The Gentleman Highwayman of California--Black Bart

 

                                             Charles Boles a/k/a Charles Bolton, T. Z. Spaulding, and Black Bart after his arrest in San Francisco in 1883.

On July 23, 1878 the outlaw known as Black Bart robbed a Wells Fargo stagecoach.  Wells Fargo was a favorite target, and he was operating in the familiar territory in and around Calaveras County, California.  When the empty strongbox was found, it contained a little poem:

 

Here I lay me down to sleep

 

To wait the coming morrow,

Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,

And everlasting sorrow.

Let come what will, I’ll try it on,

My condition can't be worse;

And if there’s money in that box

‘Tis munny in my purse.

 

—Black Bart

PO8

The daring highwayman began his crime spree just shy of two years earlier on July 26, 1875.

It was the first of a string of daring hold-ups that would continue until he was finally captured following a botched robbery of the same stage in the same location in 1883.

Black Bart was one of the few Western bad men—or western lawmen for that matter—who lived up to his reputation.  Like others his adventures were exploited in dime novels and the popular press like the Police Gazette, but unlike others there was hardly any need for exaggeration.

Bart defied all of the stereotypes.   While stagecoach robberies were common across the West, most were done by mounted gangs who counted on their horses to outrun the law.   Deathly afraid of horses, Bart did all of his robberies and his successful getaways on foot taking advantage of the rugged territory of his preferred stage lines in northern California and southern Oregon.  He did not carry a pistol or a rifle.  He showed a shotgun which he never fired, and which may never even have been loaded.  He wore a raffish derby hat and long duster and disguised his face with a flour sack with eye holes.  He was unfailingly polite and courteous to drivers and passengers alike and never uttered a profanity.  On at least two occasions he left behind short poems celebrating his crimes. Yet he got away with tens of thousands of dollars of Wells Fargo gold and U.S. Mail in his long career.

 

Wells Fargo stagecoaches like this were Black Bart's favored target, perhaps because of some grievance committed by the coma.

If Bart’s appearance and methods were unorthodox, so was his background.  Born Charles Earl Bowles in Norfolk, England in 1829, his father relocated his large family to a Jefferson County, New York farm when he was two years old.

Like many a young man, he and two of his brothers were lured to the California gold fields in 1849. They worked claims along the stream then known as the American River in the heart of Gold Rush territory. After a discouraging year, Charley, as he was known returned east.  But the lure of gold got him again and returned with brothers David and Robert, who soon died of, probably of typhoid.  Charley continued mining with limited success until abandoning the fields in 1854

The same year Charley, now spelling his last name Boles, married Mary Elizabeth Johnson and established a home near Decatur, Illinois.  The couple soon had four children.

Whatever happiness the couple may have had was interrupted by the Civil War.   Boles enlisted in Company B, 116th Illinois Regiment, on August 13, 1862.  He was evidently an excellent soldier and quickly advanced through the ranks becoming First Sergeant by the end of his first year of service.  Boles saw action in many battles, including Vicksburg where he sustained major injuries.  Later he was a part of the Western Army under General William Tecumseh Sherman on his March to the Sea.  Boles was discharged having been brevetted to First Lieutenant in June 1865 in Washington and returned home.

Like many veterans, Boles found it difficult to adjust to the hum-drum of farming life.  In 1867 he lit out to Idaho and Montana to resume prospecting.  He remained in contact with his wife in Decatur until 1871.  A final letter in August of that year made cryptic reference to a grievance against Wells Fargo and a vow to seek vengeance.  He then stopped writing and seemed to vanish off the face of the Earth.  Eventually his wife gave him up for dead.

Nothing is known of his activities from that point on until that July day in California.  Perhaps he committed other, non-attributed robberies in Montana, honing his skills.  Perhaps he just went deep into the Northern California gold country once again prospecting and learning the lay of the land.  He evidently took his inspiration not from the dashing outlaw gangs of the plains but from the legendary solo highwaymen of his native England.

 

                                          

                                                              A cartoon imagining of a Black Bart ambush and robbery.

