For this assignment, my first choice was another ad. It caught me because it stood out of other ads. Almost all ads from the site are about missing people: parents, kids, husbands, wives, etc. However, this particular ad was about one man who looked for a woman who fled to Canada, regarding the property she left in The state of Pennsylvania. It was unusual among those where people were looking for lost relatives. Nevertheless, I kept looking through other advertisements. And, when I almost have done with it and decided on my first choice, something popped up and got my attention. So, I decided against my first choice and picked the ad "William Watson searching for his wife, Nancy Watson, and their children, George and Jane." (http://informationwanted.org/items/show/3217)
At first sight, the ad was like many others. William Watson, the colored soldier, looked for his family with which he lost connection about a year or so ago. But what really stunned me that he wasn't able to indicate precisely the age of his kids. In the ad, Watson mentions two children, George, aged 9 or 10, and Jane, aged 4 or 5. Another part of the story was typical for many black men at the end of the Civil War. As I can guess from the ad, William Watson and his family belonged to one master and lived in Louisiana. After the Civil War had started, Watson run away from his master and become a soldier of 79th Regiment, Louisiana Colored Infantry. Presumably, at the end of the war, his family moved to Kentucky, and connection with them was lost. Even before the Civil War has begun, some black men sought the opportunity to flee their masters because of cruel and unfair treatment. Those few, who were lucky to manage the escape, got a few choices. Most of them decided to leave the region and run further to the North to Canada. Some run to the West in the states that abolished slavery. However, some of them decided to join the United States Army. For this purpose, The United States Colored Troops (USCT) were established. 79th Regiment, United States Colored Infantry, where William Watson had served, was one of them. According to Lest We Forget website (http://lestweforget.hamptonu.edu/page.cfm?uuid=9FEC3BA9-ABC7-58E5-BF2FF60139F5B948), the regiment was formed in 1864, a year before Watson's family moved out to Kentucky. Until they moved, I supposed, Watson managed to keep a connection with wife and kids since 79th Regimentiment was stationed primarily in Louisiana. Unfortunately, the victory of the United States that freed black people didn't make their life better immediately. As the article from the Library of Congress stated: "Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, two more years of war, service by African American troops, and the defeat of the Confederacy, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population." (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/reconstruction.html) I think this was the main reason why Watson's family decided to move to the other state and look for better conditions.
I hope that William Watson has finally found his wife and kids, and they were safe. However, I still cannot understand: either he spent so little time with his family while was working for his master, or it wasn't important for families like his own to keep track of the exact age of their kids at those times.
Hi Julia!
The detail about William Watson's military service is really fascinating. It reveals another important element in the story of Reconstruction and emancipation, the role that formerly enslaved people played in the military defeat of the Confederacy. I liked the way you framed Watson's service in relation to Black men's decisions to leave slavery--as you noted, the amount of Black men and women who left their homes in the South and fled to the Union ended up pushing the Union into allowing them to serve. As far as the last question goes, I think it might be a little of both--he might have been separated from his family often in his duties. It was also common practice for slave owners not to tell enslaved people their birthdays or exact ages. Frederick Douglass writes about this in his autobiography as one of the main distinctions he realizes between whites and Blacks when he was a young child.