
number is reported to be nearly sixty-seven percent of the able-bodied enslaved men.203
In early August 1864 it was reported to the Secretary of War that the “recruiting of
colored troops in Missouri may be regarded, for the present as virtually closed.”204 By
the informed estimations of the judge advocate of the Army, the Union had recruited so
many able-bodied black men from the region that the number remaining might only fill a
single additional regiment. Furthermore, the resistance put up by slaveholders,
specifically in counties such as Howard, where the “high price of labor, & the
extraordinary efforts made to retain them in agricultural pursuits” it was unlikely that any
more men would volunteer without compulsion.205 Superintendent of the Organization of
Missouri Black Troops, Genl. William A. Pile estimated earlier in May that nearly “3,000
200
Captain Albert Brockman to Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk, 28 May 1864, vol. 288/688
DMo, p. 132, Telegrams Sent, ser. 3534, District of North Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 226, NARA [FSSP
C-7808].
201
Unknown Asst. Adj. Genl. to Thomas Boggs, 12 March, 1864, Letters Sent, ser. 2571, vol. 15,
p. 217, Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-181]
202
Berlin et al., Slaves No More, Table 1. “Black Soldiers in the Union Army and Black Male
Population of Military Age in 1860, by State,” 203.
203
Astor, Rebels on the Border, 126; J. Holt to Hon. E. M. Stanton, 5 Aug. 1864, quoted in Berlin
et. al., The Black Military Experience, doc. 96, p. 251.
204
J. Holt to Hon. E. M. Stanton, 5 Aug. 1864, quoted in Berlin et. al., The Black Military
Experience, doc. 96, p. 251.
205
Ibid.
76 to 4,000 able-bodied black men yet remain in Missouri…but the time to enlist them has
gone by.”206
Regardless of the number of men who were removed from the community, it was
largely the female population who remained that engaged in the relentless pursuit of
freedom on the home front. Soldiers asserted their masculinity by fighting and if they
returned home empowered and claiming their wives and families.207 By October, 1864,
an Army medical board concluded that “more than a third of three Missouri black
regiments—the 62nd, 65th, and 67th U.S. Colored Infantry—had perished since enlistment,
mostly from various undiagnosed diseases.”208 An additional two hundred were
discharged due to medical reasons and the state of those remaining was regarded as poor.
Those who remained met struggles on the home front. The fact that women who
remained were submitted to systemic and occasionally fatal abuse at the hands of their
masters is unfortunately not remarkable. The fact that this abuse was communicated to
the offices of provost marshals or sent to the front lines of the formal war is, on the other
hand, a testament to the will of the enslaved and their refusal to submit to the violence of
slavery.
With the single-minded desire for able-bodied male labor, the Union military did
not intend to extend protection, much less emancipation to slave women as part of the
recruiting policy. Nevertheless, slave women availed themselves of the presence of the
Union military at every opportunity. In response to losing valuable labor through Union
recruitment, many slaveholders violently vented their anger and frustration on those who
206
Brig. Genl. Wm. A. Pile to Brig. Genl. L. Thomas, 21 May, 1864, quoted in quoted in Berlin et.
al., The Black Military Experience, doc. 96, 251.
207
For more on masculinity and black enlistment see Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The
Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 12-13.
208
Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, 487.
77 remained, often enslaved women, as a calculated retaliation to stymie slave enlistment.
In 1860, Bennett Brown managed a farm with the labor of eighteen slaves.209 During the
spring of 1864, eight of his male slaves joined the Union Army and left Howard County.
Furious and likely desperate at the prospect of starting a planting season with only a
fraction of the labor necessary, Bennett retaliated by deliberately targeting the families of
the newly enlisted soldiers. Betsy Ann Brown, sister to one and cousin to seven of the
enlisted slaves formerly owned by Bennett Brown presented the first opportunity for
reprisal. Accusing Betsy Ann of lying and of placing an “unclean spoon to a plate” at
mealtime, Bennett Brown tied a rope around Betsy Ann’s neck, “knocked her down, tied
her hands and feet,” and with the help of his son and an enslaved man, proceeded to beat
her. With her master’s foot on her throat and his son’s hands pulling the rope around her
neck Betsy Ann lost consciousness and her body was left “senseless on the floor.” When
Betsy Ann regained consciousness Bennett Brown kicked her again and told her to “get
up and go to work.” After an unspecified amount of time, Betsy Ann was able to stand,
however she did not return to work, instead she ventured to the nearest Union military
camp under the fear that “her master would come finish the work that he had begun.”
Since her brother and cousin had left with the army, Betsy Ann Brown continued
to wage the long war at home by refusing to complete the day-to-day tasks of servitude
such as fetching pails of water, cleaning dishes, and setting the table for mealtime. It is a
testament to the extent Betsy Ann Brown had begun to assert control over her own life
209
1860 United States Census, Eighth Federal Census, Richmond Township, Howard County,
Missouri, Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
78 that Bennett Brown lashed out in such a fit of violence to reconstruct his mastery.210
Even this, in the end, could not prevent Betsy Ann Brown from making her own freedom.
Betsy Ann left the man who laid claim to her body and her labor and limped into the
provost marshal office in Mexico, Missouri. She demanded that the Army would
recognize her autonomy in the same way it recognized the personhood of her brother and
enlisted cousins.211 With a “disfigured face…the mark of a rope around her
neck…hardly able to walk,” Betsy Ann refused to submit to the violent disciplines of
slavery. She made clear, Bennett Brown, was her master no more.
That accounts such as this are not rare stands as a testament to the will of enslaved
women to translate the absence of enlisted men into an opportunity for freedom on the
home front. The material record of these abuses remain in the archives to this day
because of enslaved women’s struggle to make freedom where they stood, where the
stakes were highest and future most unsure. Many women such as Betsy Ann Brown,
brought their appeals to the local provost marshals. Still more found opportunities to
send word of their struggles to enlisted men serving in the army.
In the absence of able-bodied men, masters turned to slave women to fill the labor
shortage. Almeda Patterson, a slave of James Patterson, sent word to her husband that
she was “compelled to do outdoor work, -such as chop wood, husk corn &c.” More
tragically, Martin Patterson of 2nd Missouri Volunteers of African Descent learned that “
210
For a discussion of the use of violence in response to slave resistance see; Thavolia Glymph,
Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
211
John Eckstein to Lt. John D. Campbell, May 9th, 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or
More Civilians: 1861-1867, Reel, F1614, Frame #: 0479, File: 9779, Missouri, Missouri State Archives,
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/provostPDF, (February, 2-10-14).
79 one of his children has been suffered to freeze, and has sinc died.”212 Similarly, William
Brooks, also a slave of Howard County, received word from his wife and child that their
master, Jack Sutter required them “do the same work that he formerly had to do, such as
chopping wood, splitting rails &c.”213 The labor of those unable to escape slavery
through military service took on new significance within the slaveholding household.
When masters exercised their prerogative to commit acts of violence against their slaves,
they found their actions checked by the determination of slave women slowing down
labor, appealing to local provost marshals, and finding the means to maintain
communication with the enlisted men of their family and community.
The accounts of Betsy Ann Brown, Almeda Patterson, and William Brooks are by
no means singular to Howard County, as similar accounts are recorded throughout the
state.214 Historians have found some of the most eloquent and moving documentation of a
black enlisted man’s relationship with his family who remained in bondage from the
letters of Spotswood Rice, a former enslaved man of Howard County.215 Rice’s literacy
almost certainly made him an anomaly, however, more interesting is that his narrative is
often used to illuminate a relational connection between enlisted men and their families.
In focusing on Spotswood Rice’s undoubtedly moving narrative, historians are apt to
miss the glaring fact that the onus of success for these types of communications rested
overwhelmingly on the shoulders of enslaved women, not enlisted men.
212
William P. Deming to The Headquarter of the Department of Missouri, as quoted in Berlin et
al., The Black Military Experience, Doc. 91, 243.
213
Ibid.
214
For further examples of the experiences of relatives of the slave men who enlisted in the Union
army see Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 294-297; Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, 410411.
215
Berlin et al., The Black Military Experience, Doc. 299A, 299B, 299C, p. 659-691.
