Gould, William Benjamin, 1837-1923

Among the eight men — all escaped slaves — was William B. Gould, a skilled tradesman who had worked as a plasterer around Wilmington. He could read and write, which was rare for an enslaved person, though he couldn’t know that just a day later, President Abraham Lincoln would sign the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that on Jan. 1, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy would be free.

Over the next two and a half years, until the end of the war, Gould served in the United States Navy, one of the few escaped slaves to do so, though nearly 180,000 served in the Army. And from the beginning, he kept a journal, the only known record of the war written by a contraband.

Gould chronicled the timeless monotony of shipboard life, but also the occasional excitement of chasing down Confederate blockade runners. He documented the relative racial equality he found in the Navy, but also the endless slights and occasional episodes of outright discrimination faced by Black sailors.

In the diary, which was later transcribed into a book, complete with misspellings, he recounted how in New York City he had visited the offices of The Anglo-African, one of the country’s leading Black newspapers, then “pass’d throug some of the wealthey streets of Brooklyn” and later “Listened to a verry good Lecture by George Thompson of England,” one of Britain’s leading abolitionists.

Gould was across the Atlantic, helping chase down Confederate warships, when he heard the news that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had captured Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital.

After the war Gould settled in Dedham, Mass., and became a prosperous contractor. His diary ended up packed away in his attic.

William Benjamin Gould was born on Nov. 18, 1837, in Wilmington. His father, Alexander Gould, was a white Englishman; his mother, Elizabeth Moore, was an enslaved Black woman. The details of their relationship are unknown.

William and his mother were properties of a white peanut farmer named Nicholas Nixon. At some point William learned to read and write, skills largely forbidden to enslaved people. Professor Gould speculates that William Gould may have been taught by white missionaries, who were known to defy slave owners by providing enslaved people with a basic education.

Gould also learned masonry, and Nixon hired him out to construction and renovation projects around the Wilmington area. The plaster molding at one home, the Bellamy Mansion — now a museum — still bears his initials.

Once aboard the Cambridge, he enlisted for a three-year term as a first-class boy, essentially an onboard servant. “First taking the Oath of Allegiance to the Government of Uncle Samuel,” he noted on Oct. 3, 1862. Though as a Black man Gould had only limited opportunities for advancement, he was later promoted to landsman and then wardroom steward.

The Navy was not segregated the way the Army was; white and Black men served and lived side by side. But Gould still experienced racism and discrimination at the hands of white officers. In his diary he notes how they occasionally refused to let Black sailors eat out of the ship’s mess pans because they did not want to use the same ones.

He contracted measles in May 1865, and the next several months, which he spent convalescing on shore, account for the only significant pause in his diary keeping.

Gould ultimately headed north to New York and Boston, where he switched ships, to the Niagara, whose forthcoming assignment was to interdict Confederate ships coming from Europe.

He traveled back to Wilmington, which he found eerily empty, then back to Massachusetts, to Nantucket, where he married Cornelia Williams Read, who had also been enslaved. They settled in Dedham, Mass., and had eight children, six of whom served in the Army.

In time he became a Dedham elder; he was the commander of the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the country’s leading veterans organization, and in 1918 he spoke at the town’s Decoration Day (today Memorial Day) festivities.

Gould died on May 25, 1923, at the age of 85. Though his descendants knew that he had served in the Civil War, it was only after years of research that William B. Gould IV discovered that his forebear had been born into slavery and had escaped from it.

William Benjamin Gould (November 18, 1837 – May 25, 1923) was a former enslaved person and veteran of the American Civil War, serving in the U.S. Navy. His diary is one of only a few written during the Civil War by a formerly enslaved person that has survived, and the only by a formerly enslaved sailor.[1]

William B. Gould was born in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 18, 1837,[2] to an enslaved woman, Elizabeth "Betsy" Moore,[a] and Alexander Gould, an English-born resident of Granville County, NC.[4] He was enslaved by Nicholas Nixon, a peanut planter[5][6] who owned a large plantation site on Porters Neck.[7] and at Rocky Point. Gould worked as a plasterer at the antebellum Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington, North Carolina and carved his initials into some of the plaster there.[5]

Just as the dawn was breaking on September 22, they rushed out into the Atlantic Ocean near Fort Caswell and hoisted their sail.[10][5][11] There, the USS Cambridge of the Union blockade picked them up as contraband.[5][12] Other ships in the blockade picked up two other boats containing friends of Gould in what may have been a coordinated effort.[14][8][15][d] Though Gould had no way of knowing it, within an hour and a half of his rescue President Abraham Lincoln convened a meeting of his cabinet to finalize plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.[10][14][12]

