SHAMWOW

Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman escaped to the North in 1849. But she returned into slave territory at least 13 times, escorting dozens of escaped slaves to freedom. She was known for being tough: She carried a revolver not only to ward off dogs and slave owners, but also to threaten frightened fugitives with should they lose their nerve. According to one tale, she once held at gunpoint a man threatening to turn back, telling him, “You go on or die.”She supported women’s suffrage and donated land to a church for a home for the elderly and indigent.

gunsandposes:

A banner of the 22nd Regiment of the United States Colored Troops, featuring the motto “Sic semper tyrannis” with the image of an African-American trooper bayoneting a Confederate. Sic semper tyrannis, indeed.

This man is Henry Berry Lowrie. For seven years, he and his band of Lumbee Indians, former Union soldiers, and ex-slaves would fight a guerrilla war against white supremacists in North Carolina.

Most Lumbee land in had been stolen by the time the Civil War broke out in 1861. Left with no legal recourse, Lumbee Indians were forced to accept a life of oppression and destitution. When the Confederate army began construction of Fort Fisher, the threat of starvation and malaria deterred slaveowners from sending their slaves to work on it. Whites began kidnapping and enslaving Lumbee Indians. By the war’s end in 1864, most Lumbee males had fled to hide out in the swamps to avoid slavery.

In March of 1865, a local Confederate police force, known as the Home Guard, discovered that a Lumbee carpenter had been helping escaped Union soldiers flee north. The Home Guard executed the carpenter and one of his sons. To Henry Lowrie, the murder of his brother and father would be the final tipping point.

Lowrie formed a gang (made up mostly of teenagers, including himself), and from the forests and swamps, they implemented classic guerrilla tactics. His reputation quickly grew. Lowrie became so bold that he’d break into the homes of plantation owners, wait for their arrival, and demand to be fed at their dinner table before he robbed them. One night, Lowrie breaks into the home of Sheriff Rueben King, one of the wealthiest and powerful men in Robeson County. King moved to attack Lowrie, but before he could, he was gunned down by George Applewhite, a Lowrie gangmember who had been lurking in the shadows. With the murder of a sheriff, the Lowrie Gang became the most wanted men in the country.

By 1871, the bounty on Daniel Lowrie was up to $20,000, equivalent to roughly half a million dollars today. The state militia took drastic measures, kidnapping the wives of the Lowrie gangmembers, including Henry’s wife Rhoda. There was an attempt made to free the wives as they were being escorted to jail, in which three militiamen were killed. But it was unsuccessful, and the gang was forced to retreat. Several days later, Lowrie writes a letter to Colonel Wishart, leader of the local militia. He threatened to kidnap and execute the white women of the town. Terrified, Wishart frees the Lumbee women.

In September 1871, the Lowrie Gang steals $20,000 from the Lumberton General Store. This would be their final crime. Within a week, Henry Berry Lowrie vanishes from the swamps, never to be heard from again. As with most folk heroes, there are many rumors surrounding his fate. Some claim he accidentally shot himself cleaning a double-barreled shotgun, while others suspect he took the money and fled west. It’s said that his wife Rhoda, who remained in North Carolina after her husband’s disappearance, would take frequent mysterious trips out west. Regardless, without his leadership, nearly every member of his gang was subsequently captured or killed.

Aftershock: Beyond the Civil War

According to the history books, the Civil War officially ended in 1865 with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Confederate army. But on the streets of a newly reunited nation, another fierce battle was just beginning.

In 1866, the year immediately following the end of the war, America was supposed to be reuniting, healing its wounds, and moving past years of civil unrest. However, a closer look into this historic time reveals a sinister snapshot of a discordant nation caught in the midst of deadly race riots and angry insurgencies. In this compelling program, THE HISTORY CHANNEL examines the disturbing reality behind the murder, terrorism, and chaos that marked the uncertain period of Reconstruction in America. While a new government struggled to gain control, the subjugation of “free” black men and women continued in the former Confederate states - terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed, and widespread riots in Memphis and New Orleans left hundreds dead.

AFTERSHOCK: BEYOND THE CIVIL WAR provides a revealing look into the true horror of the Civil War aftermath - a story which, until now, has gone largely untold.

You will then know how to talke to me

In September of 1864, as the American Civil War approached its conclusion, a slave-turned-soldier named Spotswood Rice wrote the following furious letter to his former owner, Katherine Diggs, and sternly warned her that she would soon be seeing him again — he was returning to Missouri, together with a thousand-strong army of black soldiers, to rescue his still-enslaved children. His anger is almost palpable.

Indeed, Spotswood Rice was reunited with his family some months later, although it’s unknown whether a showdown with Diggs occurred. Interestingly, Mary, the daughter mentioned in the letter, was interviewed as part of the Federal Writers’ Project in 1937.

Transcript follows.

September 3, 1864

Spotswood Rice to Kittey Diggs

I received a leteter from Cariline telling me that you say I tried to steal to plunder my child away from you now I want you to understand that mary is my Child and she is a God given rite of my own and you may hold on to hear as long as you can but I want you to remembor this one thing that the longor you keep my Child from me the longor you will have to burn in hell and the qwicer youll get their for we are now makeing up a bout one thoughsand blacke troops to Come up tharough and wont to come through Glasgow and when we come wo be to Copperhood rabbels and to the Slaveholding rebbels for we dont expect to leave them there root near branch but we thinke how ever that we that have Children in the hands of you devels we will trie your vertues the day that we enter Glasgow I want you to understand kittey diggs that where ever you and I meets we are enmays to each orthere I offered once to pay you forty dollers for my own Child but I am glad now that you did not accept it Just hold on now as long as you can and the worse it will be for you you never in you life befor I came down hear did you give Children any thing not eny thing whatever not even a dollers worth of expencs now you call my children your pro[per]ty not so with me my Children is my own and I expect to get them and when I get ready to come after mary I will have bout a powrer and autherity to bring hear away and to exacute vengencens on them that holds my Child you will then know how to talke to me I will assure that and you will know how to talk rite too I want you now to just hold on to hear if you want to iff your conchosence tells thats the road go that road and what it will brig you to kittey diggs I have no fears about geting mary out of your hands this whole Government gives chear to me and you cannot help your self

art-history:

J.T. Zealy 
Jack (driver), Guinea  1850 
Daguerreotype
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 

In 1850, the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, perhaps the most famous geologist and scientist in America, commissioned J. T. Zealy, a daguerreotypist in Columbia, South Carolina, to take a series of photographs of slaves from nearby plantations. The goal of the series was to provide evidence for the theory that Africans were not direct descendants of Adam and Eve but products of a separate, “second” creation. The doctrine of “separate creation” was intended to justify white racism and slavery. Zealy photographed African-born slaves whom he regarded as specimens or “types.” The portraits he sent to Agassiz stand today as perhaps the most haunting and painful images to emerge from the era of the daguerreotype. They show naked or partially clothed figures facing the camera head-on. They also reveal whip-marks, scars, and other disfigurations from slavery. What rage, pain, humiliation, or resistance the making of the daguerreotypes provoked among the sitters goes unrecorded. We are left instead with their stares, stoic and impassive, masking worlds of feeling that the viewer can only imagine. 

—Angela L. Miller, et al., American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2008)

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