The Missing Persons of Reconstruction [View all]

The Missing Persons of Reconstruction

Enslaved families were regularly separated​. A new history chronicles the tenacious efforts of the emancipated to be reunited​ with their loved ones.

Joshua D. Rothman
February 26, 2025

Corbis/Getty Images
A family of formerly enslaved people outside their house in Fredericksburg, Virginia, circa 1862–1865.


Born enslaved in northern Virginia in the 1820s, Henry Tibbs first lost his mother when their enslaver sold her to notorious Alexandria slave trader Joseph Bruin. Tibbs was just a small child when that happened, but his age was no obstacle to being sold himself to Bruin a short while later. A weeping and distraught Tibbs was reunited briefly with his mother in Bruin’s jail, only to be separated from her for a second time when Bruin loaded him onto a ship bound for New Orleans and sold him to a Mississippi cotton planter named Micajah Pickett.

Tibbs grew up among strangers on Pickett’s plantation, and he labored under the lash for decades until the Civil War came. Fleeing enslavement when the opportunity presented itself, in 1863 Tibbs enlisted as a private in the U.S. Colored Light Artillery. He spent the next two years fighting to keep his freedom, receiving a promotion to corporal and managing to emerge mostly unscathed from terrifying engagements such as the massacre of Black soldiers by Confederate forces at Fort Pillow in Tennessee that was a savage reminder of the war’s stakes.

Not that Henry Tibbs needed the reminder. By the end of the war, he had a wife and two daughters, and he did not want them to suffer slavery’s brutalities and indignities ever again. He knew the pain and the trauma all too well, and he knew that the passage of time never entirely erased them. But Henry Tibbs also knew what it meant to imagine that the agonies of the past might be undone, and that at least some of what slaveholders had stolen might be recovered. In 1879, Tibbs wrote a letter to the editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate looking for information about his mother.

A Black newspaper based in New Orleans, the Advocate was one of many papers that published letters to the editor and advertisements from formerly enslaved people who searched for family and friends after emancipation. Numbering in the thousands and appearing all over the country for decades, notices came from mothers and fathers looking for their children, sons and daughters looking for their parents, spouses and army buddies seeking one another’s whereabouts, and brothers and sisters eager for the slightest bit of intelligence about their siblings.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/189020/missing-families-former-slaves

The book is...
Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
By Judith Giesberg
Simon & Schuster, 336 pp., $29.99


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