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 1-17 of 17 Results  for:

  • 1861–1865: The Civil War x
  • 1866–1876: Reconstruction x
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Article

Bond, Scott  

Jacob Andrew Freedman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

farmer and entrepreneur, was born near Canton, Mississippi, the only child of Wesley Rutledge and Anne Maben. Rutledge was the nephew of William H. Goodlow, the owner of the estate where Anne Maben was a house slave. Wesley worked as the manager of the house for his aunt and uncle. At birth Bond was given the surname Winfield, and at the age of eighteen months he was sent with his mother to Collierville, Tennessee, where they lived until he was five years old. Subsequently, they were sent to work on the Bond farm in Cross County, Arkansas. In Arkansas Anne Maben met and married William Bond, who gave Scott Bond his surname.

The family remained on the Bond farm until the conclusion of the Civil War when only months after gaining her freedom Anne Maben died leaving Bond in the care of his stepfather Bond his stepfather ...

Article

Botha, Louis  

Bill Nasson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

farmer, general, and first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, was born on 27 September 1862 near Greytown in the British colony of Natal. His paternal grandfather, Philip Rudolph Boot (or Both), was of German settler descent and had participated in the 1830s Boer Great Trek into the interior. The son of migrant trekkers Louis Botha and Salomina van Rooyen, Louis was the ninth of thirteen children. In 1869, the Botha family left Natal and settled on a farm near Vrede in the Orange Free State, where Louis lived until the age of twenty-two. Earlier, he had been schooled at a local German mission where he received only a very basic education.

Botha’s minimal formal learning proved to be no handicap to the development of his exceptional aptitude for fieldcraft and understanding of the working of the highveld terrain. In 1886 he settled on his ...

Article

Buendía de Pecho, Catalina  

Rocío del Águila

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

who died during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) between Chile and the allied forces of Peru and Bolivia, was born in the town of San José de los Molinos, a district founded in 1876 and located in the southern Peruvian province of Ica. She was of African descent and later worked as a cotton and lima bean farmer. She bore one child.

From colonial times, the Ica region had become well known for its Afro-Peruvian population and the participation of this significant workforce in agriculture, particularly vineyards and cotton fields. As a result of the lack of written sources and biographical materials, a variety of accounts originated regarding her role in the military events that took place in the area of Los Molinos. Most versions derive from oral sources and local traditions, which suggest that Buendía played an important role in the critical battle of Cerrillo.

The ...

Article

Bush, William Owen  

Kenneth Wiggins Porter

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

William Owen Bush was born in Clay County, Missouri, on July 4, 1832. He was the oldest son of George Washington Bush and Isabella James, born in Tennessee of German ancestry. The Bush family left Missouri in 1844 for the Oregon Territory. In 1845 the family settled in what became known as Bush Prairie, a few miles south of present-day Olympia, Washington. George Bush won esteem there as a progressive, innovative, and generous farmer. William Bush married Mandana Smith Kimsey on May 26, 1859, in Marion County, Oregon. Mandana was the daughter of Dr. J. Smith and Nancy Scott Wisdom Smith, and the widow (1858) of Duff Kimsey, who had been born in Howard County, Missouri, on June 1, 1826. She had crossed to Oregon with her husband and parents in 1847 William and Mandana had three children George O ...

Article

Covey, Edward  

Kelly Boyer Sagert

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Edward Covey, about twenty-eight years old in 1834, lived with his wife and infant son, Edward, on a rented farm of 150 acres located about seven miles from Saint Michaels, Maryland. The Covey home was small, unpainted, and hidden nearly a mile from the main road. Before setting up as a small farmer, Covey worked as an overseer, where he may have gained his reputation as a “Negro breaker.” In 1834 he rented the services of Frederick Douglass for an entire year. Douglass, nearly sixteen years old, initially submitted to the regular whippings but he eventually fought back and later recorded that this was when he finally felt like a man.

Douglass's owner, Thomas Auld, leased his slave's services to Covey; through this arrangement, Covey would receive low-cost farm labor and Auld could expect a more submissive slave in return. On 1 January 1834 Douglass traveled the ...

Article

Crawford, Anthony P.  

Caroline DeVoe

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman, landowner, farmer, and lynching victim, was born into slavery in Abbeville, South Carolina, the youngest son of Thomas and Louisa, slaves on the plantation of Ben Crawford in Abbeville, South Carolina. After Emancipation and Ben Crawford's death, his widow Rebecca may have bequeathed land to her former slave, Thomas, Anthony's father. Thomas continued to acquire land, and in 1873 he purchased 181 acres of fertile land from Samuel McGowan, a former Confederate general and South Carolina Supreme Court Justice. Thomas Crawford's “homeplace” was located in an alluvial valley, approximately seven miles west of the town of Abbeville. The rich land was flanked on the east by Little River and on the west by Penny Creek.

