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Contours of Black Reconstruction
| Article
# : |
10981 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
5,073 Words |
| Author
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Arnold H. Taylor
Arnold H. Taylor, professor of history at Howard University,
is the author of Travail and Triumph; Black Life and Culture
in the South Since the Civil War (Greenwood Press, 1976) and
American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900-1939 (Duke
University Press, 1969). |
Early in 1865, Tina, a recently freed former slave, faced a terrible dilemma. Her first husband, Sam, who had been sold away from her prior to the Civil War, had returned to Port Royal, South Carolina, to rejoin her. Tina, however, was now married to Kit. Torn between the two men, she resolved to spend alternate months with each. But Kit, who confessed to Elizabeth Botume, a Yankee schoolteacher, that he had married Tina for love and loved her now "more and better" than he loved himself, could not tolerate such an arrangement. After much vacillation, Tina, moved by his pleas and concerned because he had no one but her, finally decided to remain with Kit. After her death many years later, Kit, cherishing the memory of their relationship, refused to allow any other woman to live with him.
As the Civil War neared an end, Jane Ferguson, also of Port Royal, confronted a similar situation. As a slave, she, too, had watched helplessly as her husband, Martin Barnwell, was forcibly separated from her and their infant son. She conditioned her subsequent marriage to Ferguson on his promises that if Martin ever returned, Ferguson would give her up. Nevertheless, after the fall of Charleston in February 1865, when news arrived that Martin was still alive and planned to rejoin her, Jane experienced mixed emotions. Moreover, Ferguson, who was now a Union soldier, reneged on his promise to step aside. When the moment of decision came, however, Jane did not hesitate. To Ferguson's chaplain, who interceded in his behalf, Jane declared emphatically in her Sea Island vernacular, "Martin Barnwell is my husband. …I am got no other husband but he."
As a slave couple, Smart and Mary Washington were spared the painful experience of forcible separation. By 1865 they had spent forty years as man and wife and had become the parents of nineteen children. However, as the Civil War drew to a close, they quickly seized the opportunity to formalize their union. After a traditional wedding ceremony followed by the receipt of a certificate of marriage, Smart explained to well-wishers that "[She's] my wife for sartin now."
Several months after the Civil War ended scenes similar to those occurring in the Sea Islands of South Carolina could be observed throughout the South. In an often vain but sometimes successful search for the wives, husbands, parents, and children from whom they had been separated, freedmen and freedwomen wandered from place to place, advertised in newspapers, or persuaded schoolteachers and literate friends to write letters to distant places for them. Through the formality of a marriage ceremony before an army chaplain, a civilian
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