80 The challenges of maintaining communication with a loved one in the military
was almost certainly more costly, uncertain, and dangerous for enslaved women who
remained on the home front than their husbands, brothers, and fathers who had one of the
worlds largest bureaucracies enabling them to write and send letters at their fingertips.
Writing from Benton Barracks, Rice penned two letters, one to his daughters and the
other to their mistress. To his daughters he wrote from his heart, “I have not forgot you
and that I want to see you as bad as ever…be assured that I will have you if it cost me my
life.”216 That Patterson and Brooks were writing in the earliest days of black enlistment
and Rice was writing in September shows the immediate and sustained concern soldiers
had for the freedom of their kin at home. By late 1864 “the treatment, which the families
of colored soldiers are receiving at the hands of their masters” was mentioned in an
official military report as stifling further black enlistment.217
General Order 135 is best understood as gendering emancipation in Missouri by
granting freedom to able-bodied enslaved men while ignoring the circumstances and
demands of the communities from which the soldiers themselves were enlisted. Still, the
soldiers abroad and those women who remained had a similar fight, the fight to create
and shape the meaning of freedom. When Missouri passed a constitutional amendment
abolishing slavery on January 11, 1865, the time for recruiting able-bodied enslaved men
had long since passed and those that remained joined the women on the home front in
securing autonomy and control for black families and communities.
In fact, the former master of Spotswood Rice, B. W. Lewis Sr., wrote to his friend
General Clint B. Fisk, from Glasgow of Howard County that “so many of the negroes
216
Ibid., Doc. 299A, 659.
William A. Pile to a Missouri Congressman, quoted in Berlin et al., The Black Military
Experience, Doc. 94, 248.
217
81 have left we have concluded it is not worth while to undertake to recruit from those
remaining.”218 In the nearby county of Callaway, individuals sought to impress into
service those black men who originally refused enlistment in order to assist with the fight
for freedom on the home front. A roving band of soldiers, probably of the M. S. M.,
sought out newly emancipated black men to compel into military service. If they could
not be convinced by word they chose to do so by threat. Freedmen were told to raise one
hand and, after so doing, were informed that they are now “sworn into the service and
will be immediately shot if he dont go along with the crowd.”219 The anonymous
informant from Callaway stressed the obligations that familial relations placed on the
freedmen. The emphasis of the letter was not that slaves were being illegally conscripted,
rather that the men who remained in the county were predominantly “men with large
families who are left to starve for want of some one to procure subsistence.”220
That the majority of military records regarding the recruitment of black soldiers
ignore the relational consequences of enlistment remains a hurdle for historians today.
Able-bodied black male recruitment in Missouri has long become a stand-in for
emancipation. As a consequence, women such as those of Glasgow, hauled off with the
tobacco of their former owners, are devoid of agency. The main objective of the military
record is to record the information requisite for a large military bureaucracy. When
James Day enlisted at Tipton the military recorded only the information it deemed
essential; “James Day… claimed to have been the slave of John R. White a citizen of
218
B. W. Lewis Sr. to General C. B. Fisk, 16 March 1865, Unentered Letters Received, ser. 2594,
Department of the Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 1, NARA [FSSP C-7810].
219
Anonymous to General Clinton B. Fisk, 22 Mar. 1865, Letters Received, ser. 3537, District of
North Missouri, RG 393 Pt. 2 No. 226, NARA [FSSP C-219].
220
Ibid.
82 Howard County.”221 Beyond this, and a cursory physical description, one must rely on
other sources for a more complete understanding of emancipation in Missouri. What the
army record fails to show is that beyond his status as a slave, James Day was a husband
and an expecting father.
It is unknown whether James’ wife, Eliza Day, five to six months pregnant,
travelled with her husband James across the Missouri River from Howard to Moniteau
County in order to reach the recruiting office in Tipton.222 Travel to a distant recruiting
office could be dangerous, especially if passing through land of hostile slaveholders.
Some recruits reported of hiding during the day and traveling at night.223 However,
Eliza’s role in James’ decision to enlist should not be understated. Having suffered the
loss of their first son, Scott, in infancy a few years prior, one can imagine the hope that
Eliza’s current pregnancy and James’ emancipation represented for the couple. The war
brought opportunities for freedom and James and Eliza seized them with brave and
hopeful tenacity. Like Morrison Prather and his wife Diane Williams, James Day fought
for freedom by enlisting into the Union Army while Eliza Day remained on the home
front to forge a space for their new family while her husband was away. Although Eliza
would give birth to their second son while James was away in the army, absence at the
birth of his child was not the only price freedom would require of James. After just eight
months of service in the Army, James died of disease digging trenches in Morganza,
221
Enlistment papers of James Day, Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Tipton Recruiting
Station, February 1864-April 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867,
United States Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.8],
http://www.sos.mo.gov, (accessed, September 14, 2013).
222
Our first record of Eliza Day comes from Boonville where she filed for her widows pension in
December of 1864, a month prior to the Missouri Emancipation Proclamation being signed into law.
United States Civil War Widows and Other Dependents Pension Files, s.v. Eliza Day Pension Claim for
James Day, (Pvt., Co. G, 65th USCT, Inf., Civil War), p. 1, Fold3.com. (accessed, October 12, 2013).
223
Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 283.
83 Louisiana.224 The pension applications of Diana Williams, Eliza Day, and countless
other freedwomen testify to their continued struggles after their husbands enlisted to
emancipate themselves and their families when Union policy and the will of slaveholders,
sought to preserve their bondage.
At the height of black enlistment the Assistant Provost Marshal in Fulton,
Missouri summarized the predicament of recruitment better than most. In a rare moment
of clarity, Asst. Provost Marshal Hiram Cornel sought the answer to a question
repeatedly posed to him, most likely by the enslaved and free alike; “What are we to do
with the women and children?”225 If not for the collective acts of those women, children
and unable-bodied men who refused to respect the demands of servitude expected by
both masters and the Union military, recruitment would not have marked the tectonic
shift between slavery and freedom that it has come to stand for.
224
Just over eight months after James and Eliza shared their final goodbyes; James died of scurvy
as a soldier of the 65th United States Colored Infantry at the army hospital in Morganza, Louisiana. It is
possible that the vagaries of wartime emancipation played a role in the death of Eliza’s second born son,
Montgomery “in infancy” in 1865. It is also worth noting that the death rate of the 65 th infantry was
astonishingly high. Eliza Day Pension Claim for James Day, Fold3.com, p. 14-15.
225
Capt. Hiram Cornell to Col. J. P. Sanderson, 28 Mar. 1864, quoted in Berlin et. al, The Black
Military Experience, doc. 298, p. 688.
84 CHAPTER THREE
“That was my right name”:
Slavery and Surnames in Howard County, 1860-1865
In 1822, a blue-eyed boy was born to a woman held as a slave by Dr. Samuel T.
Crews of Howard County, Missouri. It was only the year before that Missouri, a slave
territory, was admitted into the Union and became a slave state. Missouri would protect
the rights of the slaveholder by ensuring that the status of the child would follow the
status of the mother, whether free or slave. As such it came to be that this child was born
unto the world a slave. Dr. Crews looked on the newborn, brought to life on his newly
settled land in Howard County and as if taking an inventory, named him Howard
Crews.226 His first name, a mark of place, signified the geographic location of the
newborn’s birth, Howard, from Howard County. Then, even though Howard’s slave
status followed that of his mother, he was given the surname of a free man, his owner.
Crews became the child’s last name, shorthand for ‘This child belongs to Dr. Samuel T.
Crews.’ Long after the death of Howard Crews and indeed the death of slavery in
Missouri, Howard’s son provided testimony that he had “heard it stated” that Howard
was not only the slave of Dr. Crews, but that he was also the son of the man who owned
him.227 This paper investigates the surnames of Howard County residents, slave and free,
as particularly useful historical artifacts to critically examine the slave-owning household
and the place of the enslaved within it. Given the intimacies of slave labor, household
production, and family life in Central Missouri, names operated to locate the enslaved
within the household of their owner. At the same time, names also offered opportunities
226
Deposition of Lewis H. Crews, 19 Mar., 1921 Lewis Crews pension in claim of Howard Crews,
(Pvt. Co. H., 65th USCT Civil War), cert 542048, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2792].
