Riding to Freedom — African-American Agency in a Wartime Context
Circuitously, I have come to study African American history. Having two degrees in English studies and one in communication, I have a language fetish that lends itself well to close examination of historic documents. Over the course of thirty years, I have come to realize that, contrary to popular opinion, there is no paucity of primary sources from which to tell stories of African life in America.
However, as a rhetorician — one who looks for truths and, in tandem, analyzes every assertion — I have found many reasons to doubt the veracity of much of what is uttered about slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction. While utterances may be informed by evidence most of the time, assertions regarding black experiences of enslavement are also most of the time underinformed by actual voices of enslaved people themselves.
About ten years ago, I came across the Southern Claims Commission (SCC) cases. The SCC was approved in 1871, in the era of Reconstruction, by an Act of Congress. The purpose of the Commission was to “receive, examine, and consider claims submitted by Southern Unionist citizens.”
In my historical work, I have been interested in transitions to freedom including wartime emancipations in southwest Tennessee and northwest Mississippi, and I have longed to witness the transitions through the memories and voices of those who moved forward into their futures.
I have examined most closely historical records created in Marshall County, Mississippi, which borders Tennessee. In Marshall County, dozens of claims were filed requesting compensation for property taken by the Union army. Some claims were approved, and many were “barred.” Of approximately 15 claims filed by African Americans living within the county or nearby, a majority, more than 70 percent, was approved. This fact alone may be surprising. In addition, among the barred cases, there were both white and black claimants.
The success of eleven claims by African Americans is to be credited to the era in which they belonged, one in which blacks were transitioning from slavery and were participating, when and where possible, in Reconstruction governments. The claims — the voices and perspectives captured within them — are some of the first cases of blacks being recognized and treated by the federal government as citizens and of blacks seeing themselves as such.
The cases are important for many reasons, chief among the reasons being that they include testimonies of the claimants themselves as to the property they owned, their residence prior to the war and during it, their daily activities, and their loyalty to the Union. A reader of the files can learn of a claimant’s political stance on the war, approximate their wealth prior to the war, and learn with whom they were associated. This last information comes from the claimant’s own testimony and also from witnesses deposed within the claim.
Examining the cases of blacks and whites in Marshall County, especially in the county seat of Holly Springs, one is introduced to white Unionists in the county, to those with whom blacks were acquainted and persons with whom they might not have been acquainted. All claimants were asked who the best known Unionists and/or “leading men” in the vicinity were, and black claimants, like white counterparts, had little difficulty naming them — Alfred G. Dumm, B.A. Meyers, Nelson G. Gill, and B.D. Nabors for instance. In some cases, a black also was named. Richard Parham, a deponent for Alice Hardaway, a white planter, names a number of white men, as well as Nick Winston, colored.
George Hill, who stated that he was hired by James Dugg to drive cotton, presumably to Memphis, stated plainly: “I always talked freely about being a Union man. Then he clarified,
I never contributed anything to aid the troops of the United States army, except to feed the soldiers whenever they asked for it. I never did anything to aid the troops of the United States except to frequently give them such information regarding the whereabouts of the rebels.
One begins, in the process of reading the claims, noticing patterns of activities and connections of individuals and identifying a group of blacks who constituted an enslaved elite. These blacks, though there were no doubt women among them who did not enter the public record, were mostly wagoners who hauled cotton or corn to market or sold produce they had raised on small plots. These blacks, even in the context of slavery, had found or co-created income opportunities for themselves.
One of the best examples in Marshall County of black enterprise and the spaces it created is the life of Peter Chism. In Chism’s claim, which predates the Congressional Act by five years, he is identified as “a free negro.” How the examiner arrived at the classification is not known. Chism himself may have self identified as free, referring to either his prewar or postwar condition. As it turns out, Chism’s claim was not approved until 1877, ten years following the initial filing. And in 1875, when his wife Delphy Chism and his associates — Judge A. Bradford, Prince Epps, and then Lt. Gov. Alexander K. Davis — offered testimony as to Peter’s ownership of the property under question, Peter was then deceased.
Lt. Gov. Davis, in his testimony for Chism, stated that he himself was during the war, as early as 1862, in partnership with Chism, who everyone knew was “well off” and owned good horses. One of Chism’s horses was taken while Davis was in possession of it, an act that resulted in Gen. Albert L. Lee’s providing Davis a receipt for the army’s use of the animal. Davis himself made no claim of ownership or interest in the horse he had ridden or Chism’s other horses, also taken for military use according to Chism.
