ABSTRACT
This article examines formerly enslaved people’s use of Information Wanted advertisements to reconnect with lost family after the American Civil War. This article argues that physical reunification with loved ones was not the sole purpose of the advertisements of the post-emancipation era, since the advertisements both testified to the cruelty of family and kinship group separations and were radical first-person observations recording – and bearing witness to – the suffering of loved ones in enslavement. In safeguarding Black genealogies through the use of the advertisements, formerly enslaved people asserted family strength and power by publicly memorializing those they had lost. Formerly enslaved people thus employed emotion as a mechanism of resistance, within the advertisements, to protest the white emotional regime of the post-emancipation era.
In October 1888, Charlotte Grigsby took out an Information Wanted advertisement in the Star of Zion hoping for information of her brother and cousin. Grigsby utilized the title of her advertisement, ‘O, WHERE ARE THEY? LOST!’ to voice her pain and despair, while her additional subheading, ‘PLEASE HELP ME TO FIND THEM’ indicated the urgency of her search. Her emotive title would have also served an additional purpose to capture the attention of those reading the newspaper, as the Star of Zion did not have a dedicated column for Information Wanted advertisements. Grigsby further demonstrated her sorrow by beginning her ad with a statement of her suffering: ‘I am a poor woman, lost from my relation and am searching for them.’ Grigsby made no reference to a husband, or any other family member in her advertisement, and so her brother and cousin appear to be the only people she had left to rely on for emotional – and perhaps financial – support.
Grigsby shared in her advertisement that she had been separated from her brother, James Grigsby, and cousin, Nimrod Jackson, for many years. She did not specify the date of their separation, instead stating that they ‘left a few years after the hanging of John Brown.’ As she explained, ‘Both were slaves, but always said, they never intended to die slaves; so they ran away.’ As well as detailing her personal suffering and loneliness stemming from being lost from her relatives, Grigsby’s ad also served to memorialize the experiences of her brother and cousin.Footnote1
Information Wanted advertisements are notices which formerly enslaved people published in Black newspapers after the American Civil War in search of loved ones lost in enslavement, usually in columns entitled ‘Information Wanted’ or ‘Lost Friends.’Footnote2 The contents of the advertisements are emotionally complex and readers wrote in to the newspapers to share the emotional impact the advertisements had on them. As Mrs. John L. Whetstone, of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote: ‘The inquiries for “lost friends” always touches my heart as nothing else does. I often exclaim, “How long, O Lord, how long,” shall the shadow of the great curse hang over this land?’Footnote3 The Southwestern Christian Advocate also occasionally reprinted articles from other newspapers reacting to the advertisements. In January 1882, the paper reprinted this notice from the N. Y. Advocate: ‘One of the saddest things in our Church papers is the column of inquiries for “lost friends” in the Southwestern, through which children seek to find their parents, and brothers their long-lost sisters, separated from them in the old days of slavery.’Footnote4 In 1890, the Southwestern published the following from the Michigan Advocate: ‘The SOUTHWESTERN, published at New Orleans, has a department under the head, “Lost Friends,” which is pathetic in the extreme. It contains from week-to-week letters from colored people asking for information about fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters separated from each other in slave time. It makes one shudder to read, “He sold us,” “We were bought,” and similar expressions.’Footnote5
Searchers like Charlotte Grigsby used the advertisements of the 1880s onwards as a public forum to share individual stories of collective suffering and grief. Formerly enslaved people who inquired for mothers, fathers, children, friends, aunts, uncles, cousins and other kin years after their initial separations openly shared their loss and longing for those who they had been forced to live without. As well as recording the trauma resulting from family separations, many formerly enslaved people utilized the advertisements to narrate their experience of traumatic violence and suffering and the experiences of those they loved. As Nell Irvin Painter has shown, ‘we all know on a certain, almost intuitive level that violence is inseparable from slavery.’Footnote6 Significantly, the advertisements thus spoke to intergenerational trauma in the way they were used to testify against the violence inflicted on loved ones. Erin Austin Dwyer argues that with emancipation, ‘enslaved people and free Black people implicitly and explicitly challenged the idea that they were unfeeling or lacked strong familial ties.’Footnote7 Through sharing personal and collective experiences of trauma, alongside making powerful declarations of ancestry, many who took out Information Wanted ads employed emotion as a mechanism of power. As a result, the advertisements can be viewed as a space and place of protest and radical resistance and therefore a form of protest writing.
Leslie A. Schwalm observes that obituaries for formerly enslaved people ‘offer an important collection of first-hand observations and testimony to African American experiences of the trauma of slavery.’ As sites of memory and memorialization, they ‘offered an explicit counterpoint to white amnesia’ by ‘asserting their memories of the trauma of slavery and the incomplete promise of emancipation against the forgetful tide of sectional reunion.’Footnote8 Information Wanted ads were similarly employed to document individual stories of collective trauma and functioned as sites of individual and collective memory to remember kin who had come before them. By bearing witness to the violence of enslavement, the advertisements likewise demanded acknowledgement, forcing those who came across the ads to confront and remember the past.
