The Unspendable Pension of Henrietta Emory Meads

Sometime in July 1867, Henrietta Emory wrote to a clerk in the Claim Division of the Maryland Freedmen’s Bureau describing the challenges she had faced in trying to get money due to her as a soldier’s widow. “I have had so much trouble & gone so in debt to get my poor husband’s bounty, that I was able to do no more,” she lamented. With a young child to support, Henrietta certainly needed the money, which would have amounted to several hundred dollars the U.S. government owed to her deceased husband. She also had good reason to be weary of the process of claiming it, however. Having failed in an earlier bid to claim the benefits that was stymied by a corrupt Freedmen’s Bureau agent, J.P. Creager, Henrietta knew better than anyone that winning access to her rights as a war widow was an expensive endeavor. Her success, she had learned, also relied on the design and operation of a federal bureaucracy that consistently treated Black Southerners—and especially Black women—with suspicion. Nonetheless, she asserted, her claim was sound. “I can prove by the best authority, that I was lawfully married to James Emory,” she insisted. “I was married to him by a Methodist preacher, colored, & my husband paid him for marrying us, he was a regular preacher in the conference, & it was the way all the people were married.” Legally married, she insisted, the hundreds of dollars the government had yet to pay her husband ought to be hers.

I encountered Henrietta’s case in my role as an editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) while gathering materials for a forthcoming digital “microedition” on the experiences of Black Marylanders during the Civil War. As I sifted through Henrietta’s numerous petitions to representatives of the Claim Division, I was struck by the forceful manner in which she demanded recognition of her rights as a war widow and by her repeated assertions that the process of  securing  those rights was expensive and unjust. She repeatedly described herself as “a poor woman” who “can not get any thing done with out paying for it and… [was] not able to stand to it.” After identifying additional materials at the National Archives pertaining to Henrietta’s case over the course of transcribing and annotating the materials already in our collection, the reasons for her frustration became clear. In order to secure her rights, Henrietta had to contend with agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau who were frequently corrupt or racist, or both, enduring a process that seemed designed to disqualify Black women living in poverty as she did, all to obtain rights that were ostensibly already hers as a war widow. As we know from recent scholarship, her experiences were all too common among Black women trying to secure the money due them as the widows of Civil War soldiers. These experiences raise important questions about the design of the postwar state, even during the short existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau that historians have tended to see as taking a proactive role in establishing Black rights in the postwar South. Henrietta’s story offers a radically different account of the relationship between the state and the equal rights it allegedly established.

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If it were as simple as establishing the legality of her marriage to the late James Emory in 1860, Henrietta’s case would have been relatively straightforward, even without the documentary, legal, and social resources from which white claimants benefitted. “I have no money nor cant get any to go to Baltimore,” she explained in July 1867, “but I will send a certificate of my marriage, with the preacher’s name to it, sworn to before the county magistrate  I would think this proof enough.” Yet it was not proof enough because, as Brandi Brimmer’s Claiming Union Widowhood methodically demonstrates, the postemancipation state was invested in enforcing white liberal social and sexual norms on Black women rather than simply distributing the benefits to which they were legally entitled. As her case dragged on, Emory seemed increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness of Freedmen’s Bureau officials to treat her marriage as legitimate. “I was Jim Emory’s lawful wife, & have proved it to you, & me & his son Moses, are the lawful ones to have [his unpaid bounty and wages],” she wrote in April 1870. “I have gone to much expense to get it, & am not able to do more for I am a poor woman.” Before her case was closed, Henrietta would have to endure many such humiliating inquiries into the nature of her sexual history. And at each step along the way, she told agents that the process was physically, financially, and emotionally draining. It wasn’t meant to award benefits, she suggested, but to keep the wrong kind of women from accessing their rights.

Consisting of thirty-nine pages spread across two separate applications, the documents in our collection pertaining to Henrietta’s case provide an exceptionally rich record of one woman’s struggle to secure her rights and her livelihood in postwar Maryland. At the same time, however, the many gaps and silences in her case both demonstrate the challenges of using the holdings of the National Archives to tell stories such as Henrietta’s and raise important questions about the design and operation of the postwar administrative state and whether it was intended to serve women like her.

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One problem with the case files generated by Henrietta’s claims is that they provide only a partial window into her struggle—the records are preserved in ways that omit the demands and expectations of the agents who stood between her and the rights she claimed as a war widow. A May 8, 1871 letter accusing Henrietta of promiscuity, for instance, was not included in the Claim Division’s file pertaining to her case. I uncovered it only after additional searches of the division’s press copies of letters-sent volumes. The structure of these records make it all too easy for a researcher to miss this letter and therefore miss a crucial part of the story, one that gives a fuller picture of the racial and sexual priorities and anxieties of the postwar state. The additional communications from the claims office also provide crucial clues as to Henrietta’s relationships. The May 8th letter that finally convinced Henrietta to risk the expensive trip to Baltimore, for example, alleged that she had lived with several different men during her husband’s deployment before marrying another, John Meads. The gravity of these charges and their potentially fatal impact on her claim help explain the urgency of her reply, her sudden willingness to make a difficult and expensive trip to the claims office in Baltimore, and her switch from her previously frustrated and assertive tone to a more subservient one. Henrietta must have seen her rights evaporating into the disdain of the agents tasked with evaluating her claim.

