LEWISTON – Back in 1912, a 74-year-old Virginia native who had long lived in Lewiston told a Lewiston Evening Journal reporter about his memories as a free Black child growing up in a society where slavery thrived.

William L. Davis said he “witnessed many heart-rending scenes when slaves were sold,” often during the Christmas season.

“A child would be sent on an errand to market and when it returned, a buyer might be there to take it away from its parents,” Davis said. “I have seen the mothers beg on their knees to have their children kept, but their tears did no good.”

Davis described life in Virginia’s Loudon County before the Civil War and what it was like during the war as well, when he worked for several years for the Union Army as it battled the forces of the enslavers’ rebellion.

He didn’t mention any Juneteenth celebrations at the close of the fighting, but Davis told the newspaper that Dr. Alonzo Garcelon, a prominent figure in Lewiston assigned as an army surgeon, offered to bring a “whole party” of Black Virginians with him to Maine after the war in 1866.

“That was how I became a citizen of Lewiston,” Davis said. He worked for years for Garcelon, a future governor, he said, and another of the men got a job with William Frye, a U.S. senator who lived in the city.

The Journal said that by 1912, when it interviewed him, Davis had “established a reputation for industry and honesty among our people.”

Though he had worked for the Union Army, the paper said, “the government with its usual red tape formality failed to pay him for his services in the army and this money he has never been able to get” so he “follows his calling of washing windows and doing other odd jobs.”

“The old gentleman is a good talker and nothing pleases him better than to find a listener as he recalls the old days in Dixie,” the paper wrote.

It called Davis “about the last link that connects us with old slavery days.”

DAVIS’ BOYHOOD IN OLD VIRGINIA

Davis said he wasn’t certain whether he was considered a slave at the time of his birth in about 1838.

What he did know is that his grandfather, a free Black man, managed to purchase the freedom of several relatives, including perhaps Davis as a baby.

All around him, though, were enslaved Black people and white masters who lived a very different life.

Davis said he wasn’t allowed to go to school and was hired out to work starting at the age of 8.

He lived in Hillsboro, a town not far from Harper’s Ferry, scene of the famed, failed raid by John Brown that aimed to spark an uprising that would end slavery. Instead, it helped spur a war that ended slavery.

As a boy before the war, Davis said that while working he often saw a man he knew as Mr. Bowers whose father “was a boss weaver” at a woolen mill in Lewiston, long before Davis would become a resident. Bowers himself eventually became the agent for the Columbia Mill in Lewiston.

“The work of the slaves was very hard,” Davis recalled. “From sun to sun was the rule, and during busy seasons they were obliged to work far into the night.”

“There was no let-up even in winter, for then there was corn to shell, wood to cut, and a hundred other things to do,” he said. Men and women worked side by side.

“The slaves were fed on the coarsest food, about as we feed our hogs here,” Davis said. “Corn bread and middlings with a little molasses was the usual fare.”

When they weren’t working, Davis said, “the amusements of the slaves were very simple. After the work was done, a party would meet in some cabin and have music. Someone would fiddle and the others would dance, sing or pat the juba.”

“Now and then there would be a religious meeting, although some of the slave owners would not allow these to be held,” Davis said.

He said his uncle managed to purchase his own liberty with money he earned from making baskets and doing odd jobs.

“It was the custom in those days for slaves to buy their own freedom whenever they could get the money to do so, although the idea was not encouraged to any extent among the slave owners,” Davis said.

Davis said slavers differed widely in how they treated enslaved people.

“Some of the owners used their slaves the same as cattle, while others raised them well,” he said.

In either case, Davis said, “they were all anxious to raise as many slave children as possible, as some of them were nearly white. The slave owners would sell their own children.”

“I had four aunts who were slaves and married slaves,” Davis recalled, “but later were separated from their families.”

“That was the great curse of slavery. Families were liable to be broken up at anytime and scattered in all directions,” Davis said.

He said his aunts “finally got free,” but didn’t mention how. One uncle, though, “remained a slave until the Emancipation Proclamation freed him. This man, Uncle Thomas, died only last year,” Davis said in the 1912 interview. “He raised six slave children, but these finally got free.”

He said one of his uncles was “set free by his mistress” on the provision that “he would go to Liberia, in Africa,” where she thought he would be safer than in America.

Davis said the freed uncle, John Starts, went to Liberia, where he raised a family — something Davis learned from a Liberian bishop who visited America during the 1893 Chicago world’s fair.

DURING THE CIVIL WAR

When war broke out, Davis wound up driving a mule team.

“My first experience with the war was at the battle of Bull Run,” Davis said, the first major confrontation between Northern and Southern armies, just south of Washington, D.C.

“It was where the bullets fell thick and fast,” Davis said, and when the battle finally ceased, he went in search of water but could only get a single canteen full.

He said he saw a man on the way back groaning on the ground, begging for water.

“When I got to him, I saw that his leg had been torn off on one side,” Davis said, so he gave the wounded man all the water.

After the battle, which Southern forces under the command of Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard won, Davis continued to lead a team of horses, probably hauling supplies to the Confederate troops.

Davis didn’t explain exactly how, but in March 1862, he managed to slip through the lines “with a lot more colored men” and start working instead for the Union Army, first as a cook and then as a mule driver.

He said he worked as a nurse for the Freedman’s Bureau helping wounded soldiers recovering at the Arlington, Virginia, estate of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Dixie army. Lee’s former home still stands in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery, created to bury the Union dead.

Once, Davis said, Southern raiders nearly caught him but he eluded them.

In general, he said, “I shared the fate of the army until 1865, when the war was over.”

MOVING TO MAINE

After the guns quieted, Davis worked for a U.S. attorney in Washington and as a carriage driver in Baltimore.

Then, in 1866, he got a note from an officer letting him know that Garcelon, a surgeon about to return home Maine, “wanted two men and their wives to go north with him.”

“I was offered one of the places and at once accepted,” Davis said.

In a 1906 interview, Davis said he had tears in his eyes as he told Garcelon, who came to speak with him at the Freedmen’s Bureau, that he and his wife would go to Maine with him.

Davis said in the story six years later that Garcelon, a founder of the Lewiston Falls Journal in 1847, added more men to the group before they departed the nation’s capital. Ultimately, there were 10 people in the party, including two women and a child.

“Dr. Garcelon said he would take the whole party to Lewiston, and he kept his word,” Davis said.

Davis worked a number of jobs in Lewiston, including a stint as a school janitor.

Davis was a big fan of Jack Johnson, a  champion Black boxer, and in 1910 he got a prime seat at the Empire Theater to watch Johnson on stage in Lewiston. The Journal said many people congratulated Davis on the success of “his colored compatriot.”

Almost half-a-century later, Davis said that “the people of Lewiston all used us well and we all settled down in our new home and here we have since lived,” he said. “Some of the people made parties for us and showed us great kindness.”

“Here I lived and here in Lewiston, I shall die,” Davis said.

Two years later, on Aug. 15, 1914, Davis died at his home at 149 Middle St., Lewiston.

The Journal called him “the oldest colored man in Lewiston” and mentioned that he was survived by a daughter and five grandchildren.

Journal columnist Arthur G. Staples mentioned him at least a couple of times in later years in his weekly “Just Talks On Common Themes,” once for doubting that the Earth is a globe and once for chasing a cat. That piece also noted that Davis was well known for his friendliness.

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Politics and public safety clash as sheriff and mayor feud

Next »

Lewiston man hospitalized after Friday hit-and-run