[Album containing Carte de Visites of Freed People's School Teachers and Missionaries in Mississippi.]

£27,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Rare and important: a vernacular record of the teachers and missionaries of the Freed People’s schools in Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi . Victory at the Siege of Vicksburg, 18 May - 4 July, 1863, was critical. It gave Union forces control of the length of the Mississippi, which proved a lifeline for supplies and communication travelling both north and south, and effectively split the Confederacy in half. Vicksburg’s liberation allowed for teachers and missionaries from the north to establish schools for the recently emancipated Black population. Natchez had surrendered to Union troops after the fall of New Orleans in May, 1862, and in 1863 was the temporary headquarters of Ulysses S. Grant. In the wake of the Siege of Vicksburg, Natchez and the nearby area were flooded with refugees and newly emancipated Freed People . However, Confederate troops were never far and, as demonstrated here, raids on the city were common. Compiled by Mary Hyde Brown (1798-1882), the album includes portraits of 18 teachers, two missionaries, two delegates of the Christian Commission in Natchez, two school superintendents, and an orphanage director in Louisiana: essentially all the main players in a Freedmen’s school. Brown herself was one of the teachers as were a number of her relatives. All but one of the teachers are women, all are white, and apparently from the Midwest. Captions on the verso plus census records indicate that many are from Chicago, Illinois, and Indiana. The teachers and m

• Binding: Hardcover

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