A Mother's Prayers
He was five years old. He was property valued at $400. He was among the four million enslaved people whose lives were transformed by the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Would this act lead to war between the United States and the slave-holding states that had seceded? What would this war mean to slave owners and their property? These were among the many questions upon the minds of James and Elizabeth Burroughs, the southwestern Virginia owners of a five-year-old boy who would grow up to be the famous educator and leader Booker T. Washington.
Shortly after the first battle of Manassas, James Burroughs died. His wife, Elizabeth, inherited the farm and ten slaves, along with the burdens created by the war. She watched her six sons enlist in the Confederate army, off to fight for their mother's right to own other humans. Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America, made it absolutely clear that the "corner stone [of the Confederacy] rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition."
How did Booker and the other nine slaves on this farm react to the departure of those young men? Booker's mother Jane was a house slave, a cook who had helped to rear the Burroughs children. The young Booker remembered waking one morning to see his mother in tears, kneeling on the ground and praying for the armies of Lincoln to bring her and her children to freedom. This, he recalled, was when he realized his plight in life, as property to be bought and sold. If victory was where the Burroughs boys were heading, Jane's prayers - and the prayers of millions of other enslaved people - would not be answered.
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