11/10/2025
Mary Armstrong was born into slavery on June 2, 1847. As her mother was owned by William and Pauline (Polly) Cleveland, Mary was also considered their property. Her father, owned by a slave trader from another plantation, was never a part of her life. In 1937, at the age of ninety-one, Mary shared her recollections of being enslaved. Among those memories was a tragic incident involving her nine-month-old baby sister. According to Mary, the child had been crying, and Polly Cleveland, irritated by the noise, acted cruelly:
“She come and took the diaper offen my little sister and whipped till the blood jes’ ran —
jes’ ’cause she cry like all babies do, and it kilt my sister.” {1}
When Mary turned ten, she was handed over to Olivia, Polly’s daughter. Her freedom came in 1863, and by 1871, she was at last reunited with her mother.
Although only five years old, Sallie Elizabeth Adams was born into bo***ge and found herself on the auction block. The scene took place in the mid-1840s at the Smyth County Courthouse in Marion, Virginia. Thomas Thurman, seeking a young child to tend to his ailing wife, bought her. As Sallie walked away with her new owner, she glanced back at her mother one last time — a farewell she never forgot. As she grew older, she discovered solace in a tall white-oak tree, which she embraced as though it were her mother and lost family. That tree became the only family she had left, absorbing all the tears she shed.
The fear of forced separation haunted every enslaved mother. One story tells of a mother’s desperate act to escape such a fate:
“In Marion County, north of St. Louis, a slave trader bought three small children from an owner, but the children’s mother killed them all and herself rather than let them be taken away.” {3}
This woman wasn’t the only mother to take a devastating step in an effort to “protect” her child from the horrors of slavery. The most well-known case is that of Margaret “Peggy” Garner, born into slavery on June 4, 1834, at the Maplewood Plantation in Boone County, Kentucky. Enslaved from birth, Peggy endured the abuse of her master, A.K. (Edward) Gaines, who is believed to have fathered two of her four children through r**e. In 1856, Peggy, her husband, her four children, and her in-laws made a desperate attempt to escape to freedom. Their freedom was fleeting — federal marshals soon caught up with them. In a panic, Peggy ran into a back room with her children and, knowing the life they faced if returned to slavery, took a knife and killed her two-year-old daughter. Her remaining children survived but bore injuries. Her act was a desperate cry from a mother who fully understood the brutality her children would endure and who chose a horrifying end over a return to bo***ge.
Ellaine Write was just four years old when her mother was sold away. Decades later, she still vividly remembered that heartbreaking moment:
“‘Ellaine, honey mama’s gwan way off and ain’t never goin to see her baby agin.’ An I can see myself holdin onto my mama and both of us crying – and then, she was gone and I never seed her since.”
Ellaine finished her memory with a hope that lingered even into old age: “I hopes I goin to see my good mama some day, I do.” {5}
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), born free in Baltimore to African-American parents, gained fame as a poet. In 1854, she published her poem The Slave Mother, which captured the agony and heartbreak so many enslaved women endured:
“Heard you that shriek? It rose
So wildly on the air,
It seem’d as if a burden’d heart
Was breaking in despair.
Saw you those hands so sadly clasped—
The bowed and feeble head—
The shuddering of that fragile form—
That look of grief and dread?
Saw you the sad, imploring eye?
Its every glance was pain,
As if a storm of agony
Were sweeping through the brain.
She is a mother pale with fear,
Her boy clings to her side,
And in her kyrtle vainly tries
His trembling form to hide.
He is not hers, although she bore
For him a mother’s pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
Is coursing through his veins!
He is not hers, for cruel hands
May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
That binds her breaking heart.
His love has been a joyous light
That o’er her pathway smiled,
A fountain gushing ever new,
Amid life’s desert wild.
His lightest word has been a tone
Of music round her heart,
Their lives a streamlet blent in one—
Oh, Father! must they part?
They tear him from her circling arms,
Her last and fond embrace.
Oh! never more may her sad eyes
Gaze on his mournful face.
No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks
Disturb the listening air:
She is a mother, and her heart
Is breaking in despair.”
