Several years ago, I started composing an essay — They Were Sharp Bargainers: John Eaton, Jr.’s 63rd United States Colored Troops. I have not completed the article about the almost forgotten Civil War Superintendent of Freedmen and his black guard regiment because I have not felt satisfied that I had enough evidence to make the case — that still felt partly intuitive — that formerly enslaved people who succeeded at farming or other endeavors after the war had an abundance of skills they leveraged during the war and at its end. Besides their wisdom to participate in organizing a postwar community on Memphis’ President’s Island, other skills included the art of bargaining — finding a meeting ground between one’s own interests and another’s and having the nerve, the audacity, to communicate it.
Some historians of emancipation believe that some scholars have over-emphasized African American agency perhaps in attempt to deemphasize a victim paradigm. Critical observers point to various outrages perpetrated against blacks in camp, often by Union soldiers and officers; historians such as Jim Downs rightly point to unfathomable levels of death and disease suffered, among other difficulties faced and endured. These certain truths are echoed by the voices of those who experienced the transition to freedom.
“When freedom come, folks left home, out in the streets crying, praying, singing, shouting, yelling, and knocking down everything,” stated freedwoman Patsy Moore. (WPA Interview)
Though but a child during the war, she witnessed death up close, seeing dead bodies, black and white, she says, scattered about. She remembered: “folks” got sick and even died from starvation.
There are, however, few studies of life outcomes, short-term or long-term, of soldiers’ families, ones that, no matter the situations encountered found a way, paths fraught with difficulty no doubt but paths nonetheless, ones that took them from the wartime camps or so-called abandoned plantations to sharecropping, contract labor, or tenant farming. Patsy tells us how her family got from North Mississippi to Memphis, but neither her life nor that of her parents ended there. They returned to DeSoto County, where she had been born, her mother and father living there with their children in 1870 and her father, remarried, still there in 1900. They survived.
It is because of the tenacity of this formerly enslaved family that the world today has Patsy’s words; she was less than ten years old at the end of the war and nearing 70 when she sat down at her home on Round Pond Road in Madison, Ark. in St. Frances County. It was then that she called upon memory to connect her identity, her family’s, their endurance.
There are fewer studies still of blacks who managed even to thrive. There are few studies of the postwar conditions of the men of specific regiments and their families. There has been no study of Eaton’s 63rd, charged with remaining within the city, guarding the contraband camps, and working within Fort Pickering. What impact, one might ask, did their service in the Union army and navy have on their lives and the lives of family members following the war? Moreover, no studies that I am aware of focus on the civil life of individuals within the Memphis camps, of the soldiers connected to the families, and of Eaton’s President’s Island Experiment, wartime agricultural projects — that gave at least some blacks a start in farming.
As a descendant of a black soldier whose family transitioned from a Memphis contraband camp, to a Memphis freedmen’s village, to landownership in a North Mississippi county, I have spent decades trying to understand how our family faired as well as it did.
Family histories of individuals should be taken into account when evaluating outcomes. Experiences of slavery, unquestionably inhumane, at the same time differed by degree depending on slave-owning family, disposition of individual master or mistress, place, era, specific labor practices, among other things. No lesser figure than W.E.B. DuBois stated in Black Reconstruction that slave owners differed, adding that there were even benevolent ones. Such a comment is no easier for me to digest than it is likely for readers of my blog.
Yet, I am intrigued also by Patsy’s story. In her interview, she characterized William Hull and his wife — last masters of record of Grandfather Daniel, Grandmother Nancy, and their children — as “mean.” Patsy doesn’t mince words when describing the couple who owned her aunts, women who undoubtedly knew my family members. Yet, Patsy adds that William went to Virginia to purchase her mother’s sisters apparently after his brother Dabney had purchased her mother. Patsy distinguishes one master from the other when she describes Dabney Hull as “a Methodist man, kind-hearted and good.” Patsy was but a child during the last decade of the slave era. Though she remembers the wartime spent in Memphis after her father took them out of Mississippi, much of her narrative is informed by her elders’ memories.
What I myself know of Dabney Hull, as well as of William, comes from years of family history research. The Hulls were somewhat large slaveowners, at least for North Mississippi. They were blue-blooded Virginians, who, when they came of age in their adopted Mississippi home, inherited new generations of bondspeople. As Patsy indicates, they filled out their holdings by returning to Virginia’s auction blocks and also from the expansion of families like ours. In 1844, when Dabney Hull was a twenty-four-year-old bachelor, he was given my great grand uncle Dabney Green while William inherited Grandfather Daniel and other of my blood relatives.
There is reason to believe that Uncle Dabney was a companion to Dabney Hull and possibly a body servant to either him or to one of the other Hulls during the war. There is also reason to believe that Dabney Hull’s plantation and his practices were somewhat unconventional. Patsy states that he “kept a woman to cook and keep his house,” which seems another way of saying that he, remaining a bachelor his entire life, had a black woman companion.
Dabney Hull was not confined to his DeSoto County, Miss. plantation, for he owned property in other Mississippi counties including Marshall to the east, where most of the Hulls resided. In other words, Hull seems to have been somewhat of an absentee planter, very likely relying on Uncle Dabney and others to run his farm. Following the war, Dabney Hull assisted more than one black man in gaining land by holding mortgages for them, and while he does not appear to have played a direct role in the land purchases of Grandfather Daniel and Grandmother Nancy’s children, his relative generosity may have influenced other white planters in the immediate vicinity.
