The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  After a military career most notable for the number of Cherokee and Seminole he slaughtered or drove west, General Beall turned to starting Baptist churches around the state, becoming, in the words of one family genealogist, “a great Baptist exhorter.” His son, Elias Harold, who in 1840 became a major general of the Georgia militia, settled in Hamilton, opened a mercantile, and carried on the tradition of starting and tending Baptist churches. In 1863, Elias Harold’s daughter Mary Louise would marry Corporal Benjamin Henry Williams in a lavish wedding held in the midst of the Civil War. These were my paternal kinfolk.

  Hamilton’s establishment aspired to be a model of refinement, heaven to the hell of nearby Columbus, with its brawling bars and brothels, its teeming slums and smoky foundries and textile mills. In 1853, Hamilton Female College was created, boasting it would teach young ladies “to point an argument as well as to paint a picture,” and offering courses in Ovid, Virgil, and Homer. The Female College brought the brightest daughters of the best families from throughout the region “to cultivate the heart” as well as the mind.

  In addition, the county was blessed with an abundance of healing springs; spas and sanatoriums sprang up in her northern mountains. A recruitment brochure claimed Hamilton was one of the most healthful places in the state and boasted of her “moral, intelligent, and refined citizens.”

  The first wave of Williamses rolled into Hamilton aboard ox-drawn wagons somewhere around the time the county was incorporated in 1827. They were descendants of one John Williams, a Welshman who arrived in Virginia as an indentured servant but was given his freedom and a cow in 1655. The family who arrived in Hamilton consisted of “the bachelor uncle” Britain Williams, then in his forties, and Brit’s two orphaned nephews. One was my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Arundel Williams. They brought with them twenty-seven slaves (including at least one large family of fifteen). Brit, his orphaned nephews, and slaves settled on some of the most fertile and beautiful land in the county, where they built a split-log homestead, slave cabins, stables, a barn, and assorted outbuildings. They called it the Blue Springs Road Plantation. Here they raised livestock, cotton, corn, potatoes, fruit, and other foodstuffs both for sale and for their own consumption. Among Brit’s slaves were blacksmiths known far and wide for their expertise. Some set up a shop in the village, others on the plantation. They traveled freely around the county, servicing other farms and plantations.

  This slave population doubled every ten years and by 1860 the Blue Springs Road Plantation claimed nearly ninety enslaved people, thirty-two of them under the age of thirteen. At Brit’s death in 1863, at the age of eighty-three, he owned 2,200 acres and 94 slaves, making him, along with men named Lowe and Hood, one of the county’s largest slave owners. The slaves alone were worth nearly $100,000, or some $4 million in today’s dollars.

  His twentieth-century descendants would revere Brit for taking in his orphaned nephews and great-nephews and giving each some college education. He was remembered as a kind and generous man; but what of the people who provided his wealth and who lived with him far longer than any of the great-nephews, men named Isaac, Mike, Austin, Jesse, Isaac, and Samuel, and women named Celia, Susan, Mariah, Sara?

  The fact of enslavement is condemnation aplenty, yet some slave owners were more lenient than others. But little remains to document Brit Williams’s relationships with those he essentially held captive for close to half a century.

  His estate records reveal that some of the men were allowed to make and keep money: at the estate sale, Osborne, a slave, bought a blue dish for $5.50; Jordan, two counterpanes; Boy Frank, two valances and a counterpane for $15.00. Samuel, a blacksmith, and several others could read and write. Families appear to have been kept intact, with as many as four generations of several families still living together at emancipation.

  Stories were told by Brit’s descendants of devoted servants laughing and crying at weddings and funerals, happily joining their masters and mistresses at Hamilton Baptist, where they were listed as members though relegated to the balcony. Plantation records show regular doctor visits were made to slave quarters. In his will, Brit ordered “my blacksmiths” not be sold at all and that those enslaved people not specifically designated for the great-nephews who’d reached their majority be kept together on the plantation and their output used, if necessary, toward the education of the minor great-nephews. It appears that few, if any, of these slaves ran away to join “contrabands” during the Civil War as did many elsewhere and, at war’s end, most if not all remained, three or four large, intact families on or near the plantation. The men kept the Williams name, as did the women until they married.

