Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship Between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress

Preface

Preface Ifirst became interested in the life of Cecelia Reynolds, later Cecelia Holmes, still later Cecelia Larrison, when I discovered a collection of letters that Mrs. Frances Thruston Ballard had written to her, an escaped slave living in Canada. Why, I wondered, would an ex–slave mistress write to a former slave? The collection, found at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville among the papers of the Ballard family, consists of only a handful of letters, five in number. They are all from Fanny (Frances T. Ballard’s nickname) to Cecelia. The letters had been collected by Fanny’s son in the late 1890s. The son, Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston , was one of those obsessive, detail-oriented researchers who populated so many of the nation’s local historical societies in the waning years of the nineteenth century, without the likes of whom so much of the nation’s past would have been lost. It seemed odd that Cecelia’s side of the correspondence was missing. That would have been the half originally in Fanny’s possession , and as I came to know and appreciate Rogers Clark’s attention to detail, it seemed to me that he would have preserved them if they had existed. I concluded that Fanny most likely had thrown them out, while Cecelia had held on to Fanny’s letters to her for fifty years. Obviously, Fanny’s side of the correspondence had been much more valuable to Cecelia than Cecelia’s had been to Fanny. Rogers Clark, I think, had wanted to mine the story of his mother ’s relationship with Cecelia for his own literary purposes. He wrote a preface to the letters that laid out the backstory of Fanny’s ix ownership of Cecelia, the slave’s escape, and how he eventually came into possession of the letters. Cecelia, who had returned to Louisville after the Civil War, turned to the family of her former mistress for assistance after a series of financial and family disasters in the 1890s. Rogers Clark helped her and, discovering she still had his mother’s letters in her possession, bought them from her. In terms of fodder for Rogers Clark’s literary efforts, the letters evidently proved disappointing, for he never got beyond the preface he wrote in 1899. He would go on to write books on the history of the American flag and the lives of the signers of the Declaration of Independence , but Fanny’s letters sat unutilized in the archives of the Filson, of which Rogers Clark served for many years as president. By themselves, Fanny’s few letters provide only hints of Cecelia’s life in freedom. To flesh out the stories of both women required delving into the archival records of their families. Cecelia’s second husband, William Larrison, had served in the Union army during the Civil War, giving Cecelia a claim on a government pension as a veteran’s widow. The process of applying for that pension entailed an investigation of the claim by Pension Bureau examiners, an investigation that filled in some of the gaps in the lacunae-laden story of her life. Other gaps were filled by the appearance of Cecelia’s household in public administrative records—census documents, tax rolls, death records, and the like. But many gaps remained, holes in her life that had to be papered over with squishy terms like “perhaps ” and “most likely,” based on what historians have discovered about other people in similar circumstances at the time. Fanny, whose life followed the common nineteenth-century trajectory for women as she filled the roles of daughter, wife, and mother, likewise did not leave an extensive paper trail. The Ballard Family Papers at the Filson contain some business correspondence and some memorabilia from her reign as Queen of May, a social honor bestowed upon her when she was just thirteen years old. The men in her life left caches of personal papers, as the rich and prominent are wont to do, but in most cases these yielded precious little insight into Fanny’s own life. Preface x In short, with no voluminous correspondence, no decades-long span of diaries, the lives of Fanny and Cecelia cannot be told in the full detail that the life stories of other “ordinary people” have been, stories that benefited from such extensive records. No life is completely documented, and the ordinary life is documented only...