227
Deposition of Lewis H. Crews, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2792].
85 for the enslaved to test the boundaries of the slave-owning household as they made space
by and for themselves.
Names can be used to designate both physical and social place.228 In this sense,
the naming of Howard Crews illustrates the extent that slavery was intertwined with the
physical and social geography of central Missouri. On the one hand, Howard, named
after the county of his birth, illustrates the nexus of slavery and place. Historians have
remarked on central Missouri’s particular brand of slavery as notable for its small-scale.
Less slaves, more slaveholders, led to a slave society where slave-holding was more
obtainable and more common for the average yeoman farmer. 229 On the other hand, a
slave given the last name of his owner illuminates the extent slavery, especially in
Missouri, was intimately related to the household. The Crews surname can therefore be
understood to mark both the physical space of the Crews farm and a particular social
place within the Crews household.
Given the flexibility of small-scale slavery in Missouri, naming customs used by
slaveholders and slaves developed in counterpoint. Household surnames marked all
forms of property, both colloquially among townspeople, and formally as recorded in the
census. The land owned by Samuel T. Crews was known as the Crews farm and the
enslaved men and women owned by Samuel T. Crews were known as the Crews slaves.
However, unlike real estate demarcated by fences and then designated by name, the
names of people, given their humanity, are hardly static. Individuals can be known by
228
For more on movement and mobility in studies of the Civil War Era see, Yael A. Sternhell,
Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2012).
229
Aaron Astor writes of the direct relationship between small-scale slavery and the influence of
slavery in central Missouri as “dispersed smallholdings simply indicated a higher number of slaveholders
and, more important, white family members living in households headed by slaveholders.” Astor, Rebels on
the Border, 21.
86 multiple as well as variations of single names across different circumstances and social
contexts. Evidence shows that masters gave their surnames to the enslaved in order to
designate their location within the slave-owning household as labor producing chattel
property. Independently, for the enslaved, the flexibility of names tested the parameters
of the slave-owning household by marking places for themselves, their families, and
communities.
Within the specific context of Missouri slaveholding the uses of names are not
entirely reducible to what historians commonly identify as resistance, either of the
everyday variety, or of revolutionary practice.230 Rather, the significance of a name lies
in their place making. Customs of naming under slavery including carrying multiple,
often situationally specific names and the act of choosing ones own name, stretched the
bounds of the slave-owning household. Through taking, employing, and declaring their
names African Americans “asserted their right to exist.” and made a place of their own
within a system that valued their labor over their humanity.231
As former slave Eliza Ann Wilcoxson lucidly observed, it was quite common for
masters and mistresses of central Missouri to mark their slaves with their own last name.
In Howard County, stated Wilcoxson, “the colored people took the name of the old
master and mistress.”232 Peter Finch, the brother-in-law of Howard Crews, corroborated
Eliza Ann Wilcoxson’s observation when he was asked to explain why his sister Jane
230
Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 1, (Fall 2003): 116.
Walter Johnson’s notion of “enslaved humanity” offers the starting point for this analysis.
231
Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander, ‘We Shall Independent Be’: African American
Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States (Boulder: University Press of
Colorado), 5. I am indebted the framework provided by the editors and contributors to this anthology.
232
Deposition of Eliza Ann Wilcoxson, 9 Aug, 1893, Eliza A. Wilcoxson in pension claim of
Frank Hughes, (Pvt. Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), app. 380534, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Frank
Hughes, 3031]. Further analysis of the enlistment papers of the United States Colored Troops from
Howard County may suggest that masters passed on their surname with greater regularity than mistresses.
87 Frakes, her husband Howard Crews, and Finch himself were all known by different
names. He remarked simply, “the way these different names came into the same family
was that they belonged to different men.”233 Slaveholder’s customs of naming in Howard
County often denied enslaved brothers, sisters, parents, and occasionally wives and
husbands the public recognition of their kinship relations by giving primacy instead to the
names of slave-owning households.234 Social space in the ideology of slavery did not
include a place for the families of the enslaved.
One only has to go as far as the enlistment rolls of Howard County’s two Union
recruiting stations for colored troops to gain an appreciation for how prevalent this
custom was. One hundred and ninety-four slaves visited the Union provost marshal
office in Fayette and enlisted from December 26, 1863 to mid April, 1864.235 One
hundred and fifty, or seventy-seven percent, of these shared a surname with their owner.
The enlistment rolls of the Glasgow recruiting station show a remarkable similarity. Of
one hundred and fourteen slaves who enlisted at Glasgow, eighty-seven had the same
surname as their owner, seventy-six percent. These records show that at the moment of
233
Affidavit of Peter Finch, 19 Oct, 1913, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2420].
See also pension claims of Mack Stapleton, Deposition of Annie Hughes, 1 Mar., 1905, Civil
War Pension Files, [HCPC 2056]; Frank Hughes, Deposition of Eliza Ann Wilcoxan, 9 Aug., 1893, Civil
War Pension Files, [HCPC 3031]; Howard Crews, Affidavit of Peter Finch, 19 Oct, 1913, Civil War
Pension Files, [HCPC 2420], Lewis Morrison, Deposition of Cary Morrison, 12 Aug, 1897, Carey
Morrison in pension claim of Lewis Morrison (Alias Lewis Ramsey), (Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War),
cert. 451994, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Lewis Morrison, 3005], and John Smith, Mrs. Arzalia Smith
to Commissioner Winfield Scott, 19 Apr., 1926, Arzalia Smith in pension claim of John Smith (Alias John
Caldwell), cert. 512420, (Pvt. Co. I 65th USCT Civil War), Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Smith,
3661].
235
Colored Volunteer Descriptive List, Fayette and Glasgow Recruiting Station, December 16,
1863—April 16, 1864, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Two or More Civilians: 1861-1867, United States
Colored Troops Volunteers - Missouri, Missouri State Archives [F1893.8], http://www.sos.mo.gov,
(accessed, September 14, 2013). Enlistment Papers.
234
88 enlistment a strong majority of slaves in Howard County shared a surname with the
slave-owning household prior to emancipation.236
Table 8:
Enlistment
Station
Total
Enlisted
Share Surname with
Owner
Different Surname than
Owner
Fayette
194
151 (72%)
43 (28%)
Glasgow
173
137 (74%)
36 (26%)
Historians Herbert Gutman and Leon Litwack have explored the politics of names
for enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans as presenting opportunities to
affirm kinship relations. In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom Gutman finds that
after emancipation, former slaves frequently took a prior “owner’s name” rather than the
name of their most recent owner. This is explained as occurring for two basic reasons.
First, the name of a former owner (though not necessarily the most recent) often related
“an immediate slave family (or an individual) to a slave family of origin.”237
Concurrently, Gutman argues that these names “served to shape a social identity
independent of slave ownership” in post emancipation society.238 Leon Litwack shared
this second conclusion by writing that the act of taking or making public, a name
different from the most immediate owner, “reflected a deeply felt familial consciousness”
among the formerly enslaved.239 While Gutman and Litwack illuminate crucial social
claims to family, they overlook the extent to which names are also a claim to place.
236
Elizabeth Regosin notes does suggest an alternative, that slaves were simply assigned a
surname by the recruiting officer filling out the enlistment papers. Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 55. Even
if this was the case, it suggests the cultural assumption of white Missourians that slaves would share a
surname with their owner.
237
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 252.
238
Gutman, 230.
239
Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 249. Both
Gutman and Litwack draw sources on a wide variety of states. However, neither examine names within
89 If the purpose of claiming a name in emancipation was, as Gutman suggests, to
show a relation to a family origin, this origin was spatial as well as social. Testimonies
made by former slaves as they applied for Civil War pensions show that families denied a
common name under slavery were often additionally separated by space as a product of
abroad marriages. Noting that many historians feel compelled to point toward the
opposite, Elizabeth Regosin reminds us that many slaves did, in fact, take the name of
their most recent owners. Rather than nostalgia for slavery, Regosin suggests that we
might understand former slaves’ choice as their “assumption of the names they had long
recognized as their own or to which they felt entitled.”240 Quoting a former slave from
Mississippi who stated, “Our plantation (I always calls it ‘ours’ ‘cause being a Fant
nigger makes me a Fant too) wus a great big one,” Regosin illustrates the claims former
slaves felt entitled to make on their master’s name.241 The claim is twofold. As Regosin
correctly observes, first the former slave is claiming a right to the Fant name.
