1. The New York Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Friends or the Quakers, dispatched Jacobs to its school in Alexandria, Virginia, on or about the second week in January 1863. Jean Fagan Yellin, ed., The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, Vol. 2 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), 429 [hereafter Jacobs Papers].

2. Julia A. Wilbur (1815–1895) had gone to Alexandria in part to escape childless desolation in Rochester when her brother-in-law took over the care of his daughter after Wilbur's sister died. Wilbur wrote in a letter to Anna Barnes that she “was very much surprised to see Harriet Jacobs” (quote from Wilbur to Anna M. C. Barnes, January 15, 1863, in Jacobs Papers, 2:430). Historian Jean Fagan Yellin notes that Wilbur initially “resented Jacobs's presence,” but Jacobs quickly won over Wilbur within a few weeks after the two women began working closely together (quote in Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life [New York, 2004], 165).

3. I will elaborate on and provide specific evidence in the main body of this essay for the claims that I lay out here and in the remainder of the introductory section.

4. Admittedly, precise numbers of industrial sewing schools are hard to pin down. Contemporaries did not compile a centralized database, and the quality of aid-society, military, and Freedmen's Bureau records varied around the country. Some of the schools moved or closed at different times, which also makes tracking difficult. I base these numbers on published reports from the superintendent of Freedmen's schools, which consistently undercount and are incomplete.

5. On racial capitalism, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; repr., Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Walker, Juliet E. K., “Racial Capitalism in as Global Economy: The ‘Double Consciousness’ of Black Business in the Economic Philosophy of W.E.B. DuBois,” in W.E.B. DuBois and Race, eds. Fontenot, Chester J. Jr. and Morgan, Mary Alice (Macon, GA, 2001), 70–96Google Scholar; Leong, Nancy, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126 (2013): 2151–226Google Scholar; Kish, Zenia and Leroy, Justin, “Bonded Life: Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital,” Cultural Studies 29 (2015): 630–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Walter and Kelley, Robin D. G., eds., Race Capitalism Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2017)Google Scholar; Ralph, Michael and Singhal, Maya, “Racial Capitalism,” Theory and Society 48 (2019): 851–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. A useful definition of social reproductive labor appears in Susan Ferguson, “Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor,” Race, Gender & Class 15 (2008):

On the social reproductive aspects of capitalism in general and racial capitalism in particular, see Ferguson, “Canadian Contributions,” 44–47, 48; Laslett, Barbara and Brenne, Johanna, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 382–4, 388–91, 400–401CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Schwalm, Leslie Ann, “‘Ties to Bind Them All Together’: The Social and Reproductive Labor of Slave Women,” in A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana, IL, 1997), 47–74Google Scholar; Morgan, Jennifer, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC, 2021), 7–9, 15–17, 133–40Google Scholar. I think it also important to consider abstraction—racialized, classed, and the like—to deepen understandings of social reproduction. According to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the “practice of abstraction” represents “a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between [sovereignties]” (“Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” Professional Geographer 54 (2002): 16). I am extending her insight to the Black women workers in the industrial sewing schools and those who benefitted in various ways from their exploitation.

7. Glymph, Thavolia, The Women's Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill, 2019)Google Scholar, “symbolically” quote on 164, “vocabulary” quote on 170, 170–9. Glymph also discusses colonialism scholars’ analysis of white mothering as a trope characterizing white women's relationship to colonized subjects (303n1). For a discussion of how Black women mobilized the mothering trope in their work with freedpeople, see Carol Faulkner, “Mothers of the Race: Black Women in the Freedmen's Aid Movement,” in Women's Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement (Philadelphia, 2003), 67–82.

8. See Haley, Sarah, “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia,” Signs 39 (2013): 53–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Consider Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008); Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT, 2019).

10. On gender and racial capitalism, see Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Gendering the General Strike: W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction and Black Feminism's ‘Propaganda of History,’” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 3 (2013): 437–63; Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (New York, 2017), 10–32; Shauna J. Sweeney, “Gendering Racial Capitalism and the Black Heretical Tradition,” in Histories of Racial Capitalism, eds. Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy (New York, 2021), 53–84; Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery.

