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Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage. Published privately by his family, 'Before the War and After the Union' tells of Williams's life from his earliest memories of being enslaved and forced to serve Confederate soldiers in army camps, through the post-Civil War years as his family struggled to re-connect and build a new life during Reconstruction. It the ends with tales about his life as the head of a Southern Black family newly relocated to Vermont at the turn-of-the-century. When he wrote his memoir nearly sixty years after emancipation, Williams was an elderly man, far from the site of his childhood in South Carolina, but his memories and analysis were keen and veer from occasional fraught nostalgia to sharply bitter analysis.

African Americans --- Enslaved persons --- Aleckson, Sam, --- slave narrative --- Vermont --- Charleston, South Carolina