Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America

It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial relationships were notorious at the neighborhood level, but we have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships, especially from freedwomen’s and children’s points of view. Likewise, the frequency with which southern white men freed enslaved women and their children is now generally known to those familiar with American history, but less is known about the financial and emotional investments in them made by these men. Sharony Green presents three case studies with evidence from surviving letters that indicate a kind of love existing between the ex-slave mistress and her former master. She follows the journey of these women and children from the south to Cincinnati, which had the largest per capita population of mixed race people outside the South during the antebellum period.