Efforts to reunite families after emancipation. This was conducted on the campus of the university of North Carolina and is part of the booktv college series. It is about 40 minutes. Host professor Heather Andrea williams, in 1863, what was generally the slave population in the u. S. . Guest probably about 5 million the native American South at that point. Slavery has been abolished in northern states. I think it is important to say that just because many people dont realize there had been slavery in the north. But by the 1820s, it has been abolished in places like new york and massachusetts. Proslavery then continued in the south. There were about 5 million. Host of the 5 million, how many do you think were displaced from their families . Guest it is so difficult for me to speak in terms of numbers. It really is. Part of the point of the work is nobody is keeping track of people. I point out that not everybody experiences, but large numbers. If most of them did or if a third of them did, michael pacman, a geographer has estimated about a third of the slave children experience separation of some sort. So maybe they were sold away from their parents or one of the other parents were sold away. So he estimates about a Million People were taken from the asbury south to the lower south as part of a domestic slave trade. As to how many of them hide family destruction, its hard to figure out the numbers. I kind of tried to stay away from that. A lot of people experience separation. You might go with your mother if he were a child or you might be leaving her father behind. You may be leaving your grandparents behind. So disruptive that in a lot of different ways. Host in your most recent vote, help me to find my people, where did the title come from . Guest people place the newspaper of the civil war. 1865, april 1865 m. Buyout over 1865 we start to see people placing newspapers, looking for family members. They kept placing these ads come of various up until made 10 of three is the last date that i can find. So this is language from one of them. Host i dont know if you can see this. Can you read that . Guest i dont know if i can read it from over there. It was placed by third copeland in the nashville out of nashville, tennessee and appears in october of 1865. I am going to try to read it. I am old. It says information is wanted of my mother, whom i left him fall cure county, virginia in 1841. I think i need to have it closer to me. So he places in 1865 and i think its 1844 if i remember that correctly. But he had been apart from his mother for 21 years and he was looking for her and that is kind of what got me going, thinking about this book and what separation was like for people. Host what kind of records were kept by either slave traders, slave owners . Guest i find bills of sale, but they are cabaret. So you might go to the archives and find the papers of a prominent slaveholding family. The more prominent they were, the more likely they were to have kept a record and also the more likely the families were to pass them on to archives so they could read them at this point. So you might find bills of sale that would list the name of the purchaser, the name of the seller. Usually, a first name and a description of the person be purchased or sold, in age, sex, possibly a first name. So you get those kind of documents. You get in planters journals, some that were really fastidious than just paid close attention to the detail of the operation, so everyone commented to write down how many bushels of corn he was given to be fed to the hogs. How many rations were given to the enslaved people that week were that day. They might have listed families come, enslaved people in the plantation, often irked by families. At least according to the mother because the ownership of the children pass through the mother. So with you owned this woman, any of her oscar to belong to you or whomever the father children may have been. They have those kind of groupings. People might show up in a slave stands, but usually not even by name. Just by number. The number of people. So it is very, very hard to get this information. This got journals, diaries that planters kept and that can be a really important source of information because theyre talking about who they may have to sell or who they are planning to sell or who has run away or threats to their lives and confrontations with the enslaved people were rumors of slave people, so you get some information as well. Host professor williams, were you surprised that the number of slaves that could read and write to put these in . Guest my first book was selftaught africanamerican education and slavery and freedom. So i spent many years on a book about literacy. Again, i could never tell. W. E. B. Dubois estimated at slavery 5 of people, not of slavery were literate. I dont know where two boys got that number from. I cannot put a number to it. So id written a book about the deep desire for literacy during slavery and for lots of the reasons they wanted to have a partisan. When we was to be able to write to pass because of an africanamerican needed written permission about the landscape in the south. People want to learn how to read and write, to forge a path. Frederick douglass gives us the text of the past he wrote when he escaped. So why did that some people were obliterated, but i have not really what surprised me was people were using their literacy to find families, to track them down during slavery and then after slavery. When i see an ad written that was placed, i am not positive that norton koplan wrote that himself. I dont know if youve literate. Thats all i know is what he tells me. So he may have been literate or the editor of the newspaper, the color tennessean may have written this, so you may have ticked ticket. I was very surprised to see that so many people were using their literacy to write letters, to search for family members, both here and slavery and after. Host from your book, obadiah feels lived in North Carolina but spent much of his time on the road, purchasing people in virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina for sale in South Carolina. He corresponded with his wife jean during these trips, informing her of the progress of business and expressing love for her and the four children. It is evident that