The ongoing dehumanizing, persecutory and disenfranchizing context of the post-emancipation era encouraged formerly enslaved people to turn to Information Wanted ads to memorialize their experiences, as well as the histories of kin who came before them, as a means of safeguarding Black genealogies and fighting against the white supremacist record. Dwyer argues that ‘the legacy of the emotional politics of slavery continued long after Emancipation’ and so, for formerly enslaved people, presenting their emotions served to undermine the white emotional regime of the post-emancipation era.Footnote9
Cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman explains the difficulties posed by remembrance and mourning against a backdrop of a white supremacist society in which the ‘spirit of slavery’ is still dominant:
For the distinction between the past and the present founders on the interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath. How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?Footnote10
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It is difficult to develop a methodology to engage with the feelings displayed in the advertisements. Dwyer questions how scholars can truly ‘determine the feelings of people who are long dead … One cannot know how people genuinely felt in the antebellum South any more than one can know how another person genuinely feels in the present.’Footnote11 Individuals in the post-emancipation era did not have the framework or terminology for writing about trauma – or emotions generally – that we have today. Diane Miller Sommerville emphasizes that individuals in the Civil War era used language such as ‘nerves,’ ‘melancholy’ and ‘lunacy’ to describe mental health disorders, and that ‘they possessed limited capacity to link traumatic and stressful experience to a diminished mental health.’Footnote12
Psychiatrist Judith Herman’s ground-breaking work Trauma and Recovery, particularly her definition of trauma, has informed this article’s approach to the advertisements. Herman defines traumatic events as those which ‘generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death.’Footnote13 She also highlights the significance of remembering and sharing stories of trauma to the recovery process, arguing that ‘recovery requires remembrance and mourning.’Footnote14 Information Wanted ads provided formerly enslaved people with a public forum for commemoration, and in remembering and publicly mourning their relatives, the advertisements may have contributed to the process of recovery.
Herman also touches on the radical dimensions of remembrance and mourning, noting how ‘reclaiming the ability to feel the full range of emotions, including grief, must be understood as an act of resistance.’ She argues that mourning is an expression of agency, that ‘creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity.’Footnote15 It is significant that the advertisements not only testified to the cruelty of family separations, but also were radical first-person observations recording – and bearing witness to – the suffering of loved ones in enslavement.
Jennifer L. Morgan rethinks the categories of enslaved resistance in her work on enslavement, gender and capitalism to discuss the idea of ‘refusal.’ Morgan explains that enslavement required ‘the transformation of family or kin into marketed goods’ and as a result, ‘efforts to retain home, family, kith, or kin outside the marketplace took on a highly charged and politicized role.’Footnote16 Highlighting the narratives of both Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, Morgan argues that for formerly enslaved people, ‘kinship became a crucial space from which to launch a relentless critique of racial slavery.’Footnote17 Enslaved people’s ‘refusal to relinquish their kinship ties to the anonymizing record books and to the mathematical divisions of the slave traders suggests a foundational counternarrative to commodification among the enslaved.’Footnote18 This article utilizes Morgan’s concept of ‘refusal’ to argue that through Information Wanted advertisements, formerly enslaved people made declarations that their family and kinship ties could not be denied by continuing to refuse to surrender these ties long into the post-emancipation era. In safeguarding Black genealogies through recording the names and biographies of those they had lost, formerly enslaved people asserted family strength and power by publicly memorializing their relatives through the advertisements.
‘Separated by the cruel hand of slavery’: The Power of Documenting Suffering
The trauma of family separation is the most palpable form of suffering revealed in the ads. By detailing memories of family separations through the use of Information Wanted advertisements in the post-emancipation era, formerly enslaved people made clear the cruelty they were subjected to under enslavement, giving voice to the grief that these losses had inflicted upon them, using the forum provided by the ads to speak out against these injustices. Edward Brashers inquired in 1891 for his wife and daughter, Sallie and Rose Nobles, who were taken from him in Alabama, writing ‘we were separated by the cruel hand of slavery in 1847.’ Brashers made the cruelty of enslavement even more evident to his readers when he highlighted that the birth of his daughter Rose had come after their separation: ‘She [Sallie] was taken to Clark county, where, I suppose the daughter was born in 1847 or 1848.’ Now, aged sixty-three, ‘childless’ and ‘having enough of this world’s goods to leave either mother or daughter in good circumstances’, Brashers hoped to hear from his wife once more as well as the child he had been denied the chance to know.Footnote19
Brashers was not alone in utilizing an Information Wanted advertisement to share the pain of being torn from relatives before having the chance to know them. S. Young, for example, searched for his father who was taken from him when he was just three days old, declaring ‘I have never seen him in my life.’Footnote20 Similarly, Lucy Clarke noted how she was separated in 1850 from her mother, Nancy Love, when she was ‘but an infant of about 9 months.’Footnote21 Martha Kennedy searched for her parents, Rebecca and Billy, along with her siblings, Washington and Sady. She described how she had been ‘sold to a slave trader named Billy Hunter, when about four or five years old, or perhaps younger’ who brought her to South Carolina, and as a result, she wrote: ‘I know nothing of my relatives.’ From being separated from her family at such a young age, she could offer no biographical details about them beyond their names, and her grief and frustration at this fact was palpable.Footnote22
Martha Kennedy at least had the names of her family members to hold on to. Others who took out advertisements were often unable to provide the names of their relatives. Louisa Keyton, for example, who wrote that she was in search of ‘my people’, could not give her mother’s name: ‘My mother died when I was so young that I don’t remember her name.’Footnote23 Likewise, Mary Brown, searching from New Orleans, inquired for her ‘kin people’ and wrote that her mother ‘died when we were so young that I cannot give her name.’Footnote24 In doing so, both Mary Brown and Louisa Keyton honoured the memory of their mothers by inscribing their existence into the public and historical record, despite knowing very few details about them. As a result, physical reunification with their ‘people’ was not the sole purpose of these advertisements, in the way both women utilized their ads to each record their survival in enslavement. Significantly, in writing the existence of their mothers into the historical record, these women used the advertisements as surrogate head-stones, to remember, record and publicly memorialize the existence of their mothers. They could not remember the name of their mothers, but they refused to forget them.
