My on-going work with early Black print continues to remind me of the Black press’s essential push to remember and record what the dominant white American culture ignored, dismissed, forgot, suppressed, or erased.  But that hasn’t only taken the form of thinking about folks who wrote regularly for papers like the Christian Recorder like Edmonia Goodelle Highgate.  I often find smaller traces in newspapers calling to me.

Easily among the most powerful are the “Information Wanted” ads in the Recorder.  Studied in Heather Andrea Williams’s amazing Help Me to Find My People (UNC 2012), these short notices began running before the Civil War was even over and continued for decades.  They were most often placed by Black folks looking for family members, and the vast majority sought to reconnect families that had been sundered by slavery.

Imagine the context here.  Finally free, millions had (at least theoretical possibilities for) some mobility, broader communication, and legal recognition of family ties.  It is no wonder that massive numbers of Black folks sought to have their marriages officially recorded. (Sample information on this can be found here and here.)  Even more folks tried to find their parents, their children, their siblings, and other relatives and friends stolen from them by chattel slavery—which, of course, was not just a massive and oppressive legal and economic system but a set of individual daily decisions by individual white slaveowners, many of whom knew well the enslaved people they were selling away from their families and friends.

The “Information Wanted” ads are thus part and parcel of Black resistance and struggle even as they (and, in fact, because they) attempt to recover individual connections.  They also tell us about diverse Black lives in the years after emancipation--stories of love and loss, mobility and rootedness, hope and frustration.  Many Black genealogists speak of the Civil War and emancipation as a “wall” that it is difficult to ever get through; these texts both write of and write against that wall. 

As such, they desperately need more attention.  In the ideal world, I’d think they could be the basis of a spectacular “big data” project: one that not only noted the information in the ads but placed that information in dialogue with census and other government records (especially those just being released by the Freedmen’s Bureau; see, for example, the NMAAHC work).   Such work could help us pay real and long-overdue attention to the ways in which the individual stories of Black lives matter.

Take this ad, which ran for the first time on page three of the 16 March 1867 issue, for example:

INFORMATION WANTED.
Information wanted, by Amanda Bekley, of my two sons--the oldest named William Bekley, and the youngest Archibald Bekley. When I last saw them, William belonged to Jeff Thomas, of Minerva, KY, and Archibald to Langan Tabb, of Dover, KY.
Any information in regard to them will be thankfully received.
        Address,
        AMANDA WOOD,
        Sylvania, Lucas Co., Ohio.
Mar. 16-1 m.

The Recorder’s standard notation marks this as a notice that would run for one month.  As I discuss in Black Print Unbound, the cost of such ads seems to have shifted in early 1867 to twelve and a half cents per line of nine words. (In the mid 1880s, such notices were free for subscribers, though non-subscribers were charged.)  Given Amanda Wood’s submission at a moment of flux, we can’t know for certain if she had to pay for the notice.  Indeed, the paper itself tells us little about her.  We don’t even know at this point whether she was tied to AME activities in Sylvania, whether she went into nearby Toledo (with a larger Black community anchored in part by stalwart Warren AME), or whether she was directly associated with the AME church at all.

But Amanda Wood isn’t that hard to find.  A quick check of census records tells us a bit more.  By 1870, Amanda Bekley had married Stephen Wood, a New York-born farmer and widower a few years her senior.  Stephen Wood had at least one grown son, Albert, who farmed nearby.  The 1870 census of Sylvania (Lucas County, page 128B) lists Amanda Wood as 55, “F” (female), “B” (Black), and of Kentucky birth.  Stephen Wood was listed as 58, “M,” and “B.”  Both were marked as illiterate, although Black Print Unbound articulates the lack of trust we should place in such census-takers’ determinations.  One boarder, Canadian-born Henry Jackson, shared their home and worked as a farm laborer.  The 1880 census (Sylvania, Lucas County, page 21C) lists her as 69, “F,” “B,” Kentucky-born of Virginia-born parents, and working at “Keeping House”; Stephen is listed as 76, “M,” “B,” and New York-born of unlisted parentage.  A thirteen year old African American girl whose name is given as Nettie Vanbrunt and whose occupation is listed as a servant lived with them--though the Woods’ economic circumstances were never strong, and Vanbrunt’s occupation suggests that she hired out.  Digging into additional records--other censuses, vital records, land records, court records, etc.--could certainly fill out this picture further.

