By Alessandra Diaz
Alessandra Diaz began working with the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi transcription and tagging team as a high school student from Queens, New York in 2023, and has continued through completing her first year of studies at Columbia University. She authored the following blog post exploring Black parents’ efforts to reconstitute their families and demand due process when faced with the unlawful apprenticing of their children.
In December 1876, a formerly enslaved African American man named Jacob Hodges wrote to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone regarding an ongoing investigation into the kidnappings of two African American children.[1] One of these children was his twelve-year-old son, Thomas Hodges. The other, nine-year-old Alexander Ward, was the son of a formerly enslaved woman, Harriet Ward. Hodges and Ward went to insurmountable lengths to spur Mississippi and Tennessee state authorities into returning their children after they had been kidnapped and forced into unlawful apprenticeships. A series of letters from December 1876 to June 1877 between Hodges, Ward, their lawyers, and the Mississippi government showcase the harrowing yet resilient battle many African Americans fought against discriminatory laws that were meant to keep them in a cyclical state of enslavement. To have a family outside of racialized state control—after enslavers tore apart enslaved families for centuries—was a right African Americans sought relentlessly during enslavement and after national emancipation.
Hodges and Ward’s legal battles came in the wake of the Mississippi Black Codes, signed and passed in the state legislative sessions of November and December of 1865. These laws, which ranged from criminalizing the unemployment of formerly enslaved men to banning all freed people from carrying firearms, explicitly aimed to limit their civil and economic rights and control their livelihoods. One of these laws targeting the labor of formerly enslaved people was entitled “An Act to regulate the relation of master and apprentice, as relates to freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes.” This allowed law enforcement to assign those African American children whom they deemed to be abandoned to a “master or mistress” (court’s legal term) to preside over them, which in turn exerted oppressive control over African American families and their subsequent fracturing.[2]
Former enslavers exploited this law further, creating illegal apprenticeships through kidnappings, coercion, or against the will of the children’s families. If the Hodges and Ward children had been abandoned or if their parents had consented, the apprenticeship would have been lawful. However, because the parents did not consent, and made it clear that they did not, it was an illegal kidnapping. While this law outlined the rights of parents to recover their children if they were illegally apprenticed, former enslavers continued to subvert this law, as exhibited by the Hodges and War case. These loopholes diluted emancipation’s promise by creating legal opportunities for the effective re-enslavement of African American children.
Apprenticeship was the “abusive indenture of children that came in the immediate aftermath of emancipation.”[3] Specific language in the Hodges and Ward letters indicates an apprenticeship case as opposed to a regular kidnapping. Hodges explicitly used the word “bondage” about the children’s kidnapping in a January 10, 1877, letter to the governor’s secretary.[4] The terminology used to describe enslavement indicates the true aim of these apprenticeship laws: effectively re-enslaving African American children against the will of their parents by forcing them to do unpaid labor. Mississippi Judge B. C. Sims, who presided over the case and issued the warrants for the arrest of the kidnappers, wrote to the same governor’s secretary on December 29, 1876, that the two children had been taken by the two white men to “be held in service by them” against the “dignity and peace of the State of Mississippi.”[5] One witness had also described the children, in a letter written on January 28, 1877, as having been “driving a gin,” or cleaning and separating cotton before traveling eight miles to Celina, Tennessee.[6] To the parents, this is an illegal kidnapping and forced bondage. Under the apprenticeship law, however, this could have been perfectly legal.
Furthermore, while it is not explicitly stated that the men who kidnapped the children, William Williams and Stokes Wilhite, had previously been the enslavers of the two parents, Hodges and Ward themselves had previously been enslaved. Former enslavers commonly sought to immediately apprentice the children of families they had previously enslaved.[7] There is also evidence in census records that Williams enslaved people while a farmer in the 1860s in Franklin, Tennessee. He had enslaved, among others, one male, aged 24 years old, and one woman, aged 18 years old.[8] Hodges and Ward were, at the time of the kidnapping, farm laborers under the employment of a man named George C. Coleman. Coleman owned the farm where the two parents worked in 1876.[9] There is no evidence of George C. Coleman in the 1860 slave schedules that indicates he knew or enslaved Hodges or Ward.
Historian Mary Niall Mitchell asserts that former enslavers commonly used apprenticeship as a justification for kidnappings. She states that planters or sharecroppers exploited “the dependency of children…and tried to create for themselves a pool of unfree labor.”[10] Williams and Wilhite’s actions and the parents’ reactions were similar to cases wherein African American parents, especially mothers, would try the case in court. Mothers like Harriet Ward would be denied the rights to their children because they were seen as unfit, usually due to poverty and unemployment. Mitchell cites an example of a New Orleans judge, who said, in an 1864 case, that “we think it very probable our course has been misrepresented by some mothers, who think they can support themselves & family.”[11]
The American legal system seldom sided with women and families who attempted to regain guardianship over their children and were seen as being unfit or unreliable. However, as Harriet Ward did, these mothers did not submit their children to these laws. Mitchell explains how family members “all appealed to the Freedmen’s Bureau for assistance in obtaining custody of children.”[12] The Freedmen’s Bureau was an especially common resource that many families sought for legal representation when appealing to the courts. Although sometimes the Bureau would side with the former enslaver and allowed them to keep the children who had been kidnapped, they also sent letters and petitions on behalf of families to authorities. Regardless, African American families sought legal representation and fought incessantly for their right to their children throughout the presence of apprenticeship laws.