He typically hid behind an outcropping of rock or just beyond a curve, usually on an upgrade where the stagecoach teams would be laboring.  He calmly stepped into the road leveling his shot gun in the direction of the driver and politely asked for the strong box and mail.  He never robbed passengers or the driver.

Bart committed 28 holdups of Wells Fargo stagecoaches in Northern California, most of them on the Siskiyou Trail to Oregon.  On his fourth and seventh stick-ups Bart left behind poems. 

The first read:

 

I've labored long and hard for bread,

For honor, and for riches,
But on my corns too long you've tread,
You fine-haired sons of bitches,

—Black Bart, 1877

 

These ditties, along with the outlaw’s cheerful disposition sparked the interest and attention of the press and public alike.  After the second note, he was famous.  Almost any robbery on the west coast was attributed to him, some by copycats.  Most of his robberies were successful; some resulted in only a few dollars when an anticipated Wells Fargo shipment was not on board.  On one occasion he was scared off and lost his derby when a guard fired on him.  Possies chased him, but he melted into the mountains time and again.

                                            Wanted posters like this made Bart feel like a marked man.              

By the 1880s the pressure to capture him was building.  And Bart felt it.  He told a driver that year, “Hurry up the hounds.  It gets lonesome in these mountains.”  In 1882 a driver asked how much he made as an outlaw.   “Not very much for the chances I take,” he said.

On November 3, 1883 Bart returned to the site of his first robbery on Funk Hill in Calaveras County.  That day a young passenger got off the coach to hunt in the brush, planning to meet back up with it on the other side of the hill.  He got to the road and waited.  When the stage failed to appear, he began to walk back.  He met the driver with the team, which Bart had ordered un-hitched from the wagon.  Armed with the boy’s rifle the two moved back to the coach, where Bart was struggling to get the strong box un-bolted from the floor—a new Wells Fargo security measure.  The driver fired at Bart with the rifle and missed.  Bart took off, grabbing some gold and a sack of mail.  The boy took the rifle and thought he shot Bart as he disappeared into the trees.  They found traces of blood and began to follow.

Bart stashed his some of his loot in a hollow log, stuffed about $500 in gold coins into his pocket, and wrapped a bloody hand, his only wound, with a handkerchief.  He lost both the handkerchief and his glasses as he ran.  Still, he once again eluded his pursuers and seemed to make a clean get away.

Pinkerton Detectives hired by Wells Fargo recovered the items left behind.  The bloody handkerchief had a laundry mark on it.  Displaying the dogged diligence for which the Agency was famous, detectives visited more than 90 laundries before finding a matching laundry mark at Ferguson & Bigg’s California Laundry on Bush Street in San Francisco.  By co-incidence the detective, James B. Hume bore a remarkable resemblance to Bart with his massive handlebar moustache, bushy eyebrows and graying hair.  The laundry man pointed out Bart’s residence, a modest rooming house near-by.

Boles had evidently been living there for some years as T. Z. Spaulding.  He told the proprietors of the rooming house that he was a mining engineer.  His frequent business trips coincided with Bart’s robberies up north.

Boles’ true identity was only discovered when a Bible inscribed to him by his wife was found among his possessions.  Eventually, he confessed to robberies committed before 1879 in the mistaken belief that he could escape prosecution by the statute of limitations.  The police report described him as, “a person of great endurance. Exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances and was extremely proper and polite in behavior. Eschews profanity.”

News of Black Bart’s arrest and trial drew national attention.  Boles was photographed several times and illustrations appeared in national as well as California publications.

Wells Fargo chose only to prosecute for the first robbery, for which they had a firm confession.  Boles was sentenced to six years in San Quentin.  He served only four with time off for good behavior.  None-the-less, harsh prison conditions broke his health.

Upon his release, he wrote at last to his abandoned wife.  He told her he was being constantly followed by Wells Fargo agents and felt helplessly harassed.  He expressed a desire to “get away from everything.”

 

Bart continued to fascinate and inspired books, fictional and historic, stories, songs, a comic book and this 1948 highly fictionalized Universal B-movie starring Dan Durey, Yvone DeCarlo, and Jeffery Lynn.