Census records also tell us something about the white people who owned Amanda Wood’s two sons--and give some of the traces of that ownership. 

“Jeff Thomas of Minerva, KY” was most likely Jefferson Thomas, who is listed in the 1850 Mason County census (page 1A) as a tavern keeper with property totaling $1500.  Additionally, he owned five Black people.  The 1850 “slave schedule,” used in part to ensure national adherence to the infamous 3/5 clause, lists those people by age, sex, and color, but not by name.  Thus, they are listed as “40 M B,” “69 F B,” “34 F B,” “16 F M,” and “9 F B.”  Thomas likely did not yet own Amanda Wood’s son at this point, and I am still attempting to definitively determine Jefferson Thomas’s whereabouts in 1860.  In 1850, he was listed with his 34-year-old wife Elizabeth and children Edward (10), Mary Alice (7), and Jefferson (2), all born in Kentucky, as well as five boarders and an elderly woman who seems to have been Jefferson Thomas’s mother.

“Langan Tabb, of Dover, KY” left an easier trail, though he is indexed under various first names including Langhorne, Laughorne, Langorn, and Langleorn.  Listed as a 50-year-old tobacco factor in the 1850 census of Mason County (page 20A), he owned six Black people, listed in the slave schedule as “M B 19,” “M B 25,” “M B 33,” “F B 35,” “F B 32,” and “F B 80.”  He lived with his 34-year-old wife Eliza, a young man (probably a stepson or other relative) named William Hall (age 12), three children (ages 9, 6, and 3), and seventeen-year-old Caroline Hubbard, whose relationship to the Tabbs I haven’t yet determined.  They lived near William Tabb, Langhorne’s brother, who was also a slaveowner.  In 1860, Langhorne Tabb was listed (in the Mason County census, page 239) as a merchant with $20,500 in real estate and $3800 in personal property, as well as six enslaved people, who were listed in the 1860 slave schedule as “35 M B,” “35 M B,” 30 F B,” 32 F B,” “16 M B,” and “12 F B.” 

Perhaps the sixteen-year-old unnamed boy was Archibald Bekley, Amanda’s youngest son.  Perhaps not.  The “16 M B” is a trace that is tragic in its ambiguity and in all that ambiguity tells us about American history.  Archibald Bekley’s owner, Langhorne Tabb, would live to age 93 and be celebrated in the 16 August 1902 Dover Public (in claims repeated by at least one local history) as “the most prominent, wealthy, and progressive citizen” of his town.

I haven’t--at least yet--been able to definitively find Amanda Bekley Wood’s two sons after the war.  They may have kept a variation of Bekley, taken slaveowners’ surnames, or fashioned new names.  They may have stayed in Kentucky or moved out of the state.  They may not have survived.  They may be findable, or they may have been lost in the sea of post-war change.  Generations of historians and genealogists will tell you that slaveowners are easier to find than enslaved and formerly enslaved people, and perhaps the old approach of “following the white people” might help here.  Perhaps not.

Still, there is one taunting possibility for William.  A William Beckley is listed in the 1870 Minerva census (Mason County, page 464A)--certainly the name and the place.  He is 40, perhaps too old for Amanda’s son--though not definitively, especially given both slavery’s evil and the notoriously uneven census listing of ages.  He was born in Kentucky, as was his wife Harriet, age 40.  A laborer, he, like the rest of his family, is marked as illiterate.  That “rest of the family” was composed of four children: Sarah, 10, listed as a “domestic servant”; Daniel, 7; William, 2; and George, 1.  In the family’s likely 1880 listing in nearby Bracken County (page 494C), Sarah and Daniel are no longer listed, but William and George were joined by Samuel, 9; John, 7; and two children, 2 and 1, whose names I can’t yet definitively read.  I can’t help but wonder if these are Amanda Wood’s grandchildren and about how the language “Any information in regard to them will be thankfully received” doesn’t begin to tell the story.

