Women of the Blue and Gray: True Stories of Mothers, Medics, Soldiers, and Spies of the Civil War by Marianne Monson

Author:Marianne Monson [Monson, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Civil War
ISBN: 9781629724157
Amazon: 1629724157
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Published: 2018-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

The irony that a nation founded on the principles of freedom would continue to justify the institution of slavery long after much of the rest of the world had abolished it was not lost on many great voices of the age. Frederick Douglass asked what the Fourth of July could possibly mean to those enslaved within America’s borders,25 and Susie King Taylor wrote, “In this ‘land of the free’ we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong. . . . They say, ‘One flag, one nation, one country indivisible.’ Is this true? . . . It is hollow mockery.”26 The voices of Rachel Brownfield and Harriet Jacobs, culled from the stories of millions, represent a sliver of an American experience that went vastly undocumented by those who lived it.

Deep in the wilds of Louisiana, the Whitney Plantation is the only historic plantation home dedicated to telling the story of enslaved individuals. Powerful sculpture, memorials, and original cabins and artifacts preserve slave experience. As I wandered through the memorials being raised in those acres, I marveled at the forces that have sought to bury and erase the brutal reality of this history.

But the suffering of so many cannot be silenced.

Remaining slave narratives are a testament to humanity, which insists on finding a way to speak out and survive. Whether in a closeted garret, an underground network, or in relentless persistence, human beings will survive, will strive toward freedom, will foster their ability to learn and progress, in spite of impossible odds. The voices that remain from slavery stand as a reminder of where this nation has been, an understanding of where we are today, and a plea to continue fighting oppression today and into the future. As Ellen Vaden, survivor of slavery in Arkansas, once said: “Times been changing ever since I come in this world. It is the people cause the times to change.”27

Further Reading

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938. Available online from the Library of Congress at https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/.

David T. Dixon. “The Wealthiest Slave in Savannah, Rachel Brownfield and the True Price of Freedom.” In Georgia Backroads, Summer 2014.

Rhiannon Giddens. Freedom Highway, Nonesuch Records, 2017. (A musical interpretation of firsthand slave accounts.)

Harriet Jacobs. Harriet Jacobs: Incidents

in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Dover, 2001.

Andrew Ward. The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Jean Fagan Yellin. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.

Notes

Epigraph: Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co, 1907), 21. Washington was nine years old when the Emancipation Proclamation was read.

1. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938; retrieved from Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/. Accessed January 15, 2018.

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