During the war, his home was burned and with it a family Bible.[7] His birthday was inscribed in that Bible but that was the only record of his birth.[7]

Gould visited Wilmington after the war, perhaps in October 1865, and found it to be largely deserted, very unlike the bustling city he knew before the war.[12][31] He found it to be an improvement, however, where many of the trappings of the former slave economy had been removed.[12][31]

Gould married in 1865 and spent his first year as a married man working as a plasterer on Nantucket.[32] After living in New Hampshire and in Taunton, Massachusetts for a time, in 1871 the Goulds moved to 303-307 Milton Street in Dedham, Massachusetts.[33][5][15] In Dedham, Gould became a building contractor and pillar of the community.[34][33][5][15] Gould "took great pride in his work"[19] as a plasterer and brick mason.[2] His skill was rewarded with contracts for public buildings, including several schools.[32]Shortly before he got sick with the measles, Gould met John Robert Bond, another black sailor serving on the Ohio.[21] The Gould home was close to the border with Readville, where Bond settled after the war.[40][f] The two would reconnect ten years after the war and become good friends.[21] Gould would later serve as godfather to Bond's second son.[42]

Gould helped to build the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepard in Oakdale Square, though as a parishioner and not as a contractor.[5][33][12][15] He and his wife were baptized and confirmed there in 1878 and 1879.[24][g] As a signer of the Articles of Incorporation, he was one of its founders.[38] Gould's family remained active members of the church and, along with the Bonds and one other family, the Chesnuts, were the only black parishioners.[43] There was only one other black family in Dedham at the time.[5][35] Gould and his family were more likely to experience subtle slights on account of their race as opposed to outright racism while living in Dedham.[44]

Gould was extremely active in the Charles W. Carroll[h] Post 144 of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR).[46][5][47][12][15] He "held virtually every position that it was possible to hold in the GAR from the time he joined [in 1882] until his death in 1923, including the highest post, commander, in 1900 and 1901."[48][49][12] He attended the statewide encampments of the GAR in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with Bond and other black veterans from the area.[50][48] He also joined the Mt. Moriah Masonic Prince Hall Lodge in Cambridge with several other black veterans.[51] In 1911, Gould was interviewed by the local veteran's association about his wartime experiences.[24]

After he was discharged from the Navy on September 29, 1865[12] at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Massachusetts, Gould considered moving back to North Carolina where he believed he would have "a fair chance of success [in] my business".[59] Instead, he immediately went to Nantucket where he married Cornelia Williams Read,[i] on November 22, 1865 at the African Baptist Church on Nantucket.[63][5][19][64][12][15] Rev. James E. Crawford, Read's uncle, officiated.[15][64] Gould had known Read since childhood,[3][15] and she was his most frequent wartime correspondent.[59] Cornelia, who had been purchased out of slavery, was then living on Nantucket.[5][65]

Their oldest daughter, Medora Williams, was born on Nantucket, and their oldest son, William B. Gould Jr., was born in Taunton.[49] The rest, Fredrick Crawford, Luetta Ball, Lawrence Wheeler, Herbert Richardson, and twins James Edward and Ernest Moore, were all born in Dedham.[49]

The 1880 United States census lists a boy with the last name of Mabson living with the Goulds and working as an employee of Gould's.[66] The child is almost certainly the son of one of Gould's nephews through his sister Eliza, George Lawrence Mabson or William Mabson.[66]

Five of his sons would fight in World War I and one in the Spanish–American War.[5] A photo of the six sons and their father, all in military uniform, would appear in the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, in December 1917.[63][67][68] The three youngest sons, all officers, were training to go and fight in World War I in France.[63][67][68] Gould's great-grandson would describe them as "a family of fighters."[19]

Beginning with his time on the Cambridge and continuing through his discharge at the end of the war, Gould kept a diary of his day-to-day activities.[5][12] According to John Hope Franklin, Gould's diary is one of three known diaries in existence written during the Civil War by former slaves, and the only one by a Union sailor.[5][1] It is a "wealth of information about what it was like to be an African American in the Union Navy."[72]

The diary begins on September 27, 1862, five days after boarding the Cambridge, and runs until his discharge on September 29, 1865.[73] There is a section missing, which included the dates of September 1863 to February 1864.[73] It consists of two books plus 40 unbound pages.[73] It is thought that some sections of the diary, which would cover late 1864 and early 1865, have been destroyed.[74]

In the diary, Gould chronicles his trips to the northeastern United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and England.[75] The diary is distinguished not only by its details and eloquent tone, but also by its author's reflections on the conduct of the war, his own military engagements, race, race relations in the Navy, and what African Americans might expect after the war and during the Reconstruction Era.