Amanda Wood, over 260 miles away, might well not have been capable to travelling to do what might have been a fruitless, wandering search for her sons.  The “Information Wanted” ads offered a bit of hope and action, a kind of message in a bottle--even for illiterate folks, as area ministers, for example, might read them and share them with their congregants.  But for every happy reunion--and there were some--we need remember the thousands, the hundreds of thousands whose circles had been broken.

It seems to me that a great project for us all is to gather the bits we have, share them, and think and talk about these kinds of stories.  Say their names, recover their stories.

In my next post, more on the “Information Wanted” ads, the losses they tried to mend, and the life stories they suggest.

More folks are beginning to read the work of Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, who penned more than a dozen lively letters to the Christian Recorder and who I’ve worked to reintroduce through both part of a chapter in Black Print Unbound and an essay in Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism. 

She deserves much, much wider attention.

Born in 1844 to Charles and Hannah Francis Highgate, probably in either Syracuse or Albany, New York, Edmonia Highgate was immersed in Black activism early.  Her parents, for example, were friends of Jermain Loguen and Henry Highland Garnet, supporters of Samuel Ringgold Ward’s early Black newspaper (the Impartial Citizen), and acquaintances of white abolitionist Samuel Joseph May.  A rare Black graduate of Syracuse High School (1861), Edmonia Highgate taught in both Montrose, Pennsylvania, and Binghamton, New York, after being denied a position in Syracuse because of her race.  Like a number of young Black women teachers, Highgate felt the call of education efforts for the newly freed people of the South, applied to teach for the American Missionary Association, and was eventually posted in Norfolk, Virginia, with, among others, Recorder writer Sarah “Sallie” Daffin.

She taught in Norfolk for several months, and it was a life-changing experience.  The conditions there, paired with the stress of desperately working to help folks who had been enslaved for their entire lives, eventually took a toll on Highgate, and she seems to have had a breakdown.  Accompanied back to Syracuse by friends and nourished by family there, though, she recommitted herself to the struggle and, only weeks after returning home, addressed the 1864 National Convention of Colored Men.  A year later, she was teaching in schools for newly freed people again, and her work would eventually take her as far South as New Orleans.  During these years, she was thinking through both practices and philosophies of activism, and she began writing to the Recorder to share some of those thoughts (as well as broader news) in 1865.

One of Highgate’s pieces I’ve talked about most, her 3 November 1866 Recorder  “On Horse Back—Saddle Dash, No. 1,” directly invokes Henry David Thoreau and a marked Transcendentalist sensibility.  She places this thinking in dialogue with her experiences as a teacher in rural Louisiana, in the midst of seething “unreconstructed” Confederates who, Klan-like, fire shots when she is out riding. 

But the way she got to rural Louisiana is just as frightening and worth remembering just as much.  That story also found print in the Recorder. 

In an event that echoed racist violence across the South and is now known as the New Orleans Massacre or the New Orleans Riot, on 30 July 1866, former Confederates active in Louisiana’s Democratic Party attacked folks who were attempting to reconvene the state constitutional convention (originally held in 1864).  The conventioneers hoped to fight to extend voting rights and civil safeguards to African Americans in the face of a Democrat-controlled state legislature that was quickly moving to codify new Black codes.   Dozens of people—mostly African Americans—were killed; many more were wounded.  Images depicting the riot at the NYPL can be seen here and here. 

Highgate, then teaching in New Orleans, was there, and, in a letter published in the 18 August 1866 Recorder titled “New Orleans Correspondence,” she described the events that would soon push her from the city. 

The original appears as a single long paragraph.  I’ve added paragraph breaks for readability.


