Freedom's Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation

Epilogue: The Storytellers

Epilogue The Storytellers L C’ case appears at the outset of this book. Her pension file is rather unremarkable in general, a slim affair containing only a few yellowed and tattered documents. She left no popular legacy to speak of, no great speeches, no essays or books; she was and is virtually unknown. Because it recorded the fact of her existence, Louisa’s pension claim reveals her as an actor in the extraordinary drama that was the era of emancipation. The scantiness of Louisa’s pension file makes it necessary to surmise or to imagine most of the details of her life, but the few documents reveal that she was a wife and then a widow, a mother of six, a member of a community in Lexington , Kentucky. She possessed the tenacity necessary to pursue a pension claim, and the success of that claim no doubt gave her some measure of satisfaction, in terms of material reward and perhaps in knowing that she had demanded and received recognition from a government that was now hers. Louisa’s story may have been brief, but it survives because she filed a pension claim. I have sought to raise here specific questions about what it meant to have legal or legitimate family relationships in nineteenth -century America. I have endeavored to illustrate how issues of family relationships and citizenship coincided in the pension process, how efforts to acquire a pension thus reflected the challenges former slaves faced in claiming the status of citizen . At the heart of these cases are particular individuals and the stories they told, situated as they were at the threshold of entry into American society and culture. America was not necessarily unwelcoming, as the acceptance of former slaves’ pension claims suggests. Here at least was an agency of the federal government trying to uphold the goals of citizenship and the rights thereof granted in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments . This was not the Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary agency created specifically to aid former slaves, but the Pension Office, a permanent institution that processed the claims of any citizen who applied. Yet clearly the Pension Office was not standing with arms outstretched, waiting to embrace its formerly enslaved brethren. Undaunted by their lukewarm reception , pursuing goals that ranged from the practical—getting money—to the lofty—getting one’s just reward for services rendered to one’s country—former slaves told their stories to pension agents. Theirs were stories of finding or making a place in a society that simultaneously expected conformity and rejected the notion that blacks could ever live up to its standards. Their stories reflected the promises of Reconstruction —promises of freedom, civil and political rights, land, opportunity —both fulfilled and unfulfilled. Former slaves’ pension records demonstrate how individual stories shed light on collective experience. The broader themes of these stories announce what were to emerge as the significant themes of African-American history and literature in the United States in the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries , themes of identity, displacement, assimilation, resistance . The sentiments expressed in these narratives filed away in the pension records would resonate in the writings of those who became the voices of their own and future generations. In some we find the conviction of Ida B. Wells Barnett as she decried the injustice and inhumanity of a government that would not protect its citizens against lynching. Others echo with the ambiguity that W. E. B. DuBois described, the impossibility of living with a “double-consciousness . . . an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warFreedom ’s Promise  ring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”1 All reflect that sense of entitlement expressed by Martin Luther King Jr., who told members of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, “We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens, and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means.”2 It was a simple thing that King was asking —the right to get on the bus in the front, to sit in any seat, to be treated with dignity—but in its simplicity it represented the fullest claim to the rights of citizenship. When former slaves applied for pensions, their demand too was simple, but it represented an essential right of American citizens, the right...