Voices of Emancipation

Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U. S. Pension Bureau Files

Elizabeth A. Regosin, Donald R. Shaffer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814776261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Voices of Emancipation seeks to recover the lives and words of former slaves in vivid detail, mining the case files of the U.S. Pension Bureau, which administered a huge pension system for Union veterans and their survivors in the decades following the Civil War. The files contain an invaluable, first-hand perspective of slavery, emancipation, black military service, and freedom. Moreover, as Pension Bureau examiners began interviewing black Union veterans and their families shortly after the Civil War, the files are arguably among the earliest sources of ex-slaves reflecting on their lives, occurring decades before better-known WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s took place.

Voices of Emancipation explores the words of former slaves topically, beginning with recollections of slavery, moving on to experiences of military service in the Civil War, the transition to freedom, and finally to reflections on marriage and family before and after emancipation. With an introduction that places the pension files in context and presents the themes of the book, and historical commentary interwoven throughout the excerpts of the interviews themselves, Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer effectively introduce the files and the treasures they contain to students and general readers, but also provide specialists with an indispensable research tool.

1
Slavery and Emancipation

Slavery is a persistent theme in Civil War pension files. The testimony of Civil War veterans, their survivors, and their witnesses contain frequent references to the “peculiar institution,” since it touched on so many issues of pension eligibility: identity, age, disability origins, and others as well. It was hard for former slaves to prove their worthiness for a pension without revealing information about their prewar lives, and that fact made the subject of slavery unavoidable. For ex-slaves, to testify about the period before the Civil War was to talk about slavery.

Civil War pension files are not the first source on slavery from the slaves’ perspective. As discussed in the introduction, historians have long had access to published slave narratives and the 1930s interviews of the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. However, the firsthand testimony of ex-slaves in pension files is particularly strong in documenting two particular areas of slave life: slave communities and slave identity.

First, even decades later the contours of prewar slave communities are apparent in the affidavits submitted by would-be pensioners and solicited by the U.S. Pension Bureau during special examinations. After all, in determining factual information about a black applicant in the prewar period, who better to ask than other former slaves who had once been and often still were closely associated with that same person in the postwar period? Although special examiners preferred the testimony of former slaveholders and other whites, believing that their testimony was more comprehensible and therefore presumably more reliable, testimony from former slave owners often was unavailable because slaveholders had died or were inaccessible. In the hundreds of thousands of pages documenting black applicants’ lives, readers of Civil War pension files can find important insight into the structure and experiences of slave communities.

Second, the question of identity and its relationship to slavery emerges as a strong theme in the testimony about former slaves in pension applications. By identity, we mean the name by which ex-slaves referred to themselves or the name other people used for them, last names in particular, and what names reveal about familial and other social relationships. Names can expose a great deal about status, power, and relationships and about how these things changed in the era of emancipation. Identity often became an issue in Civil War pensions because the first requirement for a successful claim was for the applicant to demonstrate to the Pension Bureau that he or she was the veteran or his eligible survivor. This task was not always an easy one for ex-slaves because of the ambiguity of slave identity before and during the war, and in the transition to free identities that began during the Civil War and continued afterward. The problem was compounded by the preference of the Pension Bureau for documentary evidence that former slaves usually did not possess such as birth certificates, baptismal records, and marriage licenses. Likewise, former slaves often were further hamstrung in their pension applications by their illiteracy, a condition stemming from bondage that prevented them from knowing how to spell their names or record their birth dates by the Christian calendar—itself a consequence of the need to control slaves by attempting to deny their humanity and their worth as individuals. As Frederick Douglass poignantly explained regarding a slave’s age, owners withheld from slaves the critical elements of identity:

I never met a slave who could tell me how old he was. Few slave-mothers know anything of the months of the year, nor the days of the month. They keep no family records, with marriages, births, and deaths. They measure the ages of their children by spring time, winter time, harvest time, planting time, and the like; but these soon become undistinguishable and forgotten. Like other slaves, I cannot tell how old I am. This destitution was among my earliest troubles. I learned when I grew up, that my master—and this was the case with masters generally—allowed no questions to be put to him, by which a slave might learn his age. Such questions are deemed evidence of his impatience, and even of impudent curiosity.¹

White claimants, too, had trouble producing material evidence in their claims, though not to the extent that former slaves did. The U.S. Pension Bureau was aware of this difficulty experienced by African American applicants and, to its credit, tried to ameliorate it. Pension officials sought evidence in the form of oral testimony, both from the applicant and from witnesses who knew them and could affirm, deny, or furnish anew important facts about the claimant’s history. In this testimony, we find stories about slavery from the perspectives of former slaves, former owners, and other witnesses to the life of the peculiar institution. Some of these stories are mere snippets, a mention of having been hired out to another master on a particular date as a means of establishing one’s age, for example. Some stories appear in greater length. In order to explain why he and his son possessed different surnames, for example, a father had to recount the history of his ownership and how his family was divided by slavery. Taken together, these stories provide a vast and varied portrait of the institution through the eyes of those having recently, and not so recently, lived within its bounds.