Heather Andrea Williams highlights the change in language – the increasing use of the term ‘my people’ – that clearly emerges in the advertisements of the 1880s onwards. Moving from a search for family to a more general search for ‘my people’ indicates, according to Williams, ‘a broader possessive claim.’ As Williams highlights, ‘Perhaps it was an assertion of a claim of having had people, even if … you had never seen them. The term said, “My people who help to give me a sense of history and identity, a sense of having come from somewhere and someone.”’Footnote25 Searchers made a statement of ‘refusal’ through using the term ‘my people’ by declaring that their family and kinship groups mattered, despite enslavement’s every effort to destroy these ties. This public acknowledgement of a shared past and common heritage functioned to memorialize the individual and collective experiences of those who were formerly enslaved, highlighting the role of shared emotions in the creation of communities. Through sharing stories of private struggle, formerly enslaved people created communities for themselves in the columns of Black newspapers. As Dwyer makes clear, ‘Many historians of emotions as well as psychologists have argued that emotions are not just individually felt but are collectively constructed and historically contingent.’Footnote26
Through writing their advertisements, formerly enslaved people safeguarded their family histories and mourned their losses. According to Hartman, ‘to remember the dead is to mend ruptured lines of descent and filiation. In this regard, remembrance is entangled with reclaiming the past, propitiating ancestors, and recovering the origins of the descendants of this dispersal.’Footnote27 Formerly enslaved people including Mary Brown and Louisa Keyton took out Information Wanted ads in an attempt to recount and recover a Black genealogy, even if they could not record the names of their deceased relatives. Some searchers, such as Edward Hudson, were haunted by the absence of what they had lost as well as the not knowing. In what is a very long and detailed ad, Hudson began by setting down his autobiography. ‘My name is Edward Hudson,’ he recorded, ‘I was born in Russell county, Ala., in 1855, but was raised in Columbus, Ga.’ Hudson then provided details of his people, explaining that his mother, aunt and two uncles had been enslaved by the Hooper family and had lived in Crawford, Alabama, but had moved to Opelika. Hudson shared how his father, Richard Hudson, had left Columbus, Georgia in 1867 for Liberia. After moving to Mississippi in 1876, Hudson indicated that he ‘got entirely lost from my already scattered relatives.’ While it appeared as though Hudson was beginning to doubt the possibility of reunification, writing that ‘failing afterwards to learn of their whereabouts, after repeatedly writing to them, confirmed my belief that they too had emigrated, or are dead,’ this did not lessen his desire for reunion. Hudson concluded his ad by writing of his father: ‘I don’t know whether he is dead or living’ and shared his longing for news of him by declaring ‘I dream of him so much.’Footnote28
Information Wanted ads were a means for formerly enslaved people to bear witness to the cruelty of family separations and to reclaim their presence by recording their pain and suffering into the public and historical record. Millie Davis used her advertisement to share that she had no memory of her mother: ‘I don’t remember of ever seeing my mother.’ This was because ‘I was very small when she was taken from me. All the information that I have is from my father, William Upshaw.’ Her father had passed away fifteen years ago. By making a public declaration of what she had lost, Davis spoke out against the injustices of enslavement.Footnote29 Formerly enslaved people safeguarded Black genealogies through recording the names and biographies of even those they had never known. In doing so, they demonstrated that they possessed familial and kinship memories and histories of those who had come before them in a powerful demonstration of ‘refusal.’
‘She died from grief’: The Power of Bearing Witness
In search of lost loved ones, the advertisements documented the violence of family separations. However, the advertisements went beyond this, as they were also used to record experiences of traumatic violence under enslavement. Through individually shared histories of sacrifice and struggle, the ads were public declarations of grief. Kidada E. Williams considers testimony as a mechanism of resistance: ‘Testifying about racial violence was a crucial factor in African Americans’ individual recovery and their collective resistance to white supremacy because whenever victims related their experiences of this violence, they created witnesses to their trauma.’Footnote30 Through documenting the violence of enslavement, the Information Wanted advertisements were likewise a mechanism of resistance.