                                                                                          For the Christian Recorder
       MR. EDITOR:— During a lull in the grand saturnalia of blood I write you. Any reconstructionist who has fanatically believed Louisiana’s loyalty, beyond doubt has had demonstration to the contrary which would convince the most incredulous. On Monday, the 30th ultimo, the friends of universal suffrage, including Michael Hahn, the ex-Governor, Dr. [A. P.] Dostie, Revs. Jackson and Horton, also, one Mr. Judd, met in Convention, and endeavored to revive the Conventional measures of 1864. They assembled in the Assembly Hall, Mechanics’ Institute, only to be assailed by armed policemen, who shot into the crowd of colored men who gathered outside, killing and wounding white and colored as they chanced to be within the range of their shot. All of the mentioned persons were wounded, some of them mortally, beside over one hundred negroes, who were also, many of them taken to the Marine Hospital, and were humanely cared for by Dr. Harris, surgeon in charge, his faithful assistants, and the noble-hearted Madame [Louisa] Demortie. Your correspondent did what she could of wound-dressing until near midnight.
        Some ten died, to say nothing of those who died in the workhouse, and were locked up in the several stations by the “policemen under orders,” “all honorable men.” One of the local preachers in St. James’ Chapel was severely injured. There has been some equally unnecessary shooting of colored residents since the 30th, by our civil guard. For a day or two the city was under martial law, and we expected thorough justice from the Military Commission which was trying these rioters, but now civil power is supreme, and the revivers of the “’64 Convention” are considered “the disturbers of the public peace,” and they are to be tried before a civil tribunal. That being the translation which our mayor gave Andy Johnson’s telegram “to prevent the establishment of a new form of government here.” He was literally obeyed, and so bloodshed and carnage have their sway, all save the bloodhounds, as they had six years ago! But we must have no better government, even though the proved loyalists desire it, and simply because that government would be “new.” Dost thou forget, old Judas, the Freedom’s and Justice’s sway is as old as the heavens?
        Nor is New Orleans yet perfectly safe. The hunted non-recognized defenders of the Republic are yet threatened, and the creole fire in their veins burns—for what they syllable in a whisper—REVENGE—but it is as forcible as the serpent’s hiss, and the portents are fearful. When unoffending people are treated like dogs while returning from their daily toil; even slaughtered in cool blood in their beds, and the school-building in which their offspring are instructed in Wisdom’s ways is burned as they tried to burn mine, may not this community expect retribution?
        The Crescent City is not alone in this display of the old spirit of rebellion. In Jackson, La., about two hundred miles from here, a gang, one of whom was a “Justice of the Peace,” attempted the life of Mr. Geo. T. Ruby of Maine, because forsooth, as an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, he attempted to establish a school in that community for the freed people. They beat, and were only deferred from killing this brave, trusty colored educator, because they feared that some one of their party would betray the secret of his death. This party were brought before Judge Sherman, of the Military Commission of this city, and, after pleading “not guilty,” were bailed $1,000 each until November. In the mean time, Mr. R. is teaching steadily on, sublimely indifferent to the muttered threats against his life. We have some trusty men in the department and women, too, who “do and dare” for Freedom's cause. The estimable Rev. John Turner is on leave of absence from his charge for a few weeks. We need his calm, cheerful, powerful, executive arm in this disquieted region greatly.
                                        E. GOODELLE H.
                                        New Orleans, August 4th.

 
Certainly one of the goals of Black Print Unbound is to help recover texts and authors and histories like this.  In this vein, I’ll note Highgate wrote in a rich range of genres and with a vast sense of subjects.  

Additional Recorder works by Highgate include:
* “Salvation Only in Work,” 4 February 1865
* two parts of what seems a three-part short story “Congojoco,” 20 and 27 May 1865
* “Truth,” 27 October 1866
* “Letter from New Orleans,” 19 October 1867
* “The Work in Mississippi,” 16 January 1869

Highgate’s fellows—both writers for the Recorder and teachers and other Black activists in the post-Civil War South—similarly demand much more attention.  Daffin’s letter on Highgate’s collapse, for example, is in the 8 October 1864 Recorder, and more on Daffin can be found in my Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature.

But I also hope that our recovery of Highgate helps combat the senses that are far too common in our nation: that incidents of violence by white men against African Americans are the exception rather than the norm in our history, that such violence can be seen as a collection of random acts rather than acts tied deeply to politics and power, or that the Civil War ended all of the conditions connected to the massive system of chattel slavery and the national racism surrounding that system.

Like much of the Black press, the Christian Recorder worked tirelessly to help America remember what many folks in power wanted forgotten, never known: think of the radical power in the paper’s title if we make it a verb: Christian recording. 

I’ll take up some of these questions, these acts of remembrance, in my next post.

When William H. Davis, Band-Master for the 22nd US Colored Infantry, wrote to the Christian Recorder to encourage a convention of Pennsylvania African Americans in the 14 October 1864 letter shared in my last post, he was participating in one of the most important modes of African American activism in the nineteenth century.

