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Civil War: Smuggling Goods to Confederate Soldiers


"Them Dark Days" - The Arkansas Slave Narratives
The Civil War
James Gill (Marvell)

“Every so often mammy would go to Helena and generally I would go with her to help tote the things she got there. Ole Mr. Coolidge, he had the biggest and ‘bout the onliest store that was in Helena at the time. Mr. Coolidge was an old like gentleman and had everything most in his store—boots, shoes, tobacco, medicine, and so on—‘couldn’t no person go in and out of Helena at that time—that is, during the War—outer they had a pass. The Yankee soldier that write the passes was named Buford. He is the one what us always git our passes from for to get in and out. ‘Twasn’t long ‘fore Mr. Buford, he het to know my mammy right well and call her by her name. He, just like all the white men, knowed her as ‘Aunt Mary.’….

“There was a bunch of soldiers, that is the Confederates, what used to stay ‘round in the community constant, that we knowed, but they always had to be on the dodge….

Some of these men I ‘member good ‘cause they was us closet neighbors and some of them lived on ‘joining places. These soldiers…, they would come to our cabin sometimes and say, ‘Aunt Mary, we want you to go to Helena for us and git some tobacco and maybe some medicine, and so on, and we goin to write ole man Coolidge a note.’…When my mammy would take the note in, ole man Coolidge, he would fix mammy up in some of them big, wide hoop skirts and hide the things ‘neath the skirts that the men sent for. Then she, and sometime me with her, would light out for home and ‘cause we always had our pass and they knowed us and we easy get by the pickets and get home with the goods for those soldier men what sent us….”

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