According to Rebecca Fraser, formerly enslaved people used Information Wanted advertisements ‘as a public forum to narrate, and perhaps begin to make sense of, their own stories of loss and longing.’Footnote31 This article supports Fraser’s assertion that physical reunification was not always the sole purpose for taking out an advertisement, writing that the advertisements ‘also served another purpose for the formerly enslaved themselves in terms of very slowly working through the mental and psychological anguish that slavery and its consequences had caused them.’Footnote32 As well as providing a first-hand account of personal suffering, the ads bore witness to intergenerational trauma in their recording of the violence inflicted on their loved ones. In particular, formerly enslaved people utilized the ads as memorials to those whom Toni Morrison referred to as the ‘unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried.’Footnote33
Caroline Holloway commemorated a record of her suffering through the use of seven advertisements across four different newspapers – the Southwestern, the St. Louis Globe Democrat, the Recorder and the Daily Evening Bulletin – between March 1881 and April 1886.Footnote34 Information Wanted notices were frequently reprinted, particularly in the Christian Recorder, where the same advertisement could run for months. The advertisements Holloway took out, however, were different each time and are revealing in their references to extreme suffering and are especially significant when we consider what Holloway chose to omit.
Holloway published advertisements as Caroline Holloway, Caroline Williams, Carolina Williams, and mentioned that her name had once been Caroline Austin.Footnote35 While the name that she used changed, the information she included remained largely the same – that she was searching for her sister, Frances Austin, and that their mother, Chloe Austin, had committed suicide. ‘I would like to find the whereabouts of my sister, Frances Austin, who may have changed her name,’ Holloway declared in March 1881, ‘Our mother’s name was Chloe Austin, and she came to her death by committing suicide.’Footnote36 In other advertisements Holloway provided further detail of her mother’s death. Two weeks after her first advertisement, Holloway explained in her second ad that ‘Our mother’s name was Cloe Austin, who came to her death by hanging herself.’Footnote37 Six out of Holloway’s seven Information Wanted advertisements made reference to her mother’s death: two advertisements simply stated that she had committed suicide, while the remaining four specified that she hanged herself.Footnote38 As Terri L. Snyder observes, ‘the memory of suicide in slavery was used to indict the institution of slavery and the history of white prejudice, to keep alive the injustices of slavery in the past to fuel the politics of the present historical moment.’Footnote39 Likewise, Dwyer argues that references to suicide served to challenge ‘idealized depictions of contented slaves by describing the sorrows they had endured while enslaved’, adding that ‘suicide need not always have been a deliberate act of rebellion in order to resist the institution of slavery and rebut representations of contented slaves.’Footnote40 Therefore, as well as memorializing her mother, Holloway testified to the extreme cruelty of enslavement, using her mother’s story to counteract and fight against the white emotional regime of the post-emancipation era.
Holloway’s 1885 notice in the Recorder provided the most detail, particularly about her mother’s biography. As her sixth ad, four years since her first advertisement, she perhaps felt she could take up more space in the newspaper to share her mother’s history. Significantly, this ad is her only one not to explicitly state that she was searching for her sister Frances, choosing instead to use the all-encompassing term ‘my people.’ Beginning by declaring ‘INFORMATION WANTED OF MY PEOPLE’, Holloway first named her mother, Cleo Austin before quickly stating, ‘She is now dead.’ This ad is also the only example in which she referenced her mother’s siblings: ‘My mother had a brother, Peter or Harry Austin; she had a sister Violet, and one name Celia.’ She also recorded the name of her grandmother, Fannie. While noting that her mother’s people had been enslaved by the same family near Sparta, Tennessee – ‘they all belonged to the Austins’ – Holloway indicated that her mother had been torn apart from her family when she was young: ‘My mother was carried from Tenn. to Mo. when she was a young woman.’ Holloway then provided detail of her mother’s self-murder to again bear witness to the atrocities of enslavement by further underscoring the violent nature of her mother’s death – despite having explained in the outset that she had passed away. She also repeated her full name in a very powerful declaration of ancestry when she did so, writing ‘My mother, Cleo Austin, committed suicide.’ In this more detailed account, Holloway referenced the traumatic consequences of her mother’s suicide, as she wrote that on her death her mother ‘left three children, Amos, Florence [Francis] and Caroline.’Footnote41 As David Silkenat has shown, for formerly enslaved people, stories of family members who committed suicide ‘were among their most palpable memories of bondage.’Footnote42 This traumatic memory would have been especially intense since Holloway indicated via this ad that she was a child at her mother’s death.
