After Confederate Forces Captured Their Children, These Black Mothers Fought to Reunite Their Families

In the late summer of 1865, a few months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union forces at Appomattox Court House, Representative Thaddeus Stevens received a surprising but surely welcome letter. Written from Savannah, Georgia, its author was a free Black woman named Jane Lyles.

Lyles had previously lived at Stevens’ Caledonia Furnace, an iron-producing facility in the southern Pennsylvania mountains between Chambersburg and Gettysburg. She labored there alongside her husband, David, the furnace’s keeper, and their children, Annie, George, Thomas and Jane. In the summer of 1863, however, Confederate soldiers bound for Gettysburg captured Lyles and her children.

Two years later, with the Civil War at an end and slavery on the verge of being officially abolished nationwide, Lyles emerged from captivity and set to work recovering the life the Confederates had taken from her. With the help of the famously antislavery Stevens, she hoped to leave the place of her confinement, go to Richmond, Virginia, where she’d been forcibly parted from her children, and finally to “take them home with me.”

When Confederate forces approached Caledonia in the summer of 1863, Stevens had fled before their arrival. This was probably a wise choice for a man whom their commander, General Jubal Early, labeled an “enemy of the South” for his support of emancipation and advocacy of vigorously prosecuting the war against the Confederacy. Unable to vent their rage directly against Stevens’ person, Rebel soldiers settled for burning his furnace to the ground and carrying off the materials, provisions and animals needed to operate it.

Stevens estimated his losses at a whopping $75,000 (around $1.5 million today), an amount the Confederate press considered the “punishment due for his enormous crimes against the happiness of the human race”—in other words, his opposition to human bondage. The congressman wore his losses as a badge of honor. “We must all expect to suffer by this wicked war,” he wrote to a relative. “If, finally, the government shall be re-established over our whole territory, and not a vestige of slavery left, I shall deem it a cheap purchase.”

For Lyles and her children, the destruction of Caledonia was anything but “cheap.” In addition to wrecking the forge, Confederate soldiers carried off its Black inhabitants for enslavement in Virginia and beyond. The Rebels who invaded Pennsylvania waged war to ensure that slavery would endure not merely in “vestige,” but in totality. These agents of the slaveholders’ republic considered the African American residents of Maryland and Pennsylvania fugitives from slavery, fair game for capture and enslavement.

As historian Allen Guelzo writes in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, “To have left [them] in undisturbed freedom would have been tantamount to denying the validity of the whole Confederate enterprise.” Well before the Confederate soldiers arrived at Caledonia, therefore, one local observed them “scouring the country in every direction … for horses and cattle and Negroes.” Rebel civilians followed behind the men in gray, pursuing people they considered “their stolen Negroes,” ensnaring what a journalist recorded as “gangs of Negroes … captured in the mountains in Maryland and Pennsylvania.” A diarist reported that the Rebels were “driving them off by droves … just like we would drive cattle.”

Lyles and at least three of her children were among those kidnapped and sent to the South. As they crossed the Potomac River, the frontier of Rebel territory, a dire fate loomed in the form of the Confederate slave market. Long a pillar of that horrific global institution, commerce in the enslaved survived and even flourished in the South during the Civil War. It did so in spite of serious obstacles, including the fall of major trading hubs like New Orleans to Union forces, a devastating blockade, wild inflation and severe economic turmoil.

The practice’s endurance fulfilled an array of Confederate needs. Some slave traders bought and sold people in response to crises such as food shortages or unexpected labor requirements, deflecting the hardships of the conflict onto those they fought to keep in bondage. Others trafficked people to prevent them from pursuing the freedom offered by the war. Still others used the slave trade to actively invest in the slaveholding future for which they fought. As a result, despite all the disruptions of the war, Confederates traded thousands of people in the four years between the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865.

If the Lyles family’s experiences mirrored those of others captured by Rebel raiders, they were probably sold first in the Shenandoah Valley, possibly to a Virginian claiming to have once enslaved them. This enslaver almost certainly sold them swiftly in Richmond, the well-defended Confederate capital and the Confederacy’s largest surviving slave market by the summer of 1863. There, Rebels divided the family yet again.

Why different purchasers desired Lyles and her children remains obscure. One may have coveted skills she possessed or her personally. Another might have seen her children as a worthwhile speculation; many Confederates believed enslaved children would appreciate in value after the war and, as they grew up and had families of their own, produce generational wealth in an independent slaveholding republic. In all likelihood, one or more Virginians purchased the Lyles children, while another enslaver carried their mother to Savannah, a city with strong slave-trading ties to Richmond. From there, Lyles seems to have been sold to Thomasville in Georgia’s interior.

In the spring of 1865, however, the Confederate surrender and the ensuing breakdown of the slave system offered families like the Lyleses a chance to heal the wounds inflicted by the wartime slave trade. Not only did they now have unprecedented mobility, but they also could draw upon personal networks, Black churches and (novelly) the United States government in seeking their loved ones.

Of particular utility was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. A government agency created during the war to help formerly enslaved people navigate the transition from slavery to freedom, the Freedmen’s Bureau performed many tasks, including serving as a clearinghouse for efforts to reunite Black families. It assumed this function to rectify the wrongs of slavery, to be sure, but its motives extended beyond the purely charitable. In reuniting Black families, the bureau hoped to prevent them from becoming wards of the state, dependents on government largesse.

