1861 ENSLAVED CHILD TEACHER. Rare Volume Owned by Teacher of Enslaved Children.

A wonderfully provenanced volume. This 1861 imprint is handsomely inscribed on the ffep, "To Miss Rebecca Craighead. From Her Friend, XXXX Jones, Chaplain, 176th OVI. Nashville. June 10th, 1865."

Rebecca Craighead is a fascinating figure from the Civil War era. Born in 1834, she had been a teacher before the Civil War. Seemingly right at the War's onset, she joined the Christian Commission and served the Western Sanitary Commisssion as a nurse for injured soldiers in both St. Louis and, later, in Nashville. 

At some point she also began serving as a missionary with the American Missionary Association, working with freedman in Atlanta. All accounts of her are that she was independent, strongly principled, vocal and headstrong. She corresponded regularly with her home paper in Akron, feeding the Ohio public stories of the valor and sacrificial suffering. etc.,

This all led to a bit of trouble when she became the matron of the home for freed children in Atlanta at the close of the War. Believing it better for the children to be scurried off to the North than re-united with their parents in the South, and potentially re-enslaved or suffering under Jim Crow, etc., she enthusiastically began "placing" the freedchildren, largely girls, in white homes across Ohio. This was apparently all without AMA knowlege. She says, “My idea is that they [their families] have no further claim upon them, and that we have a right to find homes for such, just as much as though they had no relatives.”

Her program was aggressive. By one count, she shipped off as many as eighty-five children at one time. She was eventually censured by her superiors at the AMA and seems to have been removed from her post. 

I have not been able to locate the Chaplain. Interesting timing, as Nashville was one of the few places hostilities continued even after the formal end of the War in April of 1865. 

Anonymous. Pictures from the History of the Swiss. By the Author of "Little Stories for Little People," and Other Tales. Boston. Published by Brown and Taggard. 1861. 262pp.

A good copy in cloth; rubbed through at the extremities and biding a bit cocked. Text is generally solid, with a few gatherings forward in the text block and some light foxing.