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.This created a dilemma for enslaved families in the Union border states:Should a man leave for the army and fight for his freedom, or should heremain on the plantation and ride out the war with his kin? The decision tofight thus had serious implications for slave families.As thousands of men left 194 emancipationthe plantations (indeed, a greater percentage of black soldiers fought from theborder states than from other regions), they moved closer to freedom whiletheir wives, children, and other relatives remained in slavery.5Some of these men challenged the Union policy anyway and brought theirfamilies with them to army camps.A number of soldiers in Kentucky, forexample, who rushed to serve after an initial ban on black enlistment in thatstate was lifted in 1864, set up tents and temporary housing for their familiesat Camp Nelson, near Lexington.For a brief time Union officials appearedto tolerate their presence, albeit grudgingly.Yet these informal family campsproved short-lived, which Joseph Miller, a slave attached to the 124th ColoredInfantry, learned to his sorrow.In October 1864 Miller had arrived at CampNelson with his wife and four children, ranging in age from four to ten.Hemanaged to keep them in his tent for a month, until a guard told him on No-vember 22 that all families had been ordered to leave the camp by the nextmorning. The morning was bitter cold.It was freezing hard, Miller wrotea few days later in a sworn statement. I told him [the guard] that my wifeand children had no place to go.He told my wife and family that if theydid not get up into the wagon which he had he would shoot the last one ofthem. His family left.Later that night Miller went searching for his wife andchildren and found them six miles away in Nicholasville with a large groupof other soldiers families who had also been expelled.Miller and the othersoldiers testified that their kinfolk had struggled to keep warm around a firein a structure variously described as an old shed and a meeting house. They had almost no food and insufficient clothing for the early winter cold.Soon the adverse conditions took their toll on the families.Miller discoveredthat my boy was dead, and after walking back to Camp Nelson that night,he returned the next day to dig a grave and bury his son.6The alternative for men like Joseph Miller leaving their family on theplantation could be equally agonizing and deadly.The enslaved women andchildren left behind often became targets for frustrated masters, who, angeredby the men s departure, retaliated against their families by withholding ra-tions and medical care or by beating them severely.Patsey Leach of WoodfordCounty, Kentucky, recounted how her master grew especially abusive afterher husband left and was mortally wounded in a battle in Virginia. Whenmy husband was killed my master whipped me severely saying my husbandhad gone into the army to fight against white folks and he my master wouldlet me know that I was foolish to let my husband go. The master s beatingwas so severe that blood oozed from the lacerations on Leach s back.She later emancipation 195fled to Lexington, so desperate to run away that she left without four of herchildren.7 Such treatment led other wives to turn their frustration on theirhusbands.Martha Glover, of Mexico, Missouri, wrote her soldier-husbandthat her masters abuse me because you went ; they not only refused to care forher children, but constantly quarrel and beat me scandalously. Althoughthe masters were to blame for her treatment, Glover faulted her husband, too: Oh I never thought you would give me so much trouble as I have got to bearnow. His departure left her vulnerable, and she wished he had staid withme & not gone till I could go with you. She concluded, You ought not tohave left me in the fix I am in. 8This letter suggests how freedom, and the choices surrounding the seizureof freedom, could incite conflict within enslaved families [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]