Another associate of Chism, Prince Epps, stated that Davis and another black man by the name of Ray Johnson had worked together in Holly Springs in a barbershop owned by Chism. According to Epps, “everyone” knew who ran the business, and it was generally known as well that Chism had money. In Epps’s words, Chism “generally was pretty full handed.” And in addition to being flush with cash, Chism owned property that included his much loved bay horse George, considered “one of the finest horses.” Chism valued George at $500 at the time he was taken by Union Cavalry — the Kansas Jayhawkers — prior to Grant’s entry into Holly Springs.
Epps testified further that Chism bought George from a man by the name of John House, who, at the time of the deposition, lived in Jackson, Tennessee. Whether or not House’s residence indicates the extent of Chism’s dealings may not be perfectly clear, yet Epps stated that trading was a regular activity for Chism who was known, maybe widely, as “a good horseman.” In Epps’s opinion, Chism’s claim should not have been difficult to prove.
If Chism’s associates described their friend’s ingenuity clearly, Chism’s wife Delphy made it plainer still. She explained that Peter actually paid his owner, Caroline Chism, for his time. “He paid Mrs. Chism actual money for his hire, and then he did as he pleased with all he got,” Delphy Chism stated.
Among scholars of slavery such ingenuity is not a fact unknown. In an attempt to shed light on slave agency, historian Dylan Penningroth points to evidences of black slave mobility, as well as to their ownership of property. The practice of hiring out was another potential hole in an otherwise totalizing system. An enslaved person could be hired out, or hire themselves out sometimes with and sometimes without the knowledge of their master or mistress.
Historian Anne Goodstein writes that another form of hiring out was through selling or trading “such things as spring water, vegetables that [the enslaved] had raised, or cakes that they had baked.” One may begin to see how, when such activities were perpetuated over time, a bondperson might begin to experience a degree of latitude. Goodstein describes a condition between legal enslavement and liberating acts as virtual freedom.
While students of slavery are becoming accustomed to thinking about slave agency and acts of self emancipation that precede or sidestep purchasing one’s freedom, scholars have explored to a somewhat lesser extent openings which various actors found reason and means to expand.
In fact, the concept and practice of “hiring” ranged from finding employment with someone other than one’s own master or mistress to a slave owner setting up such an employment for their own benefit. In any case, the practice and the word belong to a group of terms associated with doing business in the antebellum South and wartime South.
Another black resident, George Hill, stated in his claim that he was hired by Mr. James Dugg “to drive cotton through to Memphis.” Hill made clear that he did not run the blockade for himself but only for the person who had hired him.
I never had any interest or share in any goods, wares, merchandise, stores, or supplies brought into or exported from the so-called Confederate States during the war. The cotton belonging to Mr. Dugg was taken from within the rebel lines into the Union lines, Hill stated.
One can glean from reading the claims that many Unionists carried on their business during the war although not without a great deal of difficulty. Known Unionists might be imprisoned for their acts, certainly any perceived assistance to the federal army, and they and their children who were of age were pressured to enlist in a Confederate unit.
This is the case with Methodist minister Samuel B. Carson, whose son initially enlisted with the Confederacy, and, after serving twenty-three months with a unit, was taken by his father to Memphis for protection behind Union lines. Carson’s association with well-known Union men such as Alfred G. Dumm, B.D. Nabors, and Nelson Gill no doubt marked Carson as loyal to the Union.
In the fall of 1864, William Crump — a merchant and landowner in the northern part of Marshall County — applied to the U.S. Purchasing Agent at Memphis to bring a whopping thousand bales of cotton into Union lines. Very likely, haulers like Cato Govan, George Hill, and Nelson Hunt delivered this tremendous load. If Crump’s application was in fact approved, then it seems clear that the hauling of cotton was in Marshall County regular and profitable work for black haulers from perhaps 1863 to the end of the war.
On the other hand, it is very unlikely that planters who remained in the area and who had not proven their loyalty to the Union would have themselves been able to deliver successfully the same amount of cotton to Memphis without the aid of blacks. Did blacks haul for those whites who were in rebellion? It’s a good question that remains to be answered.
Govan, a once-enslaved carriage driver of Mary Govan of Holly Springs, stated in his claim that he hauled for “anyone who would pay [his] price.” He made it clear, however, that he hauled “only for himself,” meaning with his own team rather than using someone else’s. Moreover, he maintained that he never brought back anything that wasn’t for his own use.
