FAMILY STORIES
RELATIONS: Samuel Drake
The Story of a Man Who Escaped Enslavement by My Ancestors
During the Civil War, many white Southerners fled their homes due to threatened or actual occupation of their land by federal troops. My 2nd great grandfather, Henry Winbourne Drake, was one of them. A teacher and planter who enslaved 35 people in 1863, he fought briefly for the Confederacy and represented Tensas Parish in the Louisiana State Legislature.
After fleeing their home near Waterproof, Louisiana, Drake and his family settled in Bienville Parish. On October 13th, 1863, he responded to a letter from his mother, expressing surprise that two of the men enslaved by her at “Magnolia Springs” near Church Hill, Mississippi, had left to seek their freedom.
“I am very sorry to hear of the desertion of Sam and George. It was no more than I expected of Sam, but I had hoped that Letty’s children would stay with you.”
These two sentences made me cringe at my ancestor’s obliviousness. Why would he expect enslaved people to want to stay enslaved? He seems to have assumed a relationship with the men that made their bid for freedom seem a betrayal, the breaking of a bond rather than an escape from bondage. But the sentences also made me curious. Who were Sam and George and what became of them? In the hope of finding some trace, I Googled “fugitive slave 1863.” The first result of my search was this iconic photograph that has been reproduced again and again to illustrate the evils of slavery.
Gordon, or “Whipped Peter,” escaped from a Louisiana plantation in March 1863, gaining freedom when he reached a Union camp over forty miles away. Gordon had escaped the bloodhounds that pursued him by rubbing himself repeatedly with a cut onion to mask his scent. He ran for ten days.
My first thought on seeing this picture and reading Gordon’s story was, “Surely my ancestors were not responsible for such atrocities.” How tempting it is to rationalize in this way! The myth preserved in my family went like this: While many planters treated enslaved people with unspeakable cruelty, our family was different. In conversations around the dinner table, my ancestors were characterized as charitable, gracious, genteel, courteous, and kind. Even as a young child, however, I detected a subtext to these stories — a wink, if you will. There was an understanding, unspoken of course, that there was more to it than that.
Primary source documents from Louisiana in 1863 refute the wishful thinking of my family’s mythology and illuminate the horrors that wink signaled complicity with. In fact, scars like the ones on Gordon’s back were common. J.W. Mercer, Assistant Surgeon of the 47th Massachusetts volunteers wrote: “I have found a large number of the four hundred contrabands [escaped enslaved persons] examined by me to be badly lacerated as the specimen represented in the enclosed photograph.” Mercer was referring to Gordon.
Slave narratives recorded as part of the Federal Writers’ Project include descriptions of whippings and other tortures in the enslaved people’s own words. Jim Allen of Mississippi remembers seeing slaves “whupped as many times as dere is leaves on dat ground.”
Another formerly enslaved Mississippi man, Gus Clark, answered an interviewer’s question this way, “Did I ever see any niggers punished? Yessum, I sho’ has. Whupped an’ chained too. Dey was whupped till de blood come, ’til day back split all to pieces. Then it was washed off with salt and de nigger was put right back in the field.”
A woman named Dora Franks from nearby Port Gibson recalls the whipping another enslaved woman received: “I hear tell dat dey whup her so hard dat she couldn’ walk no mo’.” She also recalls the whipping given an enslaved man named Uncle Alf who was caught leaving the plantation to visit a woman: “… dey took an give him 100 lashes wid de cat o’ ninety-nine tails. His back was something awful, but dey put him in de fiel to work while de blood still a-runnin’. He work right hard ’til dey lef. Den when he got up to de end o’ de row next to de swamp, he lit out again. Dey never foun’ ‘im dat time.”
Based on these accounts, I assume that my ancestors treated the human beings they enslaved in the same brutal way.
In 1861, Lincoln had declared that enslaved people who made it behind Union lines could be considered “contraband of war” and freed. As the Union Army moved south, thousands of enslaved people fled behind Union lines. Between April 29–30, 1863, the Union Army of Tennessee, crossed the Mississippi River roughly 15 miles north of Church Hill. Then on May 1st, Union troops took possession of nearby Port Gibson as part of the Vicksburg Campaign. Sam and George would likely have heard rumors of the Union army’s proximity and set out to reach it.
On foot and possibly pursued by slave catchers and bloodhounds, Sam and George would have navigated bottomland hardwood forest, sloughs, bayous, lakes, and swamps, as well as villages and plantations. Even today, the area is heavily wooded, swampy, and alive with water moccasins and alligators.
Once in Union-controlled territory, the two men would likely have lived in one of the many refugee camps established for “contrabands.” Contraband camps were refugee camps behind Union lines to which approximately half a million enslaved people fled. Their chances of survival in these camps were not great. Food and shelter were scarce and the swampy conditions were a perfect breeding ground for disease.
Smallpox and yellow fever spread quickly through the overcrowded camps. An agent of the Western Sanitary Commission who toured Vicksburg at the time wrote, “If the ostensible object was to kill [formerly enslaved people], nothing could be more effective” than the contraband camps lining the Mississippi River in that desperate summer of 1863.”
Since the contraband camps proved a drain on federal resources, many freed people were forced to work the land again, this time for wages and under the supervision of northern white men who leased the land from the U.S. government. The camps also served as recruiting offices for the Union Army. Many of the 180,000 men who served in the United States Colored Troops were recruited directly from contrabands camps.