Simultaneously, however, a claim over the Fant land, “Our plantation” is also being
articulated.
In the ideology of slavery, the social place of the enslaved was within the
household of the slaveholder, but no part of the physical household belonged to the
enslaved. Howard Crews was not alone in receiving a name inspired by his master’s
surname and his place of birth. Thomas Boggs, one of the “most successful and
specific regional contexts. The states that appear in Gutman, are Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, South
Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, as well as British Ship Registers removing Black loyalists following the
American Revolutionary War. The states that appear in Litwack are Texas, Mississippi, and South
Carolina.
240
Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 68.
241
Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 68.
90 prominent farmers,” named a newborn child Howard Boggs for the very same reason.242
It took constant effort to maintain a marked separation within the Boggs household
between the free Boggs family and the enslaved Boggs families. Born sometime between
1834 and 1837 to enslaved parents, Howard Boggs was raised on the Boggs farm.
Master Thomas Boggs and his wife happened to have two sons roughly the same age as
Howard. The young master Robert recalled how he and Howard were “raised together”
as children. With age, the prescribed social roles of slave and free children hardened
within the household of Thomas Boggs. Marks of difference began to develop
throughout their childhood. Traditional rites of passage, from youth to adulthood such as
baptism were withheld from Howard, though presumably not from Robert. Howard
Boggs recalled that “he was never baptized nor any slave child was baptized” on the farm
of Thomas Boggs.243
With time, the stark realities of the slave-owning household, and Howard’s
vulnerable place within it added more visceral and traumatic reminders of his slave
status. A series of separations finalized the distinction that Howard had a place in the
Boggs household as a slave, but not as a member of a family. Howard’s mother, also
owned on the Boggs farm passed away when he was four years old. Just four years later,
when Howard was eight, he was separated from his father who was sold away from the
Boggs farm to a slave trader, never to see him again.244 The final sale came at the age of
seventeen when Howard Boggs himself was also sold, reportedly for the sum of one
242
History of Howard and Cooper Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National Historical Company,
1883), 487.
243
General Affidavit of Howard Boggs, 21 Feb., 1908, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard
Boggs 2286].
244
General Affidavit of Howard Boggs, 21 Feb., 1908, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard
Boggs 2286].
91 hundred dollars “for every year he was old,” a huge profit for Thomas Boggs.245
According to Harrison A. Tresler, the 1860s were “the golden age of slave values” in
Missouri. In Platte County, “stout, hemp breaking” men were frequently sold from
“$1200 to $1400,” while most put the normal limit at $1500. Still, Tresler reports that in
the neighboring county of Boone, the highest valuation placed on a male slave in the
1850s was $1600.246 When a slave trader offered Thomas Boggs an opportunity to profit
off the sale of Howard Boggs, the decision was economic. Though the parents of
Howard Boggs created a family, a name of their own was withheld. In its place was the
name Boggs, a public recognition of the household of their owner.
Surnames were given as signs of ownership able to signal possession of mobile
property, in this case slaves, frequently moving between and among farms for leased
labor and sale.247 However, used among themselves, the enslaved often developed
multiple names signaling their presence in overlapping communities. On a farm
neighboring the Boggs property, Eliza Ann Wilcoxson recognized that the name she went
by often depended on the person she was talking too.248 Some slaves of Howard County
were known by different names to white and black acquaintances. As Wilcoxson later
explained to the Pension Bureau, her son’s “real + full name was George Franklin
Hughes.” As was common, Eliza Ann and her children were known under the name of
245
Ibid.
Harrison A Trexler, “The Value and the Sale of the Missouri Slave,” Missouri Historical
Review, vol. 8, no. 2, (January, 1914), 71-74.
247
Harrison A. Trexler remarks that due to the combined and frequent effects of runaway slaves,
financial depression of the owner, restrictions placed on bringing slaves into the state, and natural increase
of Missouri’s slave population “quite a local negro exchange flourished.” Trexler, “The Value and the Sale
of the Missouri Slave,” 79.
248
General Affidavit of Annie Hughes, 24 Aug., 1897, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard
Boggs 2292].
246
92 their current master, H.H. Hughes.249 Wilcoxson recalled how “the colored people called
him [her son] George Franklin and the white people called him Frank.”250 While Eliza
Ann did not provide any further explanation, her testimony does illuminate a certain
insider-outsider mentality present among the residents of Howard County. We cannot
know which of these names was preferred by her son, but that he was known by two
names, one full and one abbreviated remains significant. Interpreting George Franklin’s
experience solely as a laborer within the framework of the household runs the danger of
collapsing his experience as a member of multiple communities. While everyone is given
a name, George Franklin’s experience suggests that slaves exercised at least some level
of choice over how they were known on an everyday basis, and by close acquaintances.
George Franklin’s multiple names suggest that names were an opportunity for the
slaves to test the boundaries of the white household by giving and using names in a
manner of their own making. Elisabeth Regosin wrote of the northern missionary
Elizabeth Hyde Botume’s puzzling experience taking down the names of ex-slave school
children in the South Carolina Sea Island freedmen’s school. Botume recounted how
many school children “invented new names with ‘much ingenuity’ and then changed
them daily.”251 Of further surprise to Betume was a family of nine brothers and halfbrothers, each with a different surname. Whatever the reasons for the differentiation
among surnames in the family, Regosin concludes that they did not correspond neatly
with the assumptions of how names should operate in white society. Naming practices
among slaves may have still been outward signs of familial identity, though not
249
Hughes would later rise to the ranks of Major in the 9th Missouri Infantry, C.S.A., History of
Howard and Cooper Counties, Missouri.
250
Eliza Ann Wilcoxson in pension claim of Frank Hughes, [HCPC, Frank Hughes, 3031].
251
Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 57.
93 necessarily according the “traditional assumptions of family and familial identity,” such
as patrilineal descent, prevalent in free white society.252
Even after she married, Eliza Ann Wilcoxson of Howard County, Missouri was
known by the last name Hughes. Likewise, her husband Alexander was made to keep the
surname of his then owner—Wilcoxson.253 Though Alexander and Eliza Ann may have
belonged to each other in matrimony, slavery demanded a physical and symbolic
separation. They were living on separate farms, belonged to separate households, and
known by different last names. This however lasted only as long as their enslavement.
Eliza Ann went by the Hughes name up to the time of the war, before taking the name of
her husband, Wilcoxson, in the years to follow.254 Eliza Ann displayed an acute
understanding of the significance of names under slavery, was compelled to change her
name at first convenience, and spoke lucidly about her names throughout her application
for a Civil War pension in the name of her son.
The Civil War and the end of slavery brought new opportunities for former slave
men and women to change their names, though often this occurred by different means.
For some men, enlisting into the service of the United States army in late 1863 brought
the most immediate opportunity to shed the names given to them by their masters.
However, less than one quarter of the enlisted men recorded in the Union offices of
Fayette and Glasgow enlisted with surnames different from their masters. This suggests
that more commonly, if former slaves were to change their name, it occurred after their
recruitment. Such was the case of Ephraim Windsor of Co. B 56th Regiment, United
252
Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 54.
Deposition of Eliza Ann Wilcoxson, 9 Aug., 1893, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Frank
Hughes, 3034].
254
Ibid.
253
94 States Colored Troops, who enlisted under the name of his owner but assumed the name
Hawkins, taken from his father, Peter Hawkins sometime during or after the war.255 As a
common first interaction with the government, marriage offered another opportunity to
assume a new name for men and women alike. Arzelia Smith’s husband enlisted as John
Caldwell, under his master’s name but chose to be married under his father’s name, John
Smith.256
The fluidity of names and the rate with which they changed affected all the
enslaved, men and women. While Arzalia and John Smith found mutual opportunity in
marriage to adopt a new name, often it was the wife who would take on the husband’s
surname. Between being bought and sold to separate owners, women and men commonly
had a number of prior names, although, it could be predicted that this was more common
for women whose name changed more frequently with marriage.257 Isabel Herne was
known by the name of her former husband, Johnson, when she married her husband
George Herne. Her maiden name “and slave name was Belle Herne” as that was the
surname held by her father. The former wife of the deceased soldier, Charles Robertson
also stated her multiple names and that she had “been known as Martha Lynch, Martha
255
Deposition of Stephen Hawkins, 31 Aug., 1908, Mary Hawkins in pension claim of Ephraim
Hawkins (Alias Ephraim Windsor) (Pvt. Co. B, 56th USCT Civil War), Cert. 814941, Civil War Pensions,
[HCPC, Ephraim Windsor, 3065].
