I Can't Wait to Call You My Wife

October 31, 2022
Historian Roberts (Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863) spotlights how free and enslaved African Americans “cultivated family amidst a precarious existence” in this illuminating collection of letters. Divided chronologically into the antebellum, Civil War, and postwar periods, each of the book’s three sections opens with an essay offering crucial historical context and background information on the letter writers. A few of the correspondents, including married couple Adam and Emily Plummer, appear in multiple sections, providing a sense of narrative continuity. Enslaved on nearby plantations in Maryland, Adam and Emily saw each other on weekends and managed to keep their family together until 1851, when Emily and three of their children were sold at auction. The collection’s love letters reflect “the resilience of the human spirit in the face of some of the most brutal ways humans can abuse one another,” Roberts writes, while other missives seek to keep tabs on separated family members or document harsh treatment by plantation owners. After the war, correspondents discussed their struggles to find employment and education and their quest for racial equality. Expertly curated and contextualized, these letters simmer with palpable longing and fierce determination. Readers will be riveted. Illus.

January 1, 2023
Roberts, a professor of History and Africana Studies at Scripps College, brings together private letters written by African Americans during the Civil War era. Whether the authors were enslaved or free, literate or dependent upon a scribe, the common element in their correspondence was family. Organized in three parts representing the decades immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, the letters reflect the private lives, experience, and values of African Americans. Each part is preceded by an essay that provides political and social context as well as background on the lives of the writers; descriptions of individual letters and writers provide additional context. Roberts also follows the stories of several families through correspondence from parents and children separated among multiple slave-owning households, wartime letters between Black soldiers and their families, and postwar attempts at family reunification. As Roberts notes, "former slaves defined Reconstruction as reconstructing their families"; their postwar letters reflect their searches for lost family members and efforts to establish their own family names. An accessible and illuminating glimpse into the private lives of African Americans during this tumultuous time in American history.

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