Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868

Rebecca Primus was the daughter of a prominent black Connecticut family who was sent south during Reconstruction by the Hartford Freedmen's Aid Society to teach newly freed slaves. Addie Brown was a domestic servant in Connecticut and New York City--as well as Rebecca's best friend and romantic companion. These two spirited, intelligent women wrote letters in this astonishing, historically priceless volume. Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends breaks the long silence surrounding the lives of black women in America and reveals an amazing world until now unknown.

"I have today put my second class into the third Reader," wrote Rebecca from the school in Maryland's Eastern Shore that was later to bear her name. "I hear the President Johnson expect to be in Hartford the 26th," exclaimed Addie. "I wish some of them present him with a ball through his head."

Shared passion, ambitions, frustrations, politics, gossip, all the fascinating minutiae of daily life, give these unique letters extraordinary flavor and richness--and offer us an unprecedented piece of American history.