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Robert Reed Church and the Civil War

As the shock of John Brown’s raid and execution spread across the country, Captain Charles Church was doubling down on his cotton-shipping business. In 1858, he bought a new steamboat. It was massive at two hundred tons and had two engines. The interior was furnished with chaises, lounges, and armchairs. It had parlors, dining rooms, kitchens, and dozens of sleeping cabins. The exterior of the boat had a wide deck large enough to accommodate thousands of bales of cotton. Captain Church christened his new boat the Victoria and put her into service on the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans, with a stopover in Memphis.

The captain made Robert Reed Church a steward aboard the new vessel. The rank of steward was the highest possible for a slave. Robert was nineteen years old and had spent the last seven years on the river in the kitchens and dining rooms of Captain Church’s boats to earn the promotion. During that time, he and the captain had grown fond of each other. “My father gave me anything I wanted,” Robert remembered. “Though he doesn’t openly recognize me,” he equivocated. Earlier in the year, Captain Church’s other son, Charles Jr., died at the age of ten, resting the legacy of the Church name on Robert, Captain Church’s bastard son and slave.

In his work aboard the ships, Robert became acquainted with a porter, named Blanche K. Bruce, who worked the docks. Like Robert, Bruce was the product of a tryst between a white slave owner and his female slave. Unlike Robert, his father had freed him and sent him to school. Bruce was stout with light brown skin and short, wavy hair. In Bruce, Robert perhaps saw an alternative version of himself, were he free. The two became fast friends, and Robert allowed himself to dream of freedom.

As a steward, Robert was put in charge of the ship’s kitchen and dining room. The role put him on an equal footing with white merchants. When the ship docked, Robert, usually accompanied by Captain Church, would meet with grocers, importers, and bakers to buy meat, vegetables, fruit, liquor, bread, and cakes. His work was held to a high standard, as the meals on Captain Church’s boats were legendary. “The markets were searched for the best the country afforded and the days on board were marked by one feast after another.”

Captain Church also set Robert up with a woman. The Victoria was often filled with young white women who were part of bridal parties. Sometimes there were as many as five groups of bachelorettes aboard at once. Though in general Captain Church may have given Robert whatever he wanted, the young women who were guests on the captain’s ship were off-limits. Just after Robert turned eighteen, Captain Church arranged for Robert to have a “slave marriage” with a woman named Margaret Pico who was owned by friends of his in New Orleans. Marriages arranged between people owned by slaveholders were explicitly sexual in nature, as the expectation was that the coupling would result in children and produce more slaves for the owners.

Captain Church often lodged with the family that owned Margaret when he spent a few days in New Orleans at the end of the Victoria’s run. After Robert and Margaret’s marriage was arranged, whenever the captain and his son went to New Orleans, the captain would deposit Robert in Margaret’s slave quarters, where he would spend the duration of their stay in New Orleans. In 1859, Robert and Margaret produced a daughter, whom they named Laura.

In the fall of 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election sent shock waves through the South, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the Civil War. Captain Church’s steamship line was entangled with slavery. His business relied on shipping cotton picked on slave plantations to ports along the Mississippi. Talk of war could be heard among the passengers as Bob walked the dining halls on board the ships during meal service.

On April 19, 1961, in the first days of the Civil War, President Lincoln ordered the Union Navy to blockade all Southern waterways, cutting off the South’s trade with Europe and interfering with the Confederacy’s transportation of troops and provisions on the waterways. Lincoln deployed five hundred warships to ports in the Atlantic Ocean and on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to destroy any Confederate ships carrying supplies.

Not long after the blockade was announced, Robert was on board the Victoria when a group of Confederate sailors wearing gray military uniforms boarded the ship. The men announced that they were commandeering the ship on behalf of the Confederate Navy. “My sympathies were with the Union, though I did own slaves,” the captain claimed, saying he was given no choice but to turn over his ship with his black son aboard it. The Confederacy renamed his boat Confederate Steamship Victoria.

