After slavery, Black residents took to newspaper to reunite families
‘Freedom and Agency’ a Stowe Center tour brought to schools
At the end of slavery, Black families had been fractured — children, siblings, parents had been sold off and dispersed across the country. Longing to find them, people bought newspaper ads in order to find their family members who were enslaved or who had recently been freed.
“Do You Know Them?” “I desire to know the whereabouts of my brother and sister. Her name was Lettie Basey Douglass, and his name Douglass Basey They belonged to old Sam Lile. Their mother’s name is Elizabeth Basey. Any information will be thankfully received by Mary A. Basey, 27 Wethersfield Ave., Hartford,
Conn.”
That ad was placed in the Richmond (Va.) Planet on Feb. 12, 1898.
The ads began appearing as early as 1832, according to Brenna Harvey, visitor experience coordinator at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford.
“Freedom and Agency” is a tour that the Stowe Center has been bringing into Greater Hartford schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. The ads come from the Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery project.
The aim is “centering the voices of Black folks and their experience, as we think about Harriet Beecher Stowe and the work that she did on ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ really using the actual human voices and real stories, as opposed to the fictitious ones,” said Erika Slocumb, director of interpretation and visitor experience.
“And what we’re finding, I think, so far as we’re starting to include those narratives, is it is making the experience of slavery more real for people, and more humanizing, because it’s not just this thing that happened to someone and … it’s real and coming from a real human place,” she said.
Harvey said the ads are a way to make a difficult subject real to children.
“We’re teaching a really, really
challenging history, talking about the truth of racism in American history, talking about the brutality of enslavement,” Harvey said.
“It is a really painful, oftentimes traumatizing topic, I would say, and we want to make sure we’re really centering Black agency, Black activism, and the efforts Black folks made to seek their own freedom and to pursue the freedom of others and to build towards a freer world. And we want to think about activism, broadly defined,” Harvey said.
After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment ended slavery and the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to Black people, Harvey said, but, they said, “so many families are still separated. They were sold away from each other, they haven’t seen each other for years and years.”
Families began buying ads in newspapers, many in the North, seeking their longlost loved ones.
“So these are powerful in a couple of ways,” Harvey said. “One, a lot of them are from right here in Connecticut. … We have some from New Haven. We have some from Middletown.
“And I think these just show the strength of bonds of love between people that people kept struggling to find each other,” Harvey said. “They show the way communities come together, because not everyone posting these ads is literate and have to seek out the support of communities, churches and things like that in order to get them out there. And you just feel the emotion, you just feel the yearning and the striving to be together. So they’re incredibly powerful for young people. Because I think we don’t talk about love enough.”
Slocumb said the ads help students understand that slavery is completely different from anything they might experience.
The printed words help them “to be able to conceptualize what it would be like to be enslaved and not have the opportunity to build family,” she said. “It’s not that your family member took a trip or that they moved to another state. You don’t know if this person is dead or alive. It’s children who have been separated from their parents. Did they make it to adulthood? … I think that resonates or has resonated with some of those students.”
Beginning April 20, the center will launch an intergenerational family tour, Stowe on the Go!, using the ads and other historical objects to foster sometimes difficult conversations about race.
Harvey said the Stowe center’s goals are to understand the origins of racial injustice today and to see the possibilities of change.
“When we look at things like racism, sexism, poverty, inequality today, where did that come from?” Harvey said. “It came from somewhere, and it happened for a reason. Because it’s not an accident. So being able to understand that there are systems and structures and laws and choices that were made that created the world today, I think that’s incredibly important.
“And to recognize the possibility of change in ourselves as agents of change, we look to history and see the choices people made that built the world and then think about ourselves as making history every day with all the choices that we make,” Harvey said.
Talking about slavery leads to discussions of freedom and how that feels, Harvey said.
“We begin the tour just by asking kids, before we talk about enslavement … what is freedom?” Harvey said. “And then we ask, what does it feel like when we’re not free? What does it feel like to have freedom taken away? And one student on my first tour, she said, when freedom is taken away, it feels like you can’t see the people that you love. That you can’t be with the people that you love.”
For more information about the Stowe center tours, email info@ stowecenter.org.
Looking back at family history
Author Jill Marie Snyder is looking for a family member, from the perspective of the present looking back to the era of slavery.
Snyder has collected love letters between her parents in “Dear Mary, Dear Luther: A Courtship in Letters.” In the book, she includes family history, which includes an ancestor, Henry Jones, who was enslaved on a Virginia plantation.
“And I’ve spent years trying to figure out what plantation it might be,” Snyder said. “And the intriguing information I found: There was an enslaved man named Henry, actually a baby born on a plantation that was owned by Nelly Madison Hite and her husband, President Madison’s sister, called Belle Grove.”
Snyder suspects that baby may be her great-great-grandfather, but there’s a hole in the history.
“The Hite family did a really good job of maintaining records of their enslaved people, but Henry disappears from the record,” Snyder said. “And so it’s a mystery. He’s not recorded as having been sold or died or run away, he’s just dropped, dropped out of sight from their information, which is strange because they did have such detailed information. So I have always thought perhaps he was the one that ran away.”
Snyder did learn that Henry was given by Nelly Hite to her daughter as a wedding gift. “Can you imagine that?” she said. “And the daughter and her husband died relatively young, and their two sons were away at school. So that would have been a perfect time for Henry to escape if he was on that plantation.”
While Snyder doesn’t know for sure where Henry Jones was enslaved, she knows “he lived out his life in a little village in Pennsylvania called Catawissa, a very tiny little place.”
“Back then it was really literally at the end of the road,” she said. “It was just a small little village on a creek. And I think Henry might have been sent there to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad because the creek fed into the Susquehanna River.”
Many escaping slavery would follow the Susquehanna River north, Snyder said. “But that was speculation; we don’t know for sure,” she said. “But we always wondered, How did he find his way to this tiny village of Catawissa? How would he have even known about it? But anyway, he lived his life there” and had six children.
“I think being of African descent, it’s very important in African philosophy to know one’s ancestors,” Snyder said. “There’s a lot of philosophers who have written about the importance to African people of knowing our ancestors and, as one writer put it, not to worship them, but to understand their lives and how we embody and reflect their lives in ways that we don’t really even know.”