Intimate Testimonies: Formerly Enslaved Civil War Widows Pensions

As Black Civil War widows struggled to receive and maintain a pension, they left a narrative trail of their experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and reconstruction. This federally created archive, with the expressed purpose of facilitating the payment of entitlements to widows and dependents of Union soldiers, was a space where the mouths of formerly enslaved women echo their experiences and emotional realities. This presentation draws upon over fifty pension cases from formerly enslaved Civil War widows to reconstruct the intimate contours of Black women’s lives. Unique to these sources, Black women assert and claim their own sexual experiences. Following the 1882 pension law change, which criminalized widows’ sexual intimacy under the moniker of adulterous cohabitation, special examiners conducted investigations to adjudicate cases. The examination necessary to ascertain acts of “immorality and lewdness” created a form of intimate communication between the widow and pension agent. Through his questioning, the special examiner quite literally—that is to say, politically, if not physically— entered the widows' bedrooms, former plantations, neighborhood parlors, or church sanctuaries. Therefore, each file illuminates a set of beguiling characters: the widow, her children, witnesses who were often former neighbors or friends, interlopers, enemies, and former enslavers. I recast the bureaucratic pension bureau process, which on the surface appears as an emotionless regime of paperwork and administrative hurdles, as one in which emotions are as important as facts. Overall, in highlighting the importance of the affective in Black widows' claims, I position the performance of emotion as a strategy that Black women not only perfected but also employed for legal and political purposes.