Love and Sacrifice
6/25/202637 min
In 1865, Rebecca Primus left the comfort of her Northern home to help establish a school in the South. She exchanged intimate, sometimes romantic letters with her friend Addie Brown. Their correspondence offers a window into a remarkable relationship. Writer Ashley C. Ford breaks down these letters with scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin, discovering how the letters illuminate Black life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
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First 90 secondsMalcolm Gladwell· Host0:02
[mellow music] Let's go back a few years to March 3rd, 1865. Abraham Lincoln is still President of the United States, and the Civil War is still not officially over. The Confederacy would not surrender for another few months. The Union Congress has passed the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery nationwide, though it still has to be ratified by the states. Now Congress wants to do something to help those displaced or impoverished by the war, to start creating some order from the chaos in the South. Because you couldn't simply conclude a war, declare slavery over, and tell people to move on. They needed help getting started in a new world. So Northern lawmakers establish the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, and President Lincoln puts it under the Department of War. The agency quickly becomes known as the Freedmen's Bureau, which implies that it only existed to help the formerly enslaved. That is not strictly true. The Bureau also offered aid to poor whites in the South. There was so much to do and so many people in need. The agency offered legal support and also helped to establish primary schools. The goal was to educate those who had until recently been forbidden to learn how to read and write.