It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial
relationships were "notorious" at the neighborhood level. But we
have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships,
especially from freedwomen's and children's points of view. While
it is known that Cincinnati had the largest per capita population
of mixed race people outside the South during the antebellum
period, historians have yet to explore how geography played a
central role in this outcome. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers made
it possible for Southern white men to ferry women and children of
color for whom they had some measure of concern to free soil with
relative ease. Some of the women in question appear to have been
"fancy girls," enslaved women sold for use as prostitutes or
"mistresses." Green focuses on women who appear to have been the
latter, recognizing the problems with the term "mistress," given
its shifting meaning even during the antebellum period. Remember Me
to Miss Louisa, among other things, moves the life of the fancy
girl from New Orleans, where it is typically situated, to the
Midwest. The manumission of these women and their children-and
other enslaved women never sold under this brand-occurred as
America's frontiers pushed westward, and urban life followed in
their wake. Indeed, Green's research examines the tensions between
the urban Midwest and the rising Cotton Kingdom. It does so by
relying on surviving letters, among them those from an ex-slave
mistress who sent her "love" to her former master. This
relationship forms the crux of the first of three case studies. The
other two concern a New Orleans young woman who was the mistress of
an aging white man, and ten Alabama children who received from a
white planter a $200,000 inheritance (worth roughly $5.1 million in
today's currency). In each case, those freed people faced the
challenges characteristic of black life in a largely hostile
America. While the frequency with which Southern white men freed
enslaved women and their children is now generally known, less is
known about these men's financial and emotional investments in
them. Before the Civil War, a white Southern man's pending
marriage, aging body, or looming death often compelled him to free
an African American woman and their children. And as difficult as
it may be for the modern mind to comprehend, some kind of
connection sometimes existed between these individuals. This study
argues that such men-though they hardly stand excused for their
ongoing claims to privilege-were hidden actors in freedwomen's and
children's attempts to survive the rigors and challenges of life as
African Americans in the years surrounding the Civil War. Green
examines many facets of this phenomenon in the hope of revealing
new insights about the era of slavery. Historians, students, and
general readers of US history, African American studies, black
urban history, and antebellum history will find much of interest in
this fascinating study.
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