Archer Alexander
Archer Alexander

Archer Alexander

What would you do? Imagine yourself enslaved in a state that is caught between two hostile forces. On a cold winter’s night in Missouri in January 1863, Archer Alexander overheard his enslaver Richard Pitman holding a secret meeting in the back room of the local Postmaster and storeowner James Naylor, in his mercantile on the Boone’s Lick Road in St. Charles County.  Area slave owners were plotting the destruction of a vital rail link for the Union Army at the Peruque Creek Bridge, about five miles away. Without a word to his wife Louisa, who was enslaved by Naylor, he took off in the dark for the Union troop’s guardhouse, to warn them of the impending danger and what he knew. Continue reading Archer Alexander

What Makes a Hero
Archer Alexander

What Makes a Hero

Archer overheard the area men talking about how the work was going on the railroad bridge. Any day now, with the weight of the next Northern Missouri engine bearing down and over that steep gorge filled by Peruque Creek, their mission would be accomplished. They had been stealthily working at sawing the wooden timbers. And, they had stored arms and ammunition for when the great event happened! Any day now… Read more… Continue reading What Makes a Hero

What is an Abolitionist?
Slavery

What is an Abolitionist?

The Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium, created and led by the University of Virginia, represents a multi-institutional collaboration focused on sharing best practices and guiding principles about truth-telling projects addressing human bondage and racism in institutional histories. Continue reading What is an Abolitionist?

The Untold Story
Archer Alexander

The Untold Story

On April 14, 1876, a 70-year-old black man named Archer Alexander, would be immortalized when he was chosen to be the face that represented “slavery” on the Freedom Memorial in our Nation’s Capitol. Lincoln was the very man who had given him freedom… On Tuesday, January 18, 2022, the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia will host an online evening event “Archer Alexander: The Monuments Unknown Hero” Continue reading The Untold Story

Encyclopedia Virginia
Archer Alexander

Encyclopedia Virginia

Archer Alexander’s story is important not only to the fabric of Virginia’s history, but it stretches across America. A man born enslaved in Virginia, who became a hero in Missouri’s Civil War conflict, was unknown in our Nation’s capital. There Archer Alexander rises before President Abraham Lincoln, his emancipator. The Emancipation Monument which was the gift of the formerly enslaved, was the only memorial to honor Lincoln in Washington, D.C. until 1922. The “unidentified man” now has a new opportunity for his story to be heard loud and clear with this Encyclopedia Virginia entry. Continue reading Encyclopedia Virginia

The 13th Amendment
Uncategorized

The 13th Amendment

Congress passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865. It read “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”. Continue reading The 13th Amendment

The first Thanksgiving
Stories

The first Thanksgiving

That first Thanksgiving celebration was not in Plymouth, Massachusetts. While the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest feast in fall 1621, and early colonial leaders did declare days of thanksgiving when we were supposed to give our thanks for continued life. Today we celebrate Thanksgiving because of the crisis that we call the Civil War. Lincoln had declared a Proclamation appointing the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Prayer on October 3, 1863.
Continue reading The first Thanksgiving

Elijah Lovejoy
Stories

Elijah Lovejoy

The mob scaled the building and was about to set fire to the warehouse when Lovejoy was shot five times and killed while defending his press and his right to publish his thoughts on the abolition of slavery. The mob overran the warehouse and threw his press into the Mississippi River. Continue reading Elijah Lovejoy

The Eyes of That Time
Archer Alexander

The Eyes of That Time

That simple bronze monument, with two figures, a tall white man, and a black man rising on one knee, alongside him. The first ever to include a black person in our Nation’s Capital. It would share that man, with the Emancipation Proclamation at his elbow, leaning benevolently over a slave who had broken his own shackles, suggesting that the slave rise! Continue reading The Eyes of That Time

Black Lives Matter
Archer Alexander

Black Lives Matter

In January, of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except in punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; and all persons held to service or labor as slaves are hereby declared free.” Under Lincoln’s direction, hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers gave their lives to make that statement permanent. How can we forget that? Today we say the same thing when we say Black Lives Matter yet we seek to destroy those statues and images that portray those very first steps taken. How can we know how far we have come, or judge how far we have to go, if we don’t have reminders of these facts, staring us in the face as we pass by them every day? If we destroy these monuments, how can we help our children understand our enslaved ancestors lives, or what our ancestors who fought for their emancipation sacrifices were for? The Union won, and our Country was preserved. Let our Country not be torn apart once again. Emancipation means free, not equal. That is our battle that continues today. Please don’t let us confuse the two issues in our haste. We should not eradicate those battle scars that occurred in 1865, but treasure them, as they are there to serve to remind all of us, how far we have come since then, and how far we have yet to go. Let us stop and listen to their story. Continue reading Black Lives Matter

NEVER SAY NEVER
Archer Alexander

NEVER SAY NEVER

In 2018 a descendant of Archer Alexander, Keith Winstead, contacted professional Genealogist and author, Dorris Keeven-Franke, looking for help. Research has led to discoveries not previously known, which Keeven-Franke will be sharing in her next book ‘Archer Alexander, the Untold Story’. At 11 am CST, on Wednesday, May 13, 2020, Winstead and Keeven-Franke will be sharing how they discovered these new details in Never say Never, on Bernice Alexander Bennett’s program https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bernicebennett/2020/05/13/never-say-never-with-dorris-keeven-franke-and-keith-winstead. Please share this with your friends and join us with your questions. Continue reading NEVER SAY NEVER

Emancipation Memorial
Archer Alexander

Emancipation Memorial

Today marks the 144th Anniversary of the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial a bronze group which “represents President Lincoln in the act of emancipating a negro slave who kneels at his feet to receive the benediction, but whose hand has grasped the chain as if in the act of breaking it, indicated the historical fact that the slaves took active part in their own deliverance”. The enslaved is represented by Archer Alexander, who was born enslaved by the Alexander family in Virginia in 1806, taken to Missouri in 1829, where he later lived as a slave of Richard Pitman in Saint Charles County until February 28, 1863. He lived the final years of his life in St. Louis, with William Greenleaf Eliot where he lies buried in an unmarked grave in St. Peters United Church of Christ Cemetery. Continue reading Emancipation Memorial

March 30, 1863
Archer Alexander

March 30, 1863

In 1885, William Greenleaf Eliot, the grandfather of poet T.S. Eliot had published THE STORY OF ARCHER ALEXANDER FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM March 30, 1863, which is what Dr. Henry Louis Gates would call a “slave narrative”. Eliot, the founder of Washington University in St. Louis Missouri, and a young minister who had brought the Unitarian Church to St. Louis in 1834, simply refers to himself as “A member of the Western Sanitary Commission in St. Louis, MO”. Continue reading March 30, 1863

Acknowledgement
Life

Acknowledgement

Its time we acknowledge this history. Its time we tell these stories and remind everyone that the enslaved cooked the meals, fixed the broken axle on the wagon, put in the crops, and built the houses. Its time we understand that the building of America did not happen in a vacuum, that these people were here too. Continue reading Acknowledgement