In February 1888 Boles checked out of the San Francisco hotel where he was living.  Detectives traced him to the Palace Hotel in Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley far from Black Bart’s old stomping grounds.  He checked in and then just disappeared.  He was never seen or heard from again.

Later other robberies were attributed to Bart, including one in which a poem was left behind.  But Pinkertons proved that Boles was not involved.  Some stories had Boles retiring quietly to New York City under an assumed name where he may have died in 1917.  Others think he went back to prospecting in Montana or Nevada and probably died in the wilderness.

Whatever the case, the legend of Black Bart the Gentleman lived on.

From Teen Oysterman to Black Universalist Pioneer

Although no authentic image of Joseph Jordan is known to exist, he began his climb to success as a teen-age Black oysterman like these men.  He successively worked in Confederate war industry, as a grocer, a house carpenter, and a builder/developer before retiring comfortably enough to dedicate his life to preaching.

You would think that the Universalists, religious folk so radically inclusive that their Heaven excluded no souls, would welcome Black worshipers with open arms.  And some did, especially in the North.  But the denomination which was governed mostly by state and local conventions often reflected local racial attitudes and customs.  Many Southern Universalists might have been willing to share eternity with Blacks, probably assuming they would dwell on different clouds, but were not willing to share a pew—or if it had come up the Convention floor—with segregated Black churches.

That was the reality that Joseph Jordan—pronounced “Jerdan”—faced when he became the first African-American ordained by a Universalist Convention.  Jordan died on June 4, 1901 in Norfolk, Virginia at the age of 59.  This is the story of his journey and the faith to which he devoted his life.

Jordan was born in June of 1842, one of seven children of a Free Black couple in West Norfolk on the Elizabeth River.  He was literate, probably instructed at home by his parents or perhaps in informal church school.  He entered the local trade of oysterman in his early teens and worked the shoals until he was 21 and moved to Norfolk.  That would have been in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War and with so many White Virginians at war, there were opportunities for free blacks in one of the state’s most industrial cities.

As he established himself, Jordon started a family.  He married Indianna Brown, a free born woman.  The couple would have three children, only one of whom, Thaddeus—likely named for the fire-breathing Radical Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania—lived to adulthood.

Starting out as a common laborer, Jordan rose in the world.  He operated a grocery store and then became a house carpenter.  From those earnings he saved enough money to become what we might call today a builder/developer—erecting several houses in the Norfolk suburb of Huntersville.  Rental income from those homes allowed him to retire from physical labor.  He was now a successful and admired man in his community, a member of an educated and propertied elite.  But he yearned to turn his attention to a longtime passion—religion.

The discovery of the work of Universalist minister and theologian Thomas Whittemore, leader of the Restorationists, led Jordan to his new faith.

Always deeply religious, Jordan was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1880.  He established himself in a successful storefront ministry preaching the Gospel of liberation popular in the Black community.  But he was harboring some doubts about the orthodoxy he was preaching.  A sympathetic Methodist minister gave him a copy of Thomas Whittemore’s 1840 classic The Plain Guide to Universalism.  Jordan was thunder struck.

Whittemore was an up-from-the-streets Boston tough who rose to become a disciple of Hosea Ballou, the foundational figure of 19th Century Universalism.  He went on to be an influential minister, thinker, and writer who eventually questioned Ballou’s death and glory Universalism and became the leader of the Restorationists who held that a loving God would restore all souls to his grace and admit them to heaven, after the worst of them spent some time in a form of punishment to cleans them from their sins.  The book that fell into Jordon’s hands was one of the most important theological expressions of this view as well as a popular polemic that was still influencing readers more than 40 years after its publication.

Jordan studied what he could from the prolific Universalist press and tracts of the period.  When he could no longer preach the traditional Baptist Gospel, he returned to construction work and thought about his options.  There was no Universalist congregation in Norfolk or surrounding towns.  But there was a vital Universalist center in Philadelphia—one of the oldest hubs of the faith in North America.

