[The following depicts what it was like on the Homefront for the left-behind families of Southern slaves who ran away from their masters and attempted to enlist in the Union army. More often than not, their masters would take out their anger and frustration at these “betrayals” on wives these men left behind.]
”I fought to free my mammy and her little children,” a veteran recalled. But the contrabands [runaway slaves to fled to Union garrisons] who joined the Union army knew they were risking not only their own lives but the lives of loved ones who remained in slavery. One recruit trembled for his sister back in the slave South, afraid her defiant pride in his service in the Union army would get her killed.
He was right to worry. A black private named Glover received word from his wife that her overseer had “most cruelly” whipped her with a buggy harness. After a Woodford County, Kentucky, slave master named Warren Wiley found out that the runaway husband of his slave Patsey had joined the Union army, “he treated me more cruelly than ever, whipping me frequently without any cause and insulting me on every occasion.” Even after Patsey’s husband was killed, her master “whipped me severely, saying my husband had gone into the army to fight against white folks, and he – my master – would let me know that I was foolish to let my husband go” and would “take it out of my back.” He would “kill me by piecemeal,” he said, and hoped “that the last one of the nigger soldiers would be Killed.”
For the last whipping he gave her, “he took me into the Kitchen, tied my hands, tore all my clothes off until I was entirely naked, bent me down, placed my head between his Knees, then whipped me most unmercifully.”
Source:
Ward, Andrew. “We Soldiers Are Men.” River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. Viking, 2005. 66. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Anonymous in UHS, p. 144.
Anonymous (Williamson County) in Johnson, ed., God Struck Me Dead, p. 106.
Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, p. 70.
Patsey [Wiley?] in Berlin et al., eds., Free At Last, pp. 400-401.
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