Through the Storm (Le Veq Family #1)

by Beverly Jenkins

You can’t make a man love you, so—if he could do without me, I could sure do without him.

Raimond felt as if he’d just had roots worked on him. He swore he saw his future in her eyes.

Where there had been only four hundred camped outside Washington in 1861, there were ten thousand a year later; an additional three thousand were camped across the river in Alexandria. Conditions ranged from tolerable to awful.

The Firsts had sacrificed much to transform America into the nation it had become; for their labor and blood they were owed something.

Lincoln was not perfect. Black leaders found great fault with his fence-straddling ways on issues such as allowing Blacks to fight, and universal emancipation for all slaves, not just those held in the states at war. But under his leadership progress had been made, and the Black population continued to offer its full support.

Another success story came from a colony on Roanoke Island where contrabands had leased the land and built 591 houses. The land value had increased almost forty-fold by the time they celebrated their first year of freedom.

Land ownership coupled with an education were the chief goals of a free man, and thousands were working toward those ends.

A report out of a Vicksburg camp had counted more than three thousand marriages conducted over an eight-month period. Five hundred, or one-sixth, of those couples had been forcibly separated by slavery.

Broom jumping was a parlor game of sorts. The idea was to see who would wear the pants in the household of the newlyweds—the new husband or the new wife. The broom was held about a foot above the ground and it had to be jumped backward without being touched. The person who cleared the broom would be the boss.

On January 31, 1865, the House of Representatives passed the unprecedented Thirteenth Amendment. Unlike the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which abolished slavery only in those states at war with the Union, the new amendment outlawed slavery everywhere in the United States. The next day, February 1, Senator Charles Sumner sponsored a Black Boston lawyer named John Rock for the right to practice law before the Supreme Court.

Eight years earlier, in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanders, the Court had denied that Blacks were even citizens.

Then, on March 4, 1865, Frederick Douglass was invited to President Lincoln’s sec...

Blacks were now being allowed to sit in the galleries of Congress and to testify as witnesses in federal courts. Segregation had been outlawed on the streetcars in Washington, D.C., and members of the race were no lon...

The first Union troops to enter the city were the all Black, Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, commanded by Charles Francis Adams, grandson of former President John Quincy Adams. The Black citizens of the city greeted the liberating Black cavalry with deafening cheers. On April 6, 1865, three Union corps captured six thousand members of Lee’s army, and by the tenth of April, the first war between the American states was over. The nation’s joy was short-lived; four days later, President Lincoln was assasinated by a man the papers described as the sad, mad, bad John Wilkes Booth.

Lincoln had been the President of the United States, but to the Blacks of the nation, he’d been Moses, Father, the Great Liberator. He’d formed the United States Colored Troops, emancipated three and half million slaves, and now he lay dead.

Thanks to the kindness of her neighbors, Sable had learned where to market and how to get Mrs. Jackson to St. Louis Cathedral, where she and most of the other French speaking Black Catholic citizens went for Sunday Mass.

“Everyone I know is living hand to mouth,” Juliana confessed. “At one time the free Black families here owned millions of dollars in property and businesses, but now many of us are no better off than the freedmen.”

Before the war, free Blacks owned nearly fifteen million dollars’ worth of property in New Orleans alone. Many were slave owners, a fact she found startling. Some had been landowners for generations and been educated in Spain and France. When war broke out, the freeing of the slaves affected their incomes and traditions too.

The children she rescued from the streets were usually given over to the care of the Sisters of the Holy Family, a Black Catholic order in the 700 block of Orleans Street. According to the story the sisters told Sable, Catholic convents were once closed to free Blacks, but in 1842 a free woman of color named Henriette Delille, with help from a White woman named Marie Jean Aliquot, managed to get an order sanctioned and affiliated. Delille and Aliquot were soon joined by two other free women who’d also dreamed of serving God by being nuns, Juliette Gaudin and Josephine Charles. Using a building donated by a Delille relative, the nuns opened a school, a church, and an orphanage.

Julius was not the first Northern missionary to come South and complain about the uninhibited nature of many of the freedmen church services.

In her opinion the missionaries should be rolling up their sleeves and jumping into the fray instead of standing on the perimeter shaking their fingers.

The edict essentially returned all confiscated land to its original owners. As a consequence, all land deeds held by Black freedmen were no longer valid.

The Louisiana bureau alone had leased over sixty thousand acres to freedmen. Black freedmen in Tennessee were leasing sixty-five thousand acres.

All total, the Freedmen’s Bureau had 850,000 acres of confiscated land under its control. Now, thanks to Lincoln’s successor, it did not appear the land would remain under Black stewardship for much longer.

In response to the political reversals threatening postwar progress, societies dedicated to the pursuit of civil rights were forming all over the South, bringing together freedmen, White radicals, Black soldiers, and the Black elite to ensure that the race’s voice was heard.

“More’s the pity. I believe you people would have been served better by staying put. You’re never going to be treated equal because you weren’t created equal. Every race has a place and you’re trying to rise above yours, but we won’t let you. We’re going to tell our children and they’re going to tell their children and their grandchildren and we’re going to follow you down through time until you accept it.”

“We’ll never be slaves again, Sally Ann, not without bathing this country in blood.”

William D. Pierson titled, Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage.

“The Song of the Black Republicans,” the other five verses can be found in The Black Press, 1827-1890, edited by Martin E. Dann.

Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865. W.W. Norton. New York. 1966. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. 1863-1877. Harper and Row. New York. 1988. Gehman, Mary. Free People of Color of New Orleans. Margaret Media. New Orleans. 1994. Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. Free Press. New York. 1990. Hollandsworth, James G. The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War. Louisiana State University Press. Baton Rouge. 1995. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press. New York. 1988. Pierson, William D. Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage. University of Massachusetts Press. Amherst. 1993. Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War. Da Capo Press. New York. 1953. Stampp, Kenneth. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877. Vintage Books. New York. 1965. Sterling, Dorothy A., ed. The Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African-Americans. Da Capo Press. New York. 1994. Sterling, Dorothy A., ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. W.W. Norton. New York. 1984.