Govan stated plainly that he had purchased his first property, mules and a wagon, on the Courthouse Square in Holly Springs from a colored man by the name of John. The fellow slave John was, according to Govan, going away and putting his family on a train to Memphis. Govan gave John $55 — his lifetime savings — for the animals and wagon.
When I first came across Govan’s case filed six years after the close of the Civil War, it seemed odd to me that either buyer or seller would have had money or property during the war. But from reading each claim I realized that these enterprising blacks had not only money but property to trade. The war created for anyone who had capital opportunity wherever one could perceive a need and manage to fulfill it.
One in fact hears many of the “Marshall County Eleven” — Peter Chism, George Hill, Monroe Hill, Nelson Hunt, Miller Jeffries, Hogan McCorkle, Jack Powell, Adam Stephenson, James Cunningham, Logan Gorman, and Cato Govan — identify themselves as haulers, wagoners, carriage drivers, and teamsters, each of these terms being part of both the master and slave lexicons and agricultural economy. Cunningham, for instance, tells the claim examiner that during the war he was sometimes in Memphis, his “business” being that of “carpenter” while his “occupation” was wagoner. Likewise, Hunt had before the war hauled corn into town, and during the war he hauled cotton to Memphis.
It becomes clear that these sorts of activities, ones that allowed blacks to expand their geographies of enslavement beyond farms and plantations, could be leveraged both while enslaved, offering the experience of a measure of freedom. It is not unrealistic then to imagine that dozens of blacks in southwest Tennessee and northwest Mississippi may have traveled roads to Memphis or to the town square of Holly Springs.
According to scholars, black men were prepared for such work, “goading six or eight yoke of oxen all day and camping by night” having been “the winter routine of many of the Negro men” according to Sydnor. The SCC files allow today’s readers to witness how these men parlayed knowledge, skills, and talents developed during their enslavement into money-making schemes during the war. Sydnor continues,
Doubtless a slave would prefer to drive a wagon load of cotton to Memphis with a dollar and ninety cents to spend for food and lodging — or in any other preferred way — than to labor with the hoe gang in the field.
Given such experiences, it would not be unrealistic to expect that an enslaved person like Govan would have been very familiar with the route to Memphis.
Sydnor was early to describe slave mobility, recognizing that some slaves traveled so “extensively” with their masters that “there were Negro cabins on some steamboats.” Some work performed by slaves naturally involved travel or at least movement within a few miles of a farm or plantation.
If black men were in fact the main group of workers delivering cotton to Memphis, then in the wartime context they were a force with which anyone who needed to get cotton to market might have to reckon. Former planters and former slaves were pushed, that is, into a bargaining scenario. That blacks would have drawn upon previous relationships seems logical and reasonable. While the legal boundaries of the master-slave relationship may be clear, that relationship was not without loopholes, and practices on the ground surely differed by degree depending on place and person, especially in war.
Nelson Hunt, enslaved by a Mrs. Dawson, whose place was five miles north of Holly Springs, stated that he “was blockade running off and on over two years.”
I made a good deal of money at it, as I was a good hand at the business, I made as high as $100 a week in greenbacks, he remembered.
Unlike Govan, Hunt stated that he brought out goods — “bagging, and groceries sometimes, salt and meat.”
Hunt had farmed on the Dawson property for himself before the war although he stated that neither Mr. or Mrs. Dawson was keen on the idea. It was the Dawson’s overseer, W.F. Sigmin, who had allowed, even encouraged, Hunt’s small enterprise.
Testifying on Hunt’s behalf in the year of the former slave’s claim, Sigmin stated,
The way he was able to get any stock was that I gave him a little chance, and let him haul wood into town, and make a little money. I had to keep it secret from Mrs. Dawson, who did not want it done.
Sigmin explained that the way he and Hunt got away with the enterprise was that Mrs. Dawson more often than not was away, and, as for Mr. Dawson, he died before the war commenced.
As for Hunt’s ability to maneuver even while enslaved, he stated:
I was the teamster who used to haul to Memphis for old Mr. Dawson before the war, and he used to let me have what I could make on loads back.
Even as a slave, then, Hunt had more than one way of making money and apparently bargained with yet other whites, for whom he may have brought back supplies from Memphis. It seems uncustomary on the one hand that Hunt’s master would have allowed him such leverage. Any dubiousness felt by the Dawsons or by their overseer must have been assuaged by their familiarity with Hunt and by ways in which the bargain profited them.