256
Mrs. Arzalia Smith to Commissioner Winfield Scott, 19 Apr., Civil War Pensions, [HCPC,
John Smith, 3661].
257
Declaration for Widow’s Pension, 13 Aug.,1890, Isabel Herne in the pension claim of George
Herne, (Pvt., Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), Cert. 312414, Civil War Pensions [George Herne 2436]; also
Pension Claim of Russell Lewis who was married to Dilsy Lewis, “Dilsy Jackson, maiden name.” Russell
Lewis to Bureau of Pensions, Department of the Interior, 4 Feb., 1898, (Pvt. Co. F, 67th USCT Civil War),
Civil War Pensions, Cert. 779913 [Russell Lewis 2165]. Pension Claim of Richard McBane also includes
examples of his first and second wife changing their name, Sarah White became Sarah McBane, and Ann
Farrow became Ann Roberson after she married Richard, who had then changed his name to Richard
Roberson. Declaration for Widow’s Pension, 7 July, 1890, Sarah McBaine, Annie McBaine in pension
claim of Richard McBaine (Alias Richard Roberson), (Pvt. Co. D, 62nd USCT Civil War), Cert. 677152,
Civil War Pensions, [Richard McBane, Alias Roberson 2535, 2554].
95 Embree, Martha Robertson, and Martha Creson.”258 It is quite probable that some of
these names were used simultaneously, though not entirely interchangeably as she
encountered different communities. During her life, Martha Creson’s name changed four
times, the first two occurring under slavery as she was sold from the Lynch to the Embree
household and the third and fourth times, with marriage.
Multiple names held benefits and disadvantages. On the one hand, multiple
names allowed African American women a more flexible signifier of their family
relations and history. Violet Taylor for instance was known by the name Taylor after her
marriage to her husband. However she was also known “and sometimes goes by the
name of Violet Hickerson.”259 The pension examiner interpreted this to be because she
“belonged in slavery to a Mr. Hickerson.” While this was true, the examiner most likely
misinterpreted the meaning for Violet. In a letter written in her own hand, and signed
“Violet Hickersan” she explains that she had two sons in the Army, “Dennis Hickersan
and George Hickersan.” Violet never heard from either of them again after they left for
Benton Barracks. Violet was eighty-two at the time she penned this letter to the
Commissioner of Pensions in Washington D.C. Even though she wrote the letter herself,
the Pension Examiner assigned to her case described her as being “so ignorant and deaf
that I doubt whether I succeeded in making her understand” her privileges.260
In the wake of the Civil War former slaves and masters alike struggled with the
residue of slavery. A widow or a mother applying for a pension under the name of her
258
General Affidavit of Martha Creson, filed 26 May, 1893, Martha Creson in the pension claim
of Charles Robertson, (Pvt. Co. E, 68th USCT Civil War), Widow app. 552031, Civil War Pensions,
[HCPC, Charles Robertson, 3153].
259
General Affidavit of Violet Taylor, 31 October, 1894, Violet Taylor in pension claim of Dennis
Hickerson, (Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War), Civil War Pension Files, C 502049, [HCPC, Dennis
Hickerson, 1804].
260
Report of Special Examiner M. M. Brower, 28 Sept., 1900, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC,
Dennis Hickerson, 1863].
96 late husband or son had the double responsibility of establishing the “right” or “correct”
name of the soldier as well as her own. Very few former slaves who applied for a Civil
War pension avoided receiving some level of scrutiny in attempts to verify their true
name. Frequently, these investigations began after a sibling or parent who went by a
different name than the soldier or claimant made testimony. The Pension Bureau
struggled to establish which names should be considered false, and which names were
“correct.” The Civil War had brought an end to slavery, but freedom it would seem was
something entirely different. Freedom had to be made. In choosing their own last name,
frequently after shedding that of their former owner, freemen and freewomen were
collectively making this freedom at the level of the individual. Though significant,
claiming a new name was not always a simple process.
Claimants applying for a pension found that the burden of proof rested with
themselves. It was a common experience to have round after round of sworn affidavits
and testimonies made simply to establish identity under multiple names. Eliza Ann
Wilcoxson for example was asked multiple times by pension agents and attorneys to
establish her identity as well as that of her son who served in the army. Having lost her
son’s enlistment papers in a house fire, Eliza Ann did not know whether he enlisted as
Frank Hughes, or George Hughes, or as Wilcoxan. When it came time for her son
George Franklin to enlist, he could have logically and rightly chosen from any of the
three. Given Eliza Ann’s testimony, it might have been the freedom to choose that really
mattered to her son. Challenged by a pensions application bureaucracy searching for a
single correct name, former slaves struggled because the assumptions of the pension
97 bureau did not make room for their lived experience.261 When asked a final time to
establish her “correct name and the correct name of the soldier,” Eliza Ann responded
with a stern letter. She reminded the bureau that this was the “second or third time I have
given you this evidence for gracious don’t send for this same evidence again.”262
Aliases and “correct” names brought challenges to many former slaves as
government bureaucracy developed under the assumption that most citizens would
possess one given name if a man, and perhaps an additional maiden name if a woman.
Financial consequences were also a frequent variable when choosing a name. George
Pierce, son of Morrison Prather and Diana Williams recalled that even though he was
born on the Pierce farm, his mother always taught him that his “right name” was Prather,
or Preter as he liked to spell it.263 George Pierce recalled that his “mother always called
him Prather” but he was “generally called Pierce” as he was born on the Pierce farm.264
It is possible that Morrison Prather had been hired out to the Pierce household in
Richmond Township as no Prather’s were recorded in the Howard County slave schedule
of 1860.265 Also, at the time of enlistment, Morrison and the two other Prather men, Jerry
and Aaron who signed up for the Army on January 10, 1864 “claimed to have been the
slave of Isaac N. Prather, a citizen of Nodoway County,” Missouri.266 This would explain
why Morrison Prather was never known by the name Pierce. However, since Diana
261
Elizabeth Regosin corroborates this finding. She writes, “complications within the pension
process often arose because pension officials treated former slaves’ surnames as if they operated according
to free society’s assumptions about family, familial relationships, and family names.” Regosin, Fredom’s
Promise, 59.
262
Eliza Ann Wilcoxson to W. A. Fast esq., 22 Oct., 1892, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Frank
Hughes, 3027].
263
Deposition of George Pierce, 19 May, 1892, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Morrison Prather,
2668-2669].
264
Ibid.
265
1860 United States Census, Eighth Federal Census, Richmond Township, Howard County,
Missouri, Slave Schedule, State Historical Society of Missouri.
266
Colored Vol. Descriptive List, Fayette.
98 belonged to the Pierce household, as custom would have it, so too would her new born
son, George.
By reminding George that he was a Prather, not a Pierce Diana recognized his
place within to a family beyond the scope of the slaveholding household. Diana was
making the space for a Prather family by claiming a name that was outside the bounds of
what could be owned by Charley Pierce. In knowing this, Morrison’s choice to enlist as
“Prather” may have had less to do with the fact that it was the surname of his master in
Nodaway County, and more to do with the newborn child, George, who he left for the
army. Serving with Company H, of the 65 Regiment U.S.C.T., Morrison Prather died in
Port Hudson, Louisiana by the end of the year 1864.267 Diana heard by a letter sent by
Morrison’s brother Aaron, serving in the same regiment.
Diana, it would seem didn’t consider herself to be a Pierce either, even though she
was owned by and labored for the Pierce household. She was born a slave in Maryland
and recalled being “nearly full grown when I was brought to this part of the Country.”268
It is unknown whether Diana was brought with Charley Pierce as he moved from
Maryland, but is more likely that she was brought and sold to the Pierce household.
