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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE MISSING PERSONS OF RECONSTRUCTION  
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Joshua D. Rothman
February 26, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Enslaved families were regularly separated​. A new history
chronicles the tenacious efforts of the emancipated to be reunited​
with their loved ones. _

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_Last Seen
The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost
Families_
By Judith Giesberg
Simon & Schuster
ISBN13: 9781982174323

Born enslaved in northern Virginia in the 1820s, Henry Tibbs first
lost his mother when their enslaver sold her to notorious Alexandria
slave trader Joseph Bruin. Tibbs was just a small child when that
happened, but his age was no obstacle to being sold himself to Bruin a
short while later. A weeping and distraught Tibbs was reunited briefly
with his mother in Bruin’s jail, only to be separated from her for a
second time when Bruin loaded him onto a ship bound for New Orleans
and sold him to a Mississippi cotton planter named Micajah Pickett.

Tibbs grew up among strangers on Pickett’s plantation, and he
labored under the lash for decades until the Civil War came. Fleeing
enslavement when the opportunity presented itself, in 1863 Tibbs
enlisted as a private in the U.S. Colored Light Artillery. He spent
the next two years fighting to keep his freedom, receiving a promotion
to corporal and managing to emerge mostly unscathed from terrifying
engagements such as the massacre of Black soldiers by Confederate
forces at Fort Pillow in Tennessee that was a savage reminder of the
war’s stakes.

Not that Henry Tibbs needed the reminder. By the end of the war, he
had a wife and two daughters, and he did not want them to suffer
slavery’s brutalities and indignities ever again. He knew the pain
and the trauma all too well, and he knew that the passage of time
never entirely erased them. But Henry Tibbs also knew what it meant to
imagine that the agonies of the past might be undone, and that at
least some of what slaveholders had stolen might be recovered. In
1879, Tibbs wrote a letter to the editor of the _Southwestern
Christian Advocate _looking for information about his mother.

A Black newspaper based in New Orleans, the _Advocate_ was one of many
papers that published letters to the editor and advertisements from
formerly enslaved people who searched for family and friends after
emancipation. Numbering in the thousands and appearing all over the
country for decades, notices came from mothers and fathers looking for
their children, sons and daughters looking for their parents, spouses
and army buddies seeking one another’s whereabouts, and brothers and
sisters eager for the slightest bit of intelligence about their
siblings.

With the help of her students, Judith Giesberg, a professor of history
at Villanova University, has collected these materials for years and
made the still-expanding archive of them publicly available on the
internet. In her new book, _Last Seen_
[[link removed]]_, _Giesberg is only able
to pursue a handful of the stories from the archive. But those stories
are well chosen and effective representatives of so many others, and
they are powerful. For one thing, they throw into stark relief some of
the insulting and revolting myths about slavery that proliferated in
American culture by the late nineteenth century. They expose
depictions of slaveholders as loving caretakers as fairy tales,
disprove the lie that family separations were rare and
inconsequential, and demonstrate that white Americans who saw the
longing of former slaves for their families as amusing plantation
romances still believed Black families were less vital and real than
their own. But above all else, the stories Giesberg tells are damning
testimonies to the utter viciousness of a system that thrived on
tearing Black families apart without mercy, and poignant portrayals of
enduring love and hope that indifference and cruelty could never
extinguish.

Among the countless barbarities of slavery in the United States, the
violent sundering of Black families was among the most diabolical.
After the importation of enslaved people from overseas was banned in
1808, slave laborers could only legally be acquired domestically,
giving rise to a booming internal market in human beings. In the
decades before the Civil War, more than one million enslaved people
were taken across state lines. Perhaps twice as many people were
bought and sold within the boundaries of individual states. Most of
those trafficked were children, teenagers, and young adults considered
strong enough to survive the grueling labor regimen of America’s
expanding cotton empire. Slaveholders and their slave trader allies
cared little about the family and communal ties that enslaved people
had forged. They tore holes in the hearts of their victims and rent
the social fabric of Black lives as they forcibly walked or shipped
people hundreds of miles from their homes in what Giesberg and other
historians refer to as the Second Middle Passage.
 

The chaos of the Civil War scattered Black Americans across the
landscape once again. As they joined Union armies, sought harbor in
refugee camps, and took flight from their enslavers, they not
infrequently lost track of family members. And when the war ended,
they received almost no formal assistance in relocating loved ones or
otherwise piecing back together the lives that they had already fought
so hard to rebuild, sometimes more than once.