On the enslaved as capital and labor, see Sidney W. Mintz, “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?,” Review 2 (Summer 1978): 81–98; Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, 2016). This list is hardly exhaustive.

11. Robert Olwell, “‘Loose, Idle and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, IN, 1996), 97–110. White women maintained their social status by not being seen hawking goods in the market, taking in sewing or laundry, and even nursing their own children though they utterly depended on the Black women who performed those tasks. See Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York, 1868); Keith C. Barton, “‘Good Cooks and Washers’: Slave Hiring, Domestic Labor, and the Market in Bourbon County, Kentucky,” Journal of American History 84 (Sep., 1997): 436–60; Stephanie Jones-Rogers, “‘[S]he could . . . spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Slavery & Abolition 38 (2017): 337–55. On former mistresses’ continued reliance on Black women's production, see, for example, Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 176–7.

12. John Campbell, “‘As a Kind of Free Man’: Slaves’ Market-Related Activities in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860,” Slavery and Abolition 12 (June 2008): 131.

13. Justene Hill Edwards, Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (New York, 2021), 4.

14. In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, 2006), Sadiya Hartman articulates the seminal thesis about the afterlives of slavery:

Also see Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997; repr., New York, 2017); Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh.

Convict leasing links gendered racial capitalism and the state's exploitation of women. Though Sarah Haley does not explicitly reference Hartman, she notes, “Convict leasing represented a gendered regime of neoslavery that constituted modernity by extending the gender logics produced under slavery through gendered racial terror and gendered regimes of brutal labor exploitation” (No Mercy Here, 6). Talitha LeFlouria notes a crucial exception in the comparison between slavery and convict leasing: lessors discouraged Black women's reproduction because it was a detriment to profits. See LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), 97–99.

15. On institutional violence, see Cecile P. Frey, “The House of Refuge for Colored Children,” Journal of African American History 66 (1981): 10–25; Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA, 1997); David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston, 2002); William Seraile, Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York's Colored Orphan Asylum (New York, 2011).

Racial capitalism typically explores colonialism, but I foreground carcerality in my discussion of the schools. See Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, and Brian Jordan Jefferson, eds., Colonial Racial Capitalism (Durham, NC, 2022).

16. On violence against freedwomen, see Noralee Frankel, “Within the Union Lines,” in Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 28–55; Glymph, “Black Women Refugees: Making Freedom in Union Lines,” in Women's Fight, 221–50.

17. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, 2016).

18. The fragments of Mary Pope's story, told here in part using creative non-fiction, are found in “Mary Pope [Testimony],” in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977), 455–7; “Extracts of Letters from Teachers,” Freedmen's Journal, January 1865, 4–5.

19. On race, gender, and free labor ideology, see Schwalm, “‘And So to Establish Family Relations’: Race, Gender, and Family in the Postbellum Crisis of Free Labor,” in A Hard Fight for We, 234–68; Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 4, 138–40; Susan Eva O'Donovan, “Black Women and the Domestication of Free Labor,” in Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 162–207; Mary Farmer-Kaiser, “‘The women are the controlling spirits’: Freedwomen, Free Labor Ideology, and the Freedmen's Bureau,” in Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York, 2010), 64–95.

20. On industrial slavery, see Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1970); Ronald L. Lewis, Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715-1865 (Westport, CT, 1979); T. Stephen Whitman, “Industrial Slavery at the Margin: The Maryland Chemical Works,” Journal of Southern History 59 (1993): 31–62; Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York, 1994); John J. Zaborney, Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (Baton Rouge, LA, 2012), 120–48. About women industrial slaves, see Starobin, Industrial Slavery, 164–8; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York, 1981), 10–12; Theodore Kornweibel Jr. “‘Not at All Proper for Women’: Black Female Railroaders,” Railroad History 201 (Fall-Winter, 2009): 7–10.

21. On the multifaceted roles of women in the Civil War, see Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (Oxford, United Kingdom, 1992); LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 2009); Stephanie McCurry, Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 2019); Glymph, Women's Fight.

