Freedom Papers: Evidence of Emancipation, Episode 1

Intro: This is American Rhapsody, a podcast of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. American history is many things, but it’s most certainly a rhapsody, quilted together from the ragged patches of many disjointed stories yet somehow still managing to form a coherent whole.

I’m Don Carleton, executive director of the Briscoe Center, a repository for the raw materials of the past, the evidence of history that we collect, preserve, and make available for use. Each episode, we talk to the individuals who helped create that evidence, to the donors who preserved, and to the researchers who use those collections in their work.

And we keep the American Rhapsody going.

 

I’m your host Nathan Stevens. Today, we dive into the Briscoe Center’s exhibit  Freedom Papers. The physical exhibit opened in February, with an accompanying online portion.  To further explore these significant documents, we spoke with one of the head curators at the Center.

 

My name is Sarah Sonner. I’m the Associate Director for curation at the Briscoe Center. I moved here in 2016 to take on the role of looking after the center’s exhibits program. And that includes research and exhibit development and design direction for our different shows. It allows me to explore and learn about all the different topics that we specialize in here.

 

Sarah curated the Freedom Papers exhibit, showing the documents and bonds that led enslaved people to freedom in the American South before the Civil War. Many of the documents outlining these stories are from the Vandale and Natchez Trace collections, both housed at the Briscoe Center. Documents defining this variously as “emancipation,” “manumission,” and “freedom papers” illustrate various methods, including travel to other states where those rights were inherent, or freedom purchased through a bond. Yet even freedom attained by legal methods was fragile for Black Americans.

 

The Freedom papers exhibit draws from multiple different collections that we have here, primarily among those is the Natchez Trace collection features multiple sub collections on different topics that touch on the history of the American South, specifically, the lower South and Louisiana, around the town of Natchez. Different collections have different kinds of provenance stories. With the Natchez Trace, and with the Van Dale collection, which Sylvia Hector Weber’s freedom paper is drawn from these were assembled by private collectors who collected documents relating to the American south in the history of slavery.

 

Silvia Weber’s story is one of the focal points for the exhibit. Her story of gaining freedom for her family reflected the larger, horrific system of discrimination and racism that dominated the south. Silvia’s freedom, and that of her three children, was purchased in 1834 in a bond now on display at the Briscoe Center. Silvia Webber would go on to help others to freedom via travel to Mexico, and her house became a part of the Underground Railroad. The Webber land, located east of Austin, gave its name to present-day Webberville.

 

Well, the reality was that slavery was woven into every part of the economy of the American South, it was heavily dependent on enslaved labor and trading that the results of that labor with free states in the US as well. So freedom papers can encompass papers that specifically are called Freedom papers. They are basically documents that outline the Emancipation Manumission, or explicit freedom of an individual.

 

In the exhibit, there are a handful of these documents from Briscoe Center collections. Sylvia’s was no different and, in fact, came directly from the Vandale Collection at the Center. The Vandale collection specifically is deeply important for the Center, as it’s been here since the 1940s, and martials, like Silvia’s story, are still being discovered in its folds.

 

So Sylvia’s freedom papers consist of a bond that listed the price for her freedom, the people that were due to be paid to obtain the freedom for herself and her two children, and the circumstances by which they were to be paid and the timing. So it was essentially a legal bond. There are other individual stories that we drew on for the exhibition to help set Sylvia’s story in context and highlights the circumstances in particular for women and children seeking their freedom, and the different prices that they had to pay the different scenarios and situations that they found themselves legally bound by, and the methods by which they could attain their freedom, which was extremely rare at the time.

 

Beyond its importance for understanding the history of racism and slavery, Sarah also believes that the Freedom Papers highlight the difficulties of children and women in slavery. Stories that are often overlooked.

 

I think that it’s an area that hasn’t been looked at as much in our own presentations before. And I think it also helps highlight the fact that women especially black women, African American women, and slaved women, who were described in using various terms and these documents had even less agency then we would have thought for in particular, so for instance, their children weren’t automatically freed when they themselves were freed, so often the children would be granted freedom separately from their mother.

