Reconstructing "Free Woman":

African-American Women, Apprenticeship, and Custody Rights during Reconstruction from Journal of Women's History Volume 12, Number 1 by Karin L. Zipf
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In 1865, North Carolina law granted former masters preference in the apprenticeship of former slaves' children. Although mothers and fathers both endured the hardships of these losses, women's experiences diverged significantly from men's. Apprenticeship legal cases from 1865 to 1867 reveal that black women challenged two dominant ideologies, one that defined womanhood in terms of white female domesticity and another that reserved the status of independence for white men. They--sometimes successfully and sometimes not--manipulated social custom and legal doctrine to reconstruct the meaning of "free woman," defining black women as both women and free and independent citizens. To some African-American women, the term "free woman" applied to former slave women as well as white women, and it bore connotations of autonomy and independence.



Fifteen-year-old Levi Newsom eluded his master for several weeks, seeking refuge with family and friends and concealing himself in the piney woods of Davidson County, North Carolina. His master, Allen G. Newsom, a Davidson County planter, was in hot pursuit. On more than one occasion, Allen Newsom drew so close to Levi Newsom's hiding place that the young boy could almost hear the dogs barking and men arguing, sounds that had haunted Levi and his forebears for generations. Despite fear of recapture, Levi Newsom's concerns lay with the welfare of his mother, Betsey Newsom; she was engaged in a legal struggle against her former master to regain custody of her son. In those first weeks of 1867, Levi Newsom prayed that the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (hereafter Freedmen's Bureau) would cancel his indenture to Allen Newsom at his mother's behest.1

Levi Newsom's apprenticeship had begun in December 1865, the same month in which states and Congress ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. Colonel C. A. Cilley, an agent with the Freedmen's Bureau, had contracted the apprenticeship of then fourteen-year-old Levi Newsom to his former master. Betsey and Levi Newsom had contracted to work for shares on the plantation of another white man, T. H. Daniel, and were unaware of the indenture. They learned of it only when Allen Newsom's sons arrived at Betsey Newsom's door, drew their pistols upon Levi, and forced him to leave with them.2

In North Carolina, apprenticeship enabled former masters to reverse some of the effects of emancipation. Labor was scarce after the war, since many African Americans had escaped to refugee camps. Few remained behind on plantations. Planters thus grew desperate for laborers. To resolve the labor shortage, former slaveholders invoked antebellum practices of forced apprenticeship of free black children. North Carolina antebellum law had specified that county courts could apprentice "the children of free negroes, where the parents with whom such children may live, do not habitually employ their time in some honest, industrious occupation," as well as all free black children born out of wedlock. The Freedmen's Code of 1866, which modified this law to apply to children of newly freed slaves, instructed courts not only to apprentice former slave children, but also to give priority to their former masters in contracting the apprenticeship. Such plantation owners as Allen Newsom scoured the countryside for former slaves and other able-bodied adolescents who could provide invaluable service as field laborers and domestic workers. Former slaveholders became masters once again when they signed indentures that pledged guardianship until adulthood in return for a child's services.3

Recent scholarship on African-American apprenticeship has neglected to differentiate by gender the horrors of apprenticeship. Yet, African-American women endured the laws and practices of apprenticeship in a fashion different than African-American men. Black women occupied a unique status in the years of Reconstruction of the U.S. South, a status that contrasted sharply with the positions of white women, white men, and black men. Race prevented black women from achieving privileges associated with white womanhood. Gender restricted them from citizenship, a status that white men jealously preserved and black men fought to acquire. Black women found themselves in a peerless position, a void where freedwomen's status--unlike that occupied by elite and poor white women--was not yet rigidly defined by law or custom. North Carolina's rich array of resources in state supreme court records, local court documents, and Freedmen's Bureau accounts exhibit black women's special legal status and their efforts to redefine their rights.4

Although defined by their race and status as freed slaves, former slave women in North Carolina forged a gender identity that differed significantly from the gendered identities of white women. Apprenticeship litigation between 1865 and 1867 reveals that black women challenged the dominant ideologies that defined womanhood as white female domesticity and restricted the status of independence to white men. With varying degrees of success, African-American women undermined social custom and legal doctrine to modify the meaning of "free woman." They defined black women as women and free and independent citizens. To some African-American women, the term "free woman" not only applied to former slave women and white women, but it also bore connotations of autonomy and independence.

The ambiguity of former slave women's status rested on the question of womanhood, a term white society reserved for white women. Historians of black women have addressed the complex category of womanhood by exposing white men's and white women's racial assumptions that have defined womanhood in terms of whiteness and domesticity. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that domestic work characterized white women as "ladies," and female slaves' work in the fields and at menial domestic tasks characterized them as unladylike. Black women responded, White argues, by forging a distinct form of womanhood within a matri-focal slave community where women's childbearing and child rearing activities were highly valued. Historian Jacqueline Jones maintains that freedwomen's womanhood was tied to their labor; she argues further that racial and sexual assumptions created a sexually discriminatory environment for black female workers who responded by withdrawing into the domestic arena to attend to the lives of their families.5

Recently, such scholars as Leslie A. Schwalm and Elsa Barkley Brown have questioned this interpretation that black women retreated into the domestic arena for the benefit of their husbands and children. This new literature contends that black women not only challenged ideologies attributing femaleness to white women, but also rejected assumptions within their communities that enabled black men to represent the family in the public sphere. African-American women's history has contributed to two themes in current feminist historical scholarship. First, it confirms that black women were part of and helped shape the public sphere, as participants in a political culture in such public spaces as churches, missions, political rallies, and workplaces. Second, these scholars demonstrate the fallacy in the notion of universal womanhood. African-American women responding to racist and class oppression constructed a version of being a woman in contrast to established definitions of how to be a "lady."6

This study accepts the premises of the new scholarship, but goes one step further to argue that some single black women rejected the political and social conventions of the day that reserved the status of independent household head to men. This is a significant modification to the historiography of black women because its departs considerably from Laura F. Edwards's recent book, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Edwards explains that while African-American men invoked their rights as household heads before courts and lawmakers, African-American women defended their rights in court by claiming entitlement to protection from men or the state. She argues that the legal system prevented black women and poor women from challenging men's roles as household heads, and she reasons that women who invoked their rights to protection "also implicitly accepted the basic outlines of a system that located them within households headed by men."7 However, apprenticeship records indicate that some single African-American mothers demanded their rights as autonomous household heads and not as dependent wives seeking "protection." By resisting their children's indentures, these African-American women actively challenged the republican political philosophy of the nineteenth century. When former slave women demanded the return of their children, they utilized the language of citizenship. By doing so, black women redefined the term "free woman" not only to include themselves, but also to indicate a measure of autonomy that nineteenth-century society had reserved for "free men" only. African-American women, unlike white women who were relegated to dependency, were uniquely situated as former slave women to challenge nineteenth-century terms of citizenship.