While scholars have long cited documents associated with such conventions--which were held across the North and, after the Civil War, across the South, too--it has been especially exciting to see renewed and richly interdisciplinary attention being paid to the “Colored Conventions.” 

A significant portion of that attention can be traced to the wonderful Colored Conventions Project at http://coloredconventions.org/.   Led by folks at the University of Delaware (with special praise to P. Gabrielle Foreman), the Project sponsors a website rich in primary texts, works for deep community engagement, and recently sponsored an exciting symposium, “Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age,” in April 2015.  (More information on the symposium can be found at http://coloredconventions.org/ccncda, and a video clip of part of my talk there can be found at http://coloredconventions.org/symposium-abstracts/#gardnervideo.)

My study of the Recorder has included rich reading about several conventions, with the 1864 National Convention of Colored Men remaining one of my favorite subjects.  Its title aside, this Syracuse convention featured speeches by two women critical to Black Print Unbound, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Edmonia Goodelle Highgate; this was also the convention George Boyer Vashon indirectly referenced in a recently rediscovered Recorder poem he wrote in memory of one of his children (more on this in a later post and in the upcoming issue of American Periodicals). 

To give you a bit of the flavor of that specific meeting and the rich and complex networks at and surrounding Black conventions, here’s a 15 October 1864 piece on the Syracuse meeting written by Elisha Weaver, the Recorder’s editor and a convention participant:


NATIONAL CONVENTION OF COLORED MEN IN AMERICA.

      We left Philadelphia in company with the delegates from our city for the National Convention, which was appointed to meet in Syracuse, N.Y. We arrived in New York a little after 2 o’clock, P.M., and remained in the city until 6 o’clock, P.M., at which time we took the finest boat we were ever on, for the city of Albany—and we must say that we were treated with all the respect and consideration that every traveller is alike entitled to—that is, in other words, we were treated as white men have always been treated, and were awarded the pleasure of enjoying all that we paid for. The state-room given us was as fine as the prided parlor of many a lady.
     We arrived in Albany at about half-past four the next morning, and we all dropped in at an eating-saloon in that city. Well, the person in charge probably did the best he could in the way of furnishing the table, but we had to pay dearly for the whistle—in fact, we had to pay for looking at the table. We thought it was an outrage, but we found that it was the usual way all along that route to charge people for looking at the table.
     We arrived in Syracuse at about two o’clock, P.M., and your humble servant stopped there with one Mr. Lianord, until we met with the Rev. J.W. Log[u]en, a man full of soul and benevolence, and he assigned us to a place where he desired us to stop, the house of one Mr. De Forest.
     While at the residence of this brother we had the pleasure of meeting the Rev. Mr. Gibbs, Rev. Mr. Reeves and Professor Bassett. We all stopped there together, and our readers may well imagine how much we enjoyed each other's society.
     At this Convention we met with a large number of our old friends, whose company we much like to be in.
     Among other distinguished individuals, we met with no less a personage than the gentlemanly editor of the Colored Citizen, Mr. Sampson, Mr. Langston, Esq., Rev. John Peck, of Pittsburg, Professor Vashon, and many other persons of considerable note. Among the lady portion, we met Mrs. [Frances] Ellen Watkins Harper, who is celebrated for her wonderful eloquence and powers of diction, and Miss Edmonia G. Highgate, who had just returned from Norfolk, Virginia, where she had been acting in the capacity of teacher among the freedmen. We also met another very interesting young lady, whose name was, we think, Miss C.C. Duncan, also a teacher among the freedmen. These ladies left our much esteemed friend, Miss Sallie Daffin, of Philadelphia, most busily engaged in teaching the freedmen.
     The Convention passed off pretty well, at least as well as could have been expected under the existing circumstances. In regard to capability, there never was so much genuine talent brought to bear at any former Convention in this country as at the one held in Syracuse, of which we speak.
     There was generally a good feeling existing among the delegates. A number of excellent resolutions were passed at the Convention in regard to the rights of the colored man, and referring to the great importance of forming a compact and permanent union among ourselves as a people divided.
     A vote was passed by unanimous consent that an address should be delivered or forwarded to the President of the United States in regard to having at once instituted a proper acknowledgment and enforcement of the rights of our race.
     It was also determined to send an address to Congress. Very high compliments were passed upon the Hon. Charles Sumner, of the United States Senate, Major-General Butler, and some others.
     At night, while the Convention was in session, we would have three or four very able speakers to address the audience, which, by the way, never numbered less than two thousand. The hall was a very ample and commodious one, being, without doubt, the largest and finest one in the city.
     The Convention held two sessions each day, and we always had a large and respectable concourse of hearers. The addresses were generally pithy and very acceptable to the people. The Convention established a Bureau, having its headquarters in the city of Philadelphia, Pa. Mr. John Langston, Esq., was elected Chairman, and Rev. John Peck, of Pittsburg, was appointed as first Vice-President. Mr. Turner, of Philadelphia, was made the Secretary of this great Union League Company of the colored citizens of the United States—a league whose name shall spread throughout the length and breadth of this great nation.
     Now, upon the whole, we had a very good and promising time at this Convention. All that we now hope for is that a great and permanent benefit may result from this wide assembling of our people, and most earnestly do we pray that we may not be disappointed, and that a more stringent and concentrated effort should be made by us as a race and people earnestly seeking after the proper path to moral and intellectual advancement. Let this Convention be the guide-post to fame and fortune. The ball has been set in motion. Shall we keep it moving on? We shall see that.

