#lincoln cemetery
Women’s History Month
Margaret Palm-African-American History-Civil War
Margaret Palm lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, along with 190 other free African-Americans, making up about 8% of the town’s population. She rented a white shack on the west end of Emmitsburg Road, and lived there with her husband, Alf Palm and their one child.
During the months leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg, African-American members of the Gettysburg community began fleeing their homes for fear that their freedom and safety would be in jeopardy, once the Confederate army invaded their little town.
There are many stories that surround the persona of “Mag Palm”, as she was called, some perhaps mere legends passed on by other civilians over the years. One legend refers to Mag as “Maggie Bluecoat”, referring to the story that she wore a blue coat of an officer of the War of 1812, and carried a musket while aiding other slaves in their fight for freedom from slavery.
One account, however, of an attempted kidnapping of Mag Palm by two local men is well known and well documented. Many free African-Americans were often victims of kidnapping by their own white neighbors, often to be sold off to Southerners for slavery.
Like the majority of African-American women in the Gettysburg community during the Civil War years, Mag made a hard living by scrubbing floors and washing the clothes of her white neighbors. One cold winter night in 1858, three years before the war even began, upon returning home from picking up her pay from one of her employers, Mag was attacked by two men who tried to tie her hands and take her away. . Mag managed to fight both men off with the help of another neighbor, John Karseen, a store owner in town, who witnessed the attack. Years later Mag Palm was photographed demonstrating how the men bound her hands and documented the attack for history.
During the battle, her home on Emmitsburg Road was occupied by the Union army and eventually destroyed in the fighting on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863. Despite hardships in her own marriage, as her husband drank and was often prone to fits of rage, she managed to buy her own home again along Long Lane, a black community in the town, after the battle was finally over. She continued to struggle financially and was never able to stop beating rugs and scrubbing floors for a living.
Mag Palm passed away in October of 1896 from a heart ailment. She was buried in the Lincoln Cemetery in Gettysburg, among many other African-American civilians of the town. Her courageous story of struggle and survival is only one of the many forgotten African-American civilian stories of the women who lived and survived the battles fought right in their own communities, during the Civil War.