George recalled how his mother “went by her fathers name of Brooks, Diana Brooks,” for
as long as he could remember.269 Diana did not adopt the name Williams until ten-toeleven years after Morrison Prather’s death when she married John “Spot” Williams in
Howard County.
2634].
267
Child’s Declaration for Pension, 23 Apr., 1887, Civil War Pensions, [HCPC, Morrison Prather,
268
Deposition of George R. Pierce, 19 May, 1892, Civil War Pensions, [Morrisson Prather 2668].
Ibid.
269
99 If given names could not be changed, enslaved African Americans found
flexibility in how they addressed each other and presented themselves. Growing up after
the Civil War, George moved to Arkansas to “work Railroading.” When he returned
after about four months of work a Mr. Belts, likely his employer, informed him that if he
wished to go by the name Preter instead of Pierce, George would have to pay a fee.
Perhaps, George was able to use his father’s name, Prather or Preter in Arkansas. Slavery
had ended the white Pierce household’s claim to the lives and labor of Diana and her son
George. But in Howard County, if George wanted to work under his legal name, it would
be Pierce, not Prather that was recognized by the state. In the end, George told Mr. Belts
that as he did not have sufficient disposable income to legally change his name, he “liked
the name of Pierce just as well.”270
As pension applications were often made through corresponding by written letter
between the pension bureau and personal attorneys hired by the claimant, spelling
became an additional barrier for establishing a legal name.271 The examples of Eliza
Wilcoxsan/Wilcoxson, Violet Hickerson/Hickersan, George Prather/Prater/Preter
establish the regularity with which simple differences in pronunciation, levels of literacy,
and the flexibility of the nineteenth century written word delayed the application process.
In each case, pension applications were stalled for weeks as the Bureau attempted to
establish the correct name, including spelling, of the claimant. One particularly
interesting pension claim is that of Miller Estill et. al., minor children of John Estill. In
this claim, Mary Estill, the former mistress of the parents of the claimants testified as to
270
2669].
Deposition of George R. Pierce, 19 May, 1892, Civil War Pensions ,[HCPC, Morrison Prather,
271
Elizabeth Regosin refers to this as the “precariousness of stepping from the oral to the written
world.” Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 65.
100 the dates of their marriage and the birth of their children from the dates recorded in the
Estill family Bible. While Mary Estill’s name is spelled Estill, each member of the
enslaved family is spelled Estelle. It is unknown whether this was a clerical error, but
this is improbable given the fact that the same clerk or attorney would have written the
names of the former mistress and former slaves. It is also likely that the clerk copied the
names directly from the Bible as Mary Estill brought it to the hearing. Not to mention the
fact that they all lived in or near the small town of Estill Station, named of course after
the slaveholding Estill family.
The Pension Bureau however continued its struggle to ascertain the correct
spelling of the name as the claimants, filing as minor children of Mary Ann and John
Estill, signed documents with multiple variations in spelling. An affidavit establishing
the signature of Frank Estill was signed “Frank Estelle.”272 A similar affidavit was
signed by his siblings to wit, “Miller Estill, Bessie Estill, Mary Estill.” 273 As these
signatures appear in multiple handwritings and without marks it can be assumed they
were also written individually. Furthermore, the name of the final sibling, Wilgus which
appears separate as he was living in Chicago, Illinois, and was written with a third
variation, “Wilgus Estille.”274 The extent of Wilgus’ literacy is unknown and the
affidavit was only read aloud to him and cannot be considered his signature.
Nevertheless, the three variations of Estill continued to cause confusion until it was
272
Frank Estelle Certification of Signature, 30 May, 1887, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John
Estill, 1729].
273
Miller Estill, Bessie Estill, Mary Estill, John Estill, Certification of Signature, 7, May, 1887,
Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill, 1727].
274
Deposition of Wilgus Estille, 27 May, 1887, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill,
1723].
101 finally established in the case report that “The correct spelling of the name is Estill.”275
At that point, the case envelope which had the name of John Estelle written in blue ink
was marked out and replaced by Estill, written in red.276
While the experience of losing a husband and a father at the time of freedom was
not unique, there were exceptional cases of success experienced after freedom in Howard
County. Interestingly enough, Cyrus Wilson, the first slave to enlist into the United
States Army in Howard County, became one of freedom’s greatest beneficiaries after the
war. He was not born in Missouri like Howard Crews or Boggs, but like so many other
slaves of central Missouri, he moved with the household who owned him. Cyrus Wilson
was brought to the newest slave state in the United States by a family named Wilson, as
they migrated from Kentucky. On the 8th day of August 1831, a bill of sale was drawn up
between William G. Wilson and Charles Hughes in Howard County. At the age of five
William Wilson sold to “Charles, and his heirs, &c, a negro boy slave for life named C y
r u s.”277 Named only Cyrus, the young boy became known as one of the Hughes slaves
with the signing of the contract. Frequently shortened, Cyrus recalled, “while a slave I
went by name of Cy Hughes.”278
As one of the Hughes slaves, Cyrus was part of the same social network
composed of small slaveholding households and slaves as Howard Boggs, Howard
1745].
1735].
275
Report of Special Examiner Geo M Swann, 15 Aug. 1889, Civil War Pension Files [John Estill
276
Case Envelope, 30 Jan., 1882—9 Apr. 1883, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, John Estill,
277
Report of Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman, Certificates of Search, 17 March, 1925, Hannah
Wilson in the pension claim of Cyrus Wilson, (Pvt. Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 1216277, Civil War
Pension Files, [HCPC Cyrus Wilson, 1947]. Oddly enough, “Samuel C. Major” was the sole witness who
signed the bill of sale. It is likely that this is the same “Sam Major” who sold the casket to Jane and Lewis
Crews at the death of Howard Crews, see Howard Crews pension. Deposition of Paul Crews, 4 May, 1921,
Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Howard Crews, 2773].
278
Affidavit of Cyrus Wilson, 22, Apr. 1899, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson,
2089].
102 Crews, and Eliza Wilcoxsan who frequently saw each other at work on adjoining farms.
In fact, this was a small enough community for the man who signed as witness to the
1831 Bill of Sale for Cyrus, Samuel C Major, to be the same Sam Major, “old man from
Fayette” who sold the casket Howard Crews would eventually be buried in. Though
Charles and his wife Elisabeth Hughes are not listed in the 1860 Howard County slave
schedule, there are a number of Hughes households listed. All resided in the heaviest
slaveholding regions of the county, Richmond and Chariton Townships. Over half of the
population in these districts were enslaved African Americans. In fact, it was on the
neighboring Kingsbury farm that Cyrus first met Ann Kingsbury, the two would later
take up together as husband and wife. The Kingsbury place was on the bottomland near
the Missouri River, about three miles from the town of New Franklin.279 The farm of
Charles Hughes was close to the land of Thomas Boggs, “and in the neighborhood
somewhere of Dr. Kingsbury.”280
Jane Granville, formerly Jane Kingsbury, recalled Ann Kingsbury fondly. When
Jane’s mother died, Ann took her in and raised her.281 It is possible that this is where
Cyrus’s life long nickname, “Uncle Cy” originated, as Cyrus took up with Ann
Kingsbury and it became that they were “married, that is, married in slave time, in the
slave way.”282 Though they never had any children, Cyrus and Ann had an abroad
marriage and Cyrus visited every Wednesday and Saturday night, as was customary.283
By the end of the year 1863, the Wednesday and Saturday night visitations came to an
end as Cyrus Hughes enlisted into the United States Army and received his certificate of
279
Deposition of Jane Granville, 17 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files [Cyrus Wilson 2020]
Ibid.
281
Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2021].
282
Ibid.
283
Ibid., [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2020].
280
103 freedom. When asked for his name and the name of his master, he did not say Cyrus
Hughes, nor C y r u s, he answered with his childhood name and became Cyrus Wilson
once more.