 
Beyond those listed—Jermain Loguen, John Mercer Langston, and Vashon, just for three examples—the convention featured Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown, and, presiding, Frederick Douglass. 

Think of the intellectual and moral power in that hall!

You can find the proceedings at the Colored Conventions Project here: http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/282

A small selection of the massive number of Recorder articles about various Black conventions includes:
* “Convention of the Colored Men of New Jersey,” 12 August 1865
* “Colored Convention in North Carolina,” 28 October 1865
* “National Convention of Colored Soldiers and Sailors,” 3 November 1866
* “The Colored Convention,” 23 January 1869
* “Bishop Payne’s Letter to the National Convention,” 13 February 1869

In my common refrain, I’ll end by again observing how much more attention these subjects deserve.  In my next, more on one of the convention speakers, a figure who continues to amaze me, Edmonia Highgate.

Black soldiers in the US Civil War were, of course, far from just the subjects of Black writing (including, per my last post, Black poetry).  They wrote to and for not only the Recorder but a range of other newspapers.  Some of their letters have long been considered by historians, and Edwin Redkey’s A Grand Army of Black Men (Cambridge 1992) collects several fascinating texts.

While Black Print Unbound includes much about Black soldiers' reading and writing, what’s been especially interesting to me about soldiers’ letters in the Recorder, is how actively they engage with questions reaching beyond the War.  That is, in the midst of their complex struggles as soldiers (and, indeed, to simply be considered as soldiers), many of the Black men serving in the Union army wrote about political questions, struggles for civil rights, questions of faith and home--a massive and rich range of issues. As powerful combinations of personal/autobiographical writing, occasional writing, sketches, and more formal essays deeply connected to the worlds around them, these texts demand further attention from literary scholars and the broader public.

A piece that still strikes me is this 15 October 1864 Recorder letter headed “A Soldier’s Idea of What Those at Home Should Do,” which carries the dateline “Camp in the Field, Crow’s Nest, Va., September 24th, 1864”:

      MR. EDITOR—Dear Sir: I have been asked several times since I have been in the army why I did not correspond with your valuable paper, and I always told the inquirers that I did not think that I was a fit person to write for your most excellent sheet. But since then I have come to the conclusion that I would try my hand by way of writing you a few lines for your columns.
     As I was walking out towards the Crow’s Nest, near the camp of our regiment, thoughts came in my mind concerning the condition of our people in Pennsylvania. I thought of what had been done for them that so many of her sable sons should enlist in the service of the United States, and thus counted in the quota of Pennsylvania.
     I answer, Not any thing. But still we go, to fill the quota of the State. It is true we are made citizens of the United States. It is also true that we get the same bounty that white men regularly receive in the United States army, together with pay and rations. But is this all that we should look for? I answer, No. We fill the quota of the State for white men, and, as we do all this in Pennsylvania, why not vote like white men?
     They acknowledge that we make as good soldiers, if not better than the whites—and as this is the case, why not accord us our rights as citizens of the State, as well as citizens of the United States?
     We have some ten or eleven regiments that have been raised in Pennsylvania, as good as can be produced in any other State, and still they come to fill up the ranks of the Union army in solid phalanx.
     The Copperheads say we ought to go and fight. I should like to know what for, unless it be to let them stay at home to vote the iron heel of oppression upon our necks. I am sure they are not going to vote us a citizenship in the United States,—that would not do,—for then we would be their equals. But I hope at some future day, not far distant, there will be a power sprung up that will drive away the prejudice that now exists in our so-called land of liberty. I suggest that now would be a good time to hold a State Convention, and strike another blow for our own franchise, while we are in the field fighting for the preservation of the Constitution and the Union.
     You have held Conventions before concerning the rights and privileges of our race—and why not call one now while the public sympathies are with us? I am sure it would have its proper effect. Now is the time. Strike the blow while you can.
     I shall certainly look for something being done by those that remain at home, for these are the ones that ought to do the work while we are in the fields to do battle, for we well know you won't be doing any more than your duty. You cannot but see that the Copperheads are doing every thing in their power to make peace and leave slavery and us just where we were, with the exception of those few who were freed by the kind hand of the Administration. But I think they have commenced too late in the day to do us any harm now, if you use the proper vigilance at home.
     We can do nothing but fight for the country’s cause—and that we will do until every man perish by the rebel bullet. In spite of all the prejudice that we have had shown towards us, we will stand by the old flag forever. If it should happen to prove of no benefit to us as a people, it will do good to the rising generation. So we will proudly fight the battles of our common country.
     I am aware that you are going to hold a State Convention, but for what purpose, I do not know, unless it be for toleration in the cars running to and fro through your city. I recommend you to get your franchise acknowledged first, and then you can claim every thing you want. I am sure, until you can go to the polls and vote as white men do, it will benefit you nothing. If you should get any thing without this, it will only be by the mercy of the whites. Therefore, I recommend you to go for the franchise in preference to all other objects. Then you will have all you desire.
     As I am about to come to a close, I hope this rather hastily penned little letter will meet with the approbation of yourself and the readers of your paper.
     Excuse the plain language that I have used, as I have no pretensions in the least to being a Shakespeare.
                                                            Yours,
                                                            WM. H. DAVIS,
                                                            Band-Master 22d Regiment United States Col. Troops.

 
Davis was a well-known musician and music teacher with deep ties to Philadelphia.  Recorder notes on his later work can be found in pieces titled “Amateur’s Companion” in the 9 December 1865 and 30 December 1865 issues and a piece titled “The Great Cure” in the 16 December 1865.

The 22nd had been organized at Camp William Penn in January 1864 and later left for Yorktown, Virginia.  They saw significant combat in the siege of Petersburg and other engagements.  They would later be sent to Washington, DC (where they were part of the memorial observations for President Lincoln) and Texas.  More information on the unit can be found on the NPS’s site.

Among the wealth of soldiers’ writing in the Recorder, these pieces are especially interesting:
   *William B. Johnson, “Soldier’s Letter,” 26 December 1863
   *John Hance, “Letter from Sergeant Hance, 4th US Colored Troops,” 20 August 1864
   *Garland H. White, “Letter from the Reverend Garland H. White, Chaplain of the 28th US Colored Regiment, Raised in Indiana,” 20 August 1864
   *J. H. Hall, “Letter from the 54th Massachusetts Regiment,” 27 August 1864
   *unsigned, “Letter from the 1st Colored Troops,” 8 July 1865

Also of real interest, two scholars have worked to share the writings of Henry McNeal Turner, a Black Union chaplain and, later, AME Bishop.  See Jean Lee Cole’s Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner (WVU Press 2013) and as well as Andre Johnson’s The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (Lexington 2012) and Johnson's larger work collecting Turner’s writings.

I’ll talk more about the kinds of conventions that Davis's letter calls for above (and the exciting recent scholarship on them) in my next post. 

For now, I’m simply going to revel in Davis’s “plain language” and his powerful demands.