This book is about love stories: the love of family, of partners, siblings, and children who were once enslaved, of friends and those who served in the military together seeking each other to reconnect. These people were sold away or escaped to freedom. They were gone and those who loved them wanted to know the truth. Were they alive or dead? Where were they? What had happened to them since they last saw each other? (Had they married? Had more children?) Could the family be reunited?Author Judith Giesberg calls these people "The Freedom Generation."
Allow me to give you some back-story on this. As you may know, after emancipation from slavery, former enslaved people were allowed to have bank accounts and own land and property (though they were often segregated when it came to where, per localities), and also allowed to legally marry (though there were rituals of commitment and sometimes services to unite slaves, (per the slave owners values and discretion). However, in those times communications traveled slowly, very slowly compared to these days when even "snail mail" has been replaced by electronic bill paying and e-mail and unlimited long distance cell phone use. Because some slaves were sold and resold or moved along, they were often out of communication entirely. The Underground Railroad moved people to freedom. The Civil War also scattered people, including those who had been part of the military or escaped to the Union while soldiering. Upon emancipation, some had no means to move from the place they had been enslaved while others took any means possible to move elsewhere. The years passed.
You may also know about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and his New Deal which resulted in federal funds being used for projects such as the Federal Writer's Project. One of the projects that writers participated in was interviewing former slaves. These writings appear in databases as "SLAVE NARRATIVES." (At my local library this database is available and searchable.) Author Giesberg search through those testimonials as well as doing research in archives for now historical newspaper advertisements and such and brought forth some stories that might break your heart too.
Some people searched for decades, not only placing ads in newspapers but traveling and networking, asking ministers and local politicians who might be inclined to help them search. Some were successful, others not. (Through genealogy that search continues.)
In the Introduction of this book, Giesberg writes, "Tens of thousands of children were taken from their mothers and fathers over the four decades of the Second Middle Passage" and "Chance meetings of formerly enslaved people were rare."
Excerpt page 65 -
"Among the one million people sold from the Upper to the Lower South before 1860, thousands were children sold alone. According to historian Edward Baptist, between 1815 and 1820, 2,646 children under the age of thirteen were sold in New Orleans out of a total of 12,370 sales. Of their number 1,001 were sold alone."
Giesberg writes about the emotional and psychological effects that being sold away or sent away had on children and families as an aspect of her explorations of slavery in this book. Today, we find child trafficking and child labor to be abhorrent. I will say that that children who were not enslaved were also trafficked and many went to work both in Europe and the America's very young, especially before public education. That was tied in with shorter lifespans and the fact that the age of thirteen was generally thought to be the onset of adulthood; some say being a "teenager" is also a recent experience and back in the day you were either a child or an adult. It was also an aspect of a rural or agricultural society in which large families put everyone to work in some capacity, of informal apprenticeships, and very little time to play. So we're all evolving and rejecting notions that were acceptable in the past.
This is one more book I highly recommend for its extensive researched historical content and value to anyone who wants to be inspired.
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