The only ad to omit reference to her mother’s suicide is Holloway’s seventh and final ad, published in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. Under the heading ‘Slavery Days’, the paper printed the following:
Caroline Holloway of Cherry Vale, Kan., who was evidently once a slave, has written to Postmaster Backus a letter, which reads: ‘Information Wanted of my lost sister; her name was Frances; belonged to the Austin’s, Chilicothe, Mo.; sold to a speculator by the name of Linch, had a slaveyard at St. Louis, Mo. Any information received with thanks. My address, Cherry Vale, Kan.'Footnote43
Holloway recovered the humanity her mother had been denied in life by creating a lasting memorial through her advertisements, recording her mother’s death into the historical record on six separate occasions. While the newspapers she published in would have had wide geographical reach – with their readership not confined to the locations in which they published – Holloway covered her bases geographically by publishing ads in newspapers issued in California, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Louisiana. Her advertisements also share the intergenerational trauma of the women in her family, her personal struggle at losing her mother, as well as her mother’s private suffering, who took her own life. By publishing numerous advertisements over a five-year period in four different newspapers across the United States, she ensured everyone knew her story and contributed to the narrative of the collective experience of trauma in enslavement. As Snyder has argued, formerly enslaved people whose loved ones had committed suicide ‘did not condemn the act,’ highlighting that individuals in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews ‘did not express alarm or shame when relating stories of ancestors who had chosen self-destruction as an alternative to enslavement, nor did they appear to believe that self-killing had negative spiritual consequences.’Footnote44 Likewise, by referencing it in six of her seven advertisements, Holloway appeared to be unashamed of her mother’s death by suicide.
There is a lot to be said about what Holloway omitted in her ads. Holloway spoke of her mother’s suicide without including the reason why her mother had taken her own life. While Holloway may not have known, this omission highlights her mother’s unspoken trauma and suffering in her advertisements as well as in the Information Wanted advertisements more generally.Footnote45 In her 1885 Recorder advertisement, Holloway detailed her mother’s suicide after describing how she had been parted from her own mother and siblings and carried from Tennessee to Missouri. While Silkenat and Sommerville observe that the reasons why enslaved people committed suicide were ‘complex’ and ‘multilayered’ and so ‘it is unlikely that a historian could identify with certainty the cause of any subject’s suicide’, Snyder highlights family separation as a reason why some enslaved people contemplated suicide.Footnote46 Family separation may have been what pushed Chloe Austin to take her own life. Certainly, in Holloway’s March 24, 1881 ad, she wrote that at the time her mother was torn from her loved ones, she had two young children, and a baby on the way: ‘my mother and the two mentioned children [Frances and Amos] were carried from Tennessee to Livingston Co., Mo., and in the latter place I was born.’ Chloe Austin may have felt helpless caring for her children without the support of her mother and siblings.Footnote47
When examining the first-person testimony of formerly enslaved people, Hartman notes how the ‘silences and evasions’ relating to abuses which ‘exceeded the routine violence of slavery’ are just as important, including rape and sexual violence.Footnote48 In this light, we should consider what Caroline Holloway – and her mother – left unsaid. If Holloway knew the reason for her mother’s suicide, she did not specify this with the readers of her advertisements. She may have assumed her Black readership would know why her mother took her own life, based on their own experiences of the atrocities and violations of enslavement. Perhaps it would have taken Holloway too long to explain to her reader why her mother had taken her own life. Holloway may not have wanted to traumatize the reader, or re-enact her own trauma, and so omitting the reason(s) was necessary for survival. Holloway may have been experiencing disassociation – she may not have even considered the causes behind her mother’s suicide. Perhaps, simply, this was not a story to retell.
Significantly, Snyder also highlights rape and sexual violence as a reason behind why enslaved women committed suicide.Footnote49 While the advertisements do share many other aspects of violence, there is very little reference to the culture of rape and sexual violence which was inherent in enslavement. The only reference to sexual violence in the Information Wanted advertisements can be seen in the advertisements which referenced white fathers. This may be explained by what Darlene Clark Hine has coined the ‘culture of dissemblance’, which was ‘a cult of secrecy’ that Black women formulated as a means of survival ‘to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives.’Footnote50 These evasions ‘hint at those issues that Black women believed better left unknown, unwritten, unspoken except in whispered tones.’Footnote51 Perhaps this was why Black women did not share the trauma of sexual violence in the Information Wanted ads – the ads were not a place to retell such stories of extreme suffering. While we can never know for certain the reasons behind Chloe Austin’s suicide, we can be sure that it ended her grief. As Sommerville argues: ‘Self-murder was an escape from personal misery, emotional fatigue, and torment.’Footnote52
Other searchers took to their ads to detail how their relatives had suffered traumatic deaths whilst enslaved. Mrs Ellen Brown, living in New York, emphasized her struggle when she noted how her mother, Rose Coleman, was ‘suddenly killed on the plantation by a vicious kick from a cruel overseer.’Footnote53 In doing so, she emphasized the dehumanizing nature of enslavement and represented the extreme brutality suffered not only by her mother, but all enslaved women, at the whims of their enslavers. Through sharing the story of her mother’s death, Brown both remembered her mother’s suffering and fought against the white supremacist record – which portrayed enslavement as a benign institution – through her emotive language. By bearing witness to the violence of enslavement and speaking out against the cruel injustice of her mother’s death, her use of emotion became a mechanism of power.
