Black men and women in South Carolinian port cities were enslaved at the most profitable and politically powerful rice plantations, yet brilliantly managed to build somewhat independent lives. Ms. Rose Goethe represented herself as a midwife and farmer enslaved at Mr. Washington Wiley and Eliza Goethe’s rice plantation. Despite her enslavement, Rose, like many other enslaved people in Beaufort, managed to carve out time for themselves. Rose grew corn and peas and raised hogs on a family farm she ran with her husband and daughter. Rose prepared the soil, breaking up rocks to allow for a smoother, more hospitable surface. Rose tilled one row at a time and taught her daughter, Harriet, the skills of farming and the patience it requires. Sixty days after sowing the initial seeds, Rose and Harriet noticed the first green tendrils of corn emerge from the warm, black dirt. As the crop grew, she moved her hands along the cob and invited her daughter to feel the textured kernels beginning to take form. When the corn and pea plants showed signs of distress, Harriet and her parents met the crops’ earthly needs with cooling water and shade. Finally, after a blistering summer of coastal sun, the sweet corn and peas reached maturation in September, just as the air began to cool. Five months later, before her family consumed their total harvest, just as Rose was about to return to the soil for another season, she watched as men dressed in Union blue forcibly broke into her home and carried away all her bushels and belongings.
Rose witnessed General Sherman’s Union troops:
Take out my bacon, smoked beef, fifteen bushels of corn, forty towels, one bushel of peas, three gallons of syrup, four [illegible] of sugar, one and a half [illegible] rice, and one pack of lard. They also took my clothes, blankets, and bedding pots, and pans, and other household articles. They cleaned me out entirely.
On February 2, 1865, Rose Goethe experienced a burglary and political liberation in the same moment, when Union troops arrived in Beaufort. Unlike Charleston, which burnt to the ground, the port city of Beaufort was spared complete destruction. Instead, Union troops seized plantation operations and residences—even enslaved people’s private quarters. In 1871, in one of the first acts of Reconstruction, the United States government established the Southern Claims Commission to address petitions for compensation of provisions, livestock, or other supplies taken by the Union troops during the Civil War. Denied political belonging, Black Southerners, like Rose Goethe, created connections with the land, animals, homes, farms, clothing, and equipment they rightfully claimed as their own. Enslaved men and women assigned meaning to their fragile position in a nation that barred them from citizenship but allowed for a modicum of material ownership. Adam Ruth, one of Rose’s neighbors, testified to the commission that he “saw them [General Sherman’s troops] take from Rose Goethe all she had.” The taking of property and belongings created by people deprived of bodily autonomy in the civic sense is doubly painful in a nation like the United States, where citizenship requires and expects capital ownership.