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

Chapter One: The Pension Process: A View from Both Sides

S  they were married in June , Harriet Berry and her husband Joseph escaped from slavery, running to freedom behind Union army lines. The young couple made it to Norfolk, Virginia, where Joseph soon enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. After a year in the service of the Union, Joseph contracted pneumonia and died, a common fate among Civil War soldiers. In , alone in the world, scraping out a living as a servant, Harriet applied to the government for a widow’s pension. To illustrate the pension process, this chapter traces Harriet Berry’s pension claim from her first application to the Pension Office’s final decision. I have chosen to use Harriet’s claim because her general experience, the problematic areas of her claim, and her concerns about the pension process are representative of those found in other former slaves’ pension claims. To capture the broader implications of the pension process for former slaves and to uncover the traces of slaves’ transition to citizenship that lay just beneath its surface, one must pry the case apart to expose its two different dimensions. Examining the pension process from the point of view of the government as well as from that of former slaves allows an assessment of what the government demanded from former slaves and of the ways in which former slaves, armed with limited resources and a different cultural perspective, attempted to meet such demands . This view of the pension process also reveals the ex-  The Pension Process A View from Both Sides periences of former slaves as they crossed over from slavery to citizenship, as they became subject to the forces that governed the lives of all American citizens. Harriet Berry: From Slavery to Freedom H  Joseph were married in the midst of America’s bloodiest war, yet Harriet’s account of the event suggests that to some extent the rhythm of daily life went uninterrupted. Harriet and Joseph, nineteen and twenty years old, respectively, belonged to different masters in Camden County in northeastern North Carolina. They married as many slaves had, by procuring the consent of their owners. Though there was no ceremony , “no minister of the gospel present,” the slaves of both masters celebrated the marriage at a party given by a relative of Harriet’s owner.1 Harriet made no mention of it in her pension claim, but one wonders how the presence of the Union army fifty miles north at Fort Monroe in Virginia and on the islands just off the coast might have touched the celebration of her marriage. Perhaps it added to the jubilant atmosphere of the occasion as the celebrants contemplated the promise of freedom. Or the occasion might have been tinged by apprehension as slaves and masters alike questioned what the future might bring. Both jubilation and apprehension must have characterized Harriet and Joseph’s feelings shortly after their marriage as they fled their masters. During the course of the war, throughout the South wherever Union army forces had penetrated Confederate territory, many thousands of slaves ran away, determined to find freedom behind Union lines. They made perilous journeys, sometimes hundreds of miles, hiding out during the day in woods, swamps, or under brush and traveling by night under the cover of darkness by land, by water.2 Harriet and Joseph were among the thousands from their own area who made the fifty-mile trek toward Fort Monroe, an outpost under Union control in a Union-occupied area of southeastern Virginia.3 Freedom’s Promise  The timing of their escape indicates that Harriet and Joseph must have heard about the Emancipation Proclamation and desired to test its validity. As Captain C. B. Wilder, superintendent of contrabands at Fort Monroe, explained, “Some men who came here from North Carolina, knew all about the Proclammation and they started on the belief in it; but they had heard these stories and they wanted to know how it was.”4 The news that Federal forces were near bolstered the courage of many who ran away during the early years of the war. Others were encouraged by the return of runaways who had made it safely to freedom and had come back for their families. In North Carolina slave men learned that they could join the Union army from recruiters stationed at Fort Monroe who traveled into North Carolina to enlist the services of slaves there. Though many were...