Judith Giesberg, “Civil War, Civil Rights: African American Women in Civil War-Era Philadelphia”

Judith Giesberg, ed. Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Transcribed and annotated by the Memorable Days Project editorial team: Theresa Altieri, Rebecca Capobianco, Thomas Foley, Ruby Johnson, and Jessica Maiberger.

Laundress in Philadephia

This was another wonderful program July 19, 2017 at The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and fifty of his closest friends. The speaker Judith Giesberg is Professor of History at nearby Villanova University,  Editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era, a prolific author,  founder of the Emilie Davis Diaries Project (aka Memorable Days Project) and the Information Wanted Ad Project. In 2012 Giesberg and her graduate students started transcribing three diaries of Emilie Davis (1839-89), a young free black woman in Philadelphia, and posted them on their Memorable Days website. The diaries had been recently acquired by Pennsylvania Historical Society. The complete work was published in 2014 entitled Emilie Davis’s War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865, edited by Judith Giesberg and transcribed and annotated by the Memorable Days Project. The diary describes everyday life for African American women in the city during the Civil War. Giesberg first talked about Emilie’s life and Civil War Philadelphia, and then her new Information Wanted Project about African American’s effort to locate lost love-ones after Emancipation.

Judith Giesberg, Professor of History Villanova University

Judith Giesberg’s talk was part of a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminar for K-12 school teachers. My sister teaches third grade in Northampton, MA and has taken several NEH summer classes at Smith College in recent years. I hope these programs survive Trump’s budget cuts. We need an educated and critical electorate. The summer seminar Director is Lori Ginzberg, Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Penn State. She introduced her students and the speaker, and promoted The Library Company’s unique programs and collections. Philadelphia has many many historical institutions which are under appreciated.

Philadelphia was a tough town for black people free or slave during the Civil War. According to the 1860 census, there were 22,000 “free colored men and women” in Philadelphia County. There was general support for slavery despite the Quaker and abolitionist heritage in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia voted heavily Democratic in the 1860 election. The city was a Southern neighbor and economically dependent on slave cotton, sugar and agriculture. Frederick Douglass said there was not a city “in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia.” 

Nonetheless African Americans built a strong community. Emilie Davis was a student at the Institute for Colored Youth, which later became Cheney University. She attended Seventh Street Presbyterian Church, aka First (Colored) Presbyterian Church near 7th and South Street. She attended lectures by Frederick Douglass and Ellen Watkins Harper sponsored by The Social, Civil, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania. She raised money for the Ladies Union Association to provide supplies for sick and wounded United States Colored Troops (USCT) at local hospitals. Emilie Davis’s complete diary is posted at the Memorable Days website.

Black women in Philadelphia also succeeded in integrating the trolley cars so they could visit wounded soldiers in hospital. They visited the USCT at Camp William Penn in the present-day La Mott neighborhood of Cheltenham on the northern edge of the city. Black women were leaders in the civil rights struggle of the day.

Professor Giesberg and her students have launched another project informationwanted.org to transcribe advertisements from nineteenth century African American newspapers seeking information about lost family members after Emancipation. They have posted thousands of ads on their website Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery. The project seeks volunteers to help transcribe ads- just sign up. One major source for ads was the Christian Recorder published by Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia. The ads give a human picture of the devastation wrought on black families over 200 years of enslavement. A few African Americans have succeeded in tracing their ancestors using the informationwanted.org database. This should improve as the archive grows. The project is supported by Villinova University, AME Bethel Church, and the Philadelphia Abolition Society (another historic institution still active in the city).

Information wanted

Emilie Davis concludes her diary “all is well that ends well” on December 31,1865. It is a small uplift for our dark times today.

Abolitionist Legacy in LaMott PA

Donald Scott Sr., Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania). (Charleston SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008).

Historic La Mott, Pennsyvania, http://www.historic-lamott-pa.com/content/thegrowthofthevillage/index.cfm

Recruitment poster for Camp William Penn, 1863

I live in an historic neighborhood. My township of Cheltenham PA on the northern boundary of Philadelphia was a center of abolitionist activity in the 19th century. The area was known as Chelten Hills then. It is now divided into Elkins Park, Melrose Park (my home), and LaMott. 

