When In Gettysburg
If you find yourself in Gettysburg, it’s easy to get caught up in the grand stories of clashing armies, of Pickett’s Charge or Little Round Top, in the valor and the bravery of the men who fought and died there. However, if you look closely in the quieter corners, you can find poignant reminds of the true cause of the Civil War. That cause was slavery, plain and simple, the evil need of one group of men to build their society on the backs and the labors of others.
On Cemetery Ridge, the location of the main Union defensive line, just a few hundred yards north of the Angle, the so-called High-Water Mark of the Confederacy, is the Abraham Brian Farm. If you find yourself in Gettysburg, you should stop there and spend a few moments reflecting on the family that lived there and how the Civil War had been at their doorstep for more than a decade before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.
Abraham Brian was a free black man who, in 1857, bought a small farm just south of Gettysburg, the bustling small town county seat of Adams County, Pennsylvania. Despite living in a free state, Abraham worked his land knowing that just 10 miles to the south was the Mason-Dixon line and slavery. In the 1840s and 1850s, Northern free blacks were routinely kidnapped, dragged south and sold into slavery. Abraham Brian didn’t need to look any further than his own family to be reminded every day of that sobering reality.
Abraham’s wife, Catherine “Kitty” Payne, mother of two of his children, had passed just a few years before and she was his constant reminder. Kitty stands as a vivid illustration for all of us that in the mid-1800s, free didn’t always mean free.
Kitty Payne had been born a slave in 1816, property of the Maddox family of Huntly, Virginia. After Samuel Maddox died in 1837, his widow Mary continued to live for a few years in Virginia before moving to Adams County in 1843. When Mary moved north, she brought Kitty and her four children with her. Once settled in Pennsylvania, Mary freed them. Records are scant on where Kitty lived or what she did during the next two years but presumably she lived a quiet life and raised her family. That quiet life, however, wouldn’t last long. Mary Maddox’s nephew, feeling like he had been unfairly stripped of his inheritance, sent bounty hunters north and on July 24, 1845, they kidnapped Kitty and her children, returning them to Virginia and slavery.
Gettysburg was stunned and the kidnapping made local headlines. Quaker abolitionists took up Kitty's cause and gathered enough money to assist Kitty in her legal fight to remain free. Kitty ended up being one of the very few victims of southern kidnappers to be fortunate enough to win back her freedom, being declared free in 1846. Kitty and three of her children (one had died during her captivity) returned to Gettysburg and she eventually married Abraham Brian, having two children with him during their short time together before she passed away in 1851.
When the Army of Northern Virginia invaded the North in 1863, free blacks living in Pennsylvania knew full well the fate that would befall them if the Southern Army caught them. Some 1,000 free blacks would eventually be rounded up and sent south as part of Lee’s plunder of the state. Brian and his family fled Gettysburg when they heard of Lee’s invasion, returning after the battle to find their home wrecked and over a hundred soldiers buried on their property. The farm was never the same. Brian sold it in 1868, taking a job in Gettysburg and living there until his death in 1879. Abraham and Kitty are both buried in the Lincoln Cemetery in Gettysburg.
For more information about the Brian farm, see this page on the Stone Sentinels website.
No comments:
Post a Comment