Many who posted advertisements used them to bear witness to trauma experienced by others in enslavement and, in doing so, they protested the cruelty of their enslavers. Such stories of secondary trauma were then passed down to the readers of Black newspapers in a public acknowledgement of collective grief and suffering. For example, Mary Bell shared how her uncle Edward Bell had maimed himself to halt his impending sale, describing that he ‘cut his hand off before he would be sold to the Southern States.’Footnote54 Bell did not specify whether she witnessed this moment of self-inflicted violence, but this traumatic and desperate memory was something that had stuck with her, and so she memorialized this event and her uncle’s experience via her ad.
L. M. Hagood, the pastor of the Union M. E. Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, inquired in December 1887 on behalf of an unnamed member of his church. The unnamed man was born near Lebanon, Tennessee and could not confidently recall the details of the ‘kin people’ he searched for, with Hagood writing that ‘he thinks his mother’s name was Caroline and that he had a twin brother.’ However, the unnamed man could testify to the violence inflicted on both himself and his mother on the day of their separation, despite being only three years old at the time. Hagood recounted how ‘when he was starting away his mother was whipped in the dining room because she cried. When the boy cried his master whipped him also.’ The searcher struggled to remember his mother’s name but could recollect how traumatic their separation had been. Through his advertisement he protested the extreme violence and cruelty of enslavement, and the heartlessness of his enslaver, for inflicting violence on a mother and child for their expressions of emotion.Footnote55
The advertisements provided formerly enslaved people with a space to narrate their grief and trauma beyond the immediate search for family. Thos. A. Miller inquired in 1889 for his missing siblings. He and his siblings, along with their mother, had been ‘stolen’ from Petersburg, Virginia and carried to Richmond where they were each sold separately. Miller shared how his mother had died at Richmond from the heartbreak of being separated from her children: ‘Mother followed us to Richmond; there she died from grief.’Footnote56 Beth Wilson, in her article in this issue on enslaved mothers’ emotional practices following forced separations, considers examples of mothers who ‘simply could not continue in the face of their grief’, arguing that such responses may also be considered ‘acts of refusal’: ‘These enslaved women declined to accept their situation and continue as normal within the system that caused such grief and injustice.’Footnote57 Miller had used his ad to detail the extreme suffering experienced by his family, and especially his mother, which had proved too much for his mother to bear. As complex documents portraying individual and collective emotional realities, the advertisements displayed deep love and longing for kin while bearing witness to the trauma of enslavement.
‘I was stolen’: The Power of Protest
Many searchers employed emotion as a mechanism of power to testify against the sorrow of enslavement, making the advertisements a space of protest and radical resistance. Williams draws attention to the significance of word choice in her examination of the Information Wanted ads. She argues that after emancipation, a small number of people published advertisements in the Christian Recorder in which they attacked enslavement through their word choice, which served to question the lawfulness of their enslavers and their actions.Footnote58 This was not something limited to the Recorder, as those who published advertisements in the Southwestern used their space to denounce enslavement via their choice of language. By publicly naming their enslavers and deliberately employing words such as ‘taken’ and ‘stolen’, formerly enslaved people disputed the authority of those who had enslaved them and pinned the blame of their family separations, and their ultimate suffering, onto them. As Williams notes, ‘doing so would not help in their search, but it likely provided some degree of satisfaction to be able to lash out against those who had brought about their losses.’Footnote59 Moving beyond providing mere satisfaction, however, I argue that this anger served as a further mechanism of power, protesting both the violence of enslavement as well as undermining the dehumanizing and persecutory context of the post-emancipation era.
Edward E. Baptist also considers the significance of the use of the verb ‘to steal’ by formerly enslaved people in his work. Through the use of the word ‘stolen’, Baptist argues that formerly enslaved people ‘made an argument about the nature of slavery,’ as by ‘calling whites criminals whose title to human property was always shaky,’ formerly enslaved people ‘depicted the entire system as a criminal enterprise.’Footnote60 Formerly enslaved people employed language in this way throughout the advertisements. Mary Brown, whose advertisement has previously been mentioned, utilized her space in the Southwestern to denounce enslavement, her white enslavers, and the US South in general: ‘In the days when human beings were bought and sold in this chivalrous South my body belonged to Col. T. G. Johnson, of Memphis, Tenn.’ The powerful language of protest which Brown employed in her advert, especially her deliberate repetition of the phrase ‘my body’ when describing how she had been sold away and separated from her family, highlighted the trauma of enslavement as well as her own personal suffering: ‘My body was sold in New Orleans to a Mr. Absolom Gill, in 1843.’Footnote61
Just like Brown’s ad, Eliza Gardner’s word choice in her 1885 advertisement searching for her brothers is significant as she recorded that she had been ‘stolen’ from her family: ‘I was stolen and sold to Major Gibson.’ Through the use of the word ‘stolen’, she indicated her private suffering after being sold away from her loved ones, while also emphasizing the unlawfulness of the act. Furthermore, by ensuring to name her enslaver, Major Gibson, Gardner’s advertisement served to publicly condemn both her enslaver and her enslavement.Footnote62 Mary McCauly also named her enslaver in her advertisement in the Southwestern when she noted how young she was when she had been ‘taken’ from her family. ‘I was born in Washington county, Ky,’ McCauly declared, ‘I was five years of age when taken from my people.’ She went on to explain: ‘My name was Mary Gordon. I was sold to a man named Glasscock.’Footnote63 S. Young, also previously mentioned, detailed how his father was ‘taken’ from him, to Huntsville, Alabama, when he was three days old.Footnote64 Likewise, Lucy Sudds wrote how she had been ‘stolen’ from her family ‘by some white people named Alison and carried to Texas, Buck Short County.’Footnote65 Finally, Jesse Irvin noted how he ‘was but twelve years of age when mother was taken from me, but I cannot name the year.’Footnote66
Sandy Morgan shared in 1890 how his father had been ‘taken away by the terrible bondage of slavery and by speculators brought to Mississippi and sold to his last owner, Barry Moore.’Footnote67 This language of protest did more than display their anger at their enslavement or provide temporary satisfaction; it was a further means by which formerly enslaved people declared the significance of their familial and kinship ties.