The sections of this chapter focus on community, personal identity (naming and age), and emancipation. Emancipation in Civil War pension files is often inseparable from slavery. Indeed, many of the excerpts that are featured in a particular section might speak to more than one element in the experiences of slavery and freedom. The subjects sometimes overlap significantly.

Community

Historians tend to use the phrase “the slave community” to refer to slaves as a collective body. The phrase can mean both slaves’ physical proximity to one another (the “community” of slaves living in a particular locale) and their social relationships (the “community” of slaves connected by a core sense of belonging to one another, a sense of a shared situation). The notion of “the slave community” can also have even deeper meaning for historians, as it invokes the dramatic shift in thinking about the lives of slaves that occurred in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Prior to that time, historians of slavery studied the institution through the eyes of slaveholders, seeing slaves as their masters saw them. Historian John W. Blassingame explained why this perspective was distorted: “The clearest portrait the planter has drawn of the slave is the stereotype of Sambo, a submissive half-man, half-child. Such stereotypes are so intimately related to the planter’s projections, desires, and biases that they tell us little about slave behavior and even less about the slave’s inner life, his thoughts, actions, self-concepts, or personality.”² Blassingame’s own study of slavery, first published in 1972, used the WPA slave narratives and other firsthand sources to look at the institution from the perspective of slaves in an effort to understand how they experienced slavery and to examine the rich lives they created for themselves within slavery’s bounds. Blassingame titled his study The Slave Community. Since that time, the use of the phrase “the slave community” has evoked the work of Blassingame and many other historians who explored the humanity of slaves, who saw slaves not as victimized automatons responding to the circumstances of slavery but as active human agents in their own right, developing their own cultural and social institutions within the confines of slavery.³

Former slaves’ Civil War pension files contribute to the understanding of the concept of “the slave community” by offering specificity to some of the meanings attributed to it. For example, we might take it for granted that slaves living in the same locale were part of the same community. Yet, as witnesses in former slaves’ pension cases describe how they came to know a claimant and the context within which a relationship was formed, we come to understand how a “community” was constituted. Some of the examples in this section illustrate that slaves were not isolated on a single plantation or farm but had contact with one another precisely because of their proximity to other slaveholders and/or because their masters were related. This contact allowed them to forge broader relationships beyond the holdings of their own masters. Readers of Civil War pension files also come to better understand how the exterior circumstances of slave owners’ lives shape the interior lives of slaves and how these circumstances thus affected both the spatial and social dimensions of slave communities. One key theme that emerges from the pension files is the dispersal of communities resulting from changes in slave owners’ personal or economic situations. Pension files also offer glimpses of the work that dominated slaves’ lives. As historian Charles Joyner notes, “From the slaves’ point of view, toil from sunup to sundown was part of the natural rhythm of the land and was a constant part of their collective experience.”⁴ As the pension files highlight the kinds of labor that slaves performed for their masters, the kinds of labor that they performed for themselves, and the hierarchies of labor among slaves, they provide insight into this collective, or social, dimension of work that played a role in the construction of social life in slave communities.

In a striking example, Anderson Logan, the father of Civil War soldier Boley Travis, lived in the same locale in Warren County, Missouri, all his life. To ascertain his financial condition (for much of the history of the Civil War pension system, a parent had to have been dependent on his or her dead son prior to the son’s service to be eligible) and information about his relationship to his son, special examiner A. B. Casselman interviewed a number of people in 1882, black and white, who had known Logan during slavery and after. Taken together, the depositions of Logan’s neighbors reveal the intersection of lives, black and white, slave and free, that shapes a community. Although the stories are not necessarily always clear as to how it happened, they show that in an area where owners often had smaller holdings (which tended to be the case in Missouri), slaves of different masters grew up together and knew one another all their lives. The lives of slaves and owners intersected one another as slaves married among the farms, visited their spouses and children, and worked as “hired hands” on neighboring holdings.

Excerpt from the Deposition of Abram Welsh, May 8, 1882, Civil War Pension File of Boley Travis, 65th USCI, RG 15:

Ques. How long have you known Anderson Logan?

Ans. I think it is not short of fifty years.

Ques. By whom were you owned and how near did you live to him when you first knew him?