"Roadside" home of James and Lucretia Mott

La Mott was the site of the first and largest Union training ground for African American troops at Camp William Penn during the Civil War from 1863-1865. The land was leased to the Federal government by Edward M. Davis, who was the son-in-law of abolitionist and reformer Lucretia Mott. Lucretia and husband James retired to their son-in-law’s Chelten Hills farm in 1857 to an old farmhouse called “Roadside”. Their home was a stop on the underground railroad en route to freedom for escaped slaves. She hosted many prominent abolitionist leaders at Roadside – Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Octavius V. Catto, William Still, Robert Purvis, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison. Even Mary Brown stayed at Roadhouse while her husband John Brown awaited trial for his raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

AME Church of LaMott

Chelten Hills was also home to Lucretia’s banker friend Jay Cooke

(1821-1905), who became known as the financier of the Civil War. Between 1862 and 1865 he sold $830 million in war bonds, at a commission of .375%. It was good politics and good business. He and Edward Davis were members of the Union League of Philadelphia (ULP), formed in 1862 “to discountenance and rebuke by moral and social influence all disloyalty to the Federal Government.” The ULP raised money to recruit troops for the Union, and sponsored five black regiments of US Colored Troops (USCT) at Camp William Penn. Before the Civil War, abolitionist sentiment was weak in Philadelphia. Abraham Lincoln received only 2000 votes out of 76,000 cast in the city in the 1860 election. The ULP converted Philadelphia to the Republican cause during the war. They even endorsed Radical Reconstruction after the war, including desegregating the streetcars.

Donald Scott Sr. has written two books about Camp William Penn -

Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania), and Camp William Penn: 1863-1865 (2012). Scott is an English Professor at Community College of Philadelphia, and a Cheltenham resident and booster. He has assembled an amazing collection of 19th century photographs of the Camp and the township. I wish more historians made an effort to include illustrations. It adds interest and sells books. Old history books and fiction always had photographs or artwork. Maybe modern publishers will revive this tradition. It would create employment for illustrators and photographers. All that remains of Camp William Penn today is the restored front gate and main entrance on Sycamore Street. A neighborhood community group, Citizens for the Restoration of Historic LaMott, has made an on-and-off effort over the years to establish a museum and park commemorating the unique history of LaMott. The old 1910 LaMott fire station on Willow Avenue is the temporary home to archives and artifacts from Camp William Penn. Tours of the museum are by appointment only.

Camp William Penn served as the training ground for 11 regiments, 10,940 men, between July 1863 and July 1865. 1056 soldiers from Camp William Penn perished during the war. It is an ugly story, but many black soldiers and their white commanders were executed if they were captured in battle by Confederate troops. The burial ground for local US Colored Troop veterans of the Civil War is Butler Cemetery in Camden NJ at Ferry Avenue and Charles Street. I have not visited the site, but it appears to be incorporated into present-day Evergreen Cemetery on Google Maps.. There is also the African American Civil War Museum in Washington DC which documents the history of the US Colored Troops. I must investigate. After the War, some USCT veterans served as Buffalo Soldiers and fought in the Indian wars in the West.

After Camp William Penn was decommissioned, Edward Davis sold off lots and became the prime real estate developer of the new working-class neighborhood called Camptown. As a devout Hicksite Quaker, Davis sold to blacks and whites. To encourage development, Davis built a schoolhouse in 1878, and donated land for a community church in 1888, now the site of the AME Church of LaMott on Cheltenham Avenue. In 1885 the village received its first US post office and changed its name officially to LaMott in honor of their revered resident Lucretia Mott (1793-1880). In the late 19th century it became one of the early interracial communities in the nation. It remains so today. The latest arrivals to the township have been Asian-Americans in the last 40 years. The 2010 census reports the population was 56.6% White, 32.8% Black or African American, 0.2% Native American, 7.7% Asian, and 2.5% were two or more races, 3.9% of the population were of Hispanic or Latino ancestry.

African American Memorial, Washington DC

I think Lucretia Mott would be pleased. She wrote her sister in 1863, “The neighboring camp seems the absorbing interest just now. Is not this change of feeling and conduct towards this oppressed class beyond all that we could have anticipated, and marvelous in our eyes?” This from a staunch pacifist. The Civil War would finally banish chattel slavery from the US, as nonviolent efforts had failed.