‘I trust I shall meet them in heaven’: The Power of Healing
The issue of mortality runs throughout the advertisements. As we have seen, some formerly enslaved people shared that their family members had died when they were so young that they could not remember their names. Some created lasting memorials using the advertisements for their loved ones who had been ‘unceremoniously buried.’ Others, however, took out ads in the hope that they would be reunited with their family in their old age. In these instances, inquirers shared that their final wish before death was reunification with lost kin. If this was not to prove possible, some indicated a belief in a reunion in the afterlife.
Anna Quinn utilized her advertisement to communicate directly to her parents. Many formerly enslaved people appealed directly to their readers for assistance in their search, but using the advertisements to speak directly to, and especially question, those who they searched for was fairly unusual. Quinn began her advertisement by declaring: ‘I wish to inquire for my dear mother and father whom I left in Virginia when I was sold at ten years old.’ Towards the end of her advertisement, she wrote: ‘My dear mother and father, do you remember what you said to me when I was sold? You told me if you never saw me in this life you wanted to meet me in heaven. I am married now and have six children.’Footnote68 She did not record the year she was separated from her parents but did note that she was sold from them when she was ten years old. According to the 1880 Census, Quinn was thirty-five years old, making her forty-four at the time of her advertisement, meaning she had been separated from her parents for over thirty years.Footnote69
Quinn communicated with her parents after more than three decades through the use of her advertisement to pass on the message that she had survived and, despite her suffering, was doing well. By asking her parents a direct question, she pleaded with them to still remember the words they had shared in their final moments. Even if her plea was never to reach her parents, her ad was an act of healing, bearing witness to the injustice of enslavement. Quinn had clearly held on to the final words she had shared with her parents for thirty years – most of her life – and with her advertisement she made a probable step in healing these wounds, knowing that even if her ad did not result in a physical reunification, she would meet them in heaven which would have provided her with some comfort.
As is the case for the vast majority of the advertisements placed, it is unknown whether Quinn’s advertisement resulted in reunification with her parents. Reunifications were, unfortunately, few and far between. Searchers like Quinn therefore held out hope for reunification in the next life. Charlotte Harbert, for example, inquiring for her children wrote: ‘If I do not meet them again on earth I trust I shall meet them in heaven.’Footnote70 This belief may have given some comfort to their grief, providing searchers with an opportunity to work through their losses by recording their experiences via the advertisements.
The Information Wanted advertisements can be viewed as radical stories of resilience bearing witness to the trauma of enslavement. Formerly enslaved people utilized Information Wanted advertisements to publicly present their individual and collective emotions, using them to protest the injustices of enslavement and undermine the white emotional regime of the post-emancipation era. Formerly enslaved people’s efforts to safeguard kinship ties through the use of the advertisements demonstrated their family and kinship group strength and should be considered a tool of protest that they used against the institution that had attempted to destroy them. By publicly memorializing their loved ones through the advertisements, formerly enslaved people recorded their collective emotions and experiences of trauma in the columns of Black newspapers.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Silkenat and Celeste-Marie Bernier for their support and feedback on early drafts of this article. Thank you also to Beth Wilson, Emily West and all the participants of the Slavery and Emotions workshop for their invaluable comments and generous feedback in developing this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
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Katherine Burns
Katherine Burns is a PhD candidate in History in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG, UK. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 Star of Zion, October 4, 1888.
2 Information Wanted ads were published by a variety of Black newspapers but this article focuses on advertisements in three church-sponsored Black newspapers – the Christian Recorder, Southwestern Christian Advocate and Star of Zion – from the 1880s onwards. While there is a continuing interest in these documents via vital databases and online repositories, Michael P. Johnson and Heather Andrea Williams are the only scholars so far to place these documents in the centre of their discussions, but are primarily concerned with formerly enslaved people finding kin in the years immediately succeeding the war. See Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, accessed January 30, 2023, http://informationwanted.org; Lost Friends: Advertisements from the Southwestern Christian Advocate, accessed January 30, 2023, https://www.hnoc.org/database/lost-friends/index.html; Michael P. Johnson, ‘Looking for Lost Kin: Efforts to Reunite Freed Families after Emancipation’ in Catherine Clinton (ed), Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
3 Southwestern Christian Advocate, December 11, 1890.
4 Southwestern, January 12, 1882.
5 Southwestern, August 14, 1890.
6 Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 13.