The kidnappings of Alexander and Thomas were thus contextualized by a pattern of African American families pushing against apprenticeship laws that allowed for the legal separation of them from their children. Even after the kidnappers, Williams and Wilhite, were correctly identified, authorities took a negligent approach towards the case. Initially, a chancellor named L. Haughton issued a writ of Habeas Corpus for the children in early January 1877 and hired officers to deliver the writ to the kidnappers, which would hopefully lead to an arrest.[13] A writ of Habeas Corpus meant that whoever was being detained must appear in front of a court to determine the legitimacy of their detention (this writ was issued for the children, not the kidnappers).
For an unknown reason, Ward and Hodges were required to pay the officer an extra ten dollars on top of his daily salary to go to Tennessee and rescue their children. Following their payment to the officer, the parents felt “assured that [their] children would be returned to [them].”[14] However, as Hodges explained in the January 10th letter, after three days, the officer had not succeeded. The officer had remained in Aberdeen and did not attempt to uphold the agreement. Unfortunately for Ward and Hodges, “it was entirely too late to put the papers into the hands of another officer,” and they were not reimbursed or given another opportunity to request this kind of investigation again. Hodges “complained” (as described in the cover of his letter) to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone that the officer’s negligence was a violation of their civil rights. He claimed that had the kidnapped children been white, “the action of the officer would have been different; this is in direct violation of the pledges made on the stump by all democratic speakers before the two Elections prior.”[15] Hodges was livid at the law enforcement that had failed their families. He was adamant that the law had been violated, and he deserved due process.
The parents also had a white attorney, M. M. Cummings, and the aforementioned Judge B. C. Sims, a white justice of the peace, who acted as intermediaries between the parents and the state. Cummings had encouraged Hodges to file a request for the writ of Habeas Corpus. This places the kidnapping in the category of detention and forced servitude, as once again, the writ was issued for the children. The point of the writ would be that law enforcement could legally obtain the children and bring them before the court. Cummings also requested on January 19, 1877, that Justice Sims and Chancellor L. Haughton place a warrant out for the arrest of the alleged kidnappers.[16] The warrant was issued after the aforementioned failed attempts to arrest the kidnappers. Cummings also delayed in his request that the Governor of Tennessee be involved in the case, while also denying the Judges’ culpability in the late issuing of the warrants. Two other authority figures, Aberdeen Mayor Thomas S. Sykes and state senator R. O Reynolds, were also sent letters enclosing the documents of the case for them to review. Sykes would later petition Secretary Kinloch Falconer and Governor Stone on behalf of the parents.[17]
On June 11, 1877, Mayor Sykes wrote a brief letter to Governor Stone, saying that “Thomas & Alexander have been gone ‘till yesterday when they were returned by F. E. Stout into their custody, and that they now have the said Thomas and Alexander in their parental care.”[18] Stout was another police officer hired to deliver the writ and the warrant of arrest. After nearly six months of working with authorities and wrestling with indifferent law enforcement, while also fighting against centuries of law and psychological backing for the forced servitude of African American children, Hodges and Ward had reunited their families. At every opportunity for their intervention, the two parents made their voices heard, seeking their legal representation with their own money. They also exhibited no hesitancy in taking their case to the highest authority in the state. While the ultimate fate of their family is not documented, Hodges and Ward had nonetheless succeeded in keeping their family units whole. Their case joins the powerful historical tradition of African American families advocating for themselves and their families despite injustice.
Alessandra Diaz is a rising sophomore at Columbia University in the City of New York, studying History with a specialization in urban history of the Americas. She worked on the Civil War on Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project as a Transcription and Tagging research assistant from September 2023–June 2025. You can read her other CWRGM-related blogpost, “Mississippi Governor James L. Alcorn’s Impact on Education During Reconstruction,” here.
[1] Jacob Hodges, “Letter from Jacob Hodges to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; December 29, 1876,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 03 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-03-19.
[2] Laws of the State of Mississippi, (J.J. Shannon & Sons, 1866), 4-6, https://transcription.si.edu/project/42074.
[3] Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 403.
[4] Jacob Hodges,”Letter from Jacob Hodges to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; January 10, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 05 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-05-15.
[5] Hodges to Stone, December 29, 1876.
[6] Jacob Hodges, “Legal Document from Jacob Hodges; January 28, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-16.
[7] “Mississippi Authorizes “Sale” of Black Orphans to White “Masters or Mistresses,”” A History of Racial Justice, Equal Justice Initiative. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/22
[8] “1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Schedule 2, page 41,” U.S. Census Bureau, Ancestry, accessed August 1, 2025, https://www.ancestry.com/sharing/25450302?mark=7b22746f6b656e223a227373306273722b446e586545515547366741475368524b4f5039627153534774374957424f326c2f3643553d222c22746f6b656e5f76657273696f6e223a225632227d
[9] Thomas B. Sykes, “Legal Document from Thomas B. Sykes; January 20, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-13.
[10] Mary Niall Mitchell, “Labor: Tillie Bell’s Song” in Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (New York: NYU Press, 2008): 143–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.13944196.8, 168.
[11] Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 169.
[12] Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 159.
[13] L. Haughton, “Letter from L. Haughton to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; January 15, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-01.
[14] Jacob Hodges, “Letter from Jacob Hodges to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; January 10, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 05 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-05-15.
[15] Hodges to Stone, January 10, 1877.
[16] Jacob Hodges, “Letter from Jacob Hodges to Kinloch Falconer; January 19, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-09.
[17] Sykes, January 20, 1877.
[18] Thomas B. Sykes, “Letter from Thomas B. Sykes to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; June 11, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1010, Folder 101 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1010-11-23.
