Overlooked No More: William B. Gould, Escaped Slave and Civil War Diarist

This article was published on June 17, 2022, by The New York Times obituaries reporter Clay Risen. This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

On the night of Sept. 21, 1862, eight men slipped through the streets of downtown Wilmington, N.C. It was raining and humid, uncomfortable enough to keep residents, who might raise an alarm, off the street.

Reaching the docks along the Cape Fear River, the men commandeered a small sailboat. They kept the sail stowed to reduce the risk of being seen, and they rowed with the current to the river’s outlet into the Atlantic Ocean, 28 miles downstream. They made it to open waters just before dawn.

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