  As a child, I’d been told by my Williams grandmother, somewhat proudly, that my father’s family once “owned slaves.” My mother told me her family owned none. I’d learn through my research that was not true, though they owned far fewer than the Williamses had. Slavery was simply a concept to me, one to which I’d given little thought, until the day in the county clerk’s office in the Hamilton courthouse, when I came across Brit Williams’s estate listings, compiled by executor James Monroe Mobley after his death in October 1863. “1 negro man Dick, 63 yrs of age, $600; 1 negro named Cardy, 60, $300; Austin, 55, $1,000; Jesse, 40, $1500; Jordan, 30, $2,000.” And on it went, noting the sex, name, age, and price of nearly one hundred human beings—men, women, and children. Even on these legal documents, they were not permitted their own space. Interspersed among their names were farm implements and animals: “13 hogs, 10 spotted sows and six pigs, 6 spotted sows and 4 pigs, $938.00” followed by Mariah, Sarah and Easter, then “1 lot raw hides 28 lbs@3.52, 1 log chain, 12.00, 1 barrell [sic] syrup, $320.50.” Writing this down, I felt sick, as I do now. I feel sick whenever I think of those papers and that reality.

  No record I’ve found attests specifically to the treatment these families received at the hands of the old bachelor or his several overseers over this long stretch of time. “The man must be a prodigy whose manners and morals are not corruptedx by this institution,” wrote slaveholder Thomas Jefferson of slavery. Whippings of slaves were routine on most southern plantations, including Jefferson’s own; branding and other physical disfigurements were not unknown. When Brit and his slaves lived in Greene County, before migrating to Hamilton, an enslaved woman had her mouth sewn shut; another drowned her three children at the bottom of a well and hid herself there, and when discovered, she tried to pull her master in. The Williams slaves likely heard these stories and passed them down the line. In Hamilton, slaves, including, once, a lone seven-year-old girl, were sold at the courthouse door. Close by was the whipping post where owners paid the sheriff to lay thirty lashes across the backs of recalcitrant slaves.

  In the 1930s, Rias Body, formerly enslaved in Harris County, told an interviewer with the federal Works Progress Administration of being tied “in the buck,” a torturous position from which there was no escape, and beaten. But I find no signs of runaways from Brit’s plantation, nor evidence of sales. No chains, manacles, or whips appeared on the estate list, which does not mean they were not standard pieces of equipment then.

  Still, the plantation was an extremely lucrative business venture, with little to be gained by physically handicapping the workers. For forty years these families raised and handcrafted a bounty of profitable products. Enslaved women wove linens and kept beehives and raised chickens, goats, and rabbits. Boys and men hunted rabbit, squirrel, even bear and wildcat. Brit’s blacksmiths, carpenters, and other skilled craftsmen traveled widely and unguarded as they served the county; it would not do for their owner to antagonize them. Most lucrative of all were the enslaved women whose childbearing doubled Brit’s holdings every ten years. It is highly likely, given practices of the day, that the “free people of color” listed with him in the 1830 census were Brit’s family and that it was a black or mulatto woman who was, in an unacknowledged manner, in charge of his house.

  The several hundred people owned by my extended famil
y embraced freedom eagerly while still remaining loyal to their former owners. On the April day on which Union troops, heedless of the fact that the war had ended, marched into Hamilton and burned down half the town eight days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the newly liberated Lewis Hudson took up a sharp rock and carved the date April 17, 1865, into a boulder. On their way in, they burned the Blue Springs Road Plantation house and barn to ashes and the newly freed black families stepped in to build it back. When Yankee soldiers set torch to the courthouse, black and white alike poured forth to douse the flames.

  These are the kinds of “loyal darkey” stories my family and other white southern families loved to tell. I heard plenty of them as I made my rounds of Harris County—like Cheney, the Hadley slave, a mere girl whose family moved to another town at the first word of freedom, but who, allegedly loving her “white folks” so dearly, walked all the way back. They found her asleep in the buggy next morning.

