In the spring of 1861, two men appeared before the St. Louis County clerk to sign a document. One of the men, as described in detail in the document’s margins, was a “barber and boathand,” 37 years old and 5 feet 7-and-a-half inches tall. Other such documents described signees as “light,” “dark,” “copper,” “high yellow,” “bright” — and even though it did not say so here, everyone knew the man who signed his name in a wide script, Moses Dickson, was a free African American.

Below his signature was that of the other man, John How. Though the document left off How’s profession, age and height, everyone in the courthouse would have known him — he was, after all, the former mayor of St. Louis. As the battles between the Union and Confederacy began, How and Dickson signed a free negro bond, one of the most peculiar public documents of the war era.