22. For example, three thousand women did piecework in their homes for a Confederate manufactory in Atlanta. Civilians also volunteered to sew to help the army; at least fifty thousand civilians, mostly women, sewed for pay and voluntarily at Confederate depots over the course of the war. LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens, GA, 1995), 85–86; Harold S. Wilson, Confederate Industry: Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War (Jackson, MS, 2002), 153; Amy Breakwell, “A Nation in Extremity: Sewing Machines and the American Civil War,” Textile History 41 (2010): 98–107; Leslie D. Jensen, “A Survey of Confederate Central Government Quartermaster Issue Jackets,” The Company of Military Historians, http://military-historians.org/company/journal/confederate/confederate-1.htm.

On the Union military's attitudes about and treatment of freedwomen, see Frankel, “Within the Union Lines”; Glymph, “Black Women Refugees.”

23. Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868-1915 (Westport, CT, 1978), 76.

24. One reason I included “opening foray” in the title is that I cannot include every important discussion that I would like. Unfortunately, I can only acknowledge the role of free Black and self-emancipated women here. I am not able to detail Black women's aid work among freedpeople. Do see Faulkner, “Mothers of the Race”.

25. “A Pleasing Picture,” National Freedman, August 15, 1865, 231.

26. “Report of the Committee on Teachers and Publications,” National Freedman, June 1866, 167–70. Another idea for putting women to corporate work besides the industrial sewing school included building wash houses. In 1863, the superintendent of Camp Barker had suggested building wash houses and contracting freedwomen to do laundry for pay. The National Freedmen's Relief Association of the District of Columbia declined to pursue the idea. “Doc. 60. Testimony by the Superintendent of the Contrabands at Camp Barker before the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, Testimony of D. B. Nichols,” in Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, Leslie S. Rowland, and Julie Saville, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. . ., Series 1, Volume 3: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 289. Harriet Tubman successfully built a wash house in Beaufort, South Carolina, and helped freedwomen learn to wash military uniforms for pay. She privileged the needs of freedwomen and their families rather than military and aid-society officials’ biases about Black women. A Union regiment took over residence in the wash house and turned out the Black women during Tubman's absence on a Florida expedition. Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New Yorks, 2004), 196–7.

27. Some industrial sewing schools operated in conjunction with freedmen's schools and normal-school programs to train Black teachers and were not listed as separate schools in the record. Some other freedpeople's schools conducted sewing classes a few days a week or as part of the curriculum. “A Pleasing Picture”; “Northern Missionaries for South Carolina,” The Liberator, March 7, 1862, unpaginated; “Report of the ‘First National Freedmen's School,’ Alexandria, Va. for June, 1865,” 222–3, and “Packages Received by N.F.R. Assoc., since 21st June, 1865,” 246, both in National Freedman, August 15, 1865; “Pittsburgh Association—Report of the Superintendent,” American Freedman, May 1866, 28; “Baltimore Anniversary Meeting,” American Freedman, January 1867.

28. About Pope in “Extracts of Letters from Teachers,” 6. Abolitionists proposed opening an industrial school for colored youth in the free states. Black abolitionists, chief among them Frederick Douglass, rejected the idea of creating new schools segregated by race (“An Effort, We Are Glad to Learn, Is Being Made to Establish,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 15, 1853, 1). In 1866, a French philanthropist living in New York and the Freedmen's Bureau operated a short-lived farm school for Black soldiers’ male children and other orphaned boys at Soldier's Rest near Alexandria, Virginia. The farm school also operated near an industrial sewing school for fifty Black women and girls that had opened earlier in April 1866. See “Industrial Schools,” National Freedman, May 1866, 148; image “Freedman's Farm School, Near Washington DC” and story “Schools for Freedmen,” Harper's Weekly, March 30, 1867, 1. The boys’ farm school closed less than a year after it opened (Fourth Semi-annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1867 (Washington, D.C.: General Printing Office, 1867), 10).

African Americans planted schools almost immediately after they secured their freedom, some of which had been secret schools created before the Civil War. Missionaries, aid societies, and later the Freedmen's Bureau often supported rather than instilled school building within Black communities. See Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery; Heather Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); Adam Fairclough, “Freedom's First Generation,” in A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 25-58; Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2008); Hilary Green, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 2016).