In a society that revered the qualities of free men, the rights and duties of freedwomen were ill defined. Freedwomen lived in legal limbo, lacking the more certain provisions that defined the place of free white women. Furthermore, freedwomen found themselves excluded from the dialogue on citizenship between black men and white men during Reconstruction.8 Few North Carolinians considered the ambiguity concealed in the word "freedwoman," a term with racial and class meanings that placed it in contradistinction to the term "free woman."

Prior to the Civil War, North Carolina law applied the status "free woman" to women born free from involuntary servitude. The term most aptly described the status of white women who, if married, by law, could not own property and remained dependent upon their husbands. The law identified free married women as feme covert, because their husbands' identities "covered" their own. The term "free woman" also applied to single white women, or feme sole, who might own property, but could not lawfully maintain custody of children born out of wedlock. Law and custom decreed that free women lacked the power that came with citizenship conferred upon white men. Because free white women were forever dependent upon either male relatives or the county court system, their proper role was a domestic one. County officials regarded with suspicion white women who strayed from a man's household or belonged to none.9

Despite its connotations of dependency, the status "free woman" offered white women limited protections under North Carolina law. Although free married women could not own property, North Carolina protected widows' rights to dower, a legal provision that secured women's rights to one-third of their deceased husbands' property in the form of a life estate. North Carolina apprenticeship law prevented free single women from possessing full custody rights to their children, but bastardy laws enabled women to obtain support from their children's fathers if the mother revealed his name in a sworn deposition. By naming the father, women could gain financial support for their offspring and, thus, avoid their child's apprenticeship as long as the child did not require support from the county. These laws provided white women some protection, while, at the same time, assuring women's dependency upon men.10

The status freedwoman did not have the same legal implications as the status free woman. Whereas the term "free woman" implied white women's domestic obligations, the word "freedwoman" was a reminder of black women's previous condition of servitude, one that identified them with field labor and menial domestic work. Herein lay the racial and class connotations for the word. In slavery, African-American women's roles were defined by race and class. Menial domestic work and field labor separated black women from plantation mistresses who, according to historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, jealously guarded their white supremacist definition of womanhood. Having excluded black women from the definition of womanhood, white society constructed such stereotypes as the images of Jezebel and Mammy to explain black women's place. These images associated black women with sexuality and labor, in contrast to whites' notions of virtuous womanhood and domesticity for white women.11

North Carolina's Reconstruction elite linked the term "freedwoman" with domestic work and field labor. Freedwomen--having once experienced the deprivations of slavery--lacked many of the protections enjoyed by women born free. Laws of marriage and property had not applied to enslaved women. As a result, emancipation brought mixed blessings. In 1865, enslaved women gained their freedom, accompanied by propertylessness and the burdens of caring for children who, by the white community's standards, were defined as illegitimate. Although many freedmen and freedwomen married after the war, some women had lost contact with their children's fathers who were sold away prior to emancipation. Certain property and bastardy laws, not to mention U.S. Army pension rights, remained inaccessible to some freedwomen; white society's laws correlated free woman with white womanhood and domesticity and, by law, the rights and obligations of free woman did not apply to freedwomen.12

A freedwoman's status most closely resembled the position to which antebellum North Carolina society had once relegated free black women. Antebellum North Carolina law denied free black women full legal rights as free women. Although not enslaved, free black women lacked the protections granted to free women on account of their position in a racial and class hierarchy. For example, antebellum bastardy law prevented free black women from testifying against white men. In 1849, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in State v. Long that women "of color within the fourth degree" could not testify against white men in bastardy proceedings. Other statutes, such as miscegenation laws, outlawed black women's marriages to white men. And, although the state recognized white men's and white women's common-law marriages, such voluntary relations between free black women and white men were defined by law as "fornication." These laws prevented free black women who cohabited with white men from claiming dower and inheritance rights upon their partner's death.13

In 1865, freedwomen shared many burdens of race and class with freedmen. Freedmen inherited a status that deprived them of the privileges that white men possessed. North Carolina's Freedmen's Code encouraged former slaves to marry and form households. However, vagrancy and apprenticeship laws, as well as other provisions in these codes, prevented freedmen from obtaining full rights as independent citizens. This message of quasi independence did not escape the attention of freedmen, who expected all the rights of free men. Philip H. Jones, a former slave who had acquired some property, wrote a letter to Freedmen's Bureau commissioner general Oliver Otis Howard to inquire about his property rights. Jones wished to create a separate estate for his wife. He and his wife had married as slaves on 24 May 1863, and planned to "remarry" and obtain an official license as required by the Freedmen's Code. "Since we are to be remarried and obtain new lisence [sic]," he queried, "I wish to know if we have the same right to make a marriage contract as a white couple would."14

The uncertainties that led Jones to inquire about separate estates also led Abram H. Galloway, a former slave who later served as a delegate to the 1868 North Carolina Constitutional Convention and legislator in the state general assembly, to question the implications of the word "freedman." At a New Bern, North Carolina, freedmen's convention in September 1865, Galloway publicly objected to the term "freedmen." "'It is not right,'" he declared, "'we are free men now and should be called "Freemen."'" Galloway further demanded access to education, the vote, and the right to testify against whites in court.15

Although Galloway's oration received thunderous applause from the assembled audience, conservative Southern whites refused to acknowledge African-American men's status as independent citizens. Instead, they perpetuated images of African-American men as dependents who lacked the intelligence and independence required of citizenship. The editors of the Raleigh North Carolinian personally attacked Galloway and other African-American politicians by impugning their manhood. These delegates, the editors decried, were "deficient in those qualities which would make them valuable as citizens. . . .They are capricious, credulous, passionate, and, as a class, vicious." Such characterizations incensed Galloway and help to explain why he insisted on the term "free men" to describe the status of former male slaves.16

African-American men's uncertain status as citizens made African-American women's position as dependents equally unclear. The early years of Reconstruction had failed to secure the indisputability of black men's independence. Law and custom denied black men the control over women and children that white men had long since established. Burdened with the status of dependence that North Carolinians usually associated with women, freedmen lacked the power to protect and control their families. As a result, it was not clear upon whom African-American women were dependent.17

Thus, African-American women found the opportunity to form distinct notions of womanhood. To be sure, their position was circumscribed by race, class, and gender. At once, they lacked the protections free women possessed and found themselves excluded from discussions of citizenship for black men. Nonetheless, black women actively embraced the rights of free women and, at the same time, rejected confinement to domesticity and dependency. Between 1865 and 1869, Betsey Newsom and other women manipulated legal practice and rhetoric in ways that unsettled the meaning of "free woman." Among the ways women pursued their legal rights as free women, they frequently sought redress for grievances in county and military courts. Their complaints varied widely; women reported brutalities associated with rape, charged men with fathering bastard children, demanded custody of their children, and accused both blacks and whites of theft. Their persistence in litigation reflects their efforts to reverse the effects of slavery, which had trivialized violations of black women's bodies and property under slavery. In fact, African-American women's access to courts was an important step in the process of securing their rights as free women.18

Before the Civil War, slaves in interracial relationships received no legal protection on the basis of their connection to white people. Because North Carolina outlawed interracial marriages, slave and free black women who were common-law wives or mistresses of white men could not claim the usual rights of inheritance and dower--one-third of husbands' property in life estate. Slave women had no property or marital rights. In addition, the law provided no protection for free black women's "marriages" to white men. Nevertheless, voluntary and involuntary unions were formed between white men and black women during slavery. Yet, courts consistently denied relief to free black women who pursued their rights as free women.19

Upon emancipation, African-American women actively pursued their rights as white men's common-law wives, including dower, inheritance, and bastardy rights available to white women. Mary T. Bryant was a free black woman who claimed a common-law marriage to John Waddell, Esq., a slaveholder in Cumberland County. Legally prevented from marrying, the two had lived together for two and one-half decades and raised several sons and daughters. In 1865, Union general William T. Sherman's troops ransacked and set re to the plantation and killed Waddell. According to Bryant, Waddell's last will and testament, which bequeathed the entire plantation to Bryant and her two sons, was also destroyed. Under the direction of Waddell's white nephew, a lawyer named William McCoy had "taken possession of the plantation" and prevented Bryant and her sons from gaining access to Waddell's property and its crops. In 1868, Bryant contacted the Freedmen's Bureau and requested payment for her family's services on the plantation. She deserved compensation, she argued, for "I think that I aught to have pay for my service to him [before 1865]." Without the protection of a will or dower rights, Bryant asserted that it "is verry hard for me not to Reseave eney benefits for all of my labor." The Freedmen's Bureau mustered neither the resources nor interest to assist Bryant; agents never officially logged her letter into the register of complaints.20

African-American women, who, similar to Bryant, were born free demanded their rights as free women by indicating their voluntary position as common-law wives. While enslaved, freedwomen who were forced into involuntary relationships with their masters turned to different sets of laws for relief. Eliza Cook sought her rights as a free woman under the bastardy laws. In slavery, her master, James H. Cook, had seduced her at age sixteen. By 1866, she had borne seven children by him, and her family lived in a shack on his plantation. After the war, James Cook married a white woman, who seethed from humiliation at the constant presence of Eliza Cook and her children. In July 1866, his new wife demanded that James Cook eject Eliza Cook and her family from the plantation. James Cook requested that the Freedmen's Bureau supervise the family's eviction. Eliza Cook, he claimed, had paid nothing to occupy "his house" and had become "insulting and abusive" toward his family. At first, Freedmen's Bureau agent A. G. Brady expressed a willingness to comply with James Cook, but he reversed his position and ordered the former slave holder to care for Eliza Cook's family upon hearing her version of events.21

Eliza Cook claimed that James Cook should support her and her children in accordance with North Carolina's bastardy laws. She claimed her rights as a free woman and told the new Mrs. Cook that "if I had my justice I had as much right here as she had." North Carolina's bastardy laws required every unmarried woman who bore a child to name its father within three years of the child's birth. In order to prevent the child from becoming a county charge, the laws also required fathers to support their illegitimate children or face imprisonment. However, the statute of limitations had passed for six of Eliza Cook's seven children; she had never testified to their parentage because she was enslaved during their infancy. In short, North Carolina's laws failed to provide for her case.22

Eliza Cook claimed that the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 entitled her to the rights of a free woman. The act mandated that North Carolina's laws applied to all women, regardless of race. Eliza Cook maintained that the Civil Rights Act required the state to extend protection to women who had borne "bastard" children in slavery and implied that the state would have to create a new law to cover her self-proclaimed situation as a free woman. James Cook offered a compromise. He agreed to support the youngest child, an infant of eighteen months, because Eliza Cook had sworn his parentage within the three-year window allowed under the state's laws of bastardy. In return, he required Eliza Cook and her family to leave the plantation. She refused the compromise and submitted her case for consideration by the U.S. District Court; however, the court refused to hear the case. Court officials argued that Eliza Cook's situation did not apply to the Civil Rights Act, and, therefore, did not fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court. James Cook evicted Eliza Cook and her children, leaving the family dependent upon the Freedmen's Bureau for food and shelter.23

This case reveals how a freedwoman used the language of the federal government in an effort to gain her rights as a free woman. Because North Carolina law did not provide for freedwomen who had borne children by their masters in slavery, Eliza Cook reasoned that the Civil Rights Act transferred jurisdiction of her case to the U.S. government. The federal government, however, interpreted the act differently. George Washington Brooks, federal district court judge for North Carolina, argued that the Civil Rights Act was intended to apply existing state legislation evenly to blacks and whites. Congress had created the act to ensure that black men and women enjoyed full protection of state laws written for free men and women. In other words, Eliza Cook lost because the court applied the Civil Rights Act only to existing laws established to protect the rights of free men and women. It was not intended to create new laws that remedied the injustices inflicted upon African-American women during slavery.24 The government did not acknowledge Mary Bryant's and Eliza Cook's interpretations of womanhood, nor did the rights of free women apply to freedwomen in such cases as Eliza Cook's.

Yet, African-American women persisted in their efforts despite the limitations of state and federal law. Freedwomen actively worked to gain one of the rights enjoyed by white men in 1865--full and unlimited custody of their children. Custody rights were no trivial matter in 1865. Lawmakers guarded white men's rights to control dependents and sought to prevent unmarried poor white women and African-American women from maintaining households of illegitimate children. Children's labor was essential to producing independence in households, and white men had inextricably tied independence to citizenship rights. Therefore, it was vital that white men relegate women to a status of dependence. Women who managed independent households undermined the political philosophy that reserved citizenship for white men. By requiring the apprenticeship of African-American women's illegitimate children, North Carolina legislators curtailed the opportunity for black women to establish independent households.25

Violence and kidnapping preceded the apprenticeship of Lucy Ross's two daughters, Maria and Delia, ages sixteen and twelve. Over one year after the war's close, Lucy Ross, her daughters, and her brother, William James, established a household near Wilmington, North Carolina. On a September night in 1866, Lucy Ross awoke to find two white men brandishing pistols and abducting her daughters. Her brother exchanged angry words with the perpetrators; one of the men, a local constable, arrested James on the spot for misconduct. In a wagon, the two men drove off with James and the girls, while Lucy Ross, now alone, was struck by a fear that mingled with memories of her enslavement. She recognized one of the men as the overseer from her former master's plantation.26

The next morning Lucy Ross headed straight to Wilmington to learn what had happened to her daughters. The girls were in jail with several other children who had experienced similar traumas and James had been released. The girls remained in jail until word came from the Brunswick County Court that the magistrate had apprenticed them, along with the other children, to their former master, a local planter and state legislator, Daniel Lindsay Russell, Sr. Angry and horrified Lucy Ross watched Russell cart away the children who would now labor in his fields and in his household. Later that month, she reported the crime to the local Freedmen's Bureau office Her complaint, registered on 24 September 1866, eventually reached the North Carolina Supreme Court as evidence in the case In the matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Ambrose.27

Russell, a wealthy turpentine manufacturer who had served as a judge for the Brunswick County Court and delegate in North Carolina's 1865 Constitutional Convention, did not endorse African-Americans' rights as independent citizens. For Russell, the large-scale apprenticeship of African-American children went hand in hand with the South's reentry into the Union. Successful reconciliation required a stable social order, one that he professed was most effectively accomplished through apprenticeship. Russell argued that African Americans would remain forever dependent upon whites. By apprenticing former slaves' children, he argued, whites relieved black parents from the impossible burden of caring for their children. According to Russell, the Freedmen's Bureau had no right to intervene in local matters of apprenticeship between Southern whites and former slaves. "Humbugery it is that agents of the freedmans [sic] Bureau should pretend to apprentice orphan children," Russell claimed, "some individual sets himself up to be a judge and forthwith orders the apprentice to be given up to some lazy negroe who will raise them up in dirt and filth that they may be turned loose upon society to become vagrants."28

Southern whites, including Russell, linked apprenticeship and beliefs about former slaves' dependence to larger nineteenth-century understandings of citizenship. North Carolina law allowed only "citizens" to apprentice children, reserving citizenship for those who possessed the qualities of independence. Only independent individuals--usually white male property owners who could vote--possessed the ability to make rational decisions free from the influence of others. The state accorded all others--white women, children, and African Americans--the status of dependence. Thus, only white men received full citizenship privileges, which included the right to vote as well as the uninhibited right to control one's dependents. County courts could not violate the sanctity of white men's household relations, but courts did have the power to take children from the homes of dependent groups--freedmen, freedwomen, and white women.29

African-American parents disagreed, and they challenged the indentures. African Americans argued that fathers and mothers possessed the independence necessary to raise their children. By doing so, freedmen and freedwomen not only questioned apprenticeship law, but they also attacked the very foundation of nineteenth-century citizenship ideals. In September 1866, Lucy Ross protested the kidnapping of her daughters and their involuntary apprenticeship because Russell had treated her children like slaves. She pointed out that these were respectable young women who "can earn good wages for themselves." With vehemence, Lucy Ross asserted her own claims to independence by demanding that the court release the children immediately. "I am able and willing to support my children," she argued. Lucy Ross declared that the court had granted the indentures unfairly and pleaded with the Freedmen's Bureau for assistance. "I pray you," she implored, "to assist me to get my children as I have no other hope as Mr. Russell is Chareman [sic] of the Court and no justice can be had here."30

Male family and friends bolstered Lucy Ross's assertions of independence by testifying on her behalf. They acknowledged her claims to independence. In a deposition to the Freedmen's Bureau, William James stated that his sister "was fully able to support and provide" for her children and argued that the children were his sister's responsibility, and not his own, absolving himself of any obligations as the head of the household. Another brother, James Ross, seconded William James's declaration, and Charles Aubriden, a neighbor who lived three miles from William James and the Ross family, also testified to Lucy Ross's independence. Aubriden stated, she "is freely able to support her children, having made a good crop during the past season." The household relations that shaped white men's --and Russell's--notion of citizenship did not resonate among former slaves.31

Lucy Ross, her brothers, and other African Americans who protested apprenticeship occasionally drew support from Freedmen's Bureau agents, who sympathized with the plight of parents. The bureau in North Carolina had maintained uneasy relations with apprenticeship authorities. Their purpose was to aid in the transition to freedom by intervening in civil and criminal matters that involved freedpeople. Yet, their intervention sometimes led them to break North Carolina laws. In 1866, for example, Eliphalet Whittlesey, Freedman's Bureau assistant commissioner from 1865 to 1866, rejected North Carolina apprenticeship regulations and adopted his own. In instructions distributed among Freedmen's Bureau agents, Whittlesey prohibited his agents from apprenticing all children except orphans and children of parents who gave their consent. "Families should not be deprived of the services of their children," he instructed in his circular. Agents should apprentice only orphans and "destitute" children. In a bold stroke of the pen, Whittlesey blatantly deed North Carolina's 1865 apprenticeship statute, which provided for the apprenticeship of illegitimate "children of color" and children of African Americans who were not "honest" or "industrious." Apprenticeship horrified Whittlesey's successor as well. John C. Robinson argued that the institution offered former masters the ability to reinstate slavery, reversing the effects of emancipation and exposing African-American families to the same evils they had endured during slavery. He argued that "the worst feature of slavery was the forcible separation of families, and by God's help I will prevent its reestablishment within the limits of my command."32

African-American parents pressured Freedmen's Bureau agents to free children that local courts had apprenticed. In response to parents' demands, agents began to investigate and void apprenticeship cases made against Whittlesey's commands. Freedmen's Bureau agent Allen G. Rutherford agreed that Russell had violated Lucy Ross's rights to her children, and he launched an investigation. Rutherford's superiors also sensed that Russell and the courts had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Robinson noted what he identified as an unwritten North Carolina custom that prohibited courts from binding out without their parents' consent white children who reached age fourteen. He argued "that having arrived at that age[,] they can help support their parents, or if orphans can labor for their own support." Drawing upon the power of the Civil Rights Act, Robinson instructed Rutherford to void the indentures. The Freedmen's Bureau objected to racial distinctions regarding apprenticeship. Robinson explained: "No child whose parents are able and willing to support it can be bound without the consent of the parents." In one fell swoop, he challenged North Carolina apprenticeship law and endorsed Lucy Ross's claims as a parent. Rutherford followed Robinson's orders and canceled the indentures. But, Russell refused to return the children; he argued that the Freedmen's Bureau had no authority over the matter.33

Lucy Ross and the Freedmen's Bureau persisted in their efforts to change the law. With the federal government's assistance, Lucy Ross and the other aggrieved parents took Ross's case to court in Robeson County, where the children served on Russell's plantation. Lawyers representing the parents and the bureau carefully examined the case for a winning strategy. The bureau hoped that a court victory at the local level would not only void the Ross indentures but also annul all apprenticeships Russell had obtained. The Ross case, however, presented a problem that fundamentally undermined the bureau's position. Lucy Ross was an unmarried woman, and regardless of the testimony on her behalf, the bureau realized it could not present her case to the court and expect to win. State law allowed county courts to apprentice the children of unmarried black women without consent. The 1855 North Carolina Revised Code outlined several specific instances when courts could apprentice children of single women. Apprenticeship applied to children "not living with fathers," children without fathers who stood to inherit property from their mothers, and all free black children born out of wedlock. Lucy Ross's case fell into this last category. The bureau opted against challenging this aspect of the North Carolina code on apprenticeship. Despite the testimony of three male family members and friends on her behalf, her case remained weak.34

Instead, bureau lawyers challenged another provision in the code. Antebellum laws determined African-American men's parental rights by allowing courts to apprentice legitimate children in free black households where parents were "not industrious." Freedmen's Bureau lawyers imagined that a case centered on the rights of an African-American man might succeed. They feared disastrous failure if they pursued rights for Lucy Ross, an unmarried African-American woman. Thus, they chose to focus on the plight of Wiley Ambrose, another freedperson whose case differed from Lucy Ross's only because he was male. By choosing Wiley Ambrose as the plaintiff, bureau lawyers challenged a law that prohibited African-American men from claiming their rights as citizens and independent householders. They left in place a law that relegated women to the status of dependence.35

Wiley Ambrose and his wife Hepsey Saunders had fought Russell's attempts to apprentice their three children since mid-1865. Prior to emancipation, the family had served Russell as slaves. In December 1865, Russell obtained apprenticeships of Ambrose and Saunders's three children, Harriet, Eliza, and John Allen. In June 1866, Saunders entered Russell's premises by order of the Freedmen's Bureau and retrieved her children. But Russell persisted; in September 1866, he had the court apprentice the children again. In December 1866, Saunders again returned to the plantation, this time without an order to retrieve the children, and removed them from the premises. Russell, who claimed legal guardianship, threatened to have both Ambrose and Saunders imprisoned for harboring their own children.36

Freedmen's Bureau commissioner Howard encouraged agents in North Carolina to seek justice. The federal government, he claimed, would not endorse such overt acts of discrimination. Howard informed Robinson that apprenticing children without parents' consent violated the Civil Rights Act, and he encouraged Robinson to pursue the case. Howard showed no patience with conservatives who claimed that written law did not discriminate against African Americans. He declared that "even if the state law makes no distinction on account of race or color, the practice or custom does." Howard hoped that a victory over involuntary apprenticeship laws would set the standards of justice and promise relief for freedpeople in other civil rights matters. "Get the best legal advice you can in the country," he suggested, then "you will be sustained in securing justice."37

Whereas Howard supported the parents, the state supported Russell. Governor Jonathan Worth denied that this case represented a gross example of discrimination against African-American parents. He conceded that Russell may have acted with "cruel oppression," but such action "does not prove that the laws are unjust or discriminating against freedmen." Worth assured Robinson that the general assembly intended to address racial discrimination in the Freedmen's Code, legislation which the bureau later attacked for violating freedpeople's civil rights. He inquired if the Freedmen's Bureau meant to use this case as an example to challenge all state apprenticeship laws. "If this be your design," he asserted, "then I respectfully request to know what is to become of destitute orphans--illegitimate children and those abandoned by their parents, or whose parents do not habitually employ their children in some honest, industrious occupation?" Worth concurred with Russell's opinion that such freedmen and freedwomen as Wiley Ambrose and Lucy Ross lacked the unquestioned claims to independence white male citizens possessed.38

In January 1867, the case In the matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Ambrose appeared before the North Carolina Supreme Court. Freedmen's Bureau lawyers argued that the court void the indentures on two grounds. First the court had no power to apprentice children from legitimate households. The Ambrose children, born in slavery, were not "free base-born children of color." Antebellum North Carolina law had defined children born into servitude as property, not as bastards. They argued that "great 'inconvenience' would arise from holding that the Ordinance of Emancipation . . . has the effect of turning these persons into free base-born children of color." Strictly speaking, neither antebellum nor postbellum law had classified the Ambrose children as illegitimate. As slaves, the Ambrose children fell outside the purview of laws restricting the rights of bastard children. As freedpeople, the children fell under the protection of their father. But, the lawyers diluted Wiley Ambrose's own claims to independence by avoiding a firm commitment to African-American men's rights. Instead, they stated that to violate his rights would create great "inconvenience."39

While the first argument focused on Wiley Ambrose's rights to independence, the second argument centered on the children's own claims to citizenship. The court, they claimed, failed to notify the parents and children of the apprenticeship proceedings. Although apprenticeship law did not require courts to notify parties of the proceedings, Person and French pointed to certain rules, such as habeas corpus, that applied universally to judicial proceedings. Thus, the lawyers argued that the law required courts to acknowledge citizens' universal rights by providing notice to parents and children. By contrast, Freedmen's Bureau agents Rutherford and Robinson demanded that courts first obtain parents' consent. Such conflicting interpretations of the law bore significant consequences in the wake of the Ambrose case.40

The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed with the second argument and canceled the indentures. Chief Justice Edwin G. Reade argued that the law entitled the children to certain rights: "It is well settled that judgment without service of process is void." The law entitled individuals, regardless of race, to notification of proceedings. "It is a clear dictate of justice," Reade asserted, "that no man shall be deprived of his rights of person or property, without the privilege of being heard." He stated that the court should retain the power to intercede in freedmen's and freedwomen's domestic relations and ensure that children obtained proper oversight from their parents and friends. The war had caused many casualties and the responsibilities and duties of county courts must increase in proportion. Therefore, such delicate matters as apprenticeship required that all parties appear before the court. With a full presentation of the "facts," justices could then make informed decisions.41

Reade avoided the argument that recognized Wiley Ambrose's rights as the children's male provider. Perhaps Reade harbored an unequivocal view of African-American men's claims to citizenship, but he did not voice his opinion in the case. The Freedmen's Bureau lawyers had argued that Wiley Ambrose's parental rights were supreme, but Reade argued that any question regarding the parents' rights was irrelevant. The court had failed to notify the children and their parents, and that error alone annulled the indentures.42

Reade thus refused to reinterpret laws that prohibited African-American men from claiming full citizenship rights. Nonetheless, Reade had voided the apprenticeships, and his actions had unintended consequences. Some authorities disregarded or misunderstood his decision and implemented practices contrary to the law. Freedmen's Bureau agents perceived the case as a major victory in their efforts to secure freedpeople's rights. In a letter to Rutherford, Freedmen's Bureau agent F. D. Sewell predicted that the case would void all indentures made without parents' consent. He remarked that it "will have the effect to annul all of the indentures of apprenticeship in this State where colored children have been bound out contrary to the will of their parents." Sewell was right. Although Reade's opinion only voided indentures made without proper notice, bureau agents across the state interpreted the opinion to mean that courts could not apprentice without parents' consent. Two weeks after the North Carolina Supreme Court decision, acting assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau J. V. Bomford issued a directive to agents, which instructed them to cancel indentures made without proper notice to the parents. Bomford anticipated that the court's decision would effectively end the practice of involuntary apprenticeship. He declared that "the decision will operate to annul all cases of apprenticeship in the State, where the children have been bound out, against the will of their parents."43

African-American women used the confusion over the meaning of the Ambrose decision to their best advantage by interpreting the state supreme court case to mean that the law required a mother's consent to indentures. Many women demanded full custody of their children, whose fathers were slaves sold away or former masters that denied paternity; these women objected to apprenticeship whenever the indenture was made without their permission. Freedmen's Bureau records are replete with letters from freedwomen demanding the return of children who had been bound out without their consent. Grace Jenkins witnessed Daniel Skipper drag her son Henry out of the fields where he worked. Indeed, the indenture was illegal because it was made without parental notification Grace Jenkins, however, did not use that argument for redress. Instead, she claimed that she had never given her consent. Other freedwomen reported similar offenses. Elsy Baker, for example, objected to the indenture of her six-year-old son, Frank Williams, who was kidnapped in December 1866, and Betsey Jones claimed that Mrs. E. Jones held her daughter Hester and her son Sam without her consent.44

Apprenticeship's political significance hinges on the meaning of consent. According to prominent feminist political theorists, the term "consent" served as the cornerstone of nineteenth-century republican political philosophy. In a republic, free, independent, and intelligent men gave their consent (at the ballot box) to be governed. This consent was rational, and only independent citizens possessed the rational capability of providing consent. All others who lacked this rationality were denied the right to vote and deemed dependents.45

A freedwoman who rejected the legality of indentures that lacked her consent made a political statement about her ability to think rationally as a citizen. Betsey Newsom declared these rights in her complaint to the Freedmen's Bureau. In it, she claimed that, "as a freewoman of the United States & the State of North Carolina," she possessed the common right to the control and service of her own children, unless that right was forfeited by some act of her own. Not only had she cast off the term "freedwoman" in favor of the term "free woman," she also fundamentally challenged the republican political philosophy of the nineteenth century.46

Sometimes Freedmen's Bureau agents acknowledged mothers' rights to consent to their children's indentures. In apprenticeship cases that pitted mothers' rights against fathers' rights, local agents occasionally upheld a mother's right to a child over that of the father. Despite the Ambrose victory, African-American men still lacked many privileges of citizenship and manhood. Some agents argued that former slave mothers, possessed with certain qualities of nurture, were more responsible parents than former slave fathers. Allen Newsom, the planter who kidnapped Levi Newsom without his mother's consent, argued that Levi's father had consented to the indenture; therefore, he claimed the indenture was legal. Nonetheless, bureau agents upheld Betsy Newsom's claim to her child on the grounds that she had not given her consent and that Levi, who was illegitimate, by law, had no father. The father, argued Freedmen's Bureau agent Jacob F. Chur, "has no consent to give or right to confer."47

Just as Chief Justice Reade had refused to acknowledge Wiley Ambrose's full rights as an independent parent and citizen, local agents frequently rejected "legitimate" African-American fathers' claims to their children. Shade Howard complained that John King, a planter in New Hanover County, North Carolina, held his son Seth without legal right. The Freedmen's Bureau did not immediately turn the boy over to his father, the standard procedure if Shade Howard were a white man. Instead, Rutherford called Seth into his office and asked him with whom he preferred to live. Seth chose his father, but, if he had not, Rutherford would have granted custody to Seth's employer.48

At the local level, African-American mothers sometimes achieved custody of children where African-American fathers could not. Freedmen's Bureau agents' arguments for granting custody of children to mothers corresponded to some of the policies they advocated in cases of apprenticeship. Rutherford denied Archie Smith rights to his children, although he had lived with the children's mother, Mary Smith, for many years. When Archie Smith left Mary Smith for another woman, the children remained with their mother.49

Of course, bureau agents did not consciously challenge paternalist republicanism when they granted mothers rights to their children. By granting custody to mothers, bureau agents revealed their own racist assumptions that former slave men lacked the independence and responsibility necessary for parenthood. An unnamed agent said this much in Charlotte, North Carolina, when he allowed Jermina Colwell custody of her children. The agent sent the children's father, Alex Spears, a letter which stated "that as Jermina has taken care of the children for 11 years without his assisting her to support them he must not take them from her." With this letter, the bureau official criticized Spears's claims to independence and responsibility as a father.50

African-American men's uncertain status as independent citizens had dramatic implications for African-American women's claims as autonomous free women. Black men lacked the power that white men exercised over their own wives. African-American women's status was therefore contested during Reconstruction. According to white society, former slave women had failed to conform to whites' notions of domesticity and womanhood. Images of African-American women laboring in the fields contrasted significantly with the ideals of domesticity. But African-American women actively worked to reconstruct the definition of "free woman" to encompass black women as political actors. Betsey Newsom, Lucy Ross, and other former slave women rejected the term's connotations of domesticity and dependency and forged new meanings. First former slave women expanded the applicability of the term "free woman" to provide themselves with certain legal protections previously reserved for white women. Second, former slave women challenged the dependent status of the designation "free woman" and reconstructed it by claiming some of the privileges of citizenship and independence. Antebellum notions of free woman did not apply to African-American women during Reconstruction, so African-American women radically restructured what it meant to be a free and independent woman.

Notes

1 William M. Robbins (attorney for Betsey Newsom) to Colonel J. V. Bomford, 12 February 1867, Letters Received, Record Group (RG) 105, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands Records (hereafter Freedmen's Bureau Records), National Archives Branch Depository, Southeast Region, East Point, Georgia (hereafter NABDSR).

2 John R. Edie to Jacob F. Chur, 8 December 1866; and testimonies of Betsey Newsom and A. G. Newsom, In the matter of the Petition of Betsey Newsom and A. [G.] Newsom, Salisbury, Davidson County, North Carolina, 16 February 1867, both in Letters Received, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

3 North Carolina General Assembly, Revised Code of North Carolina: Enacted by the General Assembly at the Session of 1854 . . . (Boston: Little, Brown, 1855), chap. 5, esp. 78. For critical analysis of the Freedmen's Code, see Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 38-39.

4 Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 139-56; and Rebecca Scott, "The Battle over the Child: Child Apprenticeship and the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina," Prologue 10 (summer 1978): 101-13. Edwards's analysis of Reconstruction political culture demonstrates the complexity of gender relations during the era. Edwards probes the political meanings of rape cases and astutely demonstrates how African Americans and white women challenged the norms for poor white women and black women. Apprenticeship law, she argues, reflected the political nature of marriage. Edwards does not discuss African-American men's and women's contrasting experiences with apprenticeship law. See Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, chap. 1.

5 Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), chaps. 1, 3, 4; and Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), introduction. Other related studies include Susan A. Mann, "Slavery, Sharecropping, and Sexual Inequality," Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 774-98; Leslie A. Schwalm, "'Sweet Dreams of Freedom': Freedwomen's Reconstruction of Life and Labor in Lowcountry South Carolina," Journal of Women's History 9, no. 1 (1997): 9-38, Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Noralee Frankel, "The Southern Side of 'Glory': Mississippi African-American Women during the Civil War," in "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible": A Reader in Black Women's History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1995), 335-42; Laura F. Edwards, "Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction, and the Extension of Patriarchy in Granville County, North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 68, no. 3 (1991): 237-60; and Thavolia Glymph, "'This Species of Property': Female Slave Contrabands in the Civil War," in A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy, ed. Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., and Kim S. Rice (Richmond, Va.: Museum of the Confederacy, 1996), 55-72.

6 Schwalm explores the actions of freedwomen workers in Reconstruction South Carolina. In the face of white planter resistance, freedwomen defended their meanings of freedom; they contracted their own labor, contributed to low-country labor conflicts and struggled against white employers who attempted to control them as domestic servants. Schwalm, "'Sweet Dreams of Freedom,'" 1, 11-15. Elsa Barkley Brown examines African-American political culture in Reconstruction Richmond, Virginia. She asserts that African-American women's political participation signaled their worldview built upon the collective autonomy of men and women, and not the "possessive individualism" of liberal democracy. Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994); 107-46, esp. 108, 119-21. Edwards demonstrates that Southern African-American women entered the public through courts on such "private" matters as divorce, marriage, and rape. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 13-23, 198-217. See also Michelle A. Krowl, "Dixie's Other Daughters: African-American Women in Virginia, 1861-1868" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1998); and Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

7 Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 48, 161-82, quotation on 182.

8 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore examines African-American women's political responses at the turn of the twentieth century. See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

9 Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: Norton, 1984), 15-53, Suzanne Lebsock, "Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women," Journal of Southern History 43 (May 1977), 209-10; and Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 88-103. Marylynn Salmon contrasts the rights and responsibilities of feme covert and feme sole in Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), chaps. 1-2.

10 Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, 24; and Bynum, Unruly Women, 103-13.

11 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 43, 49-51, 290-93; and White, Ar'n't I a Woman? 28-31, 49-61.

12 Jones argues that Southern whites refused to grant former slave women the privileges of white women. She asserts that whites expected former slave women to serve as domestics and field laborers in Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 3-4, 52-68. Edwards discusses freedwomen's unique construction of womanhood in Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 145-83, 198-210. See also Edwards, "Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction, and the Extension of Patriarchy," 237-60; and Catherine Clinton, "Reconstructing Freedwomen," in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 306-19.

