Freedom's Women

Harriet Tubman Davis, widow of the late Nelson Davis of the US Colored Troops, who served in Company G of the 8th United States Colored Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War, received a pension in 1890 (although the Union Army pensions on a whole have not yet digitized, Harriet Tubman’s pension has been digitized and made available in NARA’s online catalog). However, there are also a few rare instances of Black women getting pensions for their own service, such as Ann Bradford Stokes who served as a Union nurse on the naval vessel USS Red Rover (all approved Union Navy pensions HAVE been digitized and made available on www.Fold3.com. For Ann Stokes’ pension on Fold3, see Navy “Survivor’s Certificate No. 17834”).  During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse, laundress and spy with the Union forces. 

When the Civil War started, Sojourner Truth urged young men to join the Union cause and organized supplies for Black troops. After the war, she was honored with an invitation to the White House and became involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau, helping freed slaves find jobs and build new lives. While in Washington, DC, she lobbied against segregation, and in the mid-1860s, when a streetcar conductor tried to violently block her from riding, she ensured his arrest and won her subsequent case. In the late 1860s, she collected thousands of signatures on a petition to provide former slaves with land, though Congress never took action. Nearly blind and deaf towards the end of her life, Truth spent her final years in Michigan.

Source: Michals, Debra.  “Sojourner Truth.”  National Women’s History Museum. 2015.  www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sojourner-truth .  

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln after the Battle of Antietam on September 22, 1862, one year into the Civil War. However, the Executive Order could not be enforced in the Confederacy during the war. The Proclamation did present the opportunity for African Americans to fight for their freedom and serve the Union armies in other ways. Lucy Higgs Nichols was one of those who took advantage of the situation.

Twenty-four-year-old Lucy Higgs was enslaved at a property in Grays Creek, Tennessee. Once the war broke out, she decided to escape slavery and join the Union Army. In June of 1862, Higgs, her daughter Mona, and a handful of other enslaved people made the 30-mile journey to Bolivar, Tennessee, where the 23rd Indiana Infantry Regiment was set up. Major Shadrack Hooper recorded her arrival into the group. Hooper even added a description, noting that Lucy was “someone having integrity, honesty, intelligence, always smiling, cheerful and kind, a willing washerwoman, seamstress, nurse, cook, and singer as well as a rattling good forager.”

In his description of Higgs, Major Hooper described her as a good forager. This was especially important in her nursing duties. The injuries suffered by soldiers during the battles were severe, but there were poor medical options to treat them. And the standard medical supplies of the day were difficult to get due to the war. Many soldiers died from easy-to-treat infections.

Higgs was an expert at finding herbs in the forest that could be used instead of medicine. Mullein leaf was used to treat asthma and gout. Hops could be boiled to be used as a sedative. Wild onions could be used to treat scurvy. And some soldiers placed tarragon leaves in their boots to keep their feet warm. Few were better than Lucy Higgs at finding these herbs and administering them to the troops.

There was a significant tragedy for Lucy during the war. Her first husband served under General Grant, but it is not known what became of him. Her daughter Mona was killed during the Siege of Vicksburg. She was given a funeral by the 23rd regiment and buried with flowers.

Throughout the war, Lucy was present for nearly every siege. She later followed General William Tecumseh Sherman as he made his legendary March to the Sea. When the war ended, Higgs stayed with the regiment and settled in the town of New Albany, Indiana as a free woman.

After losing her husband and daughter during the war, Lucy worked as a nurse and worked with the same soldiers from the battlefield. She was beloved by the veterans. Fraternal veteran organizations formed soon after the war, and Lucy was made an honorary member of the Grand Army of the Republic’s Sanderson Post. She attended every meeting.

Lucy married a man named John Nichols, but they did not have any additional children. She became nationally known in 1898 when she fought for a nurse’s pension. Thanks in part to the support of her fraternal organization, she was eventually granted $12 a month. Higgs Nichols died in 1915 at the age of 76.

A plaque in her honor was erected in her adopted hometown of New Albany, Indiana. It reads:

“Lucy, born a slave, April 10, 1838, was owned by the Higgs family that lived in Bolivar, Tennessee. She gained her freedom in 1862 by escaping to the 23rd Regiment Indiana Volunteers camped nearby. She worked as a nurse for the soliders as they fought in many major battles in the Civil War. She mustered out with them in Louisville in 1865. Lucy came to New Albany with returning veterans of the 23rd Regiment. She married John Nichols, 1870. Lucy applied for pension after Congress passed 1892 act for Civil War nurses; she was denied. In 1895, Lucy and 55 veterans of the 23rd petitioned Congress; in 1898, a Special Act of Congress awarde her pension. Lucy was an honorary member of the GAR. She died in 1915.”

Source: Neikirk, Todd, “Lucy Higgs Nichols Escaped Slavery during the Civil War By Working as a Nurse,” Feb. 18, 2022, War History Online, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/lucy-higgs-nichols-escaped-slavery-working-as-nurse.html?safari=1&D2c=1&A1c=1

Emancipation in the United States stretched over a century from the revolutionary war to the end of the Civil War.   This period was punctuated by intermediate struggles for freedom before the Civil War and more struggles to define and claim the freedom promised after the official end of slavery.    Black women used the chaos of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War to forge alternative and expanded paths to self-liberation.   Black women figured prominently in this “long emancipation” as they developed resistance strategies to challenge enslavement.   Enslaved women malingered, feigned illness, destroyed property, committed infanticide and suicide and escaped slavery to undermine the system.   Given that the woods, swamps, and slave cabins were spaces where the enslaved could exercise more autonomy than the fields and other open spaces on the plantation, bonded men had more autonomy than bond women because the latter were more confined to the plantation.  Although men comprised the majority of runaways and truants, women were also truants and truancy facilitators, providing food and information, which served to make these two forms of resistance individual and collective at the same time.  

Enslaved women faced “formidable obstacles to freedom: limited mobility, little knowledge of geography, and concern for loved ones, further complicated by the encumbrances of escaping with young children.”  Despite these obstacles, women such as Margaret Garner and Harriet Tubman fled slavery while managing family attachments in complex and innovative ways.   Beyond plantations, women escaped from presidents and statesmen.  They escaped to cities and towns, North and South; they fled poverty, wealth, benevolence, and malevolence alike.  As historian Cheryl LaRoche has argued, “although the constraints that kept women mired in captivity are well documented, their strategies for overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to freedom are not.”

Black women initiated their own liberation amid disparate circumstances.  Mothers who fled took extreme risks, fleeing with young children in the middle of the night and walking for days until reaching Union lines. Mothers who were desperate to leave abandoned their children in the most vulnerable circumstances.  A Virginian recalled her older sister, who “had a baby boy that she left behind with a daughter who had been used so bad it made her crazy.  While her mother was gone the baby died.”  Women who reached the Union lines found cruel and deadly conditions.  Union soldiers abused fugitive men, women, and children in every conceivable way.  Women were raped, children died of hunger, and men worked without pay.  Soldiers often offered ready assistance to slaveowners trying to locate their missing property, while generals barred the entrance of fugitives into Union lines altogether.

Source: Cook Bell, Karen, “Black Women, Agency, and the Civil War, Black Perspectives, September 22, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/black-women-agency-and-the-civil-war/