While Crawford's brothers worked the family farm Anthony was sent to school walking seven miles to and from school each day Seventeen year old Anthony was ...

Article

Downs, Perry  

Eric Gardner

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
01 December 2006

The oldest child of Harriet Bailey, Downs was born enslaved to Aaron Anthony, the overseer for Colonel Edward Lloyd, a wealthy planter on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Like his younger brother Frederick Douglass, Downs probably saw his mother only intermittently, as Anthony regularly hired her out; Downs was reared by his grandmother Betsey Bailey and the extended kinship network of Bailey's relatives and children. Douglass's autobiographies relate only two stories of Downs's childhood, both of which speak directly to the complexity of a child's life as a slave. When Douglass was brought from his grandmother's cabin to live on Lloyd's plantation, Wye House, in late 1824, Downs tried to comfort the frightened six-year-old with gifts of peaches and pears. Days later, Downs—only eleven years old himself—was savagely beaten by Anthony.

When Anthony died in 1827 his slaves were divided among his heirs Douglass was sent to ...

Article

July, Johanna  

Kenyatta D. Berry

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

a black Seminole, was born around 1857 or 1858 in Nacimiento de Los Negros, the settlement established in northern Mexico following the emigration of Indian and Black Seminoles from the United States Indian Territory in 1849. In 1849 about two hundred Seminoles and blacks left the reserve without the permission of Indian agents or government officials and headed to Mexico. Nine months later they crossed into the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass. The Mexican government settled the new immigrants into two small military colonies at Muzquiz and Nacimiento de Los Negros. At its peak in 1850 this colony provided a home for more than seven hundred Black Seminole men women and children The tribes of Black Seminoles were a mixture of Seminole Indians and African American slaves fleeing from Florida after the Seminole War This group became famous for their thorough clearing of marauders from their territory ...

Article

Kingsley, Anna Madgigine Jai  

Philippe Girard

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

also known as Anta Majigeen Njaay or Anna Madgigine Jai, was an African-born slave, freedwoman, and planter who spent her adult life in North America and the Caribbean. Kingsley, originally named Anta Majigeen Njaay, came from the present-day country of Senegal on the western coast of Africa. Her exact birth date is unknown. Her ethnic background was Wolof, so she may have come from the Jolof Empire. She may have been exported through Gorée Island, a prominent slave-trading emporium near present-day Dakar, Senegal. After enduring the Middle Passage, she arrived on the Danish ship Sally in Havana, Cuba, in July 1806.

In October 1806 Kingsley was purchased by Zephaniah Kingsley Jr a Bristol born Quaker planter and merchant who had successively lived in England the United States and the Danish West Indies He was supportive of slavery an institution that underpinned his vast wealth but also progressive in ...

Article

Law, Eugenia  

Wanda Feranandopulle

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
28 January 2022

from Hyman, Florence County, South Carolina, formerly enslaved, had eleven children, was a wife to Augustus (Guss) Law who was a legal voter, and was able to own land after the Civil War, when African Americans in the South acquired approximately 15 million acres.

Eugenia and some of her children worked as farm laborers, while others were teachers at the local McKnight School, and another also worked as a mail contractor using a horse and buggy.

Although the postwar Reconstruction era had encouraged African Americans to acquire property, Black landowners received very little or no support from the federal or state governments.

Eugenia did not attend school and could not read or write. In 1902 Guss Law left 450 acres of land and all possessions to Eugenia to be managed by her son Joe Although by the 1920s rural African American land ownership was declining Joe bucked this trend ...

Article

Patience, Crowder  

Juanita Patience Moss

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave, Union soldier, and farmer, was born to unknown parents in Chowan County, North Carolina, possibly on the Briols farm, located three miles from Edenton. Crowder was illiterate, and on his military records his surname is spelled Pacien. Some years after the Civil War, when his children entered school, their teachers spelled it Patience. When he applied for a government pension after the war, a member of the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Calvary by the name of Thomas Patience also gave his birthplace as that the Briols farm. Since the name of Patience is relatively uncommon, it is likely that they were brothers. Unfortunately, no records exist to verify the supposition.

When the Union army penetrated the South many slaves fled in search of the freedom promised to them if they could reach the Yankees Crowder Patience was one of these slaves At the age of eighteen he ...

Article

Pitombo, Marinha das Virgens Gallo  

Mary Ann Mahony

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

liberta (freed African) cacao farmer in the Brazilian northeast during the nineteenth century, was born into slavery around 1840, the mixed-race (parda) daughter of Efegênia, a woman enslaved on a sugar plantation in São Francisco do Conde or Santo Amaro, in the Recôncavo district of the Brazilian province of Bahia. She rose to be the matriarch of a well-established farm family in Ilhéus, a town in southern Bahia that experienced a cacao boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the waning days of slavery into the post-emancipation order.