 

So once someone did obtain their freedom, they entered into a very murky legal status, they didn’t have full citizenship, and yet they didn’t have their rights clearly defined. So if, for instance, if someone was sent away to a northern state, like Indiana or Ohio, to establish residents there and thus gain the freedom of rights that were inherent to residents of that state, if they traveled out of that state, they then risked recapture and so called runaway slave status. And that was very difficult to prove their freedom after that Sylvia’s document is really remarkable because it names the steep price that she and John Webber were asked to pay for. Not only Sylvia’s freedom, but the freedom of their two children at the time. They had to put up their land as collateral, and then they were requested to pay their two the two people named in that document they were requested to pay them to other enslaved children, so not their own children, but they were expected to trade the lives of two other people for their own freedom.

 

There was also a strange dichotomy in the documents, between the often jargon-filled legal filings versus the stark reality that someone’s freedom was on the line.

 

One of the things that really struck me when I was making choices for the show is that the more of these legal documents that I read through the more I started to recognize what is boilerplate legal term terminology, legal language, and where the individual stories really emerge within what could be a dry court record, otherwise, so you start to see examples of how people navigated a legal system, where they were treated as property. And how the court system was not set up to make this simple or easy by any means, which is why this is so rare. So I got to know this type of legal document, but also find the humanity that emerges from within this. And it was remarkable as well to go through these folders and see the same clerks handwriting over and over again. So I got the impression that this is a entire system where people are geared up to do this type of work. And in some cases, for the clerk, it might have been a road assignment, but for somebody else, it’s their literal life on the line. Reading these can sometimes feel shockingly banal, until you realize what you’re actually holding and looking at.

 

Sarah also looked through other collections at the Briscoe Center that may have overlapped with the Freedom Papers to gain a better understanding of the era and context.

 

When I was putting together this exhibit, I wanted to see if any of our Stephen F Austin papers would have evidence of the Weber family or John Weber’s title. So I read through the list of titles granted in Austin’s colony. And on page 14, I could see John Weber’s name listed with the piece of land that was put up for collateral for Sylvia and her children’s freedom. And it’s today known as Webberville. And so the couple ended up losing that land and forfeiting when they did not pay what the Bond asked them to pay. They did not trade those two children’s lives for their own freedom for Sylvia and her children’s freedom, so they ended up losing their land. And it was telling to see John Weber’s name listed among the many others and Austin’s colony. And I also found within Stephen F. Austin’s papers, written in his own handwriting, a document that listed the characteristics for settlers and his colony. In his terms of settlement, he includes a list of acceptable settler character, morals and professions and he also importantly defines an acceptable payment for that land. And this is a quote from him, which land will cost at the rate of $12.50 per 100 acres payable in cash or Spanish cattle or negros on receipt of title? So this was an explicit outline that people were to be used as payment

 

This was a difficult exhibit to create and to curate. The brutal reality of the era for enslaved people is laid bare in these documents. But that makes it even more vital to share and understand how this history still shapes Texas, and America, to this day.

 

One of the things that I always try to do with our exhibits is to promote the potential for discovery in the archive. And in an in any archive, in particular for learning about the complex, and nuanced story of how slavery was interwoven within the US economic, social, cultural, political system of the time. I think going through these documents, the more you read of them, the more they build up to more than the sum of their parts. And so it gives you a deeper understanding through this primary source material than you might get through a textbook. And it promotes a different kind of remembering. Remembering that involves individuals names and stories that transforms people from a statistic into people whose lives were treated as property and two were subjected to reinstatement potentially, for instance, if they tried to travel after they were set free. It’s one thing to read about. The economic realities in a textbook are a secondary source. And it’s another thing to look through a folder of page after page of documentation of individual lives. And the steep price that people were asked to pay the precarious circumstances that they lived in. And you know, that this is the primary evidence that has survived, so you can only imagine the reality of the time. I hope that this helps bring individual stories to light and allow people to begin thinking about the long term generational consequences of this type of history that we all share. I think that this is a shared history of our country and in Sylvia’s case of our state, and I would hope that we could by putting a name and individual stories to these, find a way to remember.

 

 

The Freedom Papers are on display now at the Briscoe Center at 2300 Red River in Austin, Texas. The physical exhibit will be up until June 28^th. And the online portion is available at briscoecenter.org.