On May 22, 1863, the War Department issued General Order №143 to create the Bureau of Colored Troops, which designated Black regiments as United States Colored Troops, or USCT. The order established a procedure for receiving formerly enslaved men into the armed forces. If Sam and George had volunteered or been pressed into service that summer, they would have been among the first Black men to fight with the Union Army for their freedom.
“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny he has earned the right to citizenship.” -Frederick Douglass
I decided to search for record of Sam and George in USCT documents and quickly found records for a Samuel Drake. Since freed people sometimes adopted the surname of the family that had enslaved them, I thought this might be the man named Sam who had escaped enslavement by my 3rd great grandmother. Susannah Priscilla Hawkins Magruder Drake.
Samuel Drake was estimated to have been born around 1838 and to have been 25 at the time of his enlistment in the 101st US Colored Infantry. According to USCT records, he was born in Macon, Mississippi, and mustered in for three years in Nashville on August 12th, 1863. Samuel was 5’5”, had a black “complexion,” black hair, and dark eyes. His occupation is listed as “Laborer. ” Was this the Samuel Drake who had been enslaved by and escaped from my family? The timing was right but the place of enlistment seemed off — until I remembered that it was the Union Army of Tennessee that had crossed the Mississippi closest to Church Hill. Could they have taken Sam to Nashville with them when the Vicksburg campaign was over?
Samuel Drake’s Volunteer Enlistment documents shows “his mark” in between his first and last names on the signature line — three crosses in dark ink.
For some reason, these three crosses — the lines that he had made with his own hand on the paper — make me cry for Samuel Drake, whoever he was. For his courage to escape from bondage and fight for his freedom. For his choice to reach for a better life instead of sinking into despair. For the fact that nobody bothered to teach him even to write his name.
President Abraham Lincoln authorized use of Black soldiers in combat with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. He did not, however, guarantee their equal treatment.
Members of the United States Colored Troops were paid less than white soldiers. From 1863 until mid-1864, Black soldiers earned a net pay of $7 a month, while whites earned $13. Meanwhile, Black soldiers faced additional dangers, especially after the Confederate Congress issued a statement that any Black men captured fighting against the South would be executed, along with their white officers. In fact, the mortality rate among the soldiers of the USCT was thirty-five percent higher than among white troops.
Despite their unequal treatment, Lincoln credited the USCT with turning the tide of the war, and sixteen soldiers of the USCT received the Medal of Honor.
By May 9th, 1865, the day that Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, more than 40,000 Black soldiers had died before they had the chance to enjoy even one day of freedom.
Samuel Drake of the 101st USCT was not one of them.
Samuel served his country for roughly two and a half years, from August 12th, 1863, until he mustered out on January 16th, 1866. Based on “soldier details” for Samuel Drake in the National Park Service Civil War Battlefields site, Samuel’s regiment was responsible for defending the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) Railroad, which was of great strategic importance to the Union. Control of the L&N was vital as it allowed for transportation of troops and supplies through Kentucky and Tennessee. It also helped the Union hold Kentucky, a border state that became a “launching pad” for Union troops into Tennessee and the Deep South.
But I have difficulty finding any trace of Samuel after he left the USCT. Unlike my family members of that same period, whose lives are documented and described in letters, deeds, wills, census records, grave markers, and even photographs, I can find little trace of Samuel.
Once he walked away from the white people who had forced him to either work or fight, he all but disappears from the public record. It is as if Samuel were worthy of notice only while someone’s possession or soldier — hard at work either to build or to protect other people’s wealth.
Where did Samuel’s feet take him on January 16th, 1866, after he mustered out in Nashville? How did he survive — with little or no money and no family members nearby? How did he find work? Where could he lay his head at night? Did he marry the first pretty girl he met, her black eyes flashing behind a crimson fan each time she flicked her wrist? Or had he left a sweetheart when he fled my ancestors’ Mississippi plantation?
I decided to search for Samuel in the voter rolls and census records and found a Sam Drake in the Tennessee Enumeration of male voters, 1891. That Sam Drake’s birth year is listed as 1838 — the same birth year listed for the Samuel Drake from Mississippi who served in the USCT and mustered out in Nashville.
In the 1900 census, the only Black Samuel Drake born in Mississippi around 1838 that I could find lived on Shelley Street in Huntsville City, Madison County, Alabama. He was married to Fannie Drake of Tennessee, and the couple had two children — a son named Stonewall Drake, 23, and a daughter named Willie Broaden, 20. Samuel’s grandchildren, the children of his daughter, Willie, also lived in the household. Their names were Anna, 2, and William, 3 months.
The Samuel Drake in the 1900 census was a day laborer who could not read or write, but he owned his own home. His son Stonewall could not read or write either and was labeled by the census-taker as “Insane.” Daughter Willie, however, was literate.
If the Samuel who escaped enslavement by my Drake ancestors was the same Samuel Drake who joined the USCT and fought for his country, and if he was in turn the Samuel Drake documented in the 1900 census, then he was a remarkable person, managing to escape slavery, fight for and win his freedom, marry, raise a family that included a literate daughter, buy his own home, and vote — all in less than four decades.
Special thanks to Edward Adams, my newly discovered cousin, for granting me permission to title my blog RELATIONS. which is also the title of his book on his Adams and Stewart family history.
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. To read about my motivation for writing this blog, please see Why focus on this dark chapter of my family history? 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 live in Austin, Texas, with my husband, dog, and five chickens.
