New York Times article- Ms. Yarrow and the Road to Antietam

    On Sept. 11, 2012, the New York Times Disunion series online carried my article about what Polly Yarrow and the Turners were doing as the Union and Confederate armies fought around Yarrowsburg on the way to the Battle of Antietam.  The article may be found here.

    Several people commented on the article, asking more or less, how I could know these things.  In response, I wrote:

    A few comments criticize this article, apparently because it isn't based on first-person accounts. The African Americans who are the subjects were illiterate and couldn't leave such accounts. They were illiterate because blacks were not allowed in schools in Maryland before the end of the Civil War and even teaching them privately to read was discouraged. This underscores the larger point of this article which is about the relationship between the Battle of Antietam, freedom, and education. If there is to be a narrative at all of what happened to this family, it has to be reconstructed from other evidence. This isn't unusual though. History is nothing more that the reconstruction of events from the available evidence. Sometimes there are no witnesses; sometimes they lie. In this article, I quote from General McLaws's after-action report of his conduct, saying that when told of Union troops to the north and east of Harpers Ferry, he thought it was "questionable." Was that true, or was the general trying to excuse his failure to be better prepared?
I would like to answer readers who want to know what the evidence is, but those answers go well beyond the space allowed here.

With respect to the movements of Polly Yarrow and her family, they had to be in Yarrowsburg on Sept. 11, 1862.  Simon Turner's father-in-law had purchased that family's freedom from a neighboring farmer in 1860 and in Oct. 1861 purchased a 77-acre piece of land near Polly.  The 1860 census counted 30 free black families in Pleasant Valley, including a third black family named Jones in the Yarrowsburg area.

Blacks couldn't move freely then.  If they traveled beyond where they were known, they would be stopped by whites and asked what they were doing and whether they were runaways.  Allen Sparrow, a white resident of Middletown, MD at this time talked about seeing 20 to 40 Negroes "hand cuft together one on each side of a long chain, the Georgemen as they cald them then with his whip driving them....They took them to Georgia and sold them to work on Cotton Farms.  At that time there was a very few people but what thought it was all right and I thought if a negro runaway I was duty bound to catch him as if a horse or anything else ran away."  Turner's father-in-law had registered his family's freedom papers, called manumissions, with the county recorder of deeds, and so if they were challenged, they had the papers to prove their status as free.  Of course, the Georgia-men were not above kidnapping even free blacks and taking them to Georgia if it made a buck.  Neither Turner nor Polly Yarrow had papers, so they couldn't travel very far.  Thus, when McLaws came, the family was pinned between the Confederates attacking from the valley and the Union defenders on Elk Ridge behind their farms.  In researching the book, a woman on a neighboring farm showed me several display boxes of musket balls, minnie balls, and even a U.S. belt buckle that treasure hunters dug up on her land, evidence of battle and this was less than half a mile from Yarrow's house.  As I say in the book, it isn't clear these came from the fighting in 1862 since the Confederates tried the same maneuver in 1864.  Still, McLaws's report on the action describes the road by Yarrow's house and says his men attacked up Solomon's Gap and met Union resistance.  I've hiked it.  It's a steep but short climb.  The houses where these families lived would have been in range of rifle fire from the defenders.

Kathleen Ernst wrote a book about what the civilians around Sharpsburg did as the big opposing armies gathered there.  Its title was taken from a quote by a young white girl who said she was, Too Afraid to Cry.  Everyone with any sense fled. The roads out of Sharpsburg were clogged with families trying to get out before the fighting started.  A few stayed and hid in basements.  An older woman who insisted on staying, despite being urged by soldiers to leave, was killed when shells hit her house.  Therefore, given the situation that Yarrow and the family found themselves in and given their houses didn't have basements, logic says they fled although both this article and the book note they may not have.  Crampton's farm was really the only safe place for them.  He still owned Simon Turner; other Turners lived there as slaves; and Crampton had provided protection to blacks in the valley in the past.  The Jones family, which was the third black family near Yarrowsburg, does not show up in the 1870 census.  So they may have died (perhaps in the fighting), fled never to return, or moved away for some other reason.

With respect to the surrender of Union forces at Harpers Ferry, the size of the garrison was put in round figures at 10,000.  It was in fact somewhat larger than that and larger than the U.S. Army surrender on Corregidor.  Several surrenders by Confederate forces were larger, but those were not surrenders by the United States Army.

With respect to Polly Yarrow being questioned by authorities, Maryland’s purpose in having her register as a free black after the Nat Turner Rebellion was to create in effect a “subversives list.”  Thus, when John Brown tried the same thing, Polly’s name was on the list of those who should be questioned.  In addition, the raid had been staged from a farm in Maryland just over Solomon's Gap from her house.  Several of the raiders had remained there rather than go to Harpers Ferry.  Others escaped Harpers Ferry and passed by.  They all fled along Elk Ridge with some even going into Pleasant Valley.  After J.E.B. Stuart helped capture Brown at the fire house in Harpers Ferry, he immediately led his men to the Maryland farm, searched it, and found weapons and papers.  Authorities in Maryland and Pennsylvania later conducted their own investigations and arrests. Some of the raiders who fled reported that there were search parties out in Maryland for days.  The Mason Commission, which was a congressional investigation, said that residents of Pleasant Valley had been questioned.
And here is an 1877 map of Pleasant Valley with Yarrowsburg marked in red.  Just above that, the mapmaker had marked the house of "Mrs. Yarrow."