Heading: (African American, 1862)
Author: Carter, Zeno Allen
Title: Letter about an escaped slave recaptured by his master and a near-rescue by indignant soldiers
Place Published: Georgetown, [Washington], DC
Publisher:
Date Published: July 19, 1862
Description:

Autograph Letter Signed. 4 pp. Headquarters, Co. E, 86th New York infantry. To his parents and partial incomplete postscript to his sister.

Private Carter, a 19 year old from Elmira, New York, in his tenth month of Army service, on guard duty with his regiment in Washington, DC, writes his parents the latest regimental gossip including the fate of a young "contraband", an escaped slave who had made his way to freedom in the Union lines, only to be legally enslaved once again: "...I suppose you have not forgotten our contraband Ambrose, well his master found out where he was and he came here and got a warrant for him then he got one of our boys ... to use a miserable subterfuge to get him (Ambrose) away from the quarters and that was the last time the poor little fellow saw Co. E quarters and ... wasn't the boys indignant...they went down on high street and came very near taking him out of the hands of the law but on the whole they thought it would not do..."

Had "the boys" known it, the tragic incident was, at least, legally questionable. Months before, Congress had passed one law prohibiting any Union military officer from using troops to return fugitive slaves to their former owners, and by another act, declared that all slaves in the District of Columbia were to be immediately emancipated. Unfortunately, when the slave-owner appeared to reclaim his "property", there was no one at hand to contest his purportedly legal warrant.



As for Private Carter, when he assured his sister that "I very much doubt our going..further South", he was wrong. Weeks after writing this letter, his regiment was ordered to join Union forces in the second battle of Bull Run, where 118 troops of the unit were killed, wounded or missing. Allen survived to fighting at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, but his luck ran out in the battle of Spotsylvania in May 1864. Carter was severely wounded and invalided home. Probably returning with some physical disability, he found employment in a shoe factory, but died in his early forties, just 13 years after war's end.

Ink faded, some wear and soil, tape repairs; fair.