Abraham Galloway is the subject of a forthcoming book this fall by renowned historian David Cecelski of Durham.
Galloway, from Wilmington, was a fugitive slave, an abolitionist, a Union spy and an early civil rights leader, meeting with President Abraham Lincoln. After the war, he was a prominent black leader and a state senator.
The book launching is scheduled for September at the old state capital building.
“He lived to be 33 years old. He never learned to read or write,” Cecelski said. “Most of his life, he was trying not to leave a record.”
Galloway’s exploits including being what Cecelski called “a master spy” for the Union Army.
Galloway’s travels took him from Maryland “deep into the Confederacy” as far south as Louisiana and Mississippi.
Researching for the book, Cecelski had doubts that there would be ample documentation about Galloway’s life. He was pleasantly surprised.
There is a section on Galloway’s life in Cecelski’s 2001 book, “The Waterman’s Song – Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina.”
“Once people started reading about him in ‘The Waterman’s Song,’ people started sending me things,” he said. “There was a woman at the National Archives that discovered that he had been in Mississippi. She sent me a copy of the document. There were people from his church in Wilmington.”
Among Cecelski’s discoveries was what he termed “a treasure trove of letters from an African-American woman in New Bern, who had been a slave until the Union captured the city. She discusses Galloway’s activities in many of them.
Cecelski’s story in “The Waterman’s Song” tells of the 26-year-old Galloway helping Union recruiting agent Edward Kinsley, who was seeking black soldiers. But Galloway did it on his terms, having the agent meet him at a New Bern home at midnight, where the recruiter was blindfolded and led to an attic room.
In the book, Cecelski writes, “If the Union intended to make this war a crusade for black liberation, then Kinsley would find no shortage of recruits in New Bern. But if the Federal army planned to use black men like chattel and wage a war merely for the preservation of the Union, that was another story.”
Galloway had demands as well — equal pay, provisions for black soldiers’ families and schooling for their children. Another provision was that the Union force the Confederacy to treat captured blacks as prisoners of war, equal to whites.
After the war, Galloway was a leader of Reconstruction politics in Eastern North Carolina. He championed for fundamental rights of freedmen and women.
Galloway’s life ended suddenly in 1870, from fever and jaundice. About 6,000 people attended his funeral, with a procession that stretched a half-mile through downtown Wilmington with flags at half staff.
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