John Brown Lives

Louis A. DeCaro Jr.. John Brown: The Cost of Freedom. New York: International Publishers, 2007.

_____. John Brown: The Man Who Lived. Essays in Honor of the Harper's Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009. New York: Lulu, 2009.

_____. John Brown, Emancipator. Middletown, DE, 2012.

Robert L. Tsai. "John Brown's Constitution." Boston College Law Review Vol 51 Issue 1 (2010): 151-207.

The John Brown Society
Box 1046, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013

"From the night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass. 1847 while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful for its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man's strong impressions." Frederick Douglass

I attend the Left Forum in NYC every year hoping to learn something new. My discovery this year was the John Brown Society panel with Society Chairman Larry Lawrence, actor and playwright Norman Thomas Marshall, and historian Louis A. DeCaro Jr. The John Brown Society promotes John Brown education and scholarship, and speaks at events like the Left Forum, and John Brown Day (his birthday) at the John Brown Farm State Historical Site in Lake Placid, NY in May. Norman Thomas Marshall and director George Wolf Reily are co-authors of the one-man drama John Brown: Trumpet of Freedom, which Marshall has performed in theaters and schools for twenty years. Louis A. DeCaro Jr. is an Associate Professor at Alliance Theological Seminary in NYC, and a prolific John Brown biographer. His John Brown the Abolitionist-A Biographers Blog reports on his current scholarship, and related news. He is also the pastor of a small urban congregation in the Bronx.

John Brown 1856

John Brown is one of the most controversial religious and political figures in American history. His fortunes in the popular culture track the state of race relations in the US. During the Civil War and immediately following, Brown was a hero and martyr. Black and white Union soldiers sang The John Brown Song while marching off to war: "John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave, His soul is marching on!" When Reconstruction waned with the Long Depression (1873-1879), Southern lost-cause historians and racists North and South recast John Brown as fanatic and failed businessman. Even civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard (1872-1949), the grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, called Brown "a principled murderer" in his influential book John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (1909). Villard indicts Brown for killing five pro-slavery neighbors along the Pottawatomie Creek in 1856 during the bloody Kansas conflict. At mid-20th century, liberal Southern historian C. Van Woodward and psychologist Kenneth B. Clark both called Old Man John Brown mentally unstable, and the instigator of a "needless war." This is the version I learned in my white suburban high school in the 1960s. Louis A. DeCaro Jr. has a great essay The John Browns of History in his John Brown: The Man Who Lived. Essays in Honor of the Harper's Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009, wherein he catalogs the myriad accounts of abolitionist John Brown over the years. Historian Louis DeCaro, activist Larry Lawrence, and performer Norman Marshall are leading a revival of John Brown studies to restore Brown's complex role in American history.

Of course, John Brown was most revered by the left and African Americans. His left admirers included labor journalist John Swinton (1829-1901), socialist Eugene Debs, civil rights founder W.E.B. Du Bois, and Communist historian Herbert Aptheker. Both Du Bois and Aptheker wrote biographies of John Brown. Brown's abolitionism was inspired by religious faith, like M. L. King, not by populism or socialism which was just emerging before the Civil War. A few African American critics disdained Brown. Vincent Harding regarded Brown as paternalistic and Ralph Ellison called Brown "demonic" and "utterly impractical." But most black leaders in the late 19th and early 20th century held John Brown in high esteem. Harriet Tubman said, "When I think how he gave up his life for our people, and how he never flinched, but was brave to the end, it's clear to me that it wasn't mortal man, it was God in him (1863)."

Harriet Tubman

Louis A. DeCaro Jr. John Brown: the Cost of Freedom (2007) is a concise biography of abolitionist Brown. It includes an appendix of recently discovered Brown letters and documents, which reveal more intimately Brown's thinking and character. John Brown was born May 9, 1800 in Connecticut of abolitionist and Puritan parents. He apprenticed in his father's tannery business, and then operated his own tannery in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Later he became a cattle trader and breeder, and an authority in the sheep and wool business. He had 20 children with two wives! Eleven children survived to adulthood. His first wife Dianthe died in childbirth. He had several business failures. Somehow he and second wife Mary Ann Day (1817-1884) overcame hardship and tragedy. They raised a huge family, and later organized a social movement as well.