29. The group organized in 1851 to support Frederick Douglass. Originally called the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, it dropped sewing from its name around 1855. Quote in Rochester Ladies’ Anti-slavery and Freedmen's Aid Society, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-slavery and Freedmen's Aid Society (Rochester, NY, 1868), 5 [hereafter 17th Annual RLAFAS Report]. Also see Hinda Mandell, “The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery (Sewing) Society: Handcraft as a Metaphorical Tool for the Abolitionist Cause,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 20 (Spring 2022): 49–66.

30. “Material for Sewing Classes,” American Freedman, August 1867, 265.

31. Quote in Horace James, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina . . . (Boston, 1865), 26. On Horace James’ philosophy in working with and providing work for freedpeople on Roanoke Island, see James, Annual Report, 12, 26–27, 29–30, 32–33, 44–48; Click, Time Full of Trial, 120.

32. James, Annual Report, 27.

33. “Industrial School, Roanoke Island,” National Freedman, August 15, 1866, 215–6; Click, Time Full of Trial, 120. “Extracts of Letters from Teachers,” 4.

34. See Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (New York, 2008); Tamika Y. Nunley, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2021), 4–7, 19–30, 56–58, 72, 94–99, Chapter 4, 149–52, Chapter 6; Crystal Lynn Webster, “At Work,” in Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC, 2021), 65–89.

35. “Extracts of Letters from Teachers,” 6.

36. “Our Future Work—The Best Means for Its Prosecution,” American Freedman, August 1866, 67–70; Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 10, 21–22, 92–93, 149–50; Robert Harrison, Washington During Civil War and Reconstruction: Race and Radicalism (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 80–81; Melder, “Angel of Mercy.”

37. “Our Future Work,” 67.

38. For examples of industrial programs at antebellum schools and institutions and the goods students produced at all-girls’ schools, see various reports such as Second Annual Report of the Wilson Industrial School Association for Girls . . . (New York, 1855); Second Annual Report of the Industrial School Association for German Girls, April, 1855 (New York, 1855); Second Annual Report of the Fourth Ward Industrial School Association, December, 1855 (New York, 1856); Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Industrial School for Girls, in Dorchester, for the Year 1859 (Boston, 1860).

39. Wilbur quoted in Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 19.

40. Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Abor, MI, 1981), 7–8, 10, 15–65; Michelle Jones, “Women's Prison History: The Undiscovered Country,” Perspectives on History, February 1, 2015, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2015/womens-prison-history. Also see Kali Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Durham, NC, 2006).

41. Nunley, At the Threshold of Liberty, 108.

42. Harriet Jacobs, “Life among the Contrabands,” The Liberator, September 5, 1862, 3, https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/support5.html.

43. Both quotes in “The Negro in Washington, DC,” Freedmen's Journal, February 1865, 18.

44. “Second Annual Report of the New-England Freedmen's Aid Society,” Freedmen's Journal, April 1865, 56.

45. Some other sources use the spelling “Harriette.” “Richmond Industrial Schools,” Freedmen's Record, November 1869, 51.

46. “First Annual Report of the Old Cambridge Freedmen's Aid Society, Nov. 29, 1865,” Freedmen's Journal 2, no. 3 (March 1866): 42–43; Lucy Chase to Dear Friends, July 1, 1864, in Dear Ones at Home: Letters from Contraband Camps, by Lucy Chase and Sarah Chase, ed. Henry Lee Swint (Nashville, TN, 1966), all quotes on 117.

47. “Meeting at Augusta, Me., in Behalf of the Freedmen—Speech of Gen. Howard,” National Freedman, August 15, 1865, 235.

48. “Lincoln Industrial School,” American Freedman, February 1867, 168.

49. U.S. Department of Education, Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia . . . (Washington, D.C., 1871), 241–3; Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 136–7; Susan Walker to Gen. O. O. Howard, July 10, 1869, in W [Folder], Jan.-–July 1869, Manuscript Registers and Letters Received by the Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (BRFAL), 1865–1872, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), [hereafter BRFAL Commissioner Letters]; Fourth Annual Report of the Assistant Commissioner, BRFAL for the District of Columbia, Washington, Maryland, and Delaware, October 10, 1868 (Washington, D.C., 1868), 14, in Registers of Letters Received by the Commissioner of the BRFAL, 1865–1871, NARA [hereafter 4th Annual BRFAL Asst. Commissioner Report for DC Area]; John W. Alvord, Fifth Semi-annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, January 1, 1868 (Washington, D.C., 1868), 16; Alvord, Sixth Semi-annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1868 (Washington, D.C., 1868), 8; Alvord, Eighth Semi-annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1869 (Washington, D.C., 1869), 9; Ella Forbes, African American Women During the Civil War (New York, 1998), 58; “Lincoln Industrial School.”

50. Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, 68, 77–79; Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 187–8, 193–4; Keith S. Bohannon, “‘More Like Amazons Than Starving People’: Women's Urban Riots in Georgia in 1863,” in Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era, eds. Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers (Chicago, 2015), 149–53. Also see Mary A. DeCredico, “‘War is Good Business’: Georgia's Urban Entrepreneurs and the Confederate War Effort,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 73 (1989): 231–49.

51. “Our Future Work,” 67–70; Forbes, African American Women, 58.

52. All freedmen's stores discussion from J. W. Sprague, “Report of the Assistant Commissioner: Arkansas, Missouri, and Indian Territory, October 18, 1866, in U.S. Senate, Ex. Doc. No. 6, 39th Cong., 2d Sess., 24–25; Report of the General Superintendent of Freedmen, Department of the Tennessee and the State of Arkansas for 1864 (Memphis, 1865), 67; John Eaton and Ethel Osgood Mason, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedman: Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to the Work for the Contrabands and Freedman of the Mississippi Valley (New York, 1907), 128, 128n1; Chase to Dear Friends, 118; Engs, Freedom's First Generation, 22–24; Janet Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York, 1981; reprint, Jackson, MS, 1999), 98–99; A. W. Williamson to George Reynolds, April 15, 1865, 880–1, and “227. Resolutions Adopted by a Meeting of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Freedpeople, April 17, 1865,” 881–5, 884–5n1, both in Berlin et al., Freedom; Edwin S. Redkey, A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army 1861–1865 (Cambridge, UK, 1992), 281–83; Click, Time Full of Trial, 72, 119–20, 135; “Address of the American Freedmen's Aid Commission,” The Liberator, December 1, 1865; “The Colored Schools,” Gloucester, MA, Cape Ann Light, April 1, 1865, 4.

53. Jacobs, “Life among the Contrabands.”

54. Lucy Chase, “First Annual Report of the Roxbury Branch of the New-England Freedmen's Aid Society,” Freedmen's Journal, January 1865, 12.

55. Robert Francis Engs, Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890 (Philadelphia, 1979), 39.

56. John W. Alvord, Sixth Semi-annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1868 (Washington, D.C., 1868), 8; Ledgers for Mrs. L. M. E. Ricks Supt. of Industrial School, Mrs. J. S. Griffing Supt. of Industrial School, Mrs. Furmey Supt. of Industrial School, Miss Walker Supt. of Industrial School, and Miss Miller Georgetown Sewing School, all in Accounts of Materials Used in Industrial Schools and Miscellaneous Lists, Volume 98 (June 10, 1863–March 31, 1868), in Manuscript Records of the BRFAL, Field Offices for the District of Columbia, Local Superintendent for Washington and Georgetown Other Records, NARA [hereafter cited as BRFAL DC Accounts of Material].

57. Also see Monthly Reports from Superintendents of the Industrial Schools of Materials and Clothing, April 1867–April 1868, in Manuscript Records of the BRFAL, Field Offices for the District of Columbia, Local Superintendent for Washington and Georgetown Reports, NARA.

58. Quote in Chase to Dear Home-Folks, 29. In 1868, Walker had done well enough that she was able to purchase a home near the Freedman's Hospital. She taught thirty to fifty women at what became known as Brewster Cottage Industrial School. The school became part of Howard University after Walker's death. “Introductory Note,” in Journal of Miss Susan Walker, March 3d to June 6th, 1862, ed. Henry Noble Sherwood (Cincinnati, 1912), reprinted in Quarterly Publication of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 7 (1912): 3–4; “Miss Susan Walker's Death,” Washington, D.C. Post, December 19, 1887, 3; Special Report of the Commissioner of Education, 241–3; Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 136–37; Walker to Howard; 4th Annual BRFAL Asst. Commissioner Report for DC Area, 14, 727.

