RELATIONS: Henry and Louisa
“Henry sends his love to Louisa. Henry wants to go home but I don’t think I will send him unless we get nearer, which I think we will be soon.” – Frank Adams in a letter dated February 14th, Valentine’s Day, 1864, from a Confederate Camp near Minden, Louisiana, to his sister Kate at Locust Ridge Plantation, Tensas Parish, Louisiana
“They are going to give out some shoes in a few days and I will try to buy some for Henry and Gilbert as they are both nearly barefooted. . . . They both send their love to their wives.” – Frank Adams in a letter dated June 22nd, 1864, from a Confederate Camp near Monroe, Louisiana, to his sister Kate at Locust Ridge Plantation
“Henry quit writing because Louisa did not answer his letters. We all talked to and tried to shame her about it but she just said that she had nothing to say to him & all she wanted to know was if he was well and you would write about that. She don’t even ask about him nowadays. I was satisfied she did not love him when they were married and felt sorry for him then. You must be kind to him and try to have patience with him. Does he ever say anything about the way Louisa treats him?” – Kate Adams in a letter dated April 9th, 1865, from Locust Ridge Plantation to her brother Frank at a Confederate Camp somewhere in Texas
The quotations above are excerpts from family letters written between my 2nd great grandfather, Franklin (Frank) Oliver Adams, and his sister, Harriet Katherine (Kate) Adams.
Henry and Louisa, mentioned in the letters, are people my ancestors enslaved, people whose lives intertwined intimately with theirs over decades before, during, and after the Civil War.
The names Henry and Louisa (sometimes spelled Lueza) appear again and again in the Locust Ridge Plantation ledger kept between 1860 and 1866. The ledger documents weather conditions, whether the Mississippi River is high or low, and the tasks each enslaved person performed daily. It tells whether they were sick or hurt and sometimes includes other details about their lives — when they received new shoes or a plug of tobacco. From these details, I feel like I know Henry and Louisa— at least a little.
For instance, I know from the ledger that Louisa routinely picked over 200 pounds of cotton per day, while Henry picked only around 100 to 160 pounds daily. As a result of Henry’s lack of talent for cotton picking, he often did other labor such as hauling and sawing wood, gardening, sowing grass, and picking corn. I also notice that Henry was very often sick, as shown on the ledger page from November, 1861, above. In fact, Henry was sick so often that I infer he must have had a chronic illness. In addition to the plantation ledger, other primary sources offer insight into Henry and Louisa’s lives.
From family letters, I know that by May, 1863, 19-year-old Frank had joined the Confederate Army, taking Henry with him. I imagine Frank’s recently widowed mother, my 3rd great grandmother Elizabeth, charging Henry with keeping her only surviving son alive. Whether or not Henry helped Frank survive the war, he certainly performed many services for my ancestor. And based on Frank’s letters, the two men developed a closer relationship than they might have had if they had stayed home.
On September 11th, 1863, Frank wrote from Camp Minden, Louisiana, “I hope the Negroes have not all left. Henry wants to go mighty bad and if I should get to come [home] I will let him. I don’t think he would go; he thinks that I am afraid to trust him.” Apparently, Frank expected or feared that Henry would run away, as many young enslaved men took the opportunity to do. After all, why should Henry stay loyal to his enslaver? Yet Frank imagined or wished for a bond of trust between them.
Frank’s letters also show that Henry was made to travel back and forth between Confederate camps and Locust Ridge carrying letters and supplies. On October 20th, 1863, Frank wrote, “I have concluded to send Henry in the morning let the consequences be what they will. I don’t know that I need anything unless you had an old piece of carpeting that we could sleep on. It is getting pretty cold…. I will look for Henry back in five days next Saturday evening.”
The journey that Frank expected Henry to make between the Confederate camp in Minden, Louisiana, and Locust Ridge was around 300 miles round trip. Google maps says that it would take at least 100 hours to walk the distance. Yet Henry was expected to make the trip, which would have been incredibly dangerous for a Black man in the South during the Civil War, in five days. Since a trained walker can cover only 20–30 miles per day, walking the 60 miles per day necessary would have been impossible. I have to assume that Henry traveled either by horse or by cart.