White Americans told members of this Freedom Generation that they
needed to move on, and white newspaper editors who did relay their
stories deployed euphemisms about searches for people who had been
“lost” lest their readership be made uncomfortable “hearing from
ex-slaves about how their children had been taken from them.” But
Black people themselves refused to forget. At the center of _Last
Seen_ are accounts of those who lived their lives in the present yet
would not relinquish those taken from them long ago. In reaching out
through networks of Black newspapers and churches to tell their
stories and ask for assistance, they left evidence, in Giesberg’s
words, “of pasts and futures that might have been.”

Each of Giesberg’s chapters generally follows a similar narrative
strategy, with one advertisement or letter standing in for others of
its type. When Hagar Outlaw asked readers of the Philadelphia
_Christian Recorder_ for help finding any of the eight children taken
from her during slavery, for example, she was just one among many
hundreds of mothers who hoped she might learn something before she
died. By the time George and Beverly Tibbs (no relation to Henry)
placed ads in newspapers in Richmond and Chicago looking for their
brother Lias, it was more than 50 years after slavery had ended, but
they were hardly the only people who never gave up on a lost siblin

Giesberg follows each highlighted account carefully and with nuance.
Sexual and physical violence and slaveholder intrusions into marriage
and parenthood helped define the contours of American slavery. Yet
every person’s life was unique, and Giesberg reminds us that those
contours were experienced differently by men, women, and children, and
that the regimes of America’s slaveholding class varied from
Virginia to Mississippi to Texas to California. A woman named Clara
Bashop placed an advertisement looking for her children, just as a man
named Tally Miller wrote a letter to the editor looking for his. But
they came to their searches after different ordeals. Bashop had been
sold apart from her 12-year-old daughter at a Richmond slave auction
and hauled off to pick cotton in Mississippi after the man who
enslaved her fell into debt. Miller had been hired out onto the land
of the man who enslaved his wife and daughters, only to have his own
enslaver decide to leave South Carolina for Louisiana. He thought he
might become richer there than he already was, and he force-marched
Miller with him for more than eight hundred miles while Miller’s
family got left behind.

Similarly, the overall trajectory of Black life during and after
emancipation might be described through the upheavals of military and
refugee life in wartime, the promise of Reconstruction, the horrifying
violence and economic subjugation that undid that promise, and the
communal vitality that Black Americans built together and brought out
of the South into northern cities during the Great Migration. But
Giesberg is sensitive to how the end of slavery and the course of
Reconstruction could look very different for different people. Henry
Safford witnessed emancipation as a soldier in the U.S. Colored Troops
and saw Reconstruction rise and fall in his native Georgia, while
sisters Julia Vickers and Emeline Hall had found their way to free
Black communities in different northern states by the time slavery
collapsed and each spent decades wondering what had become of the
other. The two sisters were ultimately reunited by happenstance after
40 years apart, probably when Vickers’s son Walter heard his aunt
was living in one of the cities he passed through while traveling the
vaudeville circuit. Safford, meanwhile, spent years trying to track
down comrades who might provide evidence of his wartime injuries,
eventually finding several whose testimony helped him apply for a
federal pension.

Context does sometimes threaten to sidetrack or overwhelm the stories
of the formerly enslaved and their families in _Last Seen. _But
Giesberg mostly manages to avoid that trap. Moreover, while Giesberg
writes with no small amount of pathos, she never tilts over into
piteousness. The story of Araminta Turner—who in 1869 sought out her
husband, Alexander, who had been dragged to Texas by his enslaver more
than a decade earlier—is wrenching. Giesberg imagines Turner late in
life telling “stories about those she had loved and lost” and
keeping “her ear to the ground for word” from the South. But
Giesberg focuses less on the sorrow and grief, and more on the
endurance and courage it took to remember and to look in the first
place.
 

The obstacles placed between people torn apart from one another in the
era of slavery were nearly insurmountable, and the odds of people
finding each other in freedom were extremely long. Giesberg records
only a few instances of reunion like that of Julia Vickers and Emeline
Hall. It happened sometimes that an advertisement was seen by the
right person in the right place, that information about a relative’s
fate was delivered to a searcher, and that people saw one another
again on this earth. But it was rare. Giesberg estimates that the
success rate of the advertisements and letters that appear in the
archive she and her students have created was perhaps as low as 2
percent. The truth was that the damage slavery inflicted on Black
families and communities was usually irreversible. That was almost
surely true for Henry Tibbs: There is no evidence that he ever saw his
mother again. But nothing could take away the hope Henry Tibbs held in
his heart. That hope is the legacy.

 

JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN is professor of history and chair of the Department
of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author of several
books about the history of American slavery including, most recently,
_The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America._

* slavery
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* Reconstruction
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* U.S. history
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* Nineteenth Century U.S. history
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* Family reunification
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