Words Have Power: Slavery, Freedom and Fort Pulaski

From Fort Pulaski National Monument, Georgia.

"A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it."
— Frederick Douglass, 1864

When the Civil War began in 1861, few could have imagined how much would change in four years. More than four million people were enslaved at the start; by the end they were free. A war begun to restore the Union ended as a war for freedom. But freedom did not guarantee equality, and the fight for it went on after the war — in many ways, it continues today.

From the Daily Georgian*, 1836.*

Built by enslaved hands

Fort Pulaski, one of the nation's Third System forts, was built of brick and mortar from 1829 to 1847 — an estimated five million bricks. Strong red bricks came by ship from Maryland and Virginia; local grey bricks came from the Hermitage Plantation, three miles outside Savannah, which ran a sawmill, an iron foundry and a brickworks — where enslaved men, women and children made the bricks.

Fort Pulaski from the air.

How the bricks were made. Soil and water were thrown into a pit, and enslaved workers stomped the mixture into clay with bare feet. Leaves, sticks and debris were picked out, the clay pressed into wooden moulds and the excess struck off with a straight stick. The wet bricks dried outside for several days, were carried to drying sheds for several weeks, then hauled to a kiln and fired for up to six days and nights, and left to cool for about a week. Finally they went by wagon and ship to Cockspur Island, to be unloaded and carried to the building site.

A family at the Hermitage Plantation. Library of Congress.

Fingerprints in the walls. In the South, including Savannah, it was illegal for enslaved people to learn to read or write, so few wrote records of their own, and many have simply avoided the subject. But their story survives in the fingerprints and handprints pressed into the wet bricks as they were moved. Their names are mostly lost; their marks are not. Look for them as you walk the fort: these people existed and deserve to have their story told.

A finger impression in a brick. NPS/Elizabeth Smith.

March Haynes: pilot, liberator, spy, soldier

March Haynes, born into slavery on March 4, 1825, was brought to Savannah in 1858, where as a dock worker and river pilot he came to know the local waterways. In 1861 he was brought to Fort Pulaski for his carpentry skills, and the Confederates used him to carry mail between the fort and the city.

He was there during the Union bombardment of April 10–11, 1862. After the garrison surrendered, Maj. Gen. David Hunter issued General Orders No. 7 on April 12: "All persons of color lately held to involuntary service by enemies of the United States in Fort Pulaski and on Cockspur Island, Georgia, are hereby confiscated and declared free, in conformity with law, and shall thereafter receive the fruits of their own labor."

March Haynes. NPS.

Free, Haynes could have gone north; instead, at the risk of his life, he slipped through the waters around Savannah in a small camouflaged boat and brought back freedom seekers to Cockspur Island — part of the several hundred who found freedom there. He then served the Union as a spy, scouting Confederate positions. In April 1863 he was arrested in Savannah for "running off" enslaved people, a charge that could have meant death — but no one came to testify, and he was released. He then enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, one of roughly 180,000 African Americans who fought for the Union.

From the Savannah Daily News*.*

Susie King Taylor: teacher to a regiment

Born into slavery near Savannah on August 6, 1848, Susie King Taylor secretly attended two schools run by Black women, in defiance of the law. At fourteen she escaped to the waters near Union-held Fort Pulaski, went on to the South Carolina Sea Islands, and joined the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, one of the first units of formerly enslaved men, later the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops. Officially a laundress and nurse, she also became their teacher, teaching children by day and adults by night, and stayed with the regiment for the whole war. She recalled teaching many of the men of Company E, "so eager to learn to read," and serving "four years and three months without receiving a dollar."

Susie King Taylor. NPS.

After the war she briefly ran a school for freed children in Savannah. In 1872 she moved to Boston and devoted her life to the Women's Relief Corps. Her 1902 memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, ended with a plea: "Justice we ask,—to be citizens of these United States, where so many of our people have shed their blood with their white comrades." In 2018 she was named a Georgia Woman of Achievement.

Robert Smalls: the Planter

Robert Smalls, born into slavery, knew Charleston Harbor as few did. In Charleston he married Hannah with their enslaver's permission, and they had two children, Elizabeth and Robert Jr., always fearing they would be sold apart. In the early 1860s he went to work on the steamer Planter.

Before dawn on May 13, 1862, with a crew of nine men and five women and three children aboard, Smalls took the Planter out of the harbour — nearly ten miles past heavily armed Confederate forts and batteries. Flying the Confederate and South Carolina flags, wearing the captain's straw hat and giving the right signals, they passed the guns; beyond Fort Sumter they raised a white bedsheet and steamed to the Union blockade. To the USS Onward, Smalls called out: "Good morning, sir! I've brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!"

Robert Smalls and the Planter*. Library of Congress.*

He pressed for Black enlistment, then returned to the Planter as pilot and later captain in the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, seeing seventeen actions, including the April 7, 1863, attack on Fort Sumter. After the war he served in South Carolina's assembly and senate and five terms in the U.S. House between 1875 and 1887. When South Carolina's 1895 constitution stripped Black citizens of the vote, he kept fighting: his race, he said, needed only "an equal chance in the battle of life."

Harriet Tubman: "be free or die"

Araminta ("Minty"), born into slavery in the early 1820s on Maryland's Eastern Shore, suffered a severe head injury as a teenager shielding an enslaved man from an overseer. On marrying John Tubman, a free man, in 1844, she became Harriet Tubman. Facing sale after her enslaver died, she escaped on foot, by night, to Pennsylvania. Then she went back — at least thirteen times in the decade before the war — bringing out family, friends and others, more than seventy people in all; abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called her "Moses." In the war she served as nurse, cook, scout and spy, and on June 1, 1863, with the 2nd South Carolina, joined the Combahee River raid, which freed more than 700 people. Afterward she worked for women's suffrage. She died in 1913 at her home in New York and was buried with military honours at Fort Hill Cemetery.

The Gullah Geechee

The Gullah Geechee are descendants of Central and West Africans enslaved on the rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic coast. Isolated together on the Sea Islands, people from many backgrounds formed a culture that kept African ways alive in language, arts, crafts and food. Gullah — called Geechee in Georgia — is a creole blending European and African languages, described as the only distinctly African creole in the United States. Cast nets, baskets and textiles remain living crafts, and much Southern food grew from enslaved cooks' African methods and ingredients. The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a National Heritage Area, stretches 12,000 square miles from Pender County, North Carolina, to St. Johns County, Florida (gullahgeecheecorridor.org).

Words have power

Fort Pulaski tries to use words that respect people whose history has been pushed aside. "Enslaved" rather than "slave": a noun implies that is all a person was, while "enslaved" says bondage was done to them, not what they were. "Enslaver" rather than "master" names who exerted the power. Consider the pairs: master / enslaver; ran away / self-emancipated; plantation / forced labour camp; runaway / freedom seeker; slave / enslaved. What do you see and feel? Do your words reinforce people's humanity — or only what was forced upon them?

Sources

• National Park Service, Fort Pulaski National Monument, "Words Have Power." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/words-have-power.htm
• The original gives Robert Smalls's birth date as April 5, 1849; the National Park Service's own biography of him (https://www.nps.gov/people/robert-smalls.htm) gives April 5, 1839.
• Its painting of freedom seekers is by a contemporary artist, and the Gullah Geechee Corridor logo belongs to the corridor, so neither is reproduced here.
• Quotations are from nineteenth-century documents and speeches and Taylor's 1902 memoir; the rest is rewritten in hubnx's own words.