59. Ledger, Amount of Materials for the Mfg. of Clothing at Industrial Schools for Destitute Freedmen D.C. [February, March, and June 1868], a letter requesting supplementary supplies in J. S. Griffing to J.V.W. Vandenburgh, February 24, 1868, and Ricks to Disbrow; handwritten list signed by Susan Walker, February 26, [1868], all in BRFAL DC Accounts of Material; “Lincoln Industrial School”; “Our Teachers and Agents in the South,” National Freedman, May 1866, 155–6.

60. “Our Future Work.”

61. Ibid.

62. Charlotte Newman, “To Punish or Protect: The New Poor Law and the English Workhouse,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 18 (2014), 122.

63. Ibid., 124.

64. “Lincoln Industrial School”.

65. 4th Annual BRFAL Asst. Commissioner Report for DC Area, 14.

66. All manufactory piece rates from [Elizabeth Logan], “Needle and Garden: The Story of a Seamstress Who Laid Down Her Needle and Became a Strawberry Girl. Written by Herself,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1865, 674, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1865/06/15-92/131866616.pdf; “Report of Julia A. Wilbur,” in 17th Annual RLAFAS Report, 8. On wartime sewing women, see Mark Russell Wilson, “The Politics of Public Arsenals: Quartermasters, Sewing Women, and the Struggle over Army Employment and Manufacturing Policy, 1861-1865,” in “The Business of Civil War: Military Enterprise, the State, and Political Economy in the United States, 1850–1880,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 2002, 500–599. An analysis of Freedmen's Bureau payroll receipts and ledgers could offer an important snapshot of pay rates. It is also important to consider the local political economic context, the progress of the war, the population of free Black people, and other factors to make a thorough analysis of pay differences between the various schools around the country.

67. “Material for Sewing Classes.”

68. “From Washington,” Freedmen's Journal, January 1866, 6–7.

69. Women teachers earned about $15–$30 month, nearly half what male teachers earned. Women teachers did a great deal beyond teaching, including management and other administrative work, but virtually never were promoted to formal leadership positions. Click, Time Full of Trial, 81, 120; “Financial Report of the Executive Committee,” National Freedman, (June 1866), 167.

70. Quote in Mrs. L. M. E. Ricks to [D.R.] Disbrow, February 20, 1868, BRFAL DC Accounts of Material; “Report of Julia A. Wilbur.”

71. Click, Time Full of Trial, 120.

72. Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980); Keith E. Melder, “Angel of Mercy in Washington: Josephine Griffing and the Freedmen, 1864-1872,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 63/65 (1963/1965): 243–72; Sandra E. Small, “The Yankee Schoolmarm in Freedmen's Schools: An Analysis of Attitudes,” Journal of Southern History 45 (1979): 381–402; Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 295–312.

73. Julia Griffing to Anne Dickinson, June 6, 1866, BRFAL DC Accounts of Material.

74. Special Report of the Commissioner of Education, 243.

75. Melder, “Angel of Mercy,” 253–5; Whites, The Civil War, 69–73, 77–78; Robert Harrison, “Welfare and Employment Policies of the Freedmen's Bureau in the District of Columbia,” Journal of Southern History 72 (2006): 87–88, 100–103, 103–104n68; Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 136.

76. “Material for Sewing Classes,” American Freedman, August 1867, 265, emphasis in original.

77. Walker to Howard; Lucy Chase to Miss [Anna] Lowell, January 14, 1869, in Dear Ones at Home, 240.

78. Jacobs, “Life Among the Contrabands”; “Report of Julia A. Wilbur”; Harriet Jacobs, “Colored Refugees in Our Camps,” The Liberator, April 10, 1863. On conditions in camps, see Click, Time Full of Trial; Engs, Freedom's First Generation; Frankel, Freedom's Women; Glymph, Women's Fight.

79. “Extracts of Letters from Teachers,” 8; Yellin, Jacobs Family Papers, 2:509; Engs, Freedom's First Generation, 18–19.

