Clara Bashop saw her daughter, Patience, for the last time in 1859.
Clara wept as she mounted an auction block in Richmond. A man named Ben Davis bought her but didn't want 12-year-old Patience. Still, Clara begged.
Her story is one of thousands of children, parents, aunts and uncles, siblings, husbands and wives separated during bondage and left looking for each other when slavery ended in 1865.
Many from what became known as the “freedom generation” took out newspaper ads in hopes of reuniting with family members or, at the very least, learning a clue as to their whereabouts.
Judith Giesberg’s book “Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families,” shares many of these ads, hundreds with a Virginia connection. The book, which was released in February, provides historical context and jarring details of the largely futile searches.
The author is a professor and historian who selected 10 stories as her primary focus. They are drawn from a website of nearly 5,000 ads and letters she and her team of Villanova University graduate students launched in 2017.
“Last Seen” leads with Bashop’s saga, which began in Charles City County, west of Williamsburg. Many ads are from freed slaves looking for relatives in Hampton Roads.
Hannah and Caesar Mallory took out an ad in the Richmond Planet looking for information about their sons, Lewis, William, Johnson, Caesar and Frank, last seen in Hampton. Lizzie Lightfoot's ad, "Do You Know Him?" appeared in the weekly publication True Southerner and asked for information about her son, Charles Lightfoot, last seen in Norfolk.
Bashop had searched for Patience for 30 years when, in October 1892, she walked into the New York World, a sensationalist newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer with a national following. By then, she had searched for Patience for years with an ad that had drawn little attention.
Her new ad read, in part: "I wish to find my daughter Patience Green. I have no trace of her since she was sold at Richmond, Va, 1859. She was then 12 years of age. John William Harris my son went with some servants ... (after the surrender) ... He was 14 years old ... Both ... belonged to Dick Christian (in name only), by whom they were sold."
Bashop was directed to a reporter who wrote a story, which published the following day. Two days later, it was picked up by the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis, Missouri and the San Francisco Chronicle in California.
The story, headlined "A Thirty Years’ Search. Mrs. Bashop’s Pitiful Quest for Her Daughter, Patience," did little to advance the search, noting "the little girl" was sold to a stranger." The buyer's name wasn't mentioned. Clara's slave trader was said to be moved by her plea, but unwilling to save Patience from "the stranger," the only way he is identified. Clara ended up in Alabama and later in Carrollton, Mississippi, 900 miles from the last place she saw her daughter.
“Stories like Clara Bashop’s didn’t usually break through to white audiences,” Giesberg said. “I wanted her story to start the book because it allows us to see the larger stage on which the drama of these searches for family was occurring. There were moments when white America paid attention.”
But those were fleeting. Most of the time, the freedom generation relied on Black newspapers to spread their pleas, including The Richmond Planet, which was founded by 13 formerly enslaved. Black pastors nationwide read the ads from their pulpits.
“The stories that made it into white newspapers were really for entertainment value,” Giesberg said.
Happy endings were rare. Giesberg estimates that the success rate of the advertisements might have been as low as 2%. Some ads were still being published as late as 1916.
Giesberg’s students continue to import ads, culled from microfiche, into the database. Still, the larger project that receives federal funding through the National Archives is in danger of being eliminated because of budget cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency.
The project receives about $100,000 per year from the National Archives, funds that will expire by August 1. Some of the money goes to curriculum produced by teachers and taught in public schools in Texas and Pennsylvania. The ads are also part of AP African American History’s required curriculum.
“It’s a moving target right now,” Giesberg said. “At this moment, on this day, there’s still money for archiving projects like this, but there’s no staff at the National Archives to administer it, and we’re not sure what the future looks like.”
Giesberg, who is on a book tour, is heartened by the feedback she has received in uncovering what she calls “the awful truth of the violence done to Black families by America’s domestic slave trade.”
“A lot of people are interested in this history because it’s part of their family history but also because they see it as part of American history,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of people offering their gratitude to me for writing the book, but also for making sure these stories are available.”
