美国国家公共电台 NPR Family Heirloom, National Treasure: Rare Photos Show Black Civil War Soldiers

Family Heirloom, National Treasure: Rare Photos Show Black Civil War Soldiers 

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If you visit the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History and Culture opening this week in Washington, you might just walk by a photo album on display and not notice it. It's that small. But we bet you'll stop at the Prickitt Civil War album once you hear the story behind it from NPR's Cheryl Corley.

CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE 2: Each of the photos in Captain William A. Prickitt's album, all of several black Civil War soldiers under his command, could fit in a locket. The album itself, just 2 inches tall, could be easily misplaced. His great granddaughter, Aneita Atwood Gates, says she heard the stories about the captain but growing up rarely saw the album. And she kept it tucked away in a box on a laundry room shelf. So Gates says she and other family members were stunned 3 when they found out the significance of their miniature family heirloom.

ANEITA ATWOOD GATES: Because we just assumed that there were other of these albums out there. Up to then, it was just this wonderful little treasure we had. But then it was like, oh, my gosh, I've got a responsibility, you know, a major responsibility.

CORLEY: Gates says there was good reason why her great grandfather wanted the photos of the black soldiers in his company. At one point during the war, Captain Prickitt became extremely ill, and some of the soldiers took care of him.

GATES: The men saved my great-grandfather's life. He got dysentery which went through the camps. The camps were very unsanitary.

CORLEY: By most estimates, about 200,000 black soldiers served in the Union army. The commanders of the U.S. Colored Troops, or USCT, were white. Gates says her family was torn at first about donating the Prickitt album to the Smithsonian. They feared it would be lost in a museum so large, and another museum closer to home wanted it, too. And the family finally realized it was precious to the captain who carried it in his pocket.

GATES: I know all the men had to think a lot about him and he of them, or he wouldn't have had this little album of them with all their pictures. And he wouldn't have carefully written their names in it. And that's what makes it so special.

CORLEY: There are 18 photos in the album, both paper prints and tintypes - tiny headshots of 17 soldiers who served in company G. One of the soldiers pictured twice carries a gun in one photo, not in the other. All are in uniform. Some wear hats with the insignia of a bugle 4, the designation for infantry 5.

The names for all but one are written on the mat surrounding each photo, presumably by Captain Prickitt. Smithsonian curator Michele Gates Moresi says to have photos where black civil war soldiers are identified was intriguing 6.

MICHELE GATES MORESI: That's pretty rare actually, so - and to have, you know, a group from the same regiment 7 with that information. You know, there are images of African-American soldiers with their troops that are, you know, available. Some of them are panoramic 8. We have a couple in our collection. But you don't always know who's who.

CORLEY: It was a friend of the Gates family who first contacted the Smithsonian. Shayne Davidson is an artist an amateur genealogist 9 who's drawn 10 portraits of the soldiers and written a book about them. First she began researching the Gates family tree and then dug up information about the black soldiers using military records and census 11 information.

SHAYNE DAVIDSON: Some were born free. Some were slaves. Some were escaped slaves, you know, who got away and then enlisted 12 in the USCT. And then there were two men who were enlisted by their slave holder 13.

CORLEY: Some slave slaveholders could get as much as $300 for enlisting 14 men, and the slaves won their freedom. Not only did Davidson find out about the background of the soldiers. She actually found some of their descendants.

VANESSA TALL BRYANT: My name is Vanessa Tall Bryant. James Tall was my grandfather.

CORLEY: Yes, James Tall, the Civil War soldier pictured in the album twice, was not her great-grandfather but her grandfather. Bryant, who is in her early 50s, says Tall lived a long life, married three times and had 16 children, fathering some like her dad at an elderly age. When he enlisted during the Civil War, James Tall was very young.

BRYANT: He was a slave near Murfreesboro, Tenn., and as a teenager, he was sent by his slave owner to actually shoe a horse at a neighboring farm. And while he was there, the person that was shoeing the horse talked to him about the Union troops that were around the area and told him he may want to take that opportunity to ride out.

CORLEY: He took the opportunity and joined the Union Army. Bryant first heard of Captain Prickitt when her family's search of military and pension records listed him as one of her grandfather's commanding officers. She found out about her grandfather's photo in the Prickitt album just a year after her father, Siegel Tall, James's son, died at the age of 91.

BRYANT: I think he recalled a photo being on the fireplace on the mantle 15 in his house, a small tintype when he was a child. That house burned, so that picture didn't survive. So it was a very emotional moment thinking that, wow, you wish your dad could have been here to see it.

CORLEY: Bryant says she plans to travel to Washington to see the album. Aneita Gates says now everyone will be able to see the members of the 25th Regiment of the USCT.

GATES: Gives me goosebumps to share this little story between an officer and his men.

CORLEY: Gates says that's what her family wanted - a national stage for her great-grandfather's miniature album of black Civil War soldiers. Cheryl Corley, NPR News.