We can also learn a great deal about the community in which Henrietta lived by paying careful attention to her claims and the ways she crafted each communication in response to what she apparently saw as an imposition on rather than a manifestation of her rights. At first glance, for example, it appears that Henrietta wrote the many petitions herself, each composed in the same handwriting in her voice. A short note towards the conclusion of her case, however, reveals that even before she sought out others to petition on her behalf, she worked with someone in her community to navigate the difficult application process. In response to inflammatory allegations of sexual promiscuity contained in the May 8th letter mentioned above, Henrietta replied on May 11th, “I have heard the letter red that you sent to me but it give me very pore incurgement but I will try to Come over [to the claims office in Baltimore] on monday the 21 if I can.” This short note positions Henrietta in quite a different light, dependent upon those around her for assistance—hearing the agent’s letter read to her—rather than providing evidence and making demands for herself as a struggling but self-reliant war widow. The census records reveal that Henrietta was indeed unable to read or write and had evidently had substantial help staking her claim to the benefits her husband had earned in uniform. In light of her May 11th reply, the omission of any mention of assistance from her earlier letters gives a sense of the expectations Henrietta sought to meet in her previous communications, expectations of literacy and respectability that had quickly unraveled amid the allegations of promiscuity.

If the May 8th letter helps us better understand Henrietta’s interaction with the postemancipation state, it also reveals a great deal about the narrow view of rights and benefits advanced by its agents. In previous communications, claims agent Edward C. Knower had instructed Henrietta that she needed only “two witnesses, colored or white, men o[r] women” to demonstrate “that you lived together as man and wife for several years.” “Unless you attend to this matter,” he had warned her, “you will never get your claim settled.” After the allegations of promiscuity came to light, however, Knower tightened the requirements on Henrietta, demanding that she “furnish the testimony of two or more reliable white persons” to satisfy him that the charges against her were baseless. Black testimony would no longer suffice. Harkening back to the prohibitions on Black testimony under the slave state, this shifting requirement reveals not only the narrow, paternalist manner in which postemancipation rights were administered, but also the general suspicion of Black communities as inherently immoral and incapable of fully exercising the rights of citizenship, among which the right to give testimony was one of the most important. Despite all that Black communities had won, and at such a steep cost—as James’s silence in this account attests—the logic of Dred Scott still seemed to animate elements of the postemancipation state.

We don’t know who helped Henrietta petition for her benefits following the initial mishandling of her claim in 1866 by Creager, but her enlistment of further assistance towards the end of the process only added to the inflammatory charges of immorality. When her claim appeared to stall in 1871, she turned to a white acquaintance, merchant John L. Turner, who wrote to Knower on Henrietta’s behalf, asking how to advance the application. After Knower informed him of the allegations of infidelity against Henrietta made by James’s father Samuel, Turner replied that “Henrietta Meeds was in my Store this morning to see Me about the Matter, and I took her to herself and Questioned her, and I she could not offer any evidence against the Statements that Samuel Emery had already Made.” Not only did Turner seize the opportunity “to do any thing that is wright for Sam,” but added to the allegations: “Hennie lived with me also James Emery her husband at the time he went in the army.” The 1870 census listed Henrietta as a cook, and perhaps this was what Turner meant in noting that Henrietta had lived both with him and James, but the context of the statement—Henrietta’s infidelity—suggests otherwise. Maybe Henrietta had already intuited Knower’s demand that she provide statements from “reliable white persons” when she sought aid from Turner, or perhaps Knower had already made these instructions clear. Whatever the case, Henrietta found in Turner’s “assistance” not only a betrayal of the respectable identity she had carefully constructed as Henrietta Emory, but also additional allegations of immorality.

Henrietta and James Emory evidently separated sometime in 1864 after a difficult and apparently abusive union, one doubtless shaped by the trauma of living under a slave state. As well as accusations of sexual immorality, Henrietta’s claim ran up against allegations that she had abused her husband James while they were together. The statement Henrietta provided from James’s physician, L.H. Beatty, asserted for example that “I have no knowledge of his ever being scalded by his wife, as I understand has been represented.” Disproving allegations of abuse was just as important to Henrietta’s application as refuting charges of infidelity. James’s father Samuel, for instance, alleged in his affidavit, quoted in the May 8th letter, not only that “Henrietta lived with other men while James Emory was in the Army,” but “that she was so living when James Emory came home sick on a furlough and she positively refused to receive said Soldier, and Care for him.” Instead, Samuel asserted, she “forced him to leave her and go to his fathers house & during four week [illness?] Henrietta paid no attention to James & did not see him until his burial.” Henrietta did pay her respects to her first husband, but apparently couldn’t bring herself to share a residence or care for him during his sick leave.

If her marriage to Emory was traumatic and painful, her union with John Meads appears to have been more harmonious. The 1880 census records them as still living together, having welcomed nine children into their family during the thirteen years of their marriage. One of the children, Moses, may have been the child she attributed to James in her letters to the Claim Division. By this time, Henrietta was no longer working outside the home as a cook, work that could carry demeaning connotations as well as the daily risk of sexual violence and may well have contributed to Turner’s suggestion of infidelity. While the state had not dignified her first marriage or her rights as a war widow, her second one, at least, seemed to have the quiet dignity and stability she had presented for herself all along.

 

Further Reading

Brandi Brimmer, Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household

Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

Dale Kretz, Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation After the Freedmen’s Bureau