Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era

Throughout the long history of American slavery, black people understood their society in the idiom of kinship. African-American families transmitted their culture from the Old World to the New, socialized the young and succored the old, buffered relations between master and slave, and served as an engine of resistance to an oppressive regime. Emancipation at once strengthened and transformed the families of former slaves. As African Americans reconstituted their domestic life on a foundation of freedom, previously hidden beliefs came into full view and familiar usages took on new meaning.

Families and Freedom tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and early Reconstruction. In the words of former slaves, free blacks, and their contemporaries, it recounts the elation accompanying the reunion of brothers and sisters separated for half a lifetime and the anguished realization that time lost could never be reclaimed; the quiet satisfaction of legitimating a marriage once denied at law and the sadness of discovering that a long-lost spouse had remarried; the pride of establishing an independent household and the pain of being unable to protect it; the hope that freedom would ensure the sanctity of family life and the fear that the new order would betray freedom's greatest promise. The documents in Families and Freedom provide insight into the most intimate aspects of the transformation of slaves to free people.

Available in paperback and suitable for classroom use, Families and Freedom includes photographs and other illustrations.

Copies of Families and Freedom may be purchased from your local bookstore or ordered from The New Press , 450 West 41st Street, 6th Floor New York, N.Y. 10036. Credit card orders may be placed online by telephone (800-233-4830) or by fax (212-629-8617). 259 pp. Cloth ISBN 1-56584-026-7; paperback ISBN 1-56584-440-8.

Sample Documents from the Volume

Maryland Fugitive Slave to His Wife, January 12, 1862
For John Boston, the triumph of his own escape to freedom within Union lines was tainted by the resulting separation from his wife.
[image of manuscript (62K)]
Testimony by the Superintendent of Contrabands at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, before the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, May 9, 1863
Captain Charles B. Wilder explained how fugitive slaves, once having escaped to Union lines, worked to liberate fellow slaves and spread the word of freedom deep in Confederate territory.
Mother of a Northern Black Soldier to the President, July 31, 1863
Shortly after the battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, a free-black woman whose son was serving in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry advised President Abraham Lincoln of his responsibility to prevent the Confederates from enslaving captured black soldiers.
[image of manuscript (75K)]
Marriage Certificate of a Black Soldier and His Wife, December 3, 1863 [image (125K)]
The marriage of two former slaves, Private Rufus Wright and Elisabeth Turner, was presided over by a black army chaplain, the Reverend Henry M. Turner.
Maryland Slave to the President, August 25, 1864
Maryland's exclusion from the Emancipation Proclamation left Annie Davis still a slave. Insistent on her right to freedom, she demanded that President Abraham Lincoln himself clarify her status.
[image of manuscript (44K)]
Missouri Black Soldier to His Enslaved Daughters, and to the Owner of One of His Daughters, September 3, 1864
Private Spotswood Rice promised his daughters – and warned the woman who owned one of them – that their liberation was at hand.
North Carolina Black Soldiers to the Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner, May or June 1865
At the end of the war, black soldiers stationed near Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau to protest the suffering of their wives, children, and parents at a settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina.