Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Louis Hughes

In 1865, Louis Hughes was a 32 year old slave. Like many slaves, his father was white and his mother was black. He was born near Charlottesville, Virginia in 1832. When he was 11, his master separated him from his mother. He never saw his mother again after 1844. He was sold to a man in Richmond who later sold him to another slaveholder in Mississippi. While there, he was abused by the master's wife. However, in 1850, he was sent north to a new estate near Memphis that his owner had recently purchased. He was living here when the Civil War began in 1861. He was married to a woman named Matilda, also owned by the same master. Like many slaveholders, Hughes' master sent him back downriver when the Union armies came.

Despite what neo-Confederates would have you believe, nearly all slaves yearned to escape. Louis Hughes was among them. Louis repeatedly took off during the war, but had bad luck, running into Confederate troops in one case. In 1864, in part to keep him from escaping, Hughes' owner sent him to work in the Confederate salt works in Alabama. At the beginning of 1865, this is where both Louis and Matilda lived and worked.

Louis was an excellent businessman and made a nice living for himself selling things to other slaves. Whites realized this at the salt works and made deals with him that helped everyone out, particularly as goods became scarce once the South was clearly losing the war. But like everyone else, he wanted out as soon as possible. In March 1865, Union forces moved to attack Mobile and all the slaves at the salt works were to be sent back to their owners. He worked in the fields for awhile back on his owner's plantation in Mississippi. But the Union armies never really came to Panola County, Mississippi. Much of the Confederate's plantation homeland never faced the realities of the war, at least until Sherman's march through Georgia and South Carolina. When the war ended, in April 1865, Hughes' owner ordered that no blacks could leave the plantation and they were to continue work as if nothing happened. By June, his master ordered that no blacks from outside the plantation could come onto his land without permission and it was clear that he was trying to close off his blacks to the outside world in order to continue appropriating their labor. At this point, Louis and another slave made their move, escaping the plantation at night and fleeing northward to Memphis. There they organized a rescue mission for the other slaves. They notified Captain Thomas A. Walker of the situation at the plantation. He could do nothing for them as he was overwhelmed with similar stories of recalcitrant planters refusing to free their slaves. On the way back though they ran into a couple of Union soldiers who were sympathetic to their plight. For the cost of two bottles of whiskey, the soldiers set them up with some soldiers who would help Louis and his friend out. Although the soldiers only numbered 2, they managed to bluff their way through the situation and fifteen slaves immediately left the plantation.

While Louis and Matilda at first were going to settle in Memphis, they soon chose to move north, and headed to Cincinnati later that summer. They continued north from there. Hughes arrived in Windsor, Ontario in December 1865, finding work as a hotel porter. He was disappointed that Canada did not provide him the opportunities he had hoped for. He spent the next few years working at jobs in northern cities, settling in Milwaukee in 1867. Louis and Matilda started a successful laundry business there. Louis became a founding member of St. Mark's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Milwaukee.

Louis also managed to find his long lost brother. With families split up all the time and spread across the South, most people never found their kin after emancipation. When they did, it was because of luck. One day, while working in Milwaukee, someone came up to Hughes and asked him if he had a brother because there was someone who looked just like him in Cleveland. Louis had accidentally chopped off one of his brother's fingers while playing as children and with this certain identifier, it was soon established that Billy was Louis' brother and they were reunited. Remarkable.

In the 1870s, Louis found himself in the nursing profession, which he proved quite skilled at. He travelled with patients as far away as Florida and California and became a member of the small, but growing, black middle class. In 1897, Louis Hughes published a memoir about his life as a slave, likely with help from one of his well-educated patients.

Louis remained bitter about slavery his entire life. In the memoir, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, he wrote about "the scars which I still bear upon my person, and...the wounds of spirit which will never wholly heal." He also attacked the Lost Cause myth, just becoming mainstream at that time, reminding his readers that if the Confederacy had won, he would still be a slave.

Matilda Hughes died in 1907. Louis lived until 1913, when he died in Milwaukee at the age of 80.

All of this information is taken from Stephen V. Ash's excellent, A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865, which I highly recommend for anyone teaching the first half of the U.S. survey. Ash takes us on a journey through the eyes of 4 Southerners as they try to make it through the difficult year of 1865. Really first rate stuff.