What do you notice? What do you wonder?
I chose this ad because it happened in the year of the liberation of slaves. I know from the advertisement that two children have been sold to the south. They were forced to separate from their parents. I know from their surnames that they are the same as their master's. That means they belong to Bailey. Why sell children? Why not sell them all? Is there a lot of this happening in this period of time? I want to know all these things.
Time/Place:
I know from the ad that this happened in St. Louis, Missouri. During the Civil War, St. Louis, Missouri, was a Union-occupied city. Black people continued to be subject to arrest by the city police. Fortunary, several African American women used the St. Louis provost marshal’s office to reunite their families after the eradication of slavery. In April 1865, a number of women applied to the St. Louis district provost marshal for assistance in regaining custody of their children who had been stranded in the Missouri countryside. The ad was published in 1906. At that time, the United States was developing rapidly, and its industry was booming, so there was a more convenient channel to find people.
Implications/Conclusions:
I know from module2 that children were often hidden out to different houses or geographically separated from their parents to discovery escape attempts. During and after the civil war, countless family members were separated. This separation is even permanent. After great turbulence and chaos, even though the war is over and slavery has been abolished, black Americans are still subject to violence and intimidation. Can the Bailey family be reunited？
In your opinion, what do you think about after such a turbulent event，can a child ever find his or her parents after being trafficked？
Hi Peihong!
I really appreciated how you contextualized this particular ad with the information about Black St. Louis women applying to the provost marshal to regain custody of their children. In this ad, since it was placed right after the Civil War's end, it might have been a similar situation where Mary Bailey was trying to reunite her children after they had been "hired out" (or basically indentured) after the war. In terms of your question, I think it depends on the time and place. In Virginia in 1866, Black women would have had the help of the Union Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. There is a chance that they could have been reunited.