80. Engs, Freedom's First Generation, 17.

81. Click, Time Full of Trial, 126–8; Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 170. On racial sexual violence, see Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York, 2012); Glymph, Women's Fight.

82. Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 132.

83. E. Lyon to O. Brown, May 31, 1866, quoted in Mary J. Farmer, “‘Because They Are Women’: Gender and the Virginia Freedmen's Bureau's ‘War on Dependency’,” in The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations, eds. Paul Alan Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (New York, 1999), 161.

84. “Report of Julia A. Wilbur”; Click, Time Full of Trial, 120–1; “Extracts of Letters from Teachers.” Also see various semi-annual reports of the Superintendent of the Freedmen's Schools regarding attendance.

85. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 400.

86. Searing to Howland, December 31, 1865, quoted in Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 188n25.

87. “Extracts of Letters from Teachers”; Searing to Howland.

88. Priya Kandaswamy, Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (Durham, NC, 2021), 114.

89. On freedwomen and vagrancy, see Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau, 57–58, 66, 88–102; Kandaswamy, 111–4; Mary Farmer-Kaiser, “‘Are They Not in Some Sorts Vagrants?’: Gender and the Efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau to Combat Vagrancy in the Reconstruction South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 88 (2004): 25–49. On prostitution and varieties of sex work in D.C., see Nunley, At the Threshold of Liberty, 88–93, 135–58.

90. In Women's Radical Reconstruction, Carol Faulkner eloquently and succinctly captures the narrow-mindedness of white abolitionists, who were supposedly among some of the strongest advocates for the formerly enslaved: “In the aftermath of slavery, abolitionists found illegitimacy, single motherhood, nakedness, and dirt” (133). On the multiple forms of enslaved and freedpeople's families, see Frankel, Freedom's Women; Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Civil War Delta (Gainesville, FL, 2003); Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 2017).

91. “Extracts of Letters from Teachers,” 4.

92. Click, Time Full of Trial, 120–1.

93. Walker to Howard.

94. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery, 66; Farmer, “‘Because They Are Women’”; Frankel, Freedom's Women; Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, especially Part II; Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau.

95. Quoted in Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction, 138.

96. Ibid., quote on 139, 137–9.

97. Walker may either have tried to defraud the military or set up Johnson for prosecution for theft. Walker directed Johnson to go to the Wisewell Barracks and sign the payroll log stating that she had worked for the month even though Johnson had not. Walker then ordered Johnson to bring the ten dollars in wages she received from the Army to her. Johnson did sign the log as ordered, and the quartermaster gave her ten dollars. Instead of taking the money to Walker as directed, Johnson took it to the D.C. superintendent J.V.W. Vandenburgh. She explained that she had not worked and did not think it proper for her to take the money but she also did not think that she should give the money to Walker. Vandenburgh to Stuart Eldridge, May 2, 1868, Freedmen's Court Records, 1865–1872, Records of the Field Offices for the District of Columbia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1870.

98. Chase to Dear Home-Folks, 37.

99. Of the 211 imprisoned freedmen, 23 had been convicted of stealing clothes, shoes, and fabric. “Freedmen's Bureau Report of an Inspection of the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, Walker County,” in Miscellaneous Records Relating to Murders and Other Criminal Offenses Committed in Texas 1865–1868, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Texas BRFAL, 1865–1869, reprinted at Freedmen's Bureau Online, https://freedmensbureau.com/texas/texasstateprison2.htm.

100. Chase to Dear Home-Folks, 30. On the politics of dress between white and freedwomen, see Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 203–6, 219–22. Here, Glymph writes about dress and other class rituals. Her observation is insightful: “In appropriating the symbols and ceremonies of the ruling class, former slaves mocked them even as they appropriated them in defense of their own humanity” (217).

101. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York, 1997), 315.

102. Helen Bradley Foster, “New Raiments of Self”: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (Oxford, UK, 1997); Katie Knowles, “Fashioning Slavery: Slaves and Clothing in the U.S. South, 1830–1865” (Ph.D. Diss., Rice University, 2014); Glymph, The Women's Fight, 91.

103. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York, 2002), “contradictions” quote on xii and “emancipatory” quote on 6.