In 1886 Jordan journeyed to the Pennsylvania city where he presented himself to the Rev. Edwin C. Sweetser of the Universalist Church of the Messiah.  It was a fortunate choice.  The Philadelphia church had historic sympathy for Blacks.  It was responsible for the first American resolution by a church body, the Universalist Convention, calling for the abolition of slavery back in 1792 and some members of the large free Black community in Philadelphia worshiped there.  Moreover, Sweetser was a willing teacher and mentor.  Jordan studied under the minister for seven months not only deepening his newfound faith but mastering its theology.

Jordan returned to Norfolk with armloads of books and a determination to preach the word of Universal Salvation.  He rented a large room at 42 Lincoln Street and converted it to a chapel and built the pulpit with his own hands.  As a well-known and respected community leader he was able to gather a small congregation.

His efforts drew the scorn and condemnation of his former Baptist colleges and other orthodox ministers who echoed the usual charge that without the threat of Hell, men, marked by original sin would sink into depravity, sin, and degradation.  Moreover, the promise of universal salvation meant that the oppressors of the Black race, those who had held them in slavery and who were creating the new Jim Crow South, would also reside ultimately in Heaven.  The Black Church had long offered the solace that as a People they would "cross over Jordan” leaving slavery and degradation behind and being rewarded with eternal life in the arms of the Lord while their evil oppressors would be struck down and condemned to eternal damnation.  It was a comforting thought, but one that made Jordan’s task more difficult.

Despite these difficulties, Jordan’s little congregation thrived.  The congregation formally organized itself as a Universalist Mission in June of 1887.

He was soon approached about adding a school to the church’s services.  Freedmen schools of Reconstruction which had been staffed by idealistic mostly Northern teachers, many of the Quakers, Unitarians, and Universalists were long gone.  And in the re-segregated South of emerging Jim Crow, public schools for Blacks were pitifully funded with few books, woefully underpaid teachers, and students crammed into tiny, overcrowded facilities.  Blacks often turned to private academies sponsored by local churches. Classes were operating at the capacity of the rented Chapel by the next fall.

                                        

                                                                The Seal of the Universalist General Convention which ordained Jordan.

Jordan’s next step was to apply to be officially recognized as a Universalist preacher.  With Sweetser’s endorsement the Universalist General Convention granted him a one-year license to preach in June of 1888.  This was the first step in the process of ordination. 

The following year a Universalist Ordaining Council of three ministers including Sweetser and four lay persons met with Jordan in the Church of the Messiah to examine his fitness for the Universalist ministry. The council found him to have a “clear and bright mind” and to be “free alike from pretension and from abjectness.”  Most importantly “He believes in us and knows why.”  The Council endorsed his candidacy as “exceedingly satisfactory.” The next day, March 31, 1880, Jordan was ordained as a Universalist minister at a ceremony in the Church of the Messiah. He was the first fully and properly ordained Black minister of the Universalist General Convention.

His mission church was reorganized as the First Universalist Church of Norfolk and admitted to the Convention, which agreed to subsidize its operations and Jordan’s efforts to further spread Universalism in the upper South.

All of this frenzied activity to get his church and school set up and operating and regularizing his personal and professional ties to the wider Universalist movement put a strain on his marriage.  His wife Indianna left him taking their son Thaddeus with her.  The couple was divorced in 1890.

Soon the Church outgrew its rented room.  The Congregation was unable to raise the money to buy property and build a building on its own so Jordan personally appealed to the General Convention meeting in Washington D.C. in 1893.   $2,758 was raised for this purpose, enough to build a church and provide for some of its furnishings.  Johnson himself built the new church on Princess Anne Avenue in the heart of the Black community which opened in November 1894.

Students at Joseph Jordan's school at the turn of the 20th Century.

The new building included a more spacious sanctuary and classrooms.  It even attracted a handful of local White Universalists who had no church of their own in which to worship—a then rare breach of rigid segregation in Sunday worship.  Jordan shared instructional duties at the school now with two additional teachers.

That led to romance.  In 1896 Jordan married one of his teachers, Mary Elizabeth Clark who was about half his age.  The couple had one child, Richard Sweetser Jordan.

His happiness was not to last long.  He worked long and hard to make his congregation and school thrive.  He was able to achieve part of his dream of spreading Universalism when he founded a Suffolk Mission as a daughter of his Norfolk congregation. Perhaps over work contributed to his death in 1901.  He was widely mourned in the Norfolk black community—even former foes and critics among the city’s other clergy turning out for his funeral in recognition of his good work.

