Sites of Memory: The Amherstburg Freedom Museum and Henry Bibb

In the first chapter of Narrative of the Life and Times of Henry Bibb. He was born May 1815 to a slave mother. when the Partus sequitur ventrem law was passed, all children of slave mothers would become slaves.

The photo on page 71 displays Henry Bibb shackled with a slave hunter on either side of him. Henry had recently escaped and been captured. His whereabouts had been exposed by two black men in Cincinnati. Who then told the slave hunters where he was located. After being captured, the slave hunters promised to buy Henry out of slavery if he were to expose where other escaped slaves were. These slave-hunters had paid so much in the search for Henry that they were desperate to recoup their costs by selling him and using potential information he knew to capture other slaves.

It’s interesting to see how a career could be made just by tracking down escaped slaves, it surely would have been a lucrative career as well. The men who captured Henry had spent hundreds of dollars through advertising and travel expenses, which was a huge amount of money at the time.

This is a drawing on page 125 depicting Henry Bibb fighting off wolves that are surrounding his wife and daughter. By including this sketch, It shows the hardships and the lengths that enslaved individuals would go through in order to escape their enslavement.
Throughout Bibb’s narrative, he laments about his daughter, Mary Frances, and how frightened she is and how he cares for her. This passage and picture clearly show how much fear Bibb held for his family, and with us as readers knowing that they will never see each other again, it hurts all the more. However, Bibb wrote this after the separation, so we need to acknowledge that parts of the narrative may be embellished due to heavy emotions and trauma. This is not to discredit the passages, but to analyze them within an emotional as well as historical context.

This picture on page 129 shows Bibb and his family fleeing from slave hunters and their bloodhounds. The passage beside it on page 128 describes the Bibb’s running away from the hunters just after the wolf attack as mentioned previously on page 125.
This was a reality for many individuals fleeing enslavement and the fear and chaos surrounding it. The picture shows the hunters on horseback holding rifles with the dogs running ahead of them. This invokes images of fox or deer hunts that occurred as sport. The angling of the picture with the family in front and the hunters chasing after them in a line-formation is militaristic and creates a sense of dread and anxiety for the reader. It exemplifies the emotions and memories of Bibb when he was running and allows the reader a glimpse of his memories in the form of a sketch.

This drawing on page 133 depicts Henry Bibb bound after being caught escaping his cotton plantation and receiving lashings. The man lashing Henry Bibb is the plantation overseer. The man in the hat is presumably Deacon Whitfield. Whitfield ordered for all of the slaves to gather around to create a specimen of escapees, and slaves who went to pray without permission, Henry had only committed the former. Henry was forced to lay face down and was stripped of his clothing, each limb was then tied to a stake. Bibbs had received fifty lashes before Whitfield stopped commanding the overseer to lay them. After the lashings Whitfield had said that there was an area of Bibb’s back that more marks could fit in, he was then paddled. After receiving these blows Bibb was washed in salt brine.

The inclusion of this image provided a graphic insight into the life of a slave, something that was rare and limited by first-hand accounts and drawings.