Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship Between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress

by Brad Asher

Overview

Cecelia was a fifteen-year-old slave when she accompanied her mistress, Frances "Fanny" Thruston Ballard, on a holiday trip to Niagara Falls. During their stay, Cecelia crossed the Niagara River and joined the free black population of Canada. Although documented relationships between freed or escaped slaves and their former owners are rare, the discovery of a cache of letters from the former slave owner to her escaped slave confirms this extraordinary link between two urban families over several decades.

Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress is a fascinating look at race relations in mid-nineteenth-century Louisville, Kentucky, focusing on the experiences of these two families during the seismic social upheaval wrought by the emancipation of four million African Americans. Far more than the story of two families, Cecelia and Fanny delves into the history of Civil War-Sera Louisville. Author Brad Asher details the cultural roles assigned to the two women and provides a unique view of slavery in an urban context, as opposed to the rural plantations more often examined by historians.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813134147
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	10/07/2011
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,022,300
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Brad Asher is the author of Beyond the Reservation: Indians, Settlers, and the Law in Washington Territory, 1853–1889. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Preface ix

1 Eight Minutes from Freedom 1

2 Fanny: Learning to Be a Slave Owner 18

3 Cecelia: Learning about Being a Slave 41

4 Fanny: A Woman's Place 57

5 Cecelia: A Family in Freedom 75

6 Fanny: The Civil War in Louisville 101

7 Cecelia: A New Life in Rochester 122

8 Fanny: Postwar Trials 142

9 Cecelia: Back in Louisville 163

Conclusion: The Bonds of Slavery 183

Acknowledgments 189

Notes 191

Bibliography 213

Index 223

Editorial Reviews

Reading between the lines and around the margins of this “lacunae-laden story,” Asher delivers a credible account of how two fairly ordinary women lived their roles as slave and mistress. When Fanny was five, her father purchased the infant Cecelia and her mother for ; when Cecelia was nine, he gave her to Fanny as a “coming-of-age” gift. Six years later, in 1846, Cecelia escaped to Canada. While Fanny remained moored in Louisville, Ky., Cecelia moved to Rochester in 1860 and back to Louisville in 1865. Although “nothing in the archives substantiates the nature of the later relationship between ,” there is evidence they met again. Careful with “speculation,” though tantalized by it, Asher serves his history suitably straight, relevant, and readable. In recreating their lives from the slight specific documentation available, he sets an informing context, for example, how the slave hiring-out system worked, how courtship was conducted, what life was like in the Canadian black settlements, how the Civil War affected Louisville. He demonstrates that the two women were certainly “bound together by the most intimate of oppressions, mistress and maid”; he makes a less persuasive case that they had, as the title states, “a remarkable friendship.” Nevertheless, Fanny remembered Cecelia in her will with and a black cashmere shawl, and Cecelia saved five letters from Fanny that led to this remarkable recreation of two lives. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Cecelia and Fanny is an excellent story, but it is also an outstanding case study on uncovering every possible source of information in order to discover the life stories of Fanny and Cecelia through the decades of the nineteenth century.

Kentucky Ancestors

[...] [T]his work does a wonderful job of not only presenting portraits of these two women but also documenting many historical facts about the contexts in which they lived, such as information about the lives of free blacks in Canada, courtship practices of the time, family lives of slaves, and how the Civil War affected many states and cities. This book is recommended for any library with African American or Southern history collections, and it will be an informative and wonderful read for anyone interested in Southern history.

Georgia Library Quarterly

"Among the countless tragic tales of slavery Brad Asher documents one of freedom and hope. When Cecelia ran away from her mistress Fanny for freedom in Canada it didn't end their relationship. Bound together by the emotional and physical bonds formed in their youth they maintained a relationship for the next fifty years. Cecelia and Fanny tells the fascinating story of their lives and times."— James J. Holmberg, The Filson Historical Society

From the Publisher

Historian Asher (Beyond the Reservation: Indians, Settlers, and the Law in Washington Territory, 1853–1889) tells a remarkable story here that focuses on the experiences of two women, Fanny Thurston Ballard, a privileged daughter of a Louisville, KY, merchant, and her childhood personal slave, Cecelia. When the opportunity for freedom came on a visit to Niagara Falls with her mistress, Cecelia escaped to Canada. Asher interweaves and fills in the gaps in the lives of Cecelia and Fanny, through archival sources and by examining the history of slavery in Kentucky and the life of women in 19th-century America. He traces the progression of each woman's life, with evidence of Fanny's easier to find; she followed a familiar and conventional pattern, but for Cecelia, a life of freedom was not a life of ease. VERDICT While many books have been written about slavery, Asher shines a light on it as a "web of personal connections that extended beyond a single generation" and shows different aspects of the master-slave relationship. Recommended for both academic and armchair historians. [See "Booked Solid," LJ 7/11, p. 31.]—Nancy Richey, Western Kentucky Univ. Lib., Bowling Green

Library Journal