Interestingly enough, Cyrus Wilson also claimed to be the slave of Elisabeth
Hughes, rather than Charles Hughes at the moment of enlistment. Ann remained at the
Kingsbury place and during the war years Jane remained “in the same house, and
sleeping on the same bed with her.”284 In her own words, Jane “was not big enough in
slavery to have a husband” and did not marry till they all came back from the army”285
but after she “got free” she was “big enough to hoe corn and to plow.”286 It was in this
way that Jane was with Ann when she died in 1864 shortly after Cyrus left in the army.
Later in life, Jane was unable to state how Ann came to die but she saw her body and
“saw them put her in a pine box…and then they put the box in a wagon, and took her to
the grave.”287 While the depositions included in Cyrus Wilson’s claim for a Civil War
veteran’s pension are inconclusive, it is likely that Cyrus heard of Ann’s death by letter
sent to him in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or that he returned briefly to Howard County.288
No matter the case, Cyrus Wilson met his life partner, Hannah Bird in a Union military
hospital in Baton Rouge.
Hannah met Cyrus for the first time in the hospital where she worked, “washing
dishes, doing the washings, cleaning the rooms, and keeping things clean.”289 Though
she did not recall how exactly they first met, she did remember that she was a free
284
Ibid.
Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1994].
286
Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2020].
287
Ibid. [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 2021].
288
Deposition of Hannah Wilson, 15 Apr. 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson,
2005] Hannah Wilson states “I never did see Ann. I heard about her, because when we was down in
Louisiana, some of them wrote to him [Cyrus] and said Ann was dead.”
289
Deposition of Hannah Wilson, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1998].
285
104 woman, and that when he came to visit her as she worked in the army hospital, he was
not sick, but he was in the army and carried a gun.290 In Louisiana, Hannah was known
as Hannah Bird, Hannah Calwell or Caldwell, and Hannah Richardson.291 Bird was her
maiden name, the surname of her father George and her mother Mandie.292 Under
slavery, she was owned by a man named Caldwell. Reuben Richardson was the father of
her first child, a son named William Richardson. Hannah was pregnant with William
around the time that Hannah met Cyrus Wilson, as he visited her at the Hospital, Hannah
and Reuben split apart. It seems that the separation was mutual as Reuben “didn’t want
to help me [Hanna] to take care of the boy.”293 Reuben left Baton Rouge and as Hannah
puts it “I didn’t have no use for him, and he didn’t have no use for me.”294 Cyrus asked if
she wanted to come back to Missouri with him. She said yes and they were married,
Hannah Bird became Hannah Wilson. William Richardson would always keep the name
of his father, even as he grew up as a son in the Wilson home.295
Cyrus once again moved to Missouri, not as a boy held as a slave, but this time as
a husband, stepfather, and freeman. Cyrus and Hannah Wilson returned to Howard
county as a new family in search for land and a life together. Jane Kingsbury, still on the
property of the Kingsbury’s at first “didn’t know who Cy Wilson was.” It wasn’t until
290
Ibid.
Report of Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman, 26, Apr. 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC,
Cyrus Wilson, 1937].
292
Deposition of Hannah Wilson, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus Wilson, 1997].
293
Ibid. [2001].
294
Ibid.
295
Deposition of William Richardson, 15 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus
Wilson, 2007]. Transcribed from the deposition, “Q-What name do you go by here? A-Will, and William
Richardson. I never went by the name, Wilson. … I always, for a fact, made my home with Cyrus
Wilson.”
291
105 later that she came to find out; everyone was talking about Cy Hughes.296 Wilson was
the name of the household that moved Cyrus from Kentucky, to Missouri. It is possible
that this was the name of his father, or mother, also owned by the Wilsons. If nothing
else, Wilson was a name that marked a place of origin. When Cyrus was sold to Hughes
he had no last name, he was transferred to the Hughes household and his childhood
history erased under the Hughes name. Taking the name Wilson could be seen as a case
against rootlessness. Despite being shipped from one place to the next, and sold from
one household to the other, Cyrus Wilson had history. He had lived on the Wilson farm,
he had been born in Kentucky.
Beyond his survival of the war, what marks Cyrus Wilson’s experience as
exceptional among those able-bodied male slaves who enlisted into the Union Army was
his ability to purchase his own land in the wake of the war years. Upon returning to
Howard County, Cyrus went to the Kingsbury place, where Ann had been living and
buried, and where Jane remained. “Jin, this is my wife,” Jane explained she was
introduced to Hannah Wilson for the first time, explaining that Cyrus “always called me
Jin.”297 She also recalled in her deposition in the pension case of Hannah Wilson that
Kingsbury had “given some of his slaves land, built them houses, and rented land to
other, and furnished them with teams.”298 It is likely that the allocation of land
Kingsbury provided became vital assistance in freedmen and women’s transition from
296
Deposition of Jane Granville, 16 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Cyrus
Wilson,1993].
297
Ibid.
298
Ibid.
106 slavery to freedom. While many slaveholders rented out land to their former slaves, it
was rare that such land was sold to the freedmen and freedwomen.299
Cyrus and Hannah Wilson maintained a mélange of occupations after returning to
Howard County. It is probable that the first land Cyrus worked following the war was
leased to him from the Kingsburys. Near the Kingsbury place, Cyrus and Hannah had
their first child together and named him George Washington Wilson. They were living
on a small pasture, cleared by Cyrus. This became known as the “Cy” pasture.
Although, Cyrus cleared the land and it commonly became known under his name, he did
not own the plot. It wasn’t until three years later that Cyrus and Hannah had saved
enough to purchase some property in Boonville, a town just down the Missouri River.300
According to George Washington Wilson, Cyrus made money by traveling across
Howard and Cooper counties with his wagon, buying and selling furs. His mother
Hannah worked mostly as a laundress in Booneville where she did washing and ironing.
The work was toilsome and George Washington remembered her monetary contributions
to the family as she “washed until she is broke up now from it.”301 As George
Washington grew older, he remembered his father mostly “did wood and sawing,” most
likely in the mills at Booneville, but “he worked over the river in the harvest a great deal,
anything to make an honest living.”302 Cyrus and Hannah Wilson also became members
of the Morgan Street Baptist church in Boonville “where uncle Cy was a local jack-leg
299
Robert Frizzell notes that in 1870, very few African Americans owned real estate, “In Chariton
Township, seven of the eighty-one black heads of household owned real estate, and ten owned personal
property. In Richmond Township, eight of the ninety-six black household heads owned real estate, and
thirty-nine owned personal property.” Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri,”
Missouri Historical Review, 258-259.
300
Deposition of George Washington Wilson, 16 Apr. 1925, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC,
Cyrus Wilson. 2010].
301
Ibid.
302
Ibid.
107 preacher of that church.”303 He also occasionally preached at a “white folks church” in
Mt. Pleasant.304
Cyrus, Hannah, George and William had established a substantial amount of
property and real estate by the time Cyrus passed away in 1924. The first to enlist, Cyrus
was among the last of the former slaves who enlisted into the ranks of the U.S.C.T. At
his death, a short obituary ran in the Booneville newpaper under the headline “UNCLE
CY WILSON DIES AT 98 YEARS—Well Known Old Colored Man Served for 35
Years as Slave—Was in Army.”305 Seven years earlier, Cyrus had drawn up a last will
and testament bequeathing his entire estate “real and personal” to his “beloved wife
Hannah B. Wilson.”306 While it is not stated in her claim for a pension following the
death of Cyrus, it is possible that Hannah retained her maiden name as her middle name
after marriage. Hannah B. Wilson, B for Bird. In the event that Hannah remarried after
Cyrus had passed away, his estate would pass in “equal parts” to Hannah, his “only child,
George W. Wilson,” and his “step son, William Richardson, share and share alike.”307
Under slavery, the names of slaves existed in a grey area. Legally the surnames
of slaves were practically superfluous except for establishing a belonging to the slave
owning household. Socially, the enslaved found names to be convenient sites from
which to challenge the expectations of the slave-owning household by marking their own
space within the household. Prior to the Civil War, this occurred when the enslaved
utilized different names when in different situations or around different groups of people.
303
Deposition of Jane Granville, 16 Apr., 1925, Civil War Pension Files [HCPC, Cyrus
Wilson,1993].
304
Ibid.