intellectually and emotionally he kept the slaves he sold in the family he loved and very separate spaces. Quote, loving life he wrote, this will inform you what i yam at this time. I am well. I shall leave this place also to hunt the market for the balance i have on hand. This is the sales of what i have sold. He goes on to list rachel 400. Stephen 525. Henry 525 comic area children 675. Amy 300, address. Guest i found this document in an archive. There is an archivist note is that these documents are very helpful except possibly to ascertain the price of slaves at this particular time. However, when i read that document, this particular document, what i saw was the kind of compartmentalization that i see in slaveowners and slave traders were engaged in. Hes writing a loving note to his wife and telling her about these people. Im so baffled by why he names them because its not likely to have really know the people. And he names them. He talks about them in terms of their monetary value. On that list, other items for sale, listed along with the is a cause them. But the second part of the letter, he is writing a love letter to his wife and sending her an extra 10 to buy Something Special for herself. Give my love to her children. I am hoping to be home by christmas. So what i see they are is with each of those sales coming he was likely separating people. He had purchased them from somebody or from several people at an auction. We dont know. So they have probably experienced some florida family separation by being with him as he is moving further south. He is selling them possibly individually. So rachel might have a child or mightve had a child. He separating families. At the same time, hes feeling the loss of the own temporary separation from his family. So what i wanted to talk about is we can say all slaveowners didnt care. But they had the capacity to care and that is what was important. He could be a loving husband and he could also be a slave trader. I wanted to look at that because i think that is how a system like slavery was able to survive. The system we look at and our whole society are able to survive because you think of yourself and your feeling of being different and has been paramount to other people. So it is okay to sell a mother, do you cannot wait to get back to your wife and children and youre not ever making those connections. Host did to slaveowners, did they care about separating slave families . Was it a policy in any way . What is important to keep them separated . Or just economically viable quite guest it was economically valuable. Frederick douglas makes the argument in his narrative, which he says that he only saw his mother at night because she worked somewhere else and she would sneak from her plantation to his. He says that slaveowners wanted to keep people separate so that they wouldnt form emotional bonds. I dont think that they thought about it to that degree. I am not really sure that would serve any purpose for them. I think it was an economic decision. There were slaves and land in an slaves and slaves were much more portable, much more mobile. You could much more equally solid and safe person. He was entertained. He paid for the wine, et cetera. Much easier than telling part of his plan, part of his holdings that made him this important person sitting at the top of the hill. So that is where the well flayed. I think that my sense is that most slaveowners didnt really think about it. Didnt care. The distance of the society which they have grown up in early on the society they created, you see them legislation where they are separating out blacks and whites in different kinds of treatment and they are identifying. They are labeling blacks inferior to whites and that would of course apply to demotions as well. They say they dont feel as deeply as we do. I dont think they spent a lot of time digging about it. However, i do talk about a slave owner named Thomas Chapman and in his journal, i found passages where he was talking about having to sell 10 people because again, he was in debt as slave people the adults knew when the owners were in debt, this is dangerous. They might he handed down. They might be passed down to other people to pay better as you and so, chaplin spent some time out of habit thats terrible and i have to go out and pick out 10 people. He says im forced to do it because the sheriff is going to come and lengthy. The basically, the sheriff is going to common for close were pulled some of this property and sell them in the market. So she decides to intervene and tells them to send them to charleston so he can make as much money as possible. Pay the debt in still have some left. What is really interesting about chaplin is that he gives us the name of these people. The first names. And then, he talks about their feelings. He says that the people who are left on the plantation, the families left behind will maybe see their children again. So why use chaplin quite a bit because i wanted again to say, this was possible. Those caring about these other families. He understood. He could not say they dont care. They dont feel as deeply as we do. He knew that they cared. They were upset, crying. He avoids them. He would not go down to the slave corridor. He sent agents down there to paula at 10 people, kind of hiding behind the curtains. So he cared about them in that sense. But he sold them. Interestingly, after the war, his handwritten journals are in an archive in charleston. You look at the journals and after the war he went back and wrote in the margins at certain significant points. So he wants to make some commentary on what had been happening. At that point where he was talking about killing people and feeling so badly and then he writes, if i had realized how ungrateful they would be that they would leave us when i got the chance, i wouldnt have cared about them. I wouldve put them all in my pocket, meaning i wouldve sold them. Others would have done the same. The union got to st. Helena early in the war. The way people on the island fled. One of the men said take care of me until i get back when he got back, the war was over. The black people had left. So now he is calling them ungrateful. So that statement to me suggests that he really had been confirmed about them. Despite the fact he sold them anyway. But now he was