The Missing Persons of Reconstruction
Last Seen
The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
By Judith Giesberg
Simon & Schuster
ISBN13: 9781982174323
Born enslaved in northern Virginia in the 1820s, Henry Tibbs first lost his mother when their enslaver sold her to notorious Alexandria slave trader Joseph Bruin. Tibbs was just a small child when that happened, but his age was no obstacle to being sold himself to Bruin a short while later. A weeping and distraught Tibbs was reunited briefly with his mother in Bruin’s jail, only to be separated from her for a second time when Bruin loaded him onto a ship bound for New Orleans and sold him to a Mississippi cotton planter named Micajah Pickett.
Tibbs grew up among strangers on Pickett’s plantation, and he labored under the lash for decades until the Civil War came. Fleeing enslavement when the opportunity presented itself, in 1863 Tibbs enlisted as a private in the U.S. Colored Light Artillery. He spent the next two years fighting to keep his freedom, receiving a promotion to corporal and managing to emerge mostly unscathed from terrifying engagements such as the massacre of Black soldiers by Confederate forces at Fort Pillow in Tennessee that was a savage reminder of the war’s stakes.
Not that Henry Tibbs needed the reminder. By the end of the war, he had a wife and two daughters, and he did not want them to suffer slavery’s brutalities and indignities ever again. He knew the pain and the trauma all too well, and he knew that the passage of time never entirely erased them. But Henry Tibbs also knew what it meant to imagine that the agonies of the past might be undone, and that at least some of what slaveholders had stolen might be recovered. In 1879, Tibbs wrote a letter to the editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate looking for information about his mother.
A Black newspaper based in New Orleans, the Advocate was one of many papers that published letters to the editor and advertisements from formerly enslaved people who searched for family and friends after emancipation. Numbering in the thousands and appearing all over the country for decades, notices came from mothers and fathers looking for their children, sons and daughters looking for their parents, spouses and army buddies seeking one another’s whereabouts, and brothers and sisters eager for the slightest bit of intelligence about their siblings.
With the help of her students, Judith Giesberg, a professor of history at Villanova University, has collected these materials for years and made the still-expanding archive of them publicly available on the internet. In her new book, Last Seen, Giesberg is only able to pursue a handful of the stories from the archive. But those stories are well chosen and effective representatives of so many others, and they are powerful. For one thing, they throw into stark relief some of the insulting and revolting myths about slavery that proliferated in American culture by the late nineteenth century. They expose depictions of slaveholders as loving caretakers as fairy tales, disprove the lie that family separations were rare and inconsequential, and demonstrate that white Americans who saw the longing of former slaves for their families as amusing plantation romances still believed Black families were less vital and real than their own. But above all else, the stories Giesberg tells are damning testimonies to the utter viciousness of a system that thrived on tearing Black families apart without mercy, and poignant portrayals of enduring love and hope that indifference and cruelty could never extinguish.
The chaos of the Civil War scattered Black Americans across the landscape once again. As they joined Union armies, sought harbor in refugee camps, and took flight from their enslavers, they not infrequently lost track of family members. And when the war ended, they received almost no formal assistance in relocating loved ones or otherwise piecing back together the lives that they had already fought so hard to rebuild, sometimes more than once.
White Americans told members of this Freedom Generation that they needed to move on, and white newspaper editors who did relay their stories deployed euphemisms about searches for people who had been “lost” lest their readership be made uncomfortable “hearing from ex-slaves about how their children had been taken from them.” But Black people themselves refused to forget. At the center of Last Seen are accounts of those who lived their lives in the present yet would not relinquish those taken from them long ago. In reaching out through networks of Black newspapers and churches to tell their stories and ask for assistance, they left evidence, in Giesberg’s words, “of pasts and futures that might have been.”
Giesberg follows each highlighted account carefully and with nuance. Sexual and physical violence and slaveholder intrusions into marriage and parenthood helped define the contours of American slavery. Yet every person’s life was unique, and Giesberg reminds us that those contours were experienced differently by men, women, and children, and that the regimes of America’s slaveholding class varied from Virginia to Mississippi to Texas to California. A woman named Clara Bashop placed an advertisement looking for her children, just as a man named Tally Miller wrote a letter to the editor looking for his. But they came to their searches after different ordeals. Bashop had been sold apart from her 12-year-old daughter at a Richmond slave auction and hauled off to pick cotton in Mississippi after the man who enslaved her fell into debt. Miller had been hired out onto the land of the man who enslaved his wife and daughters, only to have his own enslaver decide to leave South Carolina for Louisiana. He thought he might become richer there than he already was, and he force-marched Miller with him for more than eight hundred miles while Miller’s family got left behind.
Similarly, the overall trajectory of Black life during and after emancipation might be described through the upheavals of military and refugee life in wartime, the promise of Reconstruction, the horrifying violence and economic subjugation that undid that promise, and the communal vitality that Black Americans built together and brought out of the South into northern cities during the Great Migration. But Giesberg is sensitive to how the end of slavery and the course of Reconstruction could look very different for different people. Henry Safford witnessed emancipation as a soldier in the U.S. Colored Troops and saw Reconstruction rise and fall in his native Georgia, while sisters Julia Vickers and Emeline Hall had found their way to free Black communities in different northern states by the time slavery collapsed and each spent decades wondering what had become of the other. The two sisters were ultimately reunited by happenstance after 40 years apart, probably when Vickers’s son Walter heard his aunt was living in one of the cities he passed through while traveling the vaudeville circuit. Safford, meanwhile, spent years trying to track down comrades who might provide evidence of his wartime injuries, eventually finding several whose testimony helped him apply for a federal pension.
The obstacles placed between people torn apart from one another in the era of slavery were nearly insurmountable, and the odds of people finding each other in freedom were extremely long. Giesberg records only a few instances of reunion like that of Julia Vickers and Emeline Hall. It happened sometimes that an advertisement was seen by the right person in the right place, that information about a relative’s fate was delivered to a searcher, and that people saw one another again on this earth. But it was rare. Giesberg estimates that the success rate of the advertisements and letters that appear in the archive she and her students have created was perhaps as low as 2 percent. The truth was that the damage slavery inflicted on Black families and communities was usually irreversible. That was almost surely true for Henry Tibbs: There is no evidence that he ever saw his mother again. But nothing could take away the hope Henry Tibbs held in his heart. That hope is the legacy.
Joshua D. Rothman is professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author of several books about the history of American slavery including, most recently, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America.