  Today I recall the story of the fires and know what hopes those freed people had for a bright future. Their savior, Abe Lincoln, was two days dead, but had that news, so slow back then, reached them yet? Did they have reason not to believe the hopeful stories they’d been told by the men in blue who’d set those fires, reason not to be alight with expectation that that forty acres and a mule would not, any day, be theirs? Perhaps some hoped the old masters would move to Brazil, where they could still own slaves. Or perhaps they had no reason at that moment to want anything but the best for everyone around, believing emancipation would soon bring equality. Some would be compassionate. They’d seen what the white women and children and old men had endured during the war, many starving alongside them, suffering the same deprivations. By helping put out those fires, they’d be helping themselves, building goodwill for the future. There were only a few weeks like this, optimistic weeks on which many of the emancipated would look back and weep.

  I think of this period in history, in Hamilton, knowing what I now know, and feel nothing but regret that a more honest and brave-hearted people had an opportunity to turn history around and these not only failed to do so, but never even saw it. What a difference they could have made in the lives of future generations had they chosen love over fear and cooperation over conflict.

  A few miles south of Hamilton, in Columbus, the Freedmen’s Bureau set up shop, and freed people from that section of Georgia and Alabama flooded the city for their forty acres and a mule. Others, sometimes entire families, or “useless” women and children driven off farms, were looking for jobs or even just a crust of bread. Regional planters, including Hamilton’s elite, urged the federal military commander to discourage blacks from foolish aspirations, which he did, in stump speeches around the state. They also managed to have the Freedmen’s Bureau director appoint one of their own, Dr. E. C. Hood, to be county bureau agent. Within weeks, he’d lost face by hanging a freedman by his thumbs in the broiling sun for four hours and was fired, only to be replaced by another former slave owner.

  Meanwhile, Columbus was on fire with political activity among blacks. Rev. Henry Turner, a free black since birth who had served Union troops as a Methodist A.M.E. chaplain and now served freed people as a newspaper editor and political leader, was barnstorming the state, rousing fellow blacks to rise up and demand their rights. Harris County blacks traveled elsewhere if they could to hear his speeches. Only once did a Radical Republican come to the village. George Ashburn was a former white overseer especially hated by planters for his demands that they all be stripped of land and rights. At the courthouse, Ashburn was warned to watch his words or have his friends bury him the next day. A close Williams friend, veteran Pomp Ramsey, sat a few feet from the podium at which Ashburn spoke, and kept his pistol aimed at Ashburn’s head. That day Ashburn’s speech lacked its usual sharp rhetoric, and newly freed slaves in the audience took in the lesson.

  The next night, Ashburn was assassinated in bed at a Columbus boardinghouse and six Muscogee County Democrats were arrested by federal authorities. This became a national cause célèbre and one of many reasons why Congress in 1867 declared martial law in Georgia and ordered that blacks be allowed to vote for new state constitutions and officials. The South accused federal officials of torturing the prisoners, men they regarded as heroes, ratcheting up an already overheated hatred of the Yankee overlords.

  Consistent with the Hamilton town fathers’ desire to keep their former slaves away from bad political influences, none of the Yankee schoolmarms who’d flooded Columbus and surrounding towns had been allowed in Hamilton; instead the black children were taught for a time by the sheriff’s wife, then by young J. Curtis Beall, a mulatto (or mixed-race person, in the vernacula of the day), freed from the plantation of General Elias Beall and his wife, Carrie.

  But warding off bad influences on the blacks was the least of the power brokers’ worries. Just after the war, wealthy white southerners embarked upon a new phase of warfare. Their immediate goal was to get Republicans out of the South and get the South back into the Union. In the long run, they’d regain the reins of power and prosperity, subject the freed people to a new form of servitude, and win redemption in the eyes of the nation.