saying if i had only known that they were boiled to me, when given a choice between staying with me and taking their freedom, they took their freedom. If i had known that, i wouldnt have spent my time being concerned about them. Host go back to your book. For most other states simply ignored the concept of marriage between slave people, louisiana and Catholic Church influence, did acknowledge marriage like relationships, but the state denied slaves any legal merit raise. Guest that is a chapter in which im lucky that the separation of husbands and wives. I say that i realized they were not married. They could not be legally married in any of the slave states. So louisiana came the closest, saying that people formed these marriage like relationships, but not in a the slave states allowed and slave people to legally marry. The reason why is it that contract, a legally binding contract. As much as we think about love and special commitment to each other, it is a legal commitment that we make and that is why you cant just decide im not married anymore. Youve got to go through another legal process. Slave people were not considered people, we go persons in that sense. They could not enter into contracts. Because then what would that mean about the rights of an owner . If you have a legally binding contract that says you are husband and wife and you are to stay together, that is going to interfere with the legal right of the owner to sell things apart. Owners might be formed wedding ceremonies for their enslaved people. But the title of the chapter is let no man put asunder because so many former slaves said when they perform ceremonies, they never said that no man put asunder. So i went and looked at the book of common prayer and a bath just to see what the ceremonies you know, whether the marriage vows i know of in our time and they were very much in place. But those words were left out of the marriage ceremony because these people could put asunder. Their marriage could put asunder when deciding to you. Host professor williams, was there an average plantation as far as how many slaves lived at one plantation . Guest you know, somebody probably knows that number. But it really varies by state. It varies by time. In North Carolina, for instance, the holdings tended to be pretty small. About 20 people. But 20 minutes from where we are right now, there was a plantation that had 900 enslaved people. And so, it just really varied. I think most whites in the south did not own any slaves. Those who did own small numbers usually and then you had the big planters in places like virginia in the case of North Carolina, South Carolina, huge plantation holdings. Thomas chaplin, who ive been talking about on st. Helena, given to him than his father when he was 17, when Thomas Chaplin was 17 years old. And struggle to hold onto them. He didnt know what he was doing. He was engaging in activities that he couldnt afford. So it really varies quite a bit. But i am sure somebody has a number. I just dont know what it is. Host stories ever unification are scarce and those that document what happened after the initial moments of joy are more rarer still. Guest input in this book together, i divided to three parts. The first part of separation. The search for family and so during slavery and after slavery and the third is reunification. The first part of three chapters. Separation has three chapters. Reunification is one chapter. I really think that speaks to probably not the correct proportion, but i think there were many, many more separation and reunification. People might be taken from virginia, lets say, when tobacco became less economically valuable. People in virginia and at the same time, youve got the expansion of the u. S. Into places like mississippi, alabama, texas. So people are being sold from virginia into places like alabama, from North Carolina, mississippi, starting new plantations. And so, people are being sometimes family members, very often been separated and reunification could rarely take place. People writing letters back to the places where they had left their family members, people run away. If you look at runaway ave. That were published, very often they would say i think youve had it back to try to find his mother. Or he think he is headed to memphis where he has a sister who i also own. Or he may be on this plantation because he has a wife there. Many people were escaping during slavery, trying to get back to family members. Some got back to the place and people were gone or had died or have been sold away. And after the war is when you get this really dedicated search with thousands of people looking for family members, leaving on foot to find them, georgia to North Carolina to try to get back to where you had last seen your family. It was very, very difficult. Nobody kept records. One of the really important sources for this research is the Freedmans Bureau perspective. After the war, one of the things that africanamericans decided was that this could be a place that could help them to find family. Setting up schools, that africanamericans are turning to them for help. So a letter from virginia, were a family whose son was taken to new orleans and they made the traitor who took him to new orleans. We think he is in new orleans. This particular Freedmans Bureau agent went into the africanamerican community, try to find any information about this young man. Went and found the slave trade. The slave trader says i dont know where they are. I dont have any records of them. Maybe the company has a record. But by now, the Company Thinks slavery is over, so very, very difficult to try and add people because nobody had kept track of them. A particular owner kept track of his possessions or her possessions. But not in the sense of keeping any thought of a family in mind. So it was just very difficult to find family members. Host when it came to the slave trade, how important was new orleans . Guest new orleans was one of the very important ports. Youve got places like richmond, virginia. Charleston, new orleans. It is a place where many thousands of people were sold. Big slave trading markets. Theres been quite a bit of Research Done on new orleans. The charleston was another place where slave trading took away his right on the street. Washington d. C. Slave trading took