Imagine an institution that set out to systematically destroy families. That was the reality of American slavery. Wives were sold away from husbands. Children were torn from parents and grandparents.
It took a civil war, which broke out in 1861, to end slavery. When the conflict was finally over in 1865, and more than 600,000 soldiers and untold civilians were dead, those African- Americans who had survived slavery and war set out to repair their families.
White Southerners after the war did not see that the people they had once enslaved were on the road with a purpose. We know this because of letters published in newspapers at the time whose writers accused the people who had been newly freed of being lazy and shirking work. An industry of pseudo-scientific, legal, theological, fiction and nonfiction writing has been devoted to such poisonous stereotypes, lies from which America has yet to free itself.
We can know the truth because pleas for help finding loved ones can be read in the records of the federal government’s Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. What was known as the Freedmen's Bureau was established at the end of the Civil War to support tens of thousands of people who had been enslaved. The Freedmen’s bureau testimonies, archived but little known, tell a story of anguish, hope and humanity.
Without stories, there is no understanding or empathy. Just as without water, there is no life.
Denver, now Colorado’s state capital, developed at the confluence of two water ways, the Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. The area at the edge of the arid plains is the ancestral homeland of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. It was also a center for trade, hunting and community for the Ute, Lakota, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Shoshone and many other Native Americans.
Before Colorado was a state and just before a war launched to preserve slavery threatened to shred the union of states, a discovery of gold near Denver set off a rush of people from other ethnic groups into the territory. This was about the time a man in Virginia, hundreds of miles from Colorado, took money from a woman named Clara Brown in exchange for her own freedom. Aunt Clara, as she came to be known, was in her 50s then, and perhaps not expected to be able to give much more free labor.
Aunt Clara had been born into slavery around 1800. By the time she was freed in 1857, her husband and three remaining children - a fourth had died young - had been sold away from her.
Hearing that some of her relatives may have joined the thousands of people seeking opportunity in the gold fields, Aunt Clara worked as a midwife and cook for a wagon train to get from Virginia to Denver. She later left Denver to start a business – a laundry – in a gold rush town in the Colorado mountains.
As her business grew, Aunt Clara was able to help others who had been enslaved establish themselves in Colorado. She was known for her generosity.
Aunt Clara never stopped searching for her family - asking anyone who might know, sending letters to try to chase leads. She was able to learn that her husband and a daughter had died in slavery. A son had been sold and resold so many times that she could not trace him.
In 1882, Aunt Clara was able to locate her youngest daughter, Eliza Jane, in Iowa. Aunt Clara traveled to Iowa to be reunited with Eliza Jane, then returned to Denver with Eliza Jane’s daughter.
Aunt Clara, who died in 1885, is buried along the South Platte in Riverside Cemetery, known as Denver's Pioneer Cemetery. Her gravestone notes that she was the first woman accepted into the Society of Colorado Pioneers.
The cemetery’s managers lost the right to the South Platte’s waters in 2001. Since then, trees that date to the cemetery’s founding in 1876 have withered. But native grasses flourish under the bright Colorado sun.
People still come to pay their respects by laying stones on Aunt Clara’s grave marker. Some may see her as exceptional. Others, though, understand she is representative of those tens of thousands of people who had been enslaved, and who set out as soon as they were free to try to reunite their families and build their futures. For a sense of the astonishing potential possessed by women and men who had been denied so much, one only has to look to the story of Aunt Clara.