Pitombo’s mother was owned by Fortunato Pereira Gallo. Sometime after 1845, when he acquired land, Gallo brought the young girl, and presumably her mother, to Ilhéus. By 1860 the young woman was living and working with between sixty and eighty other enslaved persons on Gallo s Santo Antônio das Pedras plantation which produced timber ...

Article

Quarshie, Tetteh  

Frank Afari

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Ghanaian agricultural innovator, credited as the first successful planter of cocoa in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), was born in Christiansborg (Osu) in 1842 to Ga parents. His father, Mlekuboi, was a farmer from Teshie, and his mother, Ashong-Fio, came from Labadi. Though both parents came from poor backgrounds, and were not literate, they were known to be intelligent people of good moral standing.

Like his father, Quarshie could not read and write. In his youth he trained as a blacksmith at the Basel Missionary Industrial Training Institute at Christiansborg Castle, Osu, where the mission had set up training workshops to promote technical and vocational education in order to meet the growing demand for skilled workmen along the coast. Missionary craftsmen who manned these workshops specialized in training African apprentices in carpentry, masonry, chariot-making, blacksmithing, pottery, shoemaking, hat-making, and bookbinding. In 1854 aged twelve Quarshie was apprenticed to one ...

Article

Slaughter, Moses  

Carolyn Warfield

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
29 February 2012

Union soldier, farm worker, and Union Army veterans' leader, was born Moses Fauntleroy, in Clarksville, Montgomery County, Middle Tennessee. He was one of ten children born to Emalina Fauntleroy. As the son of a slave woman, Moses was also born a slave. According to the 1900 U.S. Federal Census, Moses asserted that his parents were born in Virginia; however, no name was given for his father.

An elderly Moses Slaughter of Evansville, Indiana, was interviewed for the Indiana Writers' Project, Slave Narratives, conducted by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1936–1938. The published interview is accessible in several formats, however, the descriptive source material has incorrect dates of certain events, likely due to an old man's declined health.

As the personal property of Joseph Murdock Fauntleroy, a prominent tobacco planter, the young Moses was separated from his family in 1854 when he ...

Article

Somers, Alfred  

Orlando Romero

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2014

former slave, soldier, farmer, and sergeant of the Thirty-First United States Regiment, was, according to a statement he gave to a New Haven Register reporter during the Civil War, born a slave in Louden County, Virginia. Somers was sold many times until he was bought by a man who lived in Ralls County, Missouri.

Somers s journey to freedom began when he joined an expedition to Pike s Peak Colorado Twelve men from Ralls County agreed with Somers s owner to take him on as a cook Somers later described his journey We reached Denver City on the 18 of June and went up the mountain We prospected for gold and found 5 cents worth in a pail full of clay We thought we had a good claim and worked But when we had laid the bottom bare we could find no more gold We gave ...

Article

Sy, El Hajj Malik  

Douglas Thomas

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

founder and leader of a branch of the Tijaniya, one of the Sufi tariqa (religious/spiritual path) in present-day Senegal, was born to a family of marabout farmers in the village of Gaya in the westernmost province of Fouta Tooro north of present-day Senegal. Fouta Tooro was a precolonial state of the Peulh people (also known as Fula or Fulbe). In 1776, an Islamic revolution overthrew the nominal Muslim Denianke rulers and established a theocratic state. Futa Tooro is also the home region of El Hajj Umar Taal, the celebrated nineteenth-century jihadist who propagated the Tijani tariqa throughout the region along with his confrontational conversion style. In the 1850s, Taal recruited for his jihad from Fouta Tooro, further destabilizing the region; in 1861, he would successfully annex Futa Tooro to his Tukuleur Empire. It was into this environment that El Hajj Malik Sy was born.

El Hajj Malik Sy ...

Article

Washington, George  

Darrell M. Milner

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

George Washington was born near Winchester in Frederick County, Virginia, the son of a mixed-race African American slave father named Washington and a white mother whose name is unrecorded. The nature of his parentage violated social conventions; his father was immediately sold, never to be involved in his life again, and his mother allowed baby George to be adopted by James C. Cochran and his wife, a white family. At age four George moved west with the Cochrans, settling first near Delaware City, Ohio; when he was nine, the family moved farther west, eventually to Bloomington on the Missouri frontier. As a black youth in the slave state of Missouri, Washington was denied a formal education, but he taught himself the rudiments of reading, writing, and mathematics. He also acquired the skills in woodcraft and marksmanship for which he would later become renowned.

By 1841 Washington and a partner ...