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IT MUST HAVE TAKEN ENORMOUS COURAGE FOR THE TWELVEyear -old “coloured boy” to walk up the marble steps into the U.S. Capitol in 832. And it would have required resourcefulness and resolve on his part to find the Senate chamber. Once there, with some luck, he encountered Isaac Bassett, a page who owed his position to a senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster.The youth informed Bassett that he had come to see Senator Webster. “He told me,” Bassett reported, “that Daniel Webster was his father.”Thereafter , Bassett went on, the youth often “came up to the Senate Chamber to see Senator Webster.” Thirty-four years later, scarcely a year after the conclusion of the Civil War, an official of the American Missionary Association posted in Atlanta commented to a northern correspondent about prospects for beginning schools for freedpeople in the Georgia city. The official, Frederick Ayer, had become acquainted with Benjamin C. Yancey, a Georgian and a former slaveowner who was showing interest in the education of freedpeople. The official noted that when Yancey visited Atlanta, he frequently stayed overnight with one of his former slaves, “Robert Yancy, alias Robert Webster,” who lived across the street from Ayer. In an almost offhanded way, Ayer also mentioned that Robert Webster was “the reputed son of Dan’l Webster.”2 These two incidents, one in 832, the other in 866, raise questions about the paternity of Robert Webster, a mulatto slave who came to prominence in Civil War Atlanta.The issue, while intriguing, cannot be finally resolved here, but it does help us understand Webster, whose story illuminates the spaces between Half Slave, Half Free: Unionist Robert Webster in Civil War Atlanta THOMAS G. DYER 295 slavery and freedom that only a few African Americans occupied in antebellum and Civil War Atlanta. A paucity of source materials makes it generally difficult to reconstruct the lives of individual African Americans who lived in the early and middle nineteenth century. Such materials as do exist are often scattered, fragmentary, and insufficient for a detailed portrait.Thus very large gaps exist in our knowledge of Webster, but we have enough sources to sketch a partial view of the difficult path between slavery and freedom that he followed during the antebellum period and a somewhat fuller picture of him during the Civil War. During the conflict Webster became part of a resilient group of Atlantans who retained their loyalties to the Union and resisted the Confederacy. From the scattered record left by and about Robert Webster, we can also offer some tentative conclusions concerning his paternity. Slaves sometimes took the surnames of their owners, and thus Webster was known at various times as Bob Gadsby, Bob Yancey, and possibly Bob Cunningham. Most frequently, no doubt, he was called simply “Bob,” given the disposition of slaveholding society not to confer the dignity of last names on slaves.Throughout this chapter he is referred to as Robert Webster.That is the name that he chose for himself once he became free to do so. Webster told a newspaper reporter in 879 that he was born on August 20, 820, in Gadsby’s National Hotel, one of the large hostelries in Washington, D.C. His mother, he said, was Charlotte Goo[d]brick, “a mulatto of rare beauty” and a slave who was purchased by the owner of the National, John Gadsby, from a man who lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia . Charlotte, it was said, had been the offspring of “one of the old aristocrats of Virginia.”How long Gadsby owned her before Robert was born cannot be ascertained.3 Throughout childhood and into young adulthood, Robert Webster was probably known as Bob Gadsby. As a boy he seems to have moved freely about Washington, as indicated by his multiple visits to the Capitol. What his childhood was like can only be speculated upon, but he probably worked in the hotel or in his owner’s home. Gadsby, also a slave trader, owned several slaves, thirty-nine of whom staffed the National. Still others lived and worked in Decatur House, Gadsby’s elegant home in Washington. Webster’s master was not universally admired. The French minister to the United States described Gadsby as “an old wretch who has made a fortune in the slave trade, which does not prevent Washington society from rushing to his house.” Webster 296 THOMAS G. DYER [13.59.36.203] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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