Although Jordan’s cause of death was not listed, both his wife and his son died of tuberculosis within two years, making it likely that the scourge also contributed to his death.  With his family gone his estate went to the General Convention which used the proceeds to subsidize the growing Suffolk church.

Rev. Joseph Fletcher Jordan, no relation to Joseph Jordan, was the third ordained Black Universalist Minister and kept the Suffolk daughter church of the Norfolk congregation founded by the elder Jordan open.

Unfortunately, without Jordan’s personal leadership his Norfolk congregation began to unravel.  The church was closed in 1906 and the building became a billiard parlor.  The Suffolk church, however continued to thrive, especially after the arrival of Joseph Fletcher Jordan, the Universalist’s third African American minister in 1904.  Despite the similarity of name, the two Jordans were not related.  The Suffolk church and its day school continued service until the congregation dissolved in1984.

 

That Ain't I a Woman Speaker Not What You Thought

 

Sojourner Truth giving her famous speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron in 1851.

On May 28, 1851 fifty-four-year-old Sojourner Truth mounted the platform and addressed the delegates to an Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron.  The meeting was held only three years after the inaugural Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. 

Truth was a former slave who had gained fame as a lay preacher and abolitionist speaker.  Accounts differ as to whether she was fully welcomed or if there were some women afraid that her presence would antagonize men otherwise sympathetic to her cause.  But Truth was already friendly with leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and most of her audience that day were either already convinced abolitionists, or at least sympathetic. 

The speech Truth gave has outlasted any other comments at the meeting and it is widely quoted by both feminists and African-American activists.  But the speech she gave may not have been the one widely quoted with its repeated refrain of “Ain’t I a Woman?” 

Truth was born a slave in 1797 in Swartekill, New York.  Her birth name was Isabella Baumfree, one of thirteen children.  The Hardenbergh family which owned her was from old Dutch colonial stock and Dutch was her first language.  She was sold along with a herd of sheep at the age of nine to English speaking tavern keeper John Neely for $100. 

By her later accounts Neely beat and raped her.  She was sold twice more becoming the property of John Dumont of West Park in 1810.  Conditions were less harsh than with her previous owners and Isabella, called Belle, labored there for several years.  She fell in love with a slave named Robert from a neighboring farm, but his owner forbad the relationship and beat him so severely that he later died.  Robert fathered her first two children. 

In 1817 Dumont selected another of his slaves, Thomas, to be her husband and he fathered three more children by 1826.

Under New York’s gradual emancipation law slavery would officially end on July 4, 1827.  Dumont had promised her release early in exchange for “doing well and faithful,” but reneged after a hand injury left her less than a fully effective worker.  Feeling cheated but determined to be fair to her master, she spun him 100 lbs. of wool, what she thought her remaining time was worth and escaped with her infant daughter. 

She could not take her other children because even under emancipation they would be held as bond servants until they were 21.  She found a sympathetic home with Isaac and Maria Van Wagener who took her in and settled her debt with Dumont for $20.  She stayed with them until emancipated under the law. 

Learning that Dumont had illegally sold her five-year-old son south to Alabama, she sued her former master with the support of the Van Wageners and after several months was able to recover her son.  She was the first Black in New York State to successfully sue a white man. 

During her time with the Wagner family, she experienced a religious conversion and became a devout Christian.  

Sojourner Truth's association with the religious fraudster Robert Mathews led to her indictment for the murder of her previous employer.  After a sensational trial she was acquitted.

In 1829 she moved with her son Peter to New York City to serve as housekeeper for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson.  Through Pierson she met the religious charlatan Robert Matthews, a.k.a. Matthias Kingdom and the Prophet Matthias who had bilked Pierson and several others out of two houses and large sums of money.  Bella went to work for him in 1832.  When Pierson died a short time later both she and Matthews were charged with his murder but acquitted.  Mathews headed west in an attempt to strike up an alliance with the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith leaving Belle behind. 

Despite the notoriety of the trial she was able to scrape together a living in the city.  Her son Peter signed on whaling ship in 1839 and after three letters never heard from him again. 