7 Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 195.
8 Leslie A. Schwalm, ‘“Agonizing Groans of Mothers” and “Slave-Scarred Veterans”: The Commemoration of Slavery and Emancipation’, American Nineteenth Century History 9, no. 3 (2008), 294–6.
9 Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 195.
10 Saidiya Hartman, ‘The Time of Slavery’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002), 758. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman speaks of the ‘ghost of slavery.’ See Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021), 133; 165; 170. For the ‘spirit of slavery’, see Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 2003), 363.
11 Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 13.
12 Diane Miller Sommerville, Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 10.
13 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 35.
14 Ibid., 194.
15 Ibid., 153, 198.
16 Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 223.
17 Ibid., 248.
18 Ibid., 251.
19 Southwestern, February 12, 1891.
20 Southwestern, November 22, 1883.
21 Southwestern, March 18, 1880.
22 Christian Recorder, July 15, 1886.
23 Southwestern, November 14, 1889.
24 Southwestern, December 11, 1884.
25 Williams, Help Me to Find My People, 192–4. Williams observes that the term ‘my people’ was used infrequently in the advertisements of the 1860s and 1870s and so its usage by those searching from the 1880s onwards attracts attention.
26 Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 14.
27 Hartman, ‘The Time of Slavery’, 758.
28 Southwestern, November 14, 1889.
29 Southwestern, June 18, 1891.
30 Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), 5.
31 Rebecca Fraser, ‘“There is No Place Like a Happy Home”: ‘Information Wanted’ Notices, the Christian Recorder, and the Idealization of the Black Family in Post-Emancipation America’, unpublished essay, 2.
32 Ibid., 12.
33 Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, ‘A Conversation’, The Southern Review 21, no. 3 (1985), 585.
34 Southwestern, March 10, 1881; Southwestern, March 24, 1881; Southwestern, February 2, 1882; Southwestern, June 12, 1884; St Louis Globe-Democrat, August 28, 1884; Recorder, January 1, 1885; Daily Evening Bulletin, April 14, 1886.
35 Caroline Austin was presumably the name Holloway’s sister Frances would have known her as, which may be why she also gave this name in her advertisements.
36 Southwestern, March 10, 1881.
37 Southwestern, March 24, 1881.
38 For the ads which state her mother committed suicide, see Southwestern, March 10, 1881 and Recorder, January 1, 1885. For the ads which specify that her mother hanged herself, see Southwestern, March 24, 1881; Southwestern, February 2, 1882; Southwestern, June 12, 1884; St Louis Globe-Democrat, August 28, 1884. Note she spelled her mother’s name as Chloe, Clara, Cloa and Cloe.
39 Terri L. Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 157.
40 Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 93. Scholars disagree on whether suicide in enslavement should be interpreted as an act of resistance. See Snyder, The Power to Die, 66–7; David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, & Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 21.
41 Recorder, January 1, 1885.
42 Silkenat, Moments of Despair, 14.
43 Daily Evening Bulletin, April 14, 1886.
44 Snyder, The Power to Die, 30; 154.
45 For more on archival silences see Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
46 Silkenat, Moments of Despair, 17; Sommerville, Aberration of Mind, 9; Snyder, The Power to Die, 152.
47 Southwestern, March 24, 1881.
48 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 16.
49 Snyder, The Power to Die, 149.
50 Darlene Clark Hine, ‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West’, Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer, 1989), 915.
51 Ibid., 916.
52 Sommerville, Aberration of Mind, 118–9.
53 Southwestern, July 20, 1899.
54 Southwestern, August 20, 1891.
55 Southwestern, December 8, 1887.
56 Southwestern, March 21, 1889.
57 See the article by Beth Wilson in this collection, ‘Her work of love’: Forced Separations, Maternal Grief and Enslaved Mothers’ Emotional Practices in the Antebellum US South’.
58 Williams, Help Me to Find My People, 164. In Johnson’s examination of Information Wanted advertisements in the Christian Recorder, he briefly considers the significance of word choice, but focuses on the words ‘left’ and ‘taken’ rather than ‘stolen.’ He argues that these were used to describe being sold, rather than to protest the institution of slavery, as Williams – and this article – suggests. See Johnson, ‘Looking for Lost Kin’, 21.
59 Williams, Help Me to Find My People, 164.
60 Edward E. Baptist, ‘“Stol’ and Fetched Here”: Enslaved Migration, Ex-slave Narratives, and Vernacular History’, in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, eds. Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 243, 258.
61 Southwestern, December 11, 1884.
62 Southwestern, January 29, 1885.
63 Southwestern, May 3, 1888.
64 Southwestern, November 22, 1883.
65 Southwestern, May 22, 1890.
66 Southwestern, September 15, 1881.
67 Southwestern, December 4, 1890.
68 Southwestern, June 27, 1889.
69 United States Census, 1880.
70 Southwestern, November 8, 1883.