305
Newspaper Clipping, UNCLE CY WILSON DIES, Civil War Pension Files, [HCPC, Cyrus
Wilson, 1943].
306
Report of Special Examiner Elmer E. Helman, Civil War Pension Files, [Cyrus Wilson 1949].
307
Ibid.
108 In this sense names were more flexible before the Civil War, especially for those who
sought pension applications. Regardless of free or slave status, names were imbued with
power, the power to mark ownership, or the power to self-identify as an individual or as a
member of a willfully chosen family. For the formerly enslaved of Howard County, the
task of making room for personal autonomy and self-determination continued after the
economic system of slavery came to an end. For many, this work involved disowning the
names of former owners and claiming a name that recognized their individuality, their
family, and their freedom.
109 CONCLUSION
Kin and Communities in the Civil War Era
Slavery in Howard County, Missouri was not a monolithic experience.
Differences based on gender and age produced as much variety in lived experience as did
differences in types of labor and interests of the slaveholder. The authors of Slaves No
More, aptly described emancipation as a “varying, uneven, and frequently tenuous
process” and this thesis does not attempt to do justice to every variation and contingency
of experience. 308 However, it has sought to interrogate slavery, emancipation, and
freedom in Howard County through asking specific questions. What were the patterns of
slaveholding in Howard County on the eve of the Civil War and how did this affect the
social lives of the enslaved? What were the routes taken by enslaved men and women of
Howard County toward emancipation and how were they part of a similar project of
making freedom? What effect did the Civil War and emancipation have on black
families and communities maintained under slavery and how did these relationships, in
turn, shape freedom?
Slavery as it was mobilized, lived, and experienced in Howard County cannot be
fully explained without an examination of the social lives of the enslaved. In 1860,
Howard County was at the geographical center of Missouri’s slaveholding river counties,
was home to the second greatest number of slaves and had the highest percentage of
slaves by population. As such, it is an ideal place to begin inquiries into what slavery
looked like in Missouri at a local level. Examining the patterns of slaveholding at the
308
Ira Berlin and others, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation in the Civil war,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5.
110 level of the township shows that slaveholding was not evenly distributed across the
county. Rather, slaves were concentrated in the regions where cash-crop agriculture was
most profitable and prevalent. Indeed, slaves were actually a slim majority in regions
with the best soil such as Richmond and Chariton Townships, while regions of poor soil
and refuse land such as Bonne Femme and Boonslick Townships were home to even
fewer slaves than the city centers of Fayette and Glasgow.
This demographic data on slavery can be as useful for showing the ways in which
slaveholding remained fairly constant across townships as well as the ways it varied.
Maps of Howard County slave holdings clearly show that where a person lived played a
large role determining the type of community they lived in. Great variation can be found
in the number of enslaved living in regions of market based agricultural production, city
centers, and yeomanry farming for self-sufficiency. On the other hand, these maps show
that the gender and age composition across townships show much less variation, and
almost reach parity in some slave-dense and slave-sparse townships. Slaves of Howard
County built their social networks around those who were geographically close, those
who they socialized with and labored beside, and those who they were brought into
contact with through the slaveholder’s business and family dealings. When the Civil War
and the opportunity for enlistment and emancipation came, it operated with the backdrop
of these social networks.
This thesis argues that enlistment and emancipation are therefore best understood
relationally within the context of slave neighborhoods and communities. Men enlisted
alongside men who they worked alongside. Some wives also went with husbands at the
time of enlistment, visiting them as long as they remained at the courthouse. Many of the
111 able-bodied men who enlisted understood their service through its impact on those they
left behind. Enlistment gendered emancipation in Howard County by removing the
majority of able-bodied enslaved men from the county to serve their term in the Union
Army, many never returned. Making wartime freedom was therefor a task taken up by
the female slaves of Howard County. Many women used the presence of the Union
Army, especially the provost marshal offices in Glasgow and Fayette to check the
violence and authority of their masters. Some women were able to maintain a
correspondence with loved ones in the military in order to claim protection from abusive
masters, and petition for essential goods for survival.
If emancipation was not a solitary act, neither was the project of making a life in
freedom. Names have always been political signifiers of place and belonging and this
was true in slaveholding Howard County as much as anywhere else. Long before
emancipation, names held social power as master’s assumed that their slaves would adopt
the name of owner’s household. Slaves, in turn, assumed flexible names, answering to
more than one surname, or choosing which one to take or pass to their children. In
freedom, many formerly enslaved changed their surname to claim belonging to family, to
a place, and to demand recognition of citizenship. The assertion of a freely chosen name
brought benefits and challenges. Assuming a name linked individuals with lineages, to
places and were public affirmations of personal histories. At the same time, expanding
government bureaucracies increasingly using names as the primary source of
identification for record keeping failed to accommodate the multiple names of former
slaves.
112 Yes, slavery was varied, emancipation tenuous, and the process of making a life
after freedom brought many unanticipated challenges for the formerly enslaved of
Missouri. Acknowledging that freedom, emancipation, and even slavery in Missouri
were often lived and experienced through social relationships of kin and community is
one way of bringing clarity to the tumultuous era of the Civil War. The social ties of
kinship and community for the enslaved were tacitly ignored or actively denied by
slaveholders, unacknowledged by military necessity, and foreign to the traditional
assumptions framing the federal bureaucracy administering postwar aid. These
relationships were central to the lives of former slaves in the transition from slavery to
freedom and they were maintained with tenacity.
113 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Archives:
MSA
Missouri State Archives, Jefferson city, Missouri
MSHS
Missouri State Historical Society, Columbia, Missouri
FSSP Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland, College Park,
Maryland
NARA
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C
Published Primary Sources:
Bruce, H. C. The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave. Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man.
orig. pub. 1895. New York: Negro University Press, 1969.
Berlin, Ira, Joseph P Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. The Black Military Experience. ser.
2, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1862-1867. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Berlin, Ira, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland.
eds. The Destruction of Slavery. ser. 1, vol. 1 of Freedom: A Documentary
History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985.
History of Howard and Cooper Counties, Missouri. St. Louis: National Historical
Company, 1883.
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 1
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1824-1836 Vol. 2
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1836-37
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1842-1843
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1840-1841
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1847
114 Laws of the State of Missouri, 1849
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1857
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1860
Laws of the State of Missouri, 1861
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Civil War and Later Pensions:
Howard Boggs
(Pvt. Co. G, 67th USCT Inf. Civil War), cert. 320668.
Morrison Prather
(Pvt., Co. H, 65th USCT Inf., Civil War), XC 346247
Mack Stapleton
(Pvt., Co. G, 67th USCT Inf., Civil War), app. 320668
John Estill
(Pvt. Co. B, 67th USCT Civil War), cert. 259433
Martin Patterson
(Pvt., Co. H, 65th USCT. Inf., Civil War), XC 872495
James Day
(Pvt., Co. G, 65th USCT, Inf., Civil War)
Howard Crews
(Pvt. Co. H., 65th USCT Civil War), cert 542048
116 Frank Hughes
(Pvt. Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), app. 380534
Lewis Morrison (Alias, Lewis Ramsey)
(Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 451994
John Smith (Alias, John Caldwell)
(Pvt. Co. I 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 512420,
Ephraim Windsor (Alias, Ephraim Hawkins)
(Pvt. Co. B, 56th USCT Civil War), cert. 814941
George Herne
(Pvt., Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 312414
Richard McBane (Alias Richard Roberson)
(Pvt. Co. F, 67th USCT Civil War), cert. 779913
Charles Robertson
(Pvt. Co. E, 68th USCT Civil War), app. 552031
Russell Lewis
(Pvt. Co. F, 67th USCT Civil War), cert. 779913
Dennis Hickerson
(Pvt. Co. H, 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 502049
Cyrus Wilson
(Pvt. Co. G, 65th USCT Civil War), cert. 1216277
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Theses and Dissertations:
Boccardi, Megan B. Remembering in Black and White. unpublished Diss. University of
Missouri, Columbia. 2011
Schreck, Kimberly A. Splitting Heirs. unpublished Diss. University of Missouri,
Columbia, 2004.
Schreck, Kimberly A. Their Place in Freedom. unpublished MA Thesis. University of
Missouri, Columbia. 1993.
125