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."
