William B. Gould was born in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 18, 1837, to an enslaved woman, Elizabeth "Betsy" Moore, and Alexander Gould, an English-born resident of Granville County, NC. He was enslaved by Nicholas Nixon, a peanut planter who owned a large plantation site on Porters Neck. and at Rocky Point. Gould worked as a plasterer at the antebellum Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington, North Carolina and carved his initials into some of the plaster there.

On September 21, 1862, William B. Gould and seven other enslaved men escaped from Wilmington via the Cape Fear River and headed for the Union-occupied zone of the North Carolina coast.
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Photo description: Middle top- and bottom right- Civil War veteran William B. Gould (seated) and his sons (left to right): Lawrence W. Gould, 1st Lt. James E. Gould, Major William B. Gould Jr., Lt. Herbert R. Gould, 1st Lt. Ernest M. Gould, & Fredrick C. Gould. December 1917

Bottom middle: William B. Gould and Cornelia Williams Read Gould with their children in the late 1880's. Back row: Lawrence Wheeler Gould, Herbert Richardson Gould, William B. Gould Jr., Medora Williams Gould; Front row: Luetta Ball Gould, James Edward Gould, Cornelia Williams Read Gould, William B. Gould, Ernest Moore Gould.
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Six days later they were picked up by the USS Cambridge and recorded as “eight contrabands from Wilmington.” Gould and his fellow escapees enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He began documenting his experiences on September 27, the day that he encountered the crewmen of the Cambridge. He kept the journal for three years; the last entry was dated September 29, 1865.

His is one of only three known diaries written by African American sailors during the Civil War, and is the only one penned by a formerly enslaved man. Gould’s diary was written in a spare style, as might be expected given the demanding routine of life aboard a naval vessel, which usually left little time for long reflective entries.

Frequently entries include comments on the weather and various incidents of interest, sometimes serious and sometimes comic in nature, as well as brief descriptions of contacts with over Union naval vessels, encounters with the enemy, the pickup of other escaped slaves, references to letters from family of friends, notations to visitors of the ships, and, in the case of the European stint of the voyage, details of ports of call.

Other entries briefly comment on the conduct of the war, such as Gould’s April 16, 1864, expression of frustration regarding the failure of the U.S. government to retaliate for the recent massacre of black and white U.S. soldiers by Confederate troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee.

Gould’s great-grandson, Stanford University law professor William B. Gould IV, edited the diary for publication in 2002. The diary is of great interest to those researching the activities of the U.S. Navy and the African American experience in the war. William B. Gould is also believed to be the author, under the pen name of “Oley,” of several pieces published during the war in the Weekly Anglo-African, a New York journal.
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William B. Gould I (1837-1923), was an enslaved plasterer in Wilmington, North Carolina, until he escaped by sea in 1862. His only known project in North Carolina is the elaborate plasterwork at the Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington. The identification in 2002 of his initials, WBG, inscribed on the back of a section of decorative plasterwork in the house revealed his previously unknown role at the mansion. Although he surely worked on other antebellum buildings, they have not been identified.

Gould, who belonged to the local Nixon family, was the son of Alexander Gould, an Englishman, and Elizabeth Moore, a Wilmington slave. As well as gaining the skills of his trade like a number of Wilmington slaves, he defied state laws and learned to read and write. He was one of several enslaved plasterers in Wilmington, including George W. Price, Sr. and Jr. (see Price Family).

During the Civil War, on the night of September 21, 1862, Gould and George W. Price, Jr. joined other slaves in an escape by water. They found a boat and rowed it down the Cape Fear River. On September 22 they boarded a Union vessel, the U. S. S. Cambridge, whose officer recorded picking up “a boat with eight contrabands from Wilmington” and listed their names and masters. Gould and the others joined the Union navy, and Gould kept a diary of his experiences. After the war, he established himself as a plasterer and bricklayer in Dedham, Massachusetts. He married Cornelia Read, a freedwoman from Wilmington, and the couple became prominent members of the community. They raised a large family including sons who also served in the military.

Their descendant William B. Gould IV, a professor of law at Stanford University, produced a book about his ancestor. Its publication was instrumental in the identification of Gould’s initials at the Bellamy Mansion. Beverly Tetterton, who was then head of the local history room at the New Hanover County Library, recalls the discovery: “It all came together with Strength Through Struggle.

I had been working with Professor Gould for years and asked if we could put the WBG story in Strength Through Struggle (we didn’t know as much then as now). The library gave complimentary copies to all the history related groups in town including the Bellamy Mansion. The day of the big book party . . . I was setting up in the Thalian Hall Ballroom and a breathless Jonathan [Noffke, then director of the Bellamy Mansion Museum] ran into the room holding up his copy of the book and screaming ‘I have to speak to this man!’ He had put two and two together and realized that the initials matched the ones on the plaster at the Bellamy Mansion. Eureka! The handwriting in the diary and on the plaster was a match. The rest is history.”
(Beverly Tetterton, email to author, 2006)

Author: Catherine W. Bishir.
Published 2015

Source: https://ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu/people/P000320

Source:
http://www.ncmarkers.com/Markers.aspx?MarkerId=D-120

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Gould