Sometime in July 1867, Henrietta Emory wrote to a clerk in the Claim Division of the Maryland Freedmen’s Bureau describing the challenges she had faced in trying to get money due to her as a soldier’s widow. “I have had so much trouble & gone so in debt to get my poor husband’s bounty, that I was able to do no more,” she lamented. With a young child to support, Henrietta certainly needed the money, which would have amounted to several hundred dollars the U.S. government owed to her deceased husband. She also had good reason to be weary of the process of claiming it, however. Having failed in an earlier bid to claim the benefits that was stymied by a corrupt Freedmen’s Bureau agent, J.P. Creager, Henrietta knew better than anyone that winning access to her rights as a war widow was an expensive endeavor. Her success, she had learned, also relied on the design and operation of a federal bureaucracy that consistently treated Black Southerners—and especially Black women—with suspicion. Nonetheless, she asserted, her claim was sound. “I can prove by the best authority, that I was lawfully married to James Emory,” she insisted. “I was married to him by a Methodist preacher, colored, & my husband paid him for marrying us, he was a regular preacher in the conference, & it was the way all the people were married.” Legally married, she insisted, the hundreds of dollars the government had yet to pay her husband ought to be hers.
I encountered Henrietta’s case in my role as an editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) while gathering materials for a forthcoming digital “microedition” on the experiences of Black Marylanders during the Civil War. As I sifted through Henrietta’s numerous petitions to representatives of the Claim Division, I was struck by the forceful manner in which she demanded recognition of her rights as a war widow and by her repeated assertions that the process of securing those rights was expensive and unjust. She repeatedly described herself as “a poor woman” who “can not get any thing done with out paying for it and… [was] not able to stand to it.”