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By Root 1385 0

had seen his parents separated by sale, had no difficulty many decades later in relating what for him had been the overriding significance of freedom: “I has got thirteen great-gran’ chilluns an’ I knows whar dey ever’one am. In slavery times dey’d have been on de block long time ago.” For the tens of thousands of slaves who had been involuntarily separated from their loved ones, freedom raised equally exciting prospects. Rather than have to wait for the heavenly reunions they had sung about, they might anticipate seeing each other again in this world. To William Curtis, a former Georgia slave whose father had been sold to a Virginia planter, “dat was de best thing about de war setting us free, he could come back to us.”17

Few scenes acted out in the post-emancipation South exceeded the drama, the emotion, the poignancy that marked the reunions of families which had been torn asunder by slavery. The last time Ben and Betty Dodson had seen each other, they had begged their master to sell them together; twenty years passed before the couple met again—in a refugee camp. “Glory! glory! hallelujah,” Ben Dodson shouted as he alternated between embracing his wife and stepping back to reassure himself that it was really she. “Dis is my Betty, shuah. I foun’ you at las’. I’s hunted an’ hunted till I track you up here. I’s boun’ to hunt till I fin’ you if you’s alive.” In many such reunions, the passage of time and the effects of bondage made recognition nearly impossible. Not until the woman at the door removed her hat and the bundle she carried on her head did a young Tennessee freedwoman discern the scar on her face, and only then did she know for certain that she was gazing upon her mother, whom she had not seen since childhood. In a Virginia refugee camp, a mother found her daughter, now eighteen years old, who had been sold away from her when only an infant. “See how they’ve done her bad,” the mother declared to anyone who would listen. “See how they’ve cut her up. From her head to her feet she is scarred just as you see her face.”18

Each reunion had its own incredible story, revealing the extraordinary resourcefulness with which husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters sought each other out in the immediate aftermath of Union occupation and emancipation. Family members embarked on these searches, a much-impressed Freedmen’s Bureau officer reported, “with an ardor and faithfulness sufficient to vindicate the fidelity and affection of any race—the excited joys of the regathering being equalled only by the previous sorrows and pains of separation.” The attempts freedmen made to relocate loved ones forcefully belied the commonly held theories about a race of moral cripples who placed little value on marital and familial ties. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists subscribed to these theories, attributing the blacks’ moral insensibility, “licentiousness,” and “false ideas touching chastity” to the evil influences of bondage. Like most whites, they tended to underestimate the depth of familial love and emotional attachment that induced so many former slaves to make the location of relatives their first priority after emancipation. “They had a passion, not so much for wandering, as for getting together,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina wrote of the postwar migrations of blacks; “and every mother’s son among them seemed to be in search of his mother; every mother in search of her children. In their eyes the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.” In North Carolina, a northern journalist encountered a middle-aged freedman—“plodding along, staff in hand, and apparently very footsore and tired”—who had already walked nearly six hundred miles in his determination to reach the wife and children he had been sold away from four years before.19

Although viewed as a post-emancipation phenomenon, the attempt to reunite with loved ones actually represented an ongoing impulse that had frequently manifested itself in the antebellum period.