Building
the Black Community:
The Family
Reuniting families separated under slavery, and solidifying existing family relations, were essential to the black definition of freedom. The family stood as the main pillar of the postwar black community.
Most slaves
had lived in family units, although they faced the constant threat of
separation from loved ones by sale. Freedpeople made remarkable efforts
to locate loved ones - a Northern reporter in 1865 encountered a former
slave who had walked more than 600 miles searching for his wife and children,
from whom he had been sold away during slavery.
Slave marriages had no legal standing; now tens of thousands of freedpeople
registered their unions before the army, Freedmen's Bureau, and local
governments.
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