Schwalm, Leslie A., “Agonizing Groans of Mothers” and “Slave-Scarred Veterans”: The Commemoration of Slavery and Emancipation

“Agonizing Groans of Mothers” and “Slave-Scarred Veterans”: The Commemoration of Slavery and Emancipation Leslie A. Schwalm This paper explores the public memory of black slavery and freedom among white and African American Midwesterners of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using an innovative approach that probes public celebrations, autobiography and memoir, family history and obituaries of the formerly enslaved, this paper challenges several key conclusions about African American relationships to the slave past that have been drawn by scholars in both literary and African American studies.
Rather than …show more content…
For decades, hundreds and sometimes thousands of Midwestern blacks came together to speak to the difference freedom had made in their lives and to celebrate, “in the most joyful manner,” the destruction of American slavery. In the early twentieth as in the nineteenth century, formal processions of decorated wagons and costumed celebrants, brass bands playing martial, popular, and religious tunes, vocal music, prayers, recitations, speeches, picnics, baseball games and dances made Emancipation Day celebrations the most important, and by far the largest, gathering of the year for black Midwesterners. As one celebrant in Fort Madison, Iowa, noted in 1942, this was a day which “really and genuinely belongs to us as American negroes.” If marked by all the pleasures of sociability in an often scattered rural population, these celebrations also included a serious political component as well. In contrast to the amnesiac culture of reminiscence among white Americans, African American women and men offered deeply personal, public testimony to the wrongs and exploitation they had experienced as slaves. In 1898 the crowd gathering at Keokuk, Iowa’s celebration, wildly applauded …show more content…
By testifying to a personal and shared past where blacks had been held as slaves and whites had been slave owners, Midwestern African Americans laid claim to their history while offering a challenge to the many ways in which black freedom remained circumscribed and therefore incomplete. Black Midwesterners also challenged the dominant racialized discourse about slavery, war and emancipation in less formal circumstances. At family gatherings and in conversations with neighbors and fellow veterans, they shared their recollections about how they came to the Midwest, recounting the choices, dangers, and difficulties they faced as fugitives trying to make their way to freedom. No matter how they arrived, their recollections carefully noted the dangerous escape from slavery that began their journeys northward. While many white Midwesterners attributed the destruction of slavery and the growing presence of African Americans in Midwestern towns and villages to the humanitarian acts of courageous and sympathetic whites or to the (overbearing) power of a centralized, empowered federal government, reminiscing African Americans attributed their arrival in the Midwest to their own sacrifices, skill, bravery, and desperation. By telling their stories to daughters, nieces, grandsons and neighbors, and