In 1842 she adopted the name Sojourner Truth because, “The Spirit calls me and I must.”  She became a Methodist, and like many others became a lay preacher and traveling evangelist mixing in a heavy dose of abolitionism.  Gaining a reputation, she was invited to join Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts in 1844.  One of many utopian social experiments of the era, the Association was founded by abolitionists and supported women’s rights and pacifism.  Other members of the association included leading abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass.  Like other communal experiments of the era, the Northampton Association collapsed in 1847 and Truth went to work as a housekeeper for Garrison’s brother-in-law.  

The front piece and title page of the first edition of Sojourner Truth's memoirs.

While there she dictated her memoirs to her friend Olivia Gilbert.  In 1850 Garrison arranged a private printing of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave.  The book was widely read in liberal circles and cemented Truth’s reputation.  The same year she was able to buy her own home in Northampton for $300 and attended the first full National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts where she shared the platform such leaders as Lucy Stone, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Ernestine Rose, and Antoinette Brown as well as old friends Garrison and Douglass.  More than 900 people attended the convention, which attracted wide, if sometimes derisive, coverage. 

Truth came to the 1850 meeting in while on a western speaking tour with abolitionist George Thompson.  The first published version of her speech was transcribed by local newspaperman Marius Robinson and was published a month after the event.  The speech was stirring and contrasted the leisure afforded White women who were “put on a pedestal” with the grim “work or die” reality for Black women both slave and free.  But it was rendered as standard English and nowhere included the words “Ain’t I a woman.” 

Those were included, along with idiomatic—and stereotypical—Southern Black speech patterns in a version of the speech published 13 years after it was given by one of the meetings organizers, Frances Dana Barker Gage.  Gage’s version is the one widely quoted today.  Yet it has its many doubters.  It is unlikely that Truth, a native Dutch speaker who had spent her entire life well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, spoke with any kind of southern drawl, Black or otherwise.  On the other hand, supporters of the Gage version argue that Robinson “cleaned up” Truth’s raw language for his genteel readers. 

More telling are factual inaccuracies in the Gage version, including the claim that she had 13 children “most of which” were sold into slavery.  In fact, she had five children, one of whom was temporarily sold into slavery.  Gage also embellished the circumstances of the speech, making it sound as if Truth spoke to a hostile audience, whereas contemporary accounts, including her own, attested to a warm reception.  The speech as recorded by Gage in 1863 began:

 Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin’ out o’ kilter. I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin’ ‘bout? Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! ‘And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?...

By contrast Robinson recorded:

 I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now...

To my ears, the originally published journal sound much more likely to have been given by a woman who had been raised in the North, had spent many years in association with highly educated people, and made a living as a preacher and speaker. 

Truth spent the next decade touring in support of abolition and women’s rights working in close association with Robinson.  She had many colorful encounters with hostile audiences, including one where a heckler insisted that she was a man, so she opened her shirt to show her breasts. 

In 1856 she sold her Northumberland home and moved to the Battle Creek, Michigan area which she would consider home for the rest of her life.  The household in her new home included a grown daughter, Elizabeth Banks, and two grandsons. 

                                    

                                                Sojourner Truth in her later years.

With the outbreak of the Civil War she saw her older grandson, James Caldwell enlist in the famous Black 54th Massachusetts while she recruited other blacks to rally for the Union.  In 1864 she was called to Washington to join the National Freedman’s Relief Association to improve the lot of newly freed slaves.  She met President Abraham Lincoln, and almost a hundred years before Rosa Parks insisted on riding Washington horse car trolleys effectively, if temporarily ending segregation on them. 

She tried to claim her 40 acres and a Mule as a freedman herself, appealing to President Ulysses Grant himself in 1870.  But despite seven years of effort was turned down because she was a woman and had been freed by a northern state years earlier.  

The Sojourner Truth Memorial statue in Florence, Michigan.

Truth resumed speaking tours after the war then returned to Battle Creek to try to vote in the 1872 Election.  But she was tired.  Sojourner Truth died in her Battle Creek home on November 26, 1886 at the age of 86.