John Brown was always anti-slavery and active in the cause. In 1837 he took a public vow at church, "Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery." This was prompted by the murder of abolitionist journalist Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in southern Illinois a few days earlier. When he moved his business to Springfield, MA in 1846, he became deeply engaged with the abolitionists there. He joined the African American Stanford Street "Free Church" (aka St. John's Congregational Church) where he met the luminaries of the movement: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and the literati who later bankrolled his raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859.

John Brown at Springfield League of Gileadites meeting

What is striking about John Brown is that he regarded African Americans as his equal, as brothers and sisters. This was rare in his time, even among white abolitionists. He crossed the color line. In 1850 he founded the League of Gileadites in Springfield MA , a militant interracial group in response to the Fugitive Slave Act to protect escaped slaves in the free states. According to historian Louis DeCaro Jr., John Brown was already formulating more radical plans to attack slavery ten years before the raid on Harper's Ferry. He argued that moral suasion had failed, and that compromise had failed. In reality guns, not votes, would decide the fate of slavery. As John Brown later testified in his trial for treason in 1859, the country was "on the eve of one of the greatest wars in history". If the slaveholders won, it would mark "an end of all aspirations for human freedom."

The Brown home in Springfield MA

In 1849 Brown moved his family to a black settlement in North Elba NY in the Adirondacks near Lake Placid. Wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith donated thousands of acres to freemen as an agrarian refuge from urban poverty and racism. The colony was affectionately known as "Timbucto". This was Brown's last home and the site of the John Brown Farm and Gravesite, a national historical landmark. I would like to visit the farmstead on John Brown Day. I would also like to explore the museums and St. John's Congregational Church in Springfield MA for John Brown history. Brown's Bible remains on display at the church.

Between 1855 and 1858 John Brown joined his older sons in Kansas to lead the armed defense of the free state settlers. Bleeding Kansas was the first act of the Civil War. Brown became a wanted man. He had to go underground to avoid arrest. He began organizing his fateful raid on the Harper's Ferry US Armory and Arsenal in ernest. Louis DeCaro Jr. argues Brown's plan was well conceived but badly executed. Brown's idea was to establish guerrilla resistance in the Southern mountains to attract runaway slaves, and undermine the viability of the slave economy over time. He raised money and recruits in the North as well in free black communities in Canada. He even held a constitutional convention on May 8, 1858 in Chatham, Ontario, where 34 blacks and 12 whites committed to abolish slavery, and passed the "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States." This would be the founding document of the "Appalachian State" and would govern their guerrilla republic in exile. The document included many features from the US Constitution while abolishing slavery and enfranchising women. Harriet Tubman (Brown called her "General Tubman") supported the plan, but in the end, Frederick Douglass opposed it which created a terrible rift between the old comrades.

Frederick Douglass

On Sunday morning, October 16, 1859, Brown led a solemn reading of the Provisional Constitution, and then set off with 21 men to capture the Harper's Ferry Armory with its 100,000 muskets and rifles. Remarkably, they succeeded with little bloodshed. He seized local slaveholders as hostages, and notified their slaves liberation was at hand. Unfortunately, John Brown tarried too long in Harper's Ferry. The next day he was pinned down in the Engine House by local militia, and the second day the US Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived and subdued Brown's band. Brown was swiftly tried and convicted of treason by the state of Virginia and hung in public December 2, 1859. Eleven months later, Lincoln was elected President and the Civil War began.

Slavery and race are so central to US history and politics. The story of John Brown merits scrutiny. Abolitionists were a small but diligent group in antebellum America. Education and religious appeals had ended slavery in the North, but were ineffectual in the South and new territories. Compromise was not possible. When the Civil War began, Lincoln's goal was to preserve the union, not abolish slavery, which was still too difficult to contemplate. Emancipation and arming black soldiers only came after three years of brutal war. John Brown foretold these events. Evidently many white Americans are still not reconciled to a multiracial and multicultural society 150 years later - witness the current 2016 presidential contest. John Brown remains contemporary.

Louis A. DeCaro Jr. has written six books on John Brown, the most recent Freedom's Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia (2015). He is probably not done yet.