Black Women in War and Freedom is the first digital humanities project to collect, interpret, and visualize digitized texts of records and documents on Black women during the Civil War and Reconstruction. This project is being led by BSU's own: Dr. Karen Cook Bell (kcookbell@bowiestate.edu).
This project merges traditional research methods—archival research, use of library databases—with digital research methods—data gathering, management, and interpretation—to achieve both a meta-analysis of Black women and by fostering a deeper and wider appreciation of their experiences. Specifically, we use digital tools to interpret the data amassed from traditional sources and develop new qualitative and quantitative data to comprehend gender, race, freedom, and citizenship.
Black Women in War and Freedom illuminates freedom through a visualization of the process of emancipation in the slave holding South and border regions of the U.S. It shows Black women and children as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy, as women who protested gender violence, and in many cases as widows who relied on kinship and community networks to navigate freedom.
The Department of Veterans Affairs Records, the Freedmen’s Bureau Records, the Southern Claims Commission Records, and local and state documents comprise the records of the Black Women in War and Freedom Project. These records provide close-up views of Black women’s wartime experiences and movement. Pension records from the Department of Veterans Affairs provide details of Black women’s martial and family histories. Like service records and pension records, Freedmen’s Bureau Records offer both broad and close-up views of Black women’s wartime movement and identifying information not available in any other record set. Freedmen’s Bureau Records contain names and personal information, including former residence and former enslaver or mistress of enslaved women. These records are essential to viewing former slaves within actual wartime contexts and are of value to the descendants of those recorded in them. Records of the Southern Claims Commission has detailed information on Black women since African Americans were among some claimants and, more often, served as witnesses. Unlike many of the other agency records in the National Archives, those of the Southern Claims Commission are scattered among four different record groups. The case files themselves are found in three different record groups, depending on the final decision of the commission.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is the Federal agency that had final jurisdiction over military pensions. Pension application files are a very rich source for family history and biographical research. The National Archives in Washington, DC holds pension application files and records of pension payments for veterans, their widows, and other heirs based on service in the armed forces of the United States between 1775 and 1916. One of the most notable of these is the approved pension file for Harriet Tubman Davis, widow of the late Nelson Davis of the US Colored Troops (although the Union Army pensions on a whole have not yet been digitized, Harriet Tubman’s pension has been digitized and made available in NARA’s online catalog). However, there are also a few rare instances of Black women getting pensions for their own service, such as Ann Bradford Stokes who served as a Union nurse on the naval vessel USS Red Rover.
Expanding digital archives to include the archives of Black women can expand our understanding of Black women during slavery and freedom, underscoring the significance of Black feminist praxis in the digital
