Looking Forward to Juneteenth
Photo credit: Carol M Highsmith. Library of Congress
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, which announced the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, from a balcony in Galveston Texas, or so the story goes. It was two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and 2 months after the Civil War had ended. Even if the enslaved people of Galveston had already heard the news, without the presence of Union troops to enforce it, the proclamation was largely theoretical at that moment.* I assume I don’t have to tell you that the anniversary of that event is now a federal holiday.
I’ve been thinking about Juneteenth a lot lately. Over the last few years, I’ve come to think of Juneteenth and the Fourth of July as bookends, marking out a space of time to think about the unfinished promise of the American Revolution, a promise we are still struggling to fulfill. More so today than ever.
One of the questions Clint Smith grapples with in the section on Juneteenth in his amazing book, How the Word is Passed, is the perception that Juneteenth is only a “Black thing.” One of the participants in the celebration in Galveston, a white Civil War re-enactor who has played the role of General Granger since 2015, summed up what I believe: “…it’s not ‘a Black thing,’ it’s an American thing. This is the final bit of freedom for all of us. And that’s just so important.”
Back in February, when I was reading my way through Black History month and visiting the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin, Texas , I told myself that we needed to find a Juneteenth celebration to attend—the same way we seek out Memorial Day services.** That didn’t work out. On Juneteenth I’m going to be headed to Minnesota to attend my college reunion. Unless there is a Juneteenth celebration in the Minneapolis airport, I’m going to miss out.
I think it is particularly important to mark that moment today. Since I won’t be attending a Juneteenth celebration in real life,*** I plan to re-read Annetter Gordon-Reed’s equally amazing On Juneteenth on the plane.
If you attend a Juneteenth celebration, I’d love to hear about it.
*It is worth remembering that the Emancipation Proclamation only emancipated enslaved people in the rebelling states. Slavery was not abolished in the United States as a whole until the 13th Amendment was passed in December, 1865. Even then, there was a cross-your-fingers-behind-your back clause that allowed involuntary servitude as a a criminal punishment.
**We attended an excellent one this year in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island. It had a small town feel in all the best ways. Highlights included:
• Two elderly members of the local American Legion post served as the color guard—an interesting change from the more familiar use of Boy Scouts. It may have been an expedient decision, but it added depth from the first moment of the service.
• A roll call of all Blue Island residents who had died in foreign wars since the Spanish American war, read by the American Legion chaplain. Each name was followed by the silvery peal of a small bell. I choked up even though I knew none of them.
• An open invitation at the end of the service to anyone who had lost a soldier in the wars to lay a rose at the foot of the flag pole.
• Taps. Always a part of these services. Always heartbreaking.
But I digress.
***Probably. Though the Minneapolis airport could surprise me.
Laundry Day (Not the Band)
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- 1730
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- 1897
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- 1900
In my last post, I made a casual reference to just how hard it was to do laundry in the mid-nineteenth century, but I didn’t bother to elaborate.* Time to correct that oversight.
Laundry in the mid-nineteenth century was a difficult job, one that most households undertook no more than once a week.**
Washing machines were a relatively new invention, first demonstrated at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London. They consisted of a ten- or twenty-gallon cylinder on top of a boiler that produced both hot water for the clothes and the steam that drove the engine. The operator would put clothes and soap in the cylinder, which then revolved for five or ten minutes. High-end versions had a second boiler for hot rinse water. The machines were expensive and found only in the wealthiest homes. In 1861 a basic machine cost $50—more than $9,000 today. (Realistically, anyone who could afford to buy a washing machine in 1861 also could afford to hire someone to wash the household linens. Maybe even more than once a week.)
Most people made do with wooden washtubs, large kettles for heating water, and plenty of elbow grease.
The first step, one most of us don’t think of as part of the laundry process today, was mending and patching. Once she finished mending torn clothing and bed linens, the laundress or housewife moved on to stain removal, which was a time-consuming process that could involve applying lemon juice to stains (a relatively expensive choice), exposing stained items to direct sunlight, or soaking them overnight in “blood warm water” (basically the same temperature as a baby’s bottle). Washable clothing (made from fabrics such a cotton and linen as opposed to silk, leather, velvet and some woolens), bed linens and rags were then washed in hot water using soft soap and a washboard,*** boiled to kill lice and insects, rinsed several times in hot water, allowed to cool, and then rinsed again in cool water.**** Wet laundry was hung out to dry on anything that would hold it off the ground: a clothesline if you were lucky enough to have one, bushes, a porch railing. A home laundry guide from 1902 pointed out that even drying clothing had its challenges. You needed a “grassy corner well open to the sun,…sheltered from high winds…the attentions of wandering poultry… and the incursions of pigs, puppies and calves…they not only soil the clothes, but will tear and even eat them.” Once dry, clothing would be ironed using a cast-iron metal iron heated on a stove or run through a mangle, a device made up of two rollers and a crank that used pressure to smooth wrinkles from the fabric.
