Illusions of Emancipation by Reidy Joseph P.;

Author:Reidy, Joseph P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

Chapter 8

The Blessings of a Home

In late March 1864, Henry Clay Bruce and his fiancée executed a bold escape from their owners in central Missouri to Leavenworth, Kansas. Bruce had been managing a farm, acting as an intermediary between his owner and his fellow enslaved laborers. At the start of the year, the owner had offered him “a free pass” to travel about at will as well as “fifteen dollars per month, with board and clothing,” and Bruce accepted despite grave misgivings. Commencing the dash for freedom, the couple knew that her owner would be in hot pursuit. After crossing the Missouri River safely into Kansas, “I then felt myself a free man,” he recalled—a “new man.” The couple headed straight for the minister of the AME Church in Leavenworth, “who united us in marriage in his parlor.”1 Becoming a legitimate family was of the highest priority for the new man and the new woman, followed closely by making a home for themselves befitting their new status.

Tens of thousands of freedom seekers undertook the journey from slavery to freedom, undergoing the transformation from persons dependent on their owners into new men and women. They did so in steps, some small and others large, some of their own volition and others forced by circumstances over which they had no control. Severing the physical and mental ties with owners always came first. For some it was the easiest step, but for others it was the hardest. When members of the AFIC visited Louisville, Robert Dale Owen met two enslaved women who hired their own time, sheltering and boarding themselves. Although both were well on their way toward independence, neither could escape the ties that bound them to “home”—that is, the dwellings of their owners, where their children still resided but where “nothing short of compulsion would cause either of them to return.” Like countless other freedom seekers, the two women faced the Faustian dilemma that pitted their ability to act like free persons—however, constrained by the fact that they were still enslaved—against the welfare of their families. They were suspended between slavery and freedom.2

In 1863, Thomas Nast, the noted illustrator of Harper’s Magazine, employed the popular before-and-after visual device to illustrate how emancipation exchanged the prewar horrors of slavery (including the sadistic abuse of enslaved people by means of branding irons and whips, the separation of families through sale, and the pursuit of freedom seekers with dogs) for the postwar promises of freedom (including compensated labor, schools, and churches under the aegis of the national flag) (see figure 8.1). By portraying slavery’s negative impact on families, Nast created an effective foil for the idealized family occupying the cabin he depicted in the centerpiece. The paterfamilias is surrounded by his wife and his children as well as an elderly woman, presumably his mother or mother-in-law. Warm from the radiated heat of a Union stove, he sits in an upholstered chair surrounded by three children while his wife cooks. In the background are two young adults, a man and a woman, who appear to be examining material, perhaps for a wedding dress.

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