  In August 1868, white and black Williamses stood together in long lines under sweltering skies to cast the first biracial vote. On the ballot for two state representative slots were Brit Williams’s formerly enslaved blacksmith, Samuel Williams; and William I. Hudson, a white man who’d held one of the county’s two seats during the war and was therefore running illegally, forbidden from taking office by Congress, along with another white man. All over the South, white men boycotted these elections, but in Harris County nearly as many white men voted as black. Earlier the Hamilton Journal had given Williams a muted endorsement by informing readers, “all negroes running for office are not Radicals,” and on the ballot he was listed as “Neg,” rather than “Rad,” which defined most black candidates. At the end of the day, Williams, who’d come to the county as a seven-year-old slave, and the white patriarch Hudson won their races.

  Meanwhile in nearby Camilla, Georgia, and elsewhere in the South, white men massacred many blacks on this election day. Harris County remained calm, partially because whites believed they had nothing to fear. Most believed that their one Negro candidate, Sam Williams, was the puppet of the ruling clan and thus entirely trustworthy. Even better, many knew that Leland Stanford, who had a shrewd legal mind, had earlier been elected delegate to the state constitutional convention ordered by Congress and attended primarily by freedmen and radical whites. As head of the Bill of Rights Committee, he’d helped to mastermind a successful effort to remove a clause in the new constitution guaranteeing the right of freedmen to hold office. He had already tricked black delegates into trusting him by pretending to support Gen. Ulysses Grant for president. Twelve days after being sworn in, all but three black members of the Georgia General Assembly were ousted on grounds that the new constitution did not guarantee their right to hold office, and Sam Williams returned home to his little cottage near the square, took off his new suit, donned his old overalls, and went back to his forge and his hammer. He was the only one of the twenty-seven black legislators who did not sign a statement of protest against their ouster.

  Partially to salve the wounds this treacherous defeat inflicted upon Hamilton’s freed people, the white members of Hamilton Baptist helped black members in their desire to build their own church. A biracial committee met to make the decision. Sam Williams made the motion, directing black members to begin the process. A half mile west, down the Blue Springs Road, in a wooded valley that dipped away from Hamilton Baptist, they built an upright wooden structure with a baptismal pool nearby. A black preacher was hired. They named their church Friendship Baptist and it quickly became the heart of a large and bustling black Baptist community. Schools, burial societies, a women’s association, lodges, and more churches would be spawned on and from this ground. Here freed people would sing and sermonize on the
main floor and in the front rows, listen to hymns sung in their own voices from the choir loft, be married at the altar, and have themselves and their children baptized in a clear pool on the grounds, the way the white folks at Hamilton Baptist had been, rather than in the muddy Mulberry Creek, as had formerly been the custom. They consecrated their sacred font with the planting of an oak tree.

  The U.S. Congress would not, however, be mollified with churches. The ouster of Georgia’s black elected officials so enraged most members that they imposed martial law upon Georgia for the second time and ordered the state to readmit its elected freedmen to the state legislature. They also ordered them to send home those who were there illegally because of their participation in the Confederate government and their refusal to sign a loyalty oath, men like William I. Hudson. Sam Williams remained in office for what was left of his term, but like many of his colleagues—many of whom were beaten or threatened—he either chose or was convinced not to run for a second term. He did, however, become a vice president of the Negro Labor Convention, an organization dedicated to helping freed people negotiate for higher pay and better working conditions. Historians would later reveal this arrangement was backed by planters, who were able to pay, eager to lure the best workers away from poorer farmers, and determined to control any black organizing. If true, that would explain why Sam Williams, who lived short steps from James Monroe Mobley, could remain in Hamilton unmolested while doing this work.

  Hamilton’s high and mighty had far more to worry about than a lowly blacksmith. The election that brought Sam Williams to power also resulted in Harris County giving a majority to the Republican candidate for governor and a “yea” vote for the state constitution written by the freedmen, their erstwhile white Republican allies, and the few planters like Stanford who’d slipped in. All this signaled trouble ahead, and when General Ulysses Grant, running as a Republican for president of the United States in 1872, won Harris County with a combination of black and white votes, the local Democratic leaders knew their fight was far from over.