Like other petitioners, Hunt’s loyalty to the Union also was questioned, yet Sigmin’s statement that Hunt had helped hide stock when the army was around apparently was not enough information to place Hunt’s fealty in question. Sigmin just as likely may have been referring to Confederate forces since both armies were in need of supplies, animals, and fodder.
Sigmin’s testimony does not do damage to Hunt’s claim. Just the opposite. While the overseer’s statements are clear on one level, a degree of obscurity makes his and Hunt’s testimonies intriguing. For instance, Sigmin did not say for whom Hunt would have hauled just as neither Hunt nor Govan identified with whom they did business.
The question of what constituted an enslaved person’s bargaining chip is an interesting one, and even more interesting is the idea that whites, even of the planter class, were reliant upon blacks not just to pick cotton or corn, to chop sugar cane or dry tobacco, but to travel on their behalf, doing business in town and also perhaps along the way. These latter functions no doubt instilled within some slave owners confidence in some of their bondpeople. The relationship may have therefore, in some small way, been compromised and enhanced by the pragmatism even while the legal condition of a slave most certainly remained static.
It may be worth noting that black claimants in answer to the examiner’s questions about there whereabouts and condition during the war almost always responded that they did not become free until The Surrender. It is an interesting example of how the men reconstructed wartime identities in the postwar period. Their carefully stated testimonies deemphasize claims to freedom during the war even as their professions of property ownership and the means by which they came into possession of animals and equipment describe the virtual freedom that Goodstein, as well as others, write of.
Some blacks, for various reasons, remained on farms and plantations where enslaved. Some, like John from whom Govan bought his first mule, packed his family and took off for someplace perceived to offer a chance to breathe more freely, while yet others might go from place to place in search of work or other opportunities. And for still more blacks — perhaps this was the case with the fleeing John — opportunity would be found in Memphis either inside or outside of the service.
Contrary to what I had imagined when I thought of blacks who stayed put, remaining in Marshall County, for instance, I have come to realize that yet other opportunities to make money existed there. The Holly Springs group cast down their buckets where they were. More than once, a black petitioner of the Government stated that his master or mistress had, upon leaving the area, told them to do the best they could for themselves, and in some cases this meant continuing to grow cotton, or, as often as not, corn.
Govan was left in Holly Springs without his mistress when she went to Alabama to spend the duration of the war. While she “refugeed” there, Govan spent some of his time sweeping the walkways of the Square, cleaning stores, and toting water. The pay may have been meager, but in adding it with what he had already saved over the years, it became enough for him to see his way to a new start in life, even at age sixty-eight.
The mules and wagon Govan purchased he put to use hauling cotton to Memphis. In this work, he made $50 or $60 per bale, fitting three bales on the wagon bed each trip. Taking a companion along, he most likely shared his earnings. William Dougherty or John Sims, both also recently enslaved, were two who rode with Govan.
These men would travel at night Govan told the examiner, and it would take them a day and a night to get to Memphis. Although Govan no doubt had reason to be afraid of guerilla bands, such fears may have been alleviated by the fact that at times the Union army occupied the entire route. According to his testimony, neither he nor his partner was ever molested, and the cotton — worth hundreds of dollars — was never stolen.
After reading Govan’s story, he entered deeply into my creative space. I dreamed about him, and he sang a song that I’ve entitled “Riding to Freedom.”
Oh, half-a-day/ridin’ till freedom come/Oh, half-a-day ridin’ till freedom come!
I made two linoleum block prints of Govan’s journey to Memphis. In one, he is driving a team of two mules. They and he are in the foreground, and the road traveled and a wooded area are in the background. Most of the prints are grey or brown printed on white paper. The effect is a wintry scene. Double printed, the viewer may also sense in his or her viewing movement.
The second print is of Govan standing at a fence that is the U.S. Government lot in Memphis, where the government’s animals were kept. Govan stated that, after his first mule was taken, he purchased two more from the Government lot.
I am moved by both prints. The first suggests mobility for enslaved persons, navigational skills, and confidence — behaviors and practices that most often are missing from stories of African American enslavement. Govan’s work as a carriage driver for Mary Govan would have familiarized him with North Mississippi roads.
People familiar with the wartime landscape of the region are aware that beginning roughly in the fall of 1862, battle for control of North Mississippi would be ongoing. J. Walter Hardaway, a petitioner for the estate of Alice Hardaway, a planter, recalls Gen. Grant’s army camped at Grand Junction, Tenn; LaGrange, Tenn; Davis Mills; Lamar, Miss and “in the vicinity of those places.”