place on the street. Ec abolitionists writing back, saying what a disgrace that in the shadow of the nations capitol, you see people being sold. In places like new orleans and charleston, they started to move to trading inside to take it off the street. You can still see some of these places in charleston, for instance, there is a museum now in the grounds they used to be one of days options. Host of the 5 million population 1863, what percentage try to escape . Guest again, terrible with numbers. During slavery, lots of men, particularly some women escaped or attempted to escape. We know this through these ads. So black people showed up in ads in the 19th century in a few ways. They showed up as property being offered for sale or somebody saying i want to purchase people. And then you see them as runaway slaves, owners looking for them and after the war the information as where they are the ones actually placing the ads. So it is just really hard to know what the numbers were. Host how do you research a book like this . Guest first of all, you kind of get it and buy something and you want to know and i started seeing as when i was working on my dissertation. I wanted to know more about the people and i wanted to know about their feelings. I know that when i read these ads, at the one koplan wrote, where youre looking for his mother, that is the only name. He gives the name of her onerous and his owners of the slave trader because maybe these white men names would be recognized. So that really got to me and i was moved by it and i wanted to know more. First, it is the commitment. You have to really want to know. And then you start going to archives. The Southern Historical collection. Duke University Special collection. Library of virginia, lots of universities in the south have these brilliant, wonderful collections. And then you go to historical societies and into the National Archives in d. C. To look at the freedman euro papers on military service records. And often you are just tiny little scraps of information. So i find and add. I dont know anything else. I look in the census data nic, but if i am not sure its him, then im not going to say it is him. Theres got to be some indicators. I see four to copeland, a woman named betty living in the household, maybe i can say that. But just lots of little pieces of information. One of the great names when you are doing research, people start to send you stuff. So other colleagues who know about your work. People in my department. Graduate students because they are out doing their research in the email and say i found this ad in this paper and i hadnt known about that. Somebody sent me a clipping that she found about a world fair kind of exhibition where an old black woman placed information about people who have lost. So this is in the 20th century. As she wanted people to remember that there has been slavery and slavery had meant separation of the families. So people start to send you information. Somebody sent me something from the schomburg in new york is that i came across this during my research and i was on a plane to new york and went to the schomburg and found a letter that an enslaved man had written. He dictated it to his slaveowners by and sent it to his wife who had them taken away. And so, it is just a lot of digging, lots of trying to figure out how things work. I found this one letter in virginia. I start the first chapter with it, where it says a friend of mine has a fine black boy for sale. Hes not very big here just about 12 years old, betty stout. Hurry if you want him. I read that and hurt myself gasping is really quiet cold archive because the way that this child was being described him even though my work is on slavery and 90s to being being people treated as property, it was stunning to me to see it in those harsh terms. I thought what am i going to do with this . I dont know this boys name. I dont know if he is the mother or father or sibling. What am i going to do with this . If you find something, look at it, turn it upside down, shake it, try to figure out. I used it to frame the chapter to set out or know about this boy, but i want to know about other boys another growth who experience separationist children. So i framed the whole chapter around that letter, where i have people who tell about their experiences and slave marriages. You know, we talked about the sources that white people created. The people that africanamericans created are in the slave marriages, these long at narratives in which they tell you their story and separation is a part of their story, whether its their own separation or someone then served from someone else. The interviews that federal government sent people to do during the great depression, to put people to work. They went and interviewed former slaves who by then were in their 70s and 80s, sometimes nine days. Film but this is a picture that was taken by the Works Progress administration during the depression and he was interviewed he has a three page interview. But i use that picture at the end of the book because he is photographed with his granddaughter. So is the message about survival end people going through the ordeals of slavery. I always want to say slavery was brutal and painful but people found ways to live. Most people did otherwise there would not have survived otherwise people just lost their mind the especially around separation. The for the most part they were resilient they kept forming new families. Even as they were holding on for they keep going in and they keep living in their Holding Onto Memories of the people they had lost and the desire to be with those people again. Sova charlie and his granddaughter represent that resilience that people came out of slavery and some came out with family members in this child was born after slavery. Because the pitcher was taken in the 1930s. It is about the continuation of the people. And as these particular individuals. Host professor, why did you choose this for the cover . It is the picture of a quilt that i made. My first book has a picture of the quilts that i made that i have just made it. Then somebody said that should be on the cover. So i set out to make a quilt for the cover for this book. And for me it is the address of a child but there is
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