13 State v. Long, 31 NC 488 (1849). Bynum provides rich analysis of laws that bound free black women's sexual and social behavior in Bynum, Unruly Women, chaps. 2, 4.

14 Jones to Howard, 4 September 1866, Letters Received, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

15 Raleigh Semi-Weekly Record, 9 September 1865.

16 Raleigh North Carolinian, 18 February 1868.

17 Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 31-45.

18 Ibid., 198-210.

19 Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, 23-24, 104-5. See also Lebsock, "Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women," 209-10; and Bynum, Unruly Women, 88-110. Salmon contrasts widowed women's property rights in Northern and Southern states in Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 141-84.

20 Bryant to "The Col in Wilmington [Allen G. Rutherford]," n.d., Letters Received, unprocessed letters, Box E2609, National Archive and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C. Although this letter is not dated, it is catalogued with other letters dated 1868. Bryant's letter remains in a box with other loose papers at the archives.

21 Brady to Eliza Cook, 9 July 1866, Brady to James H. Cook, 12 July 1866, "Complaint of Eliza Cook," 15 July 1866, and R. G. Badger to T. D. McAlpine, 26 July 1866, all in Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

22 "Complaint of Eliza Cook," and "Deposition of Eliza Cook," 12 July 1866, both in Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

23 "Complaint of Eliza Cook," McAlpine to Bomford, 11 December 1866, Bomford to Howard, 13 December 1866, and H. A. Bodham to Bomford, 13 December 1866, all in Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

24 Bomford to Howard, 13 December 1866, Bodham to Bomford, 13 December 1866, both in Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR; and "George Washington Brooks," Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William S. Powell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 1:237.

25 North Carolina General Assembly, Revised Code, chap. 5, esp. 78. Edwards discusses the legal implications of apprenticeship on African-American families during Reconstruction in Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 48-54. Bynum argues that apprenticeship law directly challenged the autonomy of poor women and African-American women in Bynum, Unruly Women, 98-109. Barbara L. Bellows examines poor women's rights to their children in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, in Barbara L. Bellows, "'My Children, Gentlemen, Are My Own': Poor Women, the Urban Elite, and the Bonds of Obligation in Antebellum Charleston," in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education, ed. Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 52-71. Stephanie McCurry explains that independence was a key element of republicanism in antebellum South Carolina in Stephanie McCurry, "The Politics of Yeoman Households in South Carolina," in Divided Houses, 27-37, and Stephanie McCurry, "The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1245-64, esp. 1246, 1262.

26 "Affidavit of Lucy Ross in the Case of Lucy Ross and Children," 24 September 1866, and "Affidavit of William James in the Case of Lucy Ross and her Children," 24 September 1866, both in Letters Received by the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

27 Ibid. In The matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Ambrose, 61 NC 91 (1867). Edwards examines this case and explains its pertinence to household politics in Reconstruction North Carolina, although she refers to it under a slightly different name, In the matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Moore. See Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 42-54.

28 Daniel L. Russell, Sr., to G. W. Tifton, 9 October 1866, Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR. Russell's son, Daniel L. Russell, Jr., became North Carolina's first Republican governor in 1898. See Jeffrey J. Crow and Robert F. Durden, Maverick Republican in the Old North State: A Political Biography of Daniel L. Russell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 2-10; John L. Cheney, Jr., ed., North Carolina Government, 1585-1979: A Narrative and Statistical History (Raleigh, N.C.: Department of the Secretary of State, 1981), 329, 331, 333, 832.

29 Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 67-69; and Karin L. Zipf, "'The Whites Shall Rule the Land or Die': Gender, Race, and Class in North Carolina Reconstruction Politics," Journal of Southern History 65 (August 1999), 499-503.

30 Ross to Howard, 31 October 1866, Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

31 Ibid. "Deposition of William James in the Case of Lucy Ross and Children," 24 September 1866, "Deposition of James Ross in the Case of Lucy Ross and Children," 24 September 1866, and "Deposition of Charles Aubriden in the Case of Lucy Ross and Children," 24 September 1866, all in Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

32 Eliphalet Whittlesey, "Circular #1," 16 February 1866, Circulars, and Robinson to Bomford, 26 December 1866, Letters to the Commissioner, both in RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

33 Robinson to Bomford, 26 December 1866, Robinson to Governor Jonathan Worth, 30 October 1866, and Russell to Tifton, 9 October 1866, all in Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

34 North Carolina General Assembly, Revised Code, chap. 5, esp. 78. See also the legal arguments made by counsel in the transcripts of In the matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Ambrose.

35 In the matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Ambrose.

36 Rutherford to Tifton, 3 January 1867, and Tifton to Rutherford, 7 January 1867, both in Letters Received, Wilmington, North Carolina, RG 105, Box 62, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NARA.

37 Howard to Robinson, 21 November 1866, Letters Received, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

38 Worth to Robinson, 1 November 1866, Letters to the Commissioner, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

39 In the matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Ambrose.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.; and Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 42-45.

43 Sewell to Rutherford, 26 January 1867, Letters to the Commissioner, and Colonel J.V. Bomford, "Circular #5," 16 February 1867, Circulars, both in RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

44 "Deposition of Grace Jenkins," 6 October 1866, C. H. Foster to Howard, 11 December 1866, and Captain Hannibal D. Norton to Colonel M. Cogswell, 18 March 1867, all in Letters Received, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

45 Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 60-67.

46 William M. Robbins to Bomford, 12 February 1867, Letters Received, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

47 John R. Edie to Chur, 8 December 1866, Robbins to Bomford, 12 February 1867, and Bomford to Chur, 29 December 1866, all in Letters Received, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NABDSR.

48 Complaint of Shade Howard, 7 January 1868, Register of Complaints, Wilmington, North Carolina, Entry 2903, vol. 270, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NARA.

49 Complaint of Mary Smith, 26 August 1867, Register of Complaints, Wilmington, North Carolina, Entry 2903, vol. 268, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NARA.

50 Complaint of Jermina Colwell, 2 December 1867, Register of Complaints, Charlotte, North Carolina, Entry 2574, vol. 74, RG 105, Freedmen's Bureau Records, NARA.

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