Thus, when Lyles informed Stevens of her hopes to recover her children and return home, the bureau saw this request as a chance to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously. Indeed, even as its Virginia agents worked to find the Lyles children, the bureau separately organized the transfer of 31 other Black children from Richmond to Philadelphia. As Superintendent H.S. Merrell wrote in a letter, the logic in doing so was that “these orphans have been for some time supported by [the government] and are now to be provided with homes, relieving it of same.”

Multiple obstacles conspired to prevent the reunion that Lyles so fervently desired. She initially lacked the money needed to pay for her travel home, and though she appealed, at Stevens’ suggestion, to a local authority in Georgia he either could not or would not help her. (Within weeks, this same individual would be arrested for assaulting a formerly enslaved man.) Lyles nevertheless made her way to Savannah, where she applied to the bureau for transportation but found no government boats or trains available to carry her north.

At Lyles’ urging, Stevens pressured the bureau into action. Within a few weeks, the agency authorized transportation for Lyles from Savannah to Washington, D.C. and ordered its Richmond agents to find her children “Ann and Jerry” (possibly a nickname for her son George), with the goal of bringing them together and returning them to Pennsylvania. What happened to her husband and other children remains unclear. Perhaps they escaped Confederate clutches, or perhaps the Confederates considered her younger children more effort than they were worth. It’s also possible that Lyles somehow received specific information about these two children’s locations but not the others. What is clear is that the upheaval of war shattered this family as it did all too many others. Whatever the circumstances, by the time the bureau’s orders reached Savannah in the winter of 1865-1866, Lyles had disappeared for a second time.

Bureau officials exerted “every effort” to find her, including seeking her in all of the city’s Black churches (a common tactic for finding lost people of color at the time), but to no avail. She had vanished, leaving no trace behind in the archive. Tragically, so had her children. The bureau’s agents in Virginia followed leads indicating that a pair of children taken from Pennsylvania had been sold to Charlotte County. Upon investigating, they found that these were not the Lyles siblings. The bureau’s failures meant that the destruction wrought by the Confederates and the slave trade would persist well beyond the war’s conclusion.

But the search wasn’t completely fruitless. True, the children rumored to be in Charlotte County weren’t from the Lyles family. But they were indeed people kidnapped from Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863 and sold in Richmond. The supposed Ann and Jerry Lyles turned out to be Zack and Sallie Marshall. Zack (who bureau officials also called “Jack”) was 7 or 8 years old, his sister perhaps 9 or 10. The pair had been taken from Greencastle by Confederate cavalry during the Gettysburg campaign, as had their older sister, Rosa. Confederates had probably seized the siblings separately, as Zack and Sallie recalled having last seen Rosa when they were all “at home with their mother,” Priscilla Marshall.

Like Lyles, the Marshall family matriarch seized the opportunities presented by the Confederacy’s downfall to begin searching for her children, though initially without success. She lacked Lyles’ political connection but exceeded her in good fortune—an unfortunately essential ingredient to the remaking of Black families in the war’s aftermath.

In January 1866, after learning the identities of the children its agents had found, the bureau sprang into action. It demanded that the probable purchaser of Zack and Sallie send them to Richmond, where they would join dozens of other formerly enslaved children in the city’s Colored Orphans’ Asylum. It also initiated inquiries for Rosa, their still-missing sister.

Meanwhile, the head of the bureau in Virginia asked Stevens for assistance in locating the Marshall siblings’ parents. It seems likely that Stevens connected him to Priscilla; two weeks later, the two were exchanging letters, with the bureau promising to send her the children—provided she could get “well-known citizens in [her] neighborhood” to confirm that she was, in fact, their mother. Priscilla rallied the required support and promised the bureau that she could secure “any amount of testimony” the government might require.

Bureau officials soon remanded Sallie and Zack into the hands of Phoebe Rushmore, a teacher working with formerly enslaved people in Richmond, who brought them home to Greencastle, ending their ordeal—though Rosa remained missing. Her continued absence, writes historian Hilary Green, testifies to how the effects of Confederate raiding long resounded in the lives and memories of Pennsylvania’s Black residents.

Jane Lyles, Priscilla Marshall and their respective children thus demonstrate the possibilities and limits of the liberation brought by the American Civil War. All fell victim to the armed forces of the slaveholders’ republic and to the wartime slave trade, embodying the lengths to which Rebels would go to keep emancipation at bay. All likewise seized the opportunities created by slavery’s destruction during the conflict, though with varying degrees of success. Their intersecting triumphs and failures demonstrate the uneven emergence of freedom in the U.S.

Though both families experienced the powerful undertow that paralleled the war’s liberating tide, the Marshalls were ultimately able to harness the opportunities it unleashed, though the sweetness of reunion proved to be tinged with bitter loss. The Lyles family, meanwhile, remained scattered, rendered flotsam of the American slave system. Divided by the slave trade, they sought help from a government under-equipped to help the sheer number of people emerging from slavery—and may well have faced opposition from white Southerners angered by the institution of slavery fading away. Taken together, these individuals’ collective experiences force us to expand our understanding of the accomplishments and costs of the Civil War, and to weigh anew the pangs that accompanied the new birth of freedom.