Ans. I then belonged to Goren Spiers, and lived about 8 or 9 miles from Campbell Logans, where he was owned.

Ques. Was he married or single at that time?

Ans. He was then single. He afterwards married my wifes daughter, my stepdaughter, Sarah Travis.

Ques. Were you present at the marriage?

Ans. No sir. My wife was present but I was not.

Ques. How long ago was that?

Ans. It must have been fully thirty years ago, perhaps longer.

Ques. How many children did they have

Ans. They have had eight.

Ques. Did they live together as man and wife continuously after they were married

Ans. Yes sir.

Ques. Were either of them married before that

Ans. No sir, not that I know of.

Excerpt from the Deposition of Allen Powell, May 10, 1882, Civil War Pension File of Boley Travis, 65th USCI, RG 15:

Ques. How long have you known Anderson Logan?

Ans. I have known him at least thirty five years, ever since I was a lad of a boy. . . .

Ques. How long did you know Bowley before the war, how far did you live from him and how often did you see him.

Ans. I knew him ever since I was a small child, and lived about fifteen miles from him and I saw him about once in every three weeks when I went to see my wife, who lived close to him.

Ques. Did you serve in the same company with him in the army?

Ans. Yes sir, we all left Warrenton together, and I served with him until he died.

Excerpt from the Deposition of Robert Aistrop, May 9, 1882, Civil War Pension File of Boley Travis, 65th USCI, RG 15:

Ques. How long have you known Anderson Logan and what has been the nature of your acquaintance with him

Ans. I have known him a great many years, at least thirty years. I knew him as the slave of one of the Logans, I am not certain which one. His wife belonged to Thomas Travis, who lived about two miles from me.

Ques. Did he live with his wife, or how do you know that she was his wife?

Ans. He was there a great deal on Sundays in slave times. I have frequently seen him there on Sundays and then they lived together as man and wife after they were free. I do not know whether they were ever married but I do not doubt that they were.

Ques. Were they recognized as man and wife by their neighbors and masters,

Ans. Oh, I think so. They were thought a great deal of.

Ques. Were there any children who were recognized as being their children, by the neighbors

Ans. Yes sir, there were a good many, I do not know how many.

Ques. Can you name any of their children?

Ans. There is Sam, George, Birch, and the one that he is contending for a pension for. Bolick I think, and Bill and some girls.

Ques. What name do these children go by now

Ans. They go by the name of Logan, and have ever since they were freed.

Ques. How many slaves did Thomas Travis have

Ans. I think there were two families of slaves. Logans family and one other family.

Ques. What was Anderson Logan’s physical condition or ability to do manual labor at the time he was freed

Ans. He has been a cripple, a right bad cripple ever since I knew him, and has been lame.

Ques. Was he then able to support himself?

Ans. Oh yes sir. He was able to make a support for himself. He worked at his trade. He was a factory hand, working at the tobacco factory. He was hired out all the time when he was a slave and got very good pay.

Ques. Did he work at that trade after he was freed

Ans. I don’t think he ever did. I have often thought that he ought to have went at it. His sons have kept him since his wife died.

Ques. Has he any property, or has he had any since he was freed.

Ans. He has a horse, is all I know of.

Excerpt from the Deposition of John A. Aistrop, May 9, 1882, Civil War Pension File of Boley Travis, 65th USCI, RG 15:

Ques. How long have you known Anderson Logan,

Ans. I have known him about as long as I can recollect.

Ques. Has he been married during your acquaintance with him, If so who was his wife

Ans. His wifes name was Sarah, and she belonged to Thomas I. Travis ever since I can recollect.

Ques. Had they any children, and can you name them

Ans. I can name several of them. There was Sam, and Birch, George, Bill, Martha, Bowley, Fanny, and Kitty. I don’t recollect any others?

Ques. Did these all pass as the children of Anderson Logan, among the neighbors

Ans. So I always understood.

Ques. What was his physical condition or his ability for manual labor at and prior to the time he was freed?

Ans. From the time he was freed I don’t think he could hire out for his board, except among his children. I know I would not give him his board. He has been a cripple ever since I can recollect, being lame, and walking sideways. About 1859 I hired him about five months, from his mistress and gave twenty five dollars a month for him to roll tobacco and as a kind of boss in my tobacco factory. He knew a great deal about tobacco, and was very skillful in a factory. But he would be of no account at farm labor.

Ques. Has he ever worked in a tobacco factory since he was free.

Ans. Not to my knowledge.

Ques. Would his labor in a factory have been as valuable since you hired him as at that time

Ans. No sir, it would not. I doubt if he could have hired after the war for more than his board. His style of rolling tobacco had gone out ...