As the picture of black movement across the landscape becomes clear in the stories these enterprising blacks tell, one begins to wonder just how much movement predated the war. Goodstein’s work may suggest that the West, the region under discussion, was concentrated by a planter class that had brought their slaves with them essentially to break the land and build habitation. Their labor was needed. While frontier life may have for a short time lacked a “systemic structure,” masters and mistresses still “determined boundaries of black existence.”
In her book Troubled Refuge, Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War, historian Chandra Manning explains that part of the difficulty blacks in the West experienced in transitioning to freedom was the constant movement of troops and the opening and closing of contraband or refugee camps as a result. She writes,
Try to feel and smell what it was like to exit slavery in each particular place. Remember that people who ran to freedom during the Civil War could not see the outcome of their actions. No analytical thread, no clear narrative arc, gave order to their days. Instead, they had to try to make their hopes for freedom real in the gritty detail of what each day in a difficult place brought them.
To be clear, Manning is not referring to the blacks I write about here but those who left sites of enslavement to follow the army or navy into, it would turn out, mostly temporary camps. Still, one wonders if Manning would describe Govan and Hunt in such terms. In the spaces of war and the lead up to war, how much agency did they come to exercise in the organization of their days? What plans did they begin to make for themselves and also, at times, for their families?
Given the business acumen of the freedpeople I write about here and their clear planning, it seems hard to believe that they did not imagine the narrative arc that their lives would take as a result of their definite actions. The truth is that each of these men had a past, and it was their experiences during slavery that, in most, if not all, cases suggested to them what was possible during the war.
There are still other black figures that might be examined in order to create a clearer picture of disparate experiences of Marshall County blacks making their transition to freedom. Some historians wishing to affirm the humanity of enslaved persons have, focusing on African American agency, argued that the human spirit transcends the condition of enslavement. While I have tended to insist on retaining the word slave from a legal standpoint, the stories I include here go far in making the case that people carrying the yoke of bondage found ways, when they could, to lighten the load and to see beyond physical and legal walls of slavery.
Years ago, a family member of mine, a cousin now deceased, described our ancestors — brought to North Mississippi in the 1830s from Spotsylvania County, Virginia — as “free slaves.” I spent a great deal of time trying to understand the meaning of the oxymoronic phrase, consulting scholar W.E.B. DuBois, who in Black Reconstruction in America allows for a measure of diversity of practice among slaveowners. DuBois described a fraction of said persons as “benevolent.”
Even as DuBois listed all of the rights withheld from the enslaved, deprivations that included a right to own property or to enter into contracts, he insisted nevertheless that some slaveowners and perhaps slaves themselves found holes within a seemingly total system. DuBois wrote: “Of the humanity of large numbers of slave masters there can be no doubt.” It is questionable what DuBois meant by humanity or by benevolence. Would the small opening that Sigmin and even Mrs. Dawson at times created be an example, on the local or plantation level? Can making such an allowance while maintaining a human’s bondage be thought of as humane? These are real rather than rhetorical questions that might be pondered.
I recognize that these questions are not easily confronted, and it may in fact be easier to fall back on existing opinions. Sigmin’s description of Hunt as a “favorite hand,” so regarded by Mrs. Dawson, may lead some to question Hunt’s character or politics as it were.
In any case, “free slave” would seem to point to room for maneuver even under the yoke of slavery: some degree of mobility and an opportunity to create an income. According to DuBois, “There was a growing class of merchants who traded with the slaves and Free Negroes.”
Likewise, Ira Berlin, whose Freedom and Southern Society Project, beginning in the 1970s, recovered voluminous documents evidencing African American wartime transitions to freedom, devoted a volume— Many a Thousand Gone, the First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, to historicizing slave agency. Berlin’s argument rests in the idea that the institution of slavery in North America evolved over the course of two centuries. And, beginning as a Transatlantic economic phenomenon, it engaged not only whites but a diversity of blacks who fulfilled various roles in its development before, some of them, became entangled within the very system of which they were a part.
An argument for studying slavery at the super-local level, even while keeping an eye to its evolution on a world stage and its persistence nationally, provides a glimpse into the lives of bondspeople within specific contexts. What was slavery like, then, for a dozen or more blacks in the latest stage of slavery, in North Mississippi? And how did those experiences preface emancipation?
