Black Families in Civil War Maryland
Sometime in July 1867, Henrietta Emory wrote to a clerk in the Claim Division of the Maryland Freedmen’s Bureau describing the challenges she had faced in trying to get money due to her as a soldier’s widow. “I have had so much trouble & gone so in debt to get my poor husband’s bounty, that I was able to do no more,” she lamented. With a young child to support, Henrietta certainly needed the money, which would have amounted to several hundred dollars the U.S. government owed to her deceased husband. She also had good reason to be weary of the process of claiming it, however. Having failed in an earlier bid to claim the benefits that was stymied by a corrupt Freedmen’s Bureau claims agent, J.P. Creager, Henrietta knew better than anyone that winning access to her rights as a war widow was an expensive endeavor. Her success, she had learned, also relied on the design and operation of a federal bureaucracy that consistently treated Black Southerners—and especially Black women—with suspicion. Nonetheless, she asserted, her claim was sound. “I can prove by the best authority, that I was lawfully married to James Emory,” she insisted. “I was married to him by a Methodist preacher, colored, & my husband paid him for marrying us, he was a regular preacher in the conference, & it was the way all the people were married.” Legally married, she insisted, the hundreds of dollars the government had yet to pay her husband ought to be hers.
Like many Black Marylanders, Henrietta encountered a postwar state heavily invested in projecting white middle class sexual and social norms onto the Black families emerging from slavery and state-sponsored discrimination. As her letters reveal, although Henrietta was born free, she found it difficult to navigate the social and financial burdens of pursuing her claim as a war widow for her husband's unpaid bounty and wages. Her persistence in spite of these obstacles is a testament to the lengths Black women would go to assert their rights as citizens, even as state surveilance of her sexual activity ultimately left her unable to achieve recognition as a war widow.
You can continue reading an analysis of her story, published by FSSP editor William Horne with Muster, the blog of the Journal of the Civil War Era.
Mapping Freedom's Struggle
The interactive map above charts the attempts of Black Marylanders to destroy slavery. Often their work encountered stiff resistance from the government itself, as when President Lincoln attempted to limit the visibility of Black troops, who he blamed for the murder of white officers by Confederate sympathizers. While we may today think of Lincoln as a tireless advocate for emancipation and equality, that was hardly the experience of Black organizers and communities struggling against state-sponsored racial discrimination and violence.
Lincoln's intervention in recruiting practices illustrates the spatial implications of these policy issues, involving officials and officers in Washington, Baltimore, and Maryland's Eastern Shore. Where documents engage multiple areas, we have placed a point for each on the map. You can click on each point for a summary and transcription of the related document, or zoom in or out for different vantage points in freedom's struggle.
Explore the struggles of Black Marylanders to gain recognition of their status as families.
Black Maryland families treated the right to create stable households that were protected from arbitrary interference and coercion of their white neighbors and elected officials as an essential consequence of emancipation.
Matilda Johnson, for example, not only demanded to have her children returned to her, but also required that her former enslaver "deliver to her forthwith all goods chattels and household utensils of every description that rightfully belong to her." These items, taken by her former enslaver, were not only important as she sought to establish her own household for her family, but were likely also crucial to her ability to earn a wage.
You can read Johnson's petitions, along with those of other Black families, in the section that follows.
Henrietta Emory explains that she is too poor to provide evidence in her pension case
Theresa Duffin reports that her former enslaver beat her after she argued with his wife and that they refuse to return her property
Jane Uncles testifies that her formerly enslaved daughter was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for defending herself during a beating by her enslaver
Black drummer boy Reason Brown petitions for furlough to visit his family in Maryland
Formerly enslaved Matilda Johnson petitions the Freedmen's Bureau for the return of her children and household goods, after which the agency waived her right to her children
The deputy provost marshal for Kent County reports that local officials used state indenture laws to facilitate the theft of Black children by former enslavers
Kitty Bowland claims her son was illegally arrested and forced into the Army
A White Unionist testifies on the abuses of the apprenticeship system to bind large numbers of Black children
Free Black Woman Barbara Diggs petitions for the release of her children, who were bound out against her will
General Henry H. Lockwood attempts to break up the abusive apprenticeship system on the Eastern Shore, but is countermanded by headquarters
White Baltimore resident Sarah Alnutt petitions the military for help returning a Black child taken from her residence by family members
Sarah Parsons retrieves her daughters from her former enslaver with help from the military
Amid widespread abuses of the apprenticeship system to bind formerly enslaved children, Governor Bradford complains about oversight efforts
