As we close out Black History Month, and begin Women’s History Month, this seems like a fitting time to discuss how black women in the region of Milliken’s Bend were affected by the war. One of the finest works I have read about African-American women and families is Noralee Frankel’s Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi.

Much of her book concerns women in the region of Vicksburg. She discusses slave marriages, which came in many forms. One couple might have been forced to be together at the insistence of the slaveholder. Another couple might have lived together on the same plantation for many decades, mutually loving each other as in any other marriage – but still not officially married because slaves did not have the power to enter into contracts. In other cases, a couple may have been separated by sale or migration. In such times, both the man and the woman, after a time, would probably “take up” with someone else. If a “married” couple decided they wanted to separate (for there was no divorce, since there was no marriage), then they simply “quit” each other.

One of the first acts former slaves often took after their freedom was to marry in a formal, legal ceremony. Such ceremonies often were officiated by Union USCT officers or chaplains, and frequently recorded in company books. African-Americans saw it as gaining a right they had been denied for many years. At times, couples long separated by force or distance, were reunited, binding themselves to each other so that “no man could put asunder” their love again.

In other cases, the former slaves saw no point in the white Yankees’ ceremonies. They saw it as yet another way whites tried to interfere in their lives, and this was particularly true if a zealous white chaplain came about berating them for “living in sin” and urging upon them the “necessity” of having a formal marriage. Some couples had lived together for years as man and wife, and didn’t see any reason why their relationship couldn’t continue the way it always had. They knew they were true to each other, and trusted God knew, too.

When black men went off to the army, their mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts became particularly vulnerable. Union soldiers frequently abused them – beating them, raping them, or taking them in as laundresses, cooks, or personal servants. Frankel finds that women became the primary plantation workers, after masses of men enlisted.

Numbers of the women, their children, and their aging parents, were cooped up in “contraband camps” on the west bank of the Mississippi, in Louisiana, at places like Young’s Point.

Others, mostly in Mississippi, stayed on the plantations where they lived. White planters would interpret this as “loyalty” – but in truth, the desire to stay with and near their own families was what motivated them. With the uncertainty and upheaval of battles all around them, these slaves did not “choose” bondage as much as they committed to staying with their children, parents, siblings and extended family in the quarters. Too often, they had experienced or witnessed the arbitrary destruction of black families. Staying together brought strength.

Frankel’s book is a rewarding study of the black Southern family negotiating the uncharted and uncertain territory of freedom. She gives voice to the many women of the time, relying heavily upon pension files from their husbands who served in the U.S. Colored Troops. Indeed, I find her work to be comparable to listening to the WPA ex-slave narratives. It is history from lived experience, and these women’s voices should not remain silent.