Henry was by no means the only enslaved person forced to support the Confederacy during the war. According to Kevin M. Levin writing in Smithsonian,
“Enslaved workers constituted the backbone of the Confederate war effort. Although stories of these impressed workers and camp slaves have been erased from our popular memory of the war in favor of mythical accounts of black Confederate soldiers, their presence in the Confederate army constituted a visual reminder to every soldier — slaveowner and non-slaveowner alike — that their ultimate success in battle depended on the ownership of other human beings. Anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 enslaved people supported in various capacities…. Many of them labored as cooks, butchers, blacksmiths and hospital attendants, and thousands of enslaved men accompanied Confederate officers as their camp slaves, or body servants. These men performed a wide range of roles for their owners, including cooking, cleaning, foraging, and sending messages to families back home.”
While Henry was forced to participate in the first modern war on the side of those seeking to keep him and his loved ones enslaved for life, Louisa was forced to continue her labor at my ancestors’ Locust Ridge Plantation. Louisa was not born at Locust Ridge, however, or even in Louisiana. The 1870 Census, the first to record the names of Black Americans, lists her birthplace as Kentucky and her age as 27, which means she would have been born around 1843.
While I can’t be certain, I believe the document below describes Louisa’s sale to my 3rd great grandfather. The age recorded on the document, dated 1859, corresponds to Louisa’s birthdate in the 1870 census. Louisa, “of Copper Color,” was only fifteen years old when Israel Adams purchased her from a slave trader in Natchez, Mississippi, for $1,250.
Like Henry and approximately a million other enslaved people, Louisa was part of one of the largest migrations in U.S. history, in which slavers compelled roughly one million enslaved people to migrate from the Upper to the Lower South to meet the demand for labor in cotton plantations.
Teenaged Louisa was likely chained or roped together with other enslaved people in a coffle and forced to march hundreds of miles. Since the destination was Natchez, which is on the Mississippi River, she may also have been transported like cargo in the hold of a steamboat for part of the journey.
Once in Natchez, she would have passed through the infamous Forks of the Road slave market, where she would have been held in a pen and fattened up, greased to make her skin gleam, and dressed in fancy clothes so she would fetch the highest price possible, which she did. Louisa’s sale price of $1,250 was well above the average paid for a female field hand.
On the auction block, Louisa would have been required to allow potential buyers to examine her. My 3rd great grandfather may have peered into her mouth and pinched the skin on the back of her hand — or wherever he wished — to determine her age.
I imagine her standing tall, chin held high and eyes grazing the heads of the gathered crowd. Perhaps she struggled to hold back tears, longing for whatever family she might have known back in Kentucky. Oh, Louisa!
Plantation records show that Louisa spent the following years working both as a house servant and as a field hand at Locust Ridge. For instance, the ledger page below shows that during the week ending November 23rd, 1861, Louisa, (spelled Lueza and listed as #29) picked cotton Monday and Tuesday and worked in the house Wednesday through Saturday. Her only day off was Sunday.
Between early 1863 and 1865, Louisa remained enslaved at Locust Ridge. During those war years, my great grandmother and her daughters, Kate and Molly, ran the plantation with the help of a succession of overseers. As a result, the ledger entries during this period are more varied and sporadic. But some pages do still give insight into Louisa’s life during that time. For instance, the ledger page below records that on Thursday, February 12th, 1863, the enslaved women quilted, sewed, shelled corn, gardened, and worked to shore up the levy against the rising river.
Then, on April 9th, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union Army. On that same day, not having yet heard the news, my great aunt Kate wrote the lines below, which also appear at the beginning of this narrative, to her brother Frank, stationed somewhere in Texas.
“Henry quit writing because Louisa did not answer his letters. We all talked to and tried to shame her about it but she just said that she had nothing to say to him & all she wanted to know was if he was well and you would write about that. She don’t even ask about him nowadays. I was satisfied she did not love him when they were married and felt sorry for him then. You must be kind to him and try to have patience with him. Does he ever say anything about the way Louisa treats him?”
