Gould’s descendants unveil his statue.
Civil War vet William B. Gould and his sons (left to right) Lawrence, James, William Jr., Herbert, Ernest and Frederick.
Hundreds pay tribute to former slave William Benjamin Gould
William Benjamin Gould’s remarkable life, leading from bondage in the antebellum South to a daring escape and service in the Union Navy, was celebrated over Memorial Day weekend with the dedication of a bronze statue in Dedham, the town where he settled and raised his family after the Civil War.
The emotional unveiling of Gould’s dignified seated figure took place on the centennial anniversary of his death and in the presence of his great-grandson, William B. Gould IV, a retired Stanford Law professor, whose father grew up in the nearby family homestead on the Boston-Dedham line.
Several of Gould’s great-greatgreat grandchildren pulled on a black cloth to reveal the contemplative image, but the fabric snagged, requiring the aid of two 54th Massachusetts Regiment re-enactors to use their long bayonets to lift the cloth and complete the unveiling.
Several hundred Dedham residents, gathered to witness the ceremony at William B. Gould Park, broke into applause. The re-enactors fired volleys of tribute from their Springfield percussion-cap muskets into the still spring air.
In remarks to the audience, Gould IV, 86, said that on a family trip to Wilmington, N.C., where his great-grandfather worked as an enslaved plasterer, they saw no statues of any Black veterans of the Civil War but passed by many of Confederate soldiers.
“Statues cannot be viewed as neutral and they do not exist in a vacuum. They project the memories of the past and the values associated with them,” Gould IV said.
“When the time capsules contained within this statue are opened, 100 and 200 years from now, it may be that William B. Gould’s values, expressed in war and peace here in Dedham, will in some way shape or promote the discussions of future generations.”
Those values led all of Gould’s six sons into military service, some as officers, in the Spanish-American War and World War I. The father was a founder of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Dedham’s Oakdale Square, where he did the plastering work on the Episcopalian sanctuary’s interior.
The church honored the Dedham veteran during a Sunday morning service with the family seated in the same pew occupied by the Goulds for decades before the family dispersed around the country.
Gould also built strong ties to
St. Mary’s Church in Dedham. He won the plastering contract for the
church in the late 19th century. After discovering that inferior cement
had been used, he ordered all the work ripped out and redone at his
expense. The decision nearly bankrupted his firm but won him plaudits
for his honesty and probity.
Gould’s
adventure from slavery to freedom began in the bustling riverport city
of Wilmington. On the day before President Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the states under rebellion,
the 24-year-old Gould joined seven others in rowing 28 miles up the Cape
Fear River into the open Atlantic, where they were picked up by the
passing frigate U.S.S. Cambridge.
Gould
and his companions were declared “contraband of war,” thus
circumventing the requirements of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that
they be returned to their enslavers. Gould himself enlisted on board and
served through the end of the conflict.
He
kept a detailed diary of his experiences, which his great-grandson
published in “Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black
Sailor” in 2002.
Gould
IV speculated that his great-grandfather learned to read and write from
church missionaries in North Carolina in violation of laws prohibiting
literacy among slaves. His surviving writings include several columns
published under the pseudonym “Oley” in New York City’s “The
Anglo-African,” an abolitionist newspaper.
His
contributions were part of an active political and social life of
concerts, lectures and meetings pursued during shore-leave in New York,
Boston and other ports.
In
Nantucket, he met his future wife, Cornelia Reed, a former slave whose
freedom was purchased with the help of prominent Black abolitionist
Henry Highland Garnet. After the war, Gould and Reed were married
by Rev. James E. Crawford in the African Baptist Church on Nantucket.
They raised eight children together, six sons and two daughters.
Among
the most poignant of Gould’s writings is a description of his return to
occupied Wilmington — his birthplace, the scene of his escape and the
place his skilled work can still be seen in the antebellum Bellamy
mansion.
Writing in the Nov. 4, 1865 “Anglo-African,” seven
months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Gould finds “the
old Town anything but what we left it. Her streets are entirely
deserted. Her wharves that used to groan under millions of barrels and
thousands of bales are entirely bare. Her stores are all closed with few
exceptions and her workshops are silent. The river glides noiselessly
by, and not a ship there to break the current. The grass is growing
unmolested in her streets.”
Nowhere
is the double veil, of which W.E.B. DuBois wrote in “The Souls of Black
Folk,” more evident than in what follows: The reflections of a man —
born a slave, now free, a Black sailor in a white navy — looking at the
dying embers of a city he once knew but seeing in its demise a new burst
of freedom.
“Yet with
all this change for the worse, there is a still greater change for the
better,” Gould wrote. “You miss the Auction block in Market Square where
the traffic in Human beings used to be carried on. Her Traders Jails
are turned into military Guard Houses, where at any time you may see any
number of the former Lords of the soil taking a view of the passerby
from a commanding position. The nine O’clock Bell, too is silent, and
when you walk out at night the demand for your Pass is not made, and
upon the whole, Wilmington is changed.”
By
that point in his life, Gould had seen more of the world than most
Americans ever would: he had crossed the Atlantic in the U.S.S. Niagara
to pursue Confederate ships off the coast of France, England, Holland,
Spain and Portugal; met famous writers and preachers like Henry Beecher
Stowe, father of the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; and took up both pen
and cutlass to combat the greatest evil of the age.
Discharged
from the Navy on Sept. 29, 1865, after three years and nine days of
service, Gould soon married and moved to Dedham, the Norfolk County
seat.
Gould was active
in the Charles W. Carroll Post 144 of the Grand Army of the Republic
and held nearly every post, including commander. He died at age 85 in
1923.
The Dedham
Transcript recorded his death under the headline: “East Dedham Mourns
Faithful Soldier and Always Loyal Citizen: Death Came Very Suddenly to
William B. Gould, Veteran of the Civil War.”
The
statue, commissioned under the leadership of Brian Keaney, a
fourth-generation Dedhamite, was sculpted by Bolivan-born Pablo Eduardo,
who studied period clothing to render the image historically accurate.
Sitting atop a granite plinth on a ridge above Mother Brook, the statue
includes Gould’s toolbox at his feet. Draped over his chair is the coat
he wore as commander of the veterans post.
Gould
IV, a past chairman of the National Labor Relations Board who led
negotiations to settle the 1993 Major League Baseball strike, said his
great-grandfather, were he alive today, would surely “want us to repair
the inequality in our country, as he did with his work, with great care
and honesty.”
Gould and his companions
were declared “contraband of war,” thus circumventing the requirements
of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that they be returned to their
enslavers. Gould himself enlisted on board and served through the end of
the conflict.