#slave narrative

"While we honor the living soldiers who have done so much we must not forget to whisper for fear of desturbeing the Glorious sleep of the ma[ny] who have fallen."

Following right along from his contemporary Abraham Galloway (previous lesson), today we examine the life and (perhaps more importantly) the recorded history of William B. Gould. Born enslaved in 1837 North Carolina and raised with particular skills as a plasterer, Gould took advantage of the onset of the Civil War --at a time when plantation owners weren't in a position to oversee their slaves as closely-- and escaped along with seven other slaves aboard a steamship headed up Cape Fear in 1862. This ship was in turn intercepted by a patrolling Union gunboat, the USS Cambridge, part of the Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and in very short order Gould enlisted in the U.S. Navy and signed on as a member of her crew, eventually attaining the rank of Petty Officer. Significantly while aboard the Cambridge, Gould began the practice of keeping a journal.

During the next three years, Gould would record his Civil War service in the U.S. Navy, first aboard the Cambridge, and later aboard the Ohio and then Niagara; the latter during her epic hunt through European waters for the Confederate cruisers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. His journal entries weren't particularly organized and frankly meandered --but at the very least he did clearly designate the respective dates of each entry: a blessing to future archivists and historians! At the time of Grant's capture of Richmond, Gould was serving aboard the Niagra, cruising off Southampton, England. While there he took note of a proposal that "intimates Colinization for the colard people of the United States... This move... must and shall be resisted. We were born under the Flag of the Union and we never will know no other. My sentement is the sentement of the people of the States."

In 1865 after discharge, Gould moved to Nantucket, Mass., where he married Cornelia Williams Read and took on a career as a plasterer; he later settled in Dedham, where he raised eight children, including five sons who would later in the Spanish-American War, and one son in World War I. His diaries were packed away in an attic, scarcely to be thought of again, until 1958 when they would be rediscovered by his grandson William B. Gould, III. Gould himself died in 1923.

His diaries remain a treasure trove of firsthand information; not only did chronicle the relentless monotony of shipboard life, but also the occasional excitement of chasing down Confederate blockade runners. He also singled out the unusual (relative) racial equality such as was unique to the Navy, but he also didn't leave out the slights, microaggressions, and the outright discrimination that were a daily fact of life for him and for all Black sailors. His writings offer some truly unique vantage points, not only on the events of the Civil War itself, but the aftermath and the way the nation --and indeed the world-- were addressing such seismic changes.

The Underground Railroad by William Still

Progress:

Did my American Lit reading. We’re moving onto slave narratives which should be interesting. Did some of the planning for my sequel novel for the Restless series. Have started redoing my TBR list.

To do list:

-Edit one page summary for WIP.

-Do some more study on Vita and Virginia.

“I had not lived fourteen years in slavery for nothing. I had felt, seen, and heard enough, to read the characters, and question the motives, of those around me. The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.” 

—Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the true story of a young woman, Harriet Jacobs, who escaped from slavery. Jacobs hid in a cramped cupboard for seven years before eventually escaping to Philadelphia and then to New York. In 1858, she published an account of her experiences, titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which became one of the most famous anti-slavery narratives.

Frederick Douglass, Appendix to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845

Now let's talk about an actual Black Loyalist. Meet Boston King, born enslaved in (or around) 1760 in South Carolina. Significantly, King's parents were first-generation slaves (meaning, kidnapped and brought over from Africa). Both were literate and ensured that their son would also become so. Ostensibly apprenticed as a carpenter, as King would later tell it, his particular owner was so harsh and cruel with his punishments (floggings) that one instance left him unable to work for three weeks. During the Revolution, King stole ("borrowed") a horse and slipped away from his owner, pledging loyalty to the British near Charleston, undertaking dangerous missions on behalf of Captain Grey of the New York Volunteers, which was a Loyalist regiment from Nova Scotia. King later made his way to New York --the last American port to be evacuated by the British-- and while there he met Violet, another former South Carolina slave who had also joined the British side with the promise of freedom. After the Revolution, Boston and Violet were given certificates of freedom for their service to the British crown. Along with nearly 3,000 other Black Loyalists who had risked severe punishment and even execution during the war, they were evacuated and resettled in British-held Birchtown, Nova Scotia.

(This was neither a smooth nor a guaranteed process --Gen. George Washington had been negotiating firmly with the outgoing British commander-in-chief over the fate of Loyalist slave refugees, perhaps mindful of the vulnerability of his own "assets." [See Lesson #123 in this series!] Persistent eleventh-hour rumours that negotiations might fail and that the former slaves might yet be deported back to their former owners brought considerable anxiety; in King's words, "For days, we lost our appetite for food and sleep departed from our eyes.")

Now married to Violet and resettled in Birchtown, King honed his trade as a master carpenter and was also ordained as a Methodist minister. Unfortunately farming conditions in Nova Scotia were notoriously poor those years --in some instances bordering on outright famine-- and in 1792 the Kings decided to take advantage of a long-standing British offer to move to the newly-founded Province Of Freedom (later Sierra Leone), an established community for freed Blacks. The Kings were among the first (of approx. 1,200) settlers in what would become known as Freetown, although Violet died of malaria soon after they had arrived.

At the behest of the Sierra Leone Company, King was trained in London for two years as a teacher and missionary, and then returned to Freetown in 1796 to dust off his preaching skills --language barriers be damned. At some point during his time in London he penned his autobiography, Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, which would eventually see publication in serial form in 1798 in Wesleyan Methodist Magazine. The publication is significant because it was one of the very first written narratives of American slave life to see print --preceding Frederick Douglass's seminal work by nearly 50 years. At one point while in London King preached to a white congregation and reflected upon this in his memoir: "I found a more cordial love to the White People than I had ever experienced before. In the former part of my life I had suffered greatly from the cruelty and injustice of the Whites, which induced me to look upon them, in general, as our enmies (sic): And even after the Lord had manifested his forgiving mercy to me, I still felt at times an uneasy distrust and shyness toward them; but on that day the Lord removed all my prejudices."