My first thought on reading this was that my great aunt Kate must have been quite the busybody. But was she correct that Louisa did not love Henry? After all, Henry was around 20 years her senior, and it is possible that my ancestors compelled her to marry him so she might produce more slaves, thereby increasing their wealth. As a 15 year old enslaved girl, Louisa would have had no real ability to consent or refuse to marry. Whether or not Louisa and Henry’s marriage while enslaved was by choice, it is impossible to know, but my ancestors’ letters indicate that they were considered married by all at Locust Ridge.
What might their wedding have looked like? WPA interviews provide some details about plantation weddings in the 1800s.[i] Of her marriage, Mary Vaughn Reynolds, formerly enslaved in Louisiana circa 1832–1865, remembers, “After while I taken a notion to marry and massa and missy marries us same as all the niggers. They stands inside the house with a broom held crosswise of the door and we stands outside. Missy puts a li’l wreath on my head they kept there and we steps over the broom into the house. Now, that’s all they was to the marryin’. After freedom I gits married and has it put in the book by a preacher.”
Another formerly enslaved woman, Elizabeth Ross Hite, recalls “Sometimes de slaves would hav marriages lak de people do today wid all de trimmings. Da veil, gown an ev’rything. Dey married for de preacher an had big affairs in dere quarters. Den sometime dey would go to de master to git his permission an blessings and he would say, C’mon darky jump over dis brum an call yo’self man and wife.” Master might er gav some of dem darkies present or sumpin caise dere was er lot of darkies gwine to master. Shucks some of dem darkies didn’t care er bout master, preacher or nobody dey jest went an got married, married demselves.”
Sometime in 1865, after the Civil War had ended, Frank and Henry returned to Locust Ridge, where Louisa waited. Now she and Henry were, at least theoretically, free to make their own decisions. And on December 26th, 1866,[ii] the couple married for a second time in an official ceremony recorded in the Louisiana Compiled Marriage Index.
The fact that they married again so soon after emancipation seems significant. Aunt Kate was likely mistaken in her assumptions about Louisa’s lack of feeling for Henry. Louisa may simply have wanted to keep her personal life private and avoid interference from the people who controlled so many other aspects of her life.
“I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.” ― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Louisa and Henry’s marriage while enslaved had had no legal standing and no protection from the abuses and control imposed on them by their enslavers. Enslaved couples could be separated (as Henry and Louisa were during the war) or sold apart at their master’s will. After the Civil War, the right to legally marry was one of the first civil rights afforded to Black Americans. Henry and Louisa wasted no time exercising that right.
Their first child, William, was born in March of that year, followed by Louis in 1867, Frank O in 1868, Isaiah and Mary in 1870, Ida in 1872, and Henry Turner, Jr. in 1874. And while Henry and Louisa had never been given the opportunity to learn to read and write, four of their seven children were literate. According to Ancestry, the couple had at least 55 grandchildren.
Marriage is challenging under the best of circumstances. That people who survived enslavement, separation, and civil war met the challenge and raised a thriving family is miraculous. I have been blessed to meet at least one of Henry and Louisa’s many descendants, and I hope to have the honor of meeting others.
About the Author
I began researching my family’s involvement in the slave society of the South in the spring of 2021. Until that time, I knew very little about American history and nothing about genealogy. I am slowly learning about both. In addition to the essays and interviews published on Medium, I have published essays and op-eds in Salon, the Austin American Statesman, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine, among others. I have an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University.
Special thanks to Edward Adams, one of my newly discovered cousins, for granting me permission to title my blog RELATIONS. which is also the title of his book on his Adams and Stewart family history.
[i] The fact that people today have transformed plantations into wedding venues where they hold antebellum-themed weddings is in such poor taste that I do not have words to convey my disgust.
[ii] The date of Henry and Louisa’s wedding, December 26th, is significant. Boxing Day, or the day after Christmas, had been one of the only days off allowed enslaved people and marked a period of relative ease between one year’s harvest and preparation of the fields for the next year’s planting season. The day was referred to as “Boxing Day,” because planters sometimes gave enslaved people boxes containing small gifts, such as candy or coins. So, although slavery had officially ended when Henry and Louisa married in 1866, the familiar rhythms of plantation life continued.
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