All this sounds hard enough, but this description masks the layers of physical work involved in the process. Water had to be brought from sources with varying degrees of inconvenience: a stream or pond at some distance from a home, a shared pump in an urban neighborhood, a farmyard well. Once acquired, water was heated in large kettles on wood-or coal-burning stoves—the fuel for which had to be lugged as well— and carried from kitchen to washtub. Commercial soap was not yet widely available outside of major cities. Many families made their own.
From mending to folding, laundry was backbreaking work. There’s a reason why washerwomen are portrayed as physically powerful in popular literature and images of the time.
Makes you appreciate modern laundry equipment doesn’t it?
*In part because I assumed I wrote a blog post about this back in 2015 when I was writing Heroines of Mercy Street, a book about Civil War nurses in which laundry played a surprisingly large part.
**My description draws on research in the United States. The details may have differed in Europe but the big picture would have remained the same.
***I paused here to do a little dive into the question of washboards, which seem to have appeared in the early nineteenth century and were greeted as a serious technological improvement
****Though I’m willing to bet that some harried women skipped a few rinses on occasion.
“Stagecoach Mary” Fields Carries the Mail
Fifty years before the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion made postal history, a six-foot tall, powerfully built formerly enslaved woman named “Stagecoach Mary” Fields delivered the mail in rural Montana as a Star Route Carrier for the United States Post Office.*
When Mary was emancipated, she left West Virginia, where she had been enslaved, and worked her way up the Mississippi on the steam boats. She eventually ended up ending up in Toledo, Ohio.** She worked for a time at the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart in Toledo, where she did the laundry,*** ran the kitchen, maintained the garden and grounds—and made friends with the convent’s Mother Superior, Mother Amadeus Dunne.*** *That friendship may have helped her keep her job: her gun-toting, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, bad-tempered ways were not a good fit for the quiet of the convent
Mother Amadeus moved west to Montana, where she founded another convent. When she fell ill, Mary followed. She worked for a time at Mother Amadeus’s new convent, St. Peter’s Mission, near Cascade Montana.. Mary’s rough manners and bad-temper ways got her in trouble with the bishop. The final straw came when she and a male employee of the mission got into a fight, in which they both pulled their guns. Neither fired, but the Bishop demanded that the nuns fire Mary. (Was the man she fought with also fired? My sources don’t say.)
Mary moved to Cascade, where she tried a number of ways to make a living. She took in laundry and opened several restaurants that failed—perhaps due to her habit of feeding people for free if they didn’t have the money to pay. Mostly she did odd jobs, including work for the Ursuline mission. (Evidently the nuns found ways to get around the Bishop’s orders.)
In 1895, now in her mid-sixties, Mary got a contract with the Post Office to be a Star Route Carrier, apparently with the help of the Ursuline nuns. She was the second woman to get such a contract since the Star Route service was established in 1845. Rural Montana was a wild place. Driving a stagecoach provided by the Ursulines, Mary delivered the mail in spite of bandits, wolves, and the weather. (A broader, more dangerous variant of “neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night.”*****) In bad weather, when the coach couldn’t get through, she picked up the mail bags and walked. She carried both a rifle and a revolver and built a reputation of being fearless and ferocious.
She retired after delivering the mail for eight years and settled down in Cascade, where she became a beloved town character, who drank in the town saloons and ate in the towns restaurants for free. She celebrated two birthdays a year because she didn’t know when she was born, wore men’s trousers under her skirts, and supported the local baseball team with flowers from her garden and a punch in the face for anyone who bad-mouthed the team.
She died on December 5, 1914. The town raised money to have her buried in a cemetery on the road that linked Cascade to the Ursuline mission, a route she had driven frequently with the mail. Her funeral was one of the largest the town had seen.
Montana-born actor Gary Cooper, who met Fields on a visit to Cascade when he was nine, summed up her life in an interview about Mary with Ebony magazine “Mary lived to become one of the freest souls ever to draw breath or a .38.”
*The purpose of the Star Route service was to reduce the cost of getting the mail from one remote rural post office to another. Previously, local stage coach companaies had carried the mail, often charging the government for the use of the horses, the wagon and a driver. Independent contractors, who provided their own transportation, which sometimes was no more than a horse or a canoe, bid for the four-year contracts to deliver the mail with “celerity, certainty, and security.”
**Which is not on the Mississippi. Some details are missing in Mary’s story.
***Not a small job in the mid-nineteenth century.
****Some sources claim the friendship dated back to the days when Mary was enslaved in West Virginia, but this has not been substantiated.
*****The first version of this was written by the Greek historian Herodotus, referring to the couriers of the ancient Persian empire: “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these courageous carriers from the swift completion of their appointed course.”
https://www.sendoso.com/resources/blog/direct-mail-legend-stagecoach-mary