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By Root 1416 0

Except for punishment, no other factor had accounted for as many runaway slaves; indeed, a significant number of such escapes came immediately after a master had sold a spouse, a parent, or a child.20 Equally important, the strong commitment to family ties had kept thousands of slaves from resorting to flight. Emancipation made the search for lost relatives less perilous, though not necessarily more successful. Where contact had been maintained during the period of separation, either through letters or the “grapevine,” reunions were effected with little difficulty. The wartime contraband camps, by bringing together thousands of uprooted and “runaway” slaves, provided valuable information about separated families and reunited many of them.

For countless numbers of freed slaves, however, the attempt to find lost relatives became an arduous, time-consuming, and frustrating task, requiring long and often fruitless treks into unfamiliar country, the patience to track down every clue and follow up every rumor, and the determination to stay on a trail even when it suddenly appeared to vanish. “Dey was heaps of nigger families dat I know what was sep’rated in de time of bondage dat tried to find dey folkses what was gone,” Tines Kendricks recalled. “But de mostest of ’em never git togedder ag’in even after dey sot free ’cause dey don’t know where one or de other is.” Of the “dozens of children” Jennie Hill knew who searched for parents “sold ‘down the river,’ ” as well as parents who looked frantically for their children, she could remember only one case in which the family was reunited. “Some perhaps were killed in the battles but in the majority of the cases the children of slaves lost their identity when they were taken from the place of their birth into a new county.” Martha Showvely, who was twenty-eight years old at the time of emancipation, had not seen her mother since they were separated by sale in 1846. After the war, she reached the county where her mother reportedly resided, only to learn that death had claimed her life three years earlier. The efforts to reunite with loved ones sometimes involved risks other than disappointment over failure. Hoping to find any members of his family, James Curry ventured back to the county in North Carolina from which he had escaped more than twenty years before the war; whether provoked by his earlier escape or by his association with northern abolitionists, enraged local whites assaulted him.21

Despite herculean efforts, the prospects for a successful reunion remained slim. Many years had passed since relatives had last seen each other and inevitable changes had altered physical appearances. The searcher usually carried with him only a visual image of what a spouse, a child, or a parent had looked like numerous years, even decades, earlier. No sooner had a missionary teacher in South Carolina returned from a trip to Virginia than an elderly black woman tearfully pleaded for any information she might have gathered about the whereabouts of her daughter.

As soon as she heard I had travelled through Virginia, she came to me to know if I had ever seen her “little gal.” … And she begged me to look out for her when I went back. She was sure I should know her, she “was such a pretty little gal.” It was useless to tell her the girl was now a woman, and doubtless had children of her own. She always had been and always would be her “baby.”22

The Freedmen’s Bureau did what it could to help, acting as a clearinghouse of information and providing free transportation in some cases; at the same time, northern teachers and missionaries, many of them stationed in the contraband camps, frequently spent entire days writing letters for ex-slaves who were trying to make contact with a relative, invariably on the basis of the scantiest information. “Ellen Cummins; least dat was her name, w’en dey dun toted her off to Florida,” an elderly black woman replied when asked for the address of her daughter, who had been sold away from her twenty years before at the age of four. Upon learning that his brother,