Women's Radical Reconstruction by Carol Faulkner

Author:Carol Faulkner [Faulkner, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9780812203912
Google: Twxy3BzBktsC
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-04-19T16:14:59+00:00

Figure 6. Freedpeople entering a refugee camp, Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1863 (drawn by A. R. Waup). Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-088812.

Howland and her friends supplemented the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau by offering immediate relief to sick, widowed, elderly, and simply impoverished former slaves. In 1865, Howland sent Anna Searing, a friend from home and a teacher in the District, ten dollars for what Searing described as “needs that cannot be reached in any other way than by an immediate bestowal of charity.” As a bureaucratic agency, accountable to the public, the Freedmen’s Bureau could not act quickly enough to provide emergency clothes, food, or fuel. Searing offered the example of “a widow near us whose whole family were sick with the small pox and she had lately recovered from sickness and unable to go to service even after her children had been conveyed to the Hospital. We presented her case to the Bureau but it was some time before they acted and meanwhile the family must not suffer for food and fuel.”25 Because of their private and often personal funding, Howland and her friends had the flexibility to be generous. Lizzie Bailey reported that Dorcas Holland, an aged freedwoman from Freedmen’s Village, a camp specifically for elderly freedpeople, came to her complaining that she was suffering for food. Bailey reported that she was going to investigate the case as Holland was poorly dressed and very thin: “If I find she is really suffering as she said I shall take some of my own money and get them something right away until you can send me some for now it is very hard times for them they can get no work and the weather continues very cold so that they really need some assistance now, the clothing you have will be very acceptable.”26 Like Bailey and Howland, many female reformers gladly gave their own money when government and Northern assistance was not forthcoming. Their parallel efforts constituted a women’s version of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

While donating money and clothing for freedpeople’s relief, Howland also pursued her interest in education. Howland helped establish schools by finding Northern support for teachers, aiding in the purchase of buildings, and acting as a go-between for freedpeople and the bureau. She encouraged her friend, the Reverend Mr. J. R. Johnson, to teach at several schools in northern Virginia and convinced the Philadelphia Friends to pay him a salary of twenty dollars a month.27 Mr. J. P. Read of Falls Church, Virginia, wrote Howland to obtain support for his daughter’s Sabbath school. Read and his daughter kept up the school of sixty students, but they had been doing so without pay:

The colored people here have never called on the Government for any thing and are industrious and well behaved set as can be found in any community it appears to be their misfortune that my daughter started a Sabbath school among them (now one year since) as it appears to cut them off from all the Charitable Societies.

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