Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage. Published privately by his family, Before the War and After the Union traces Williams's life from his earliest memories of being enslaved and forced to serve Confederate soldiers in army camps, through the post-Civil War years as his family struggled to re-connect and build a new life during Reconstruction. It the ends with tales about his life as the head of a southern Black family newly relocated to Vermont at the turn-of-the-century"--