In the winter of 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant authorized two Middle Georgia men to cross through the Union army’s military lines. Their transit furthered a top-secret mission: a high-stakes conference between Alexander Stephens, the more famous of this Georgia pair, and President Abraham Lincoln. Top officials from two warring would make a long-shot attempt to end the Confederate rebellion through a negotiated peace. A gambit that Stephens hoped might also save slavery failed. Military operations continued a few months longer, giving Grant enough time to grind down rebel armies and secure an unconditional surrender and the extirpation of American bondage.
The presence of Vice-President Stephens’ enslaved attendant, a man named Benjamin Travis, drew little attention in the wide-ranging press coverage of the Hampton Roads’ Conference. But the efforts of Travis to steady the walk of the Confederate Vice-President as the two stepped aboard the Mary Martin, Grant’s own personal steamer, drew incisive first-hand commentary. Writing to a Massachusetts Senator, one informant declared it fitting that “the bone of contention between the two armies now fronting each other” had become an embodied presence at this climactic stage. The element that had brought on the conflict assumed the persona of a character at its finale, appearing “in the shape of a black man carrying a valise.”
An interchange between U.S. army officials and Alexander Stephens probed Ben Travis’s legal status, not the symbolism of his presence as him carrying the Vice-President’s baggage. Stephens insisted that Travis’s remained chattel, regardless of any Congressional dictate from Washington. He was well aware that the enemy saw things differently. Travis might have made a successful bid for personal liberation while within U.S. jurisdiction. Had Travis attempted that route, he would have broken legal ties not with Alexander but with Linton Stephens, who had been his enslaver for a dozen years prior to the historic 1865 episode that represented his brush with high-level history.
Travis went north in the first year of the Civil War, and seems never to have returned to Linton Stephens’ household in Sparta. His relocation from Hancock County to Richmond Virginia made him a resident of the Confederate capital and he likely stayed in the same city afterwards. As war raged, he was frequently mentioned in Stephens’ correspondence, as a figure who catered to the Vice President’s needs and laid the foundation of a wholly new life.
Image Credits: left: post-Civil War image of the residence of the Linton Stephens family in Sparta, where Ben Travis lived until 1861; right, one of three Alexander Stephens Richmond residences that housed Ben Travis during the Confederate rebellion. Correspondence indicates that Travis was regularly confined to cramped basement quarters in a city where housing was in short supply.
An extended 1862 back-and-forth between half-brothers Linton and Alexander Stephens scrutinized Ben Travis’s life, habits, and predilections. Linton became Travis’s enslaver in 1852, when he married the wealthy daughter of James Thomas. Over succeeding years, Linton dotted his correspondence with references to Travis as one of his most trusted enslaved subordinates By the outbreak of war, Linton claimed to understand Travis as well as any Black Georgian in his orbit. Having come to know him as intimately as “the typography of my bedroom,” Linton boasted that “with this knowledge of him,I pronounced him to be a jewel of a servant provided he has the right master.”
Linton found Travis to be most responsive to whites that exercised power and earned wide-spread public esteem. The obedience Travis performed for such men was far from complete, as several indications of his assertiveness reveal. Like free people of color with whom he associated, the enslaved Ben Travis assumed a proper as well as a Christian name and acquired an elegant writing script rare for an enslaved person. He gained enough of Linton’s trust that by 1860, he was dispatched without supervision on an errand to Kentucky. Perhaps his enslaver knew he would return, not to serve the Stephens family by to sustain ties to an enslaved wife named Mary (listed as “Taliaferro Black Lives” subject term as “Mary of Sparta”). The heavy blow of Mary’s death in January of 1861 was followed by a new love in Richmond, where he took as a second wife a free-born woman of color who earned wages as a dress-maker. This woman did not outlive the war but by 1865, Ben Travis would likely have knit himself into the fabric of Virginia’s largest city.
The last heard of Ben Travis was in 1865, when he was the intended recipient of a note written by Alexander Stephens from Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor. Having been steadied by Travis’s arm while on the way to the Hampton Roads conference, Alexander now sought out support in the form of a particular brand of Richmond tobacco. He very much wanted Ben Travis to purchase and mail it to him. In the same letter that made that request, Alexander inquired about mutual Richmond friends. There is no indication whether that final favor asked of Travis was honored or whether the letter was ignored. Just as likely was the possibilities that it never even reached the freedman to whom it was addressed.