Robert was conscripted to the CSS Victoria in the employ of the rebel navy. The boat was used to transport troops and military supplies up and down the Mississippi, using its speed to outrun the blockade fleet. If a ship was caught, the Union Navy had instructions to destroy and sink it. While Bob was working on a Confederate blockade runner, his younger brother, James Wilson, was conscripted into the Confederate Army as a soldier in Arkansas. Emmeline had hoped during her dying days to save her sons from slavery, and now they found themselves aiding the Confederacy in the war to protect the right of white Southerners to hold black men like themselves in bondage.

NEAR DAYBREAK ON JUNE 6, 1862, AS THE SUN WAS RISING OVER the Mississippi River, Robert Reed Church was on the deck of the CSS Victoria. His ship was floating just outside the Memphis wharf, looking out onto a fleet of Confederate warships further out on the river, waiting for a coming battle. The Union Navy was approaching to invade and conquer Memphis. Robert stood on the deck with crew members and Confederate sailors, watching the approaching fleet draw closer, feeling both uncertainty and excitement. The Union warships would perhaps bring freedom if they were victorious, but they also could bring death if they sank his ship.

There were eight Confederate ships in the river guarding the city. Each of them had cotton bales stacked like bricks against all four sides of their superstructures to protect against light artillery. The cotton-clad flotilla was poorly armed. In total, the rebel ships had eight cannons. The Union fleet was twice the size of the Confederate. Its seventeen ships were assembled in two battle lines moving down the river, their exteriors clad with iron, armed with guns and cannon. In another line were nine ram boats with six-foot-long knifelike structures on their front end. Those “beaks” could puncture the hulls of the enemy ships when smashed into them, flooding and sinking them.

In the early morning, more than five thousand Memphians made their way from their homes to the edge of the river to watch the battle. They stood in groups on the bluffs, twenty feet up from the fighting. The Union fleet stopped two hundred feet from the city; then the air exploded with the steady drone of gunfire. “About 5½ A.M., the Bragg came up toward us and opened fire,” a Confederate soldier later reported. “It was answered by us instantly.” The fleets exchanged fire for more than an hour with neither side taking much damage. By the time they were done, the river was covered in smoke and the air smelled of gunpowder. In the haze, two Union ram boats came charging toward the Confederate ships. They knifed at their hulls, sinking one, the CSS Colonel Lovell, and damaged several others, puncturing their hulls. As the Confederate ships scrambled, the Union gunboats sailed into deadly range of the Confederate ships and opened fire.

The Union ships shot up and breached one Confederate ship after another. On the bluff, the citizens of Memphis, who had been cheering the gunfight, fell silent. After the Union Navy sank three Confederate ships, the Confederate flotilla surrendered. When the battle was over, a union ship began to close on Robert’s ship, the CSS Victoria. Something inside Robert told him to flee. He followed his instinct; he walked to the edge of the boat, gathered his nerve, and jumped. With a splash, he disappeared into the Mississippi as the sun came up over Memphis.

IN THE HOURS AFTER THE BATTLE OF MEMPHIS, THE RIVER WAS churning and muddy. As the gun smoke cleared, scraps of wood, cotton, and metal from the destroyed Confederate ships littered the surface of the water. Downriver, Robert Reed Church paddled and kicked toward the shores of Memphis. He swam to the bank and pulled himself up onto land. As he collected himself on solid ground, his hair stuck to his face and scalp and his sopping wet, muddy clothing clung to his frame.

What was he at that moment? A slave, a freedman, a deserter? Whom did he belong to? The Confederacy, the Union, his father, himself? There was only one way to be sure. He collected himself and headed toward the city, dripping water as if he had just been baptized. He was unafraid of whatever awaited him. He had just survived his second flirtation with a watery grave. Slavery and brushes with death had wrung whatever fear he had been born with from his breast.

In Memphis, Robert found men both black and white wearing blue Union uniforms and carrying guns, stationed on corners, patrolling the town. High in the sky, he could see the Union flag flying over city hall. After the battle of Memphis, the mayor surrendered the city to the Union, suspending slavery in the town. At that moment Robert dared to think he was free.