Anderson Whitted

Anderson Whitted was born in October 1848 in Orange County, North Carolina, one of nine children. The enslaver was a doctor whose family were Hicksite Quakers. His mother cared for the white children. His father belonged to the doctor's half-brother fourteen miles away and was allowed a horse to visit every two weeks. His father could read and spell well and taught the children; though the law forbade it, the family owned a Bible and a spelling book. His grandmother often traveled with the doctor to help care for the sick.

When the war broke out, the doctor's son joined the Confederate army and was wounded. The doctor and Anderson's grandmother went to bring him home; the doctor died on the way, but his grandmother nursed the son back to health. After that, the doctor's older son took over, and things changed for the worse. He refused the enslaved their share of the crops and turned Anderson's whole family out by the road in June, just before a big wheat harvest. Anderson, then sixteen, ran fourteen miles to get his father, who borrowed wagons and rented a house at the edge of town. Soon after, freedom came, and the family was together for the first time. They received government rations of hardtack and pickled beef. During the war Anderson had also run off for two weeks to a Union camp, where he gathered firewood on horseback for the soldiers, the happiest days he had known.

He saw processions of people tied together behind wagons after sales, with mothers' babies sold away from them. His older brother attended a Quaker school and later held federal posts in Washington. In 1880 Anderson moved to Rockville, Indiana, worked at the brickyards that supplied the new courthouse, and sent for his wife and seven children. He married again after his first wife's death, and in old age divided his time among his three daughters.