If Uncle Dabney, a few years Grandfather Daniel’s senior, was “high up on the plantation ladder,” Grandfather possibly was a well. I reveal in a recent writing — “What’s in a Name, Constructing the Walker Williams Family in Mississippi and Virginia” (published in Genealogy and Social History, Cambridge Scholars, 2022) the way in which a large community of slaves of the Hull’s Marshall County plantation, Greenwood, were divided at the death of matriarch Elizabeth Herndon Hull. I suggest that the men at the top of the the inventory and at the top of the “items” each child was bequeathed were judged the most able-bodied. It would be these men who would see to new land being broken; their own bodies would be sacrificed to this purpose, but their knowledge, their wisdom, would be called upon as they transitioned.
Robert Engs reasoned in Freedom’s First Generation that enslaved people who did well during slavery should not have been expected to have done any less well following it. Such logic, rather than being merely hopeful, becomes a fresh lens from which to view Grandfather Daniel and other black families that made President’s Island home for several decades.
In a video interview I gave on African Americans in contraband camps, I refer indirectly to men from two companies of the 63rd (B and K). Few people have viewed the video, and I’m glad because there are many statements I would revise or otherwise expound upon, any that make it sound like I’ve overlooked horrific conditions within the camps — consequences of the federal government’s failure to anticipate wartime migrations of African Americans. Death is not, however, lost upon me; my second great grandmother, wife of Grandfather Daniel, is alive in 1864 but not in 1870. She likely perished at Memphis’ Camp Shiloh.
Fortunately, that’s not where the family’s story ends. In 1870, Grandfather Daniel had remarried, the family continued to grow, and he, along with other soldiers, were renting land, each new farmer planting between five and ten acres. In a city hot with racial strife, the 1866 Memphis Riot no doubt a not very distant memory, the freedmen’s village, still an island separate from the city in 1866, must have made the difference between life and death for those who’d chosen to remain.
This fact of settlement within the village speaks volumes and raises many questions not the least of which are why that particular place and what were the conditions there between 1865 and 1880 that many black families would have remained in the contraband camp-turned freedmen’s village.
Answers to these questions may be apparent to some readers, perhaps to historians familiar with agricultural experiments that took place in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas during the war. If one’s perspective is colored by all of the tragedies of war and entrenched within a victim paradigm, it will prove quite difficult to imagine for formerly enslaved people an industrious, entrepreneurial, or justice-seeking mindset.
And yet, one could argue that the venture into renting land to farm, the growth of some of the new farmers’ assets over the course of ten years, and the fact that most of the 63rd applied for the soldiers’ bounty and whatever other compensation they had coming to them suggest that they were something more than self-preserving. They had an ability to see opportunities before them, fit themselves into openings, and deal with any white who was willing to do business with them.
As I stated in “Emancipation on Memphis’ President’s Island,” Grandfather Daniel experienced a 700% increase in the land he farmed between 1870 and 1880. And leading up to 1880, he had spent a whopping $80 on fencing materials and $400 in labor costs. Rather than being forced to sign labor contracts with former planters, or have their children apprenticed, freedpeople on President’s Island after the war worked for each other. Needless to say, they could not have carried on such operations without going into Memphis, over time establishing themselves in the city’s cotton market. President Island’s black farmers could not have succeeded without knowing the value of labor, whether they received their due or not, the fluctuating value of cotton, and how to negotiate and trade with people who almost inherently thought blacks inferior but who could still, sometimes, be persuaded.
Readers may be interested in knowing how Grandfather Daniel made such calculations, and my answer would be that a lack of literacy skills did not preclude numeracy skills and business-know-how. As one of my DeSoto County, Mississippi cousins once said to me, “Lots of people knew how to make a living.” If the concept of bargaining has disappeared from business discourse, I am able to pull up my own grandfather’s voice as he spoke of the families with whom he “traded.”
I am guilty for sure of marveling at Grandfather Daniel’s know-how and I wonder, as others might, how he could go from laboring on the farm of William Hull in Marshall County, Miss. as late as 1863 to running his own operation just two years later. In his mid-thirties during the war, he would have spent that much time in slavery, picking up a set of skills, as likely agricultural ones as any other kind.
As I have studied business and mathematical terms belonging to nineteenth century agriculture, words like figuring and bargaining, a white colleague whose mother’s family comes out of Tippah County, Miss. suggested I also give some thought to reckoning. It was good advice and also a good concept to include in my collection of terms, for, like figuring and numeracy, it invokes a cosmology, an order. This belief system is implied in the legal instrument that is the Last Will and Testament. Many of my DeSoto County ancestors born into slavery, especially male ones, left a Will. This fact won’t likely strike most twenty-first century readers as usual for African Americans, and when I learned early in this century of their practice I was very much taken by surprise.
For an ancestor who died in 1913, the instruction stated plainly in his Will, written two years prior, that his executor was to follow this prescription —
…take possession of all my personalty property, of which I may die possessed and shall sell the same for cash, as speedily as possible after my death. It is my will and I so direct that my said executor shall also take possession of my real property of which I shall die seized and possessed, and shall sell the same for cash.
The testator, Richard W. Williams, further directed his executor, son Wesley S. Williams, to advertise the sale of said land in the county newspaper for public auction. Proceeds from the sale of Richard’s land and liquidation of his personalty was to be divided evenly between his wife and children.
Having read several wills written in Mississippi and a few others written in Virginia, I have learned that a Last Will and Testament is a reckoning — a coming to terms with both what one has acquired in his or her earthly life and a divestment of earthly effects. The manner in which one divides one’s money or property both reflects the perceived quality of relationships with family members and one’s sense of how those relationships should be left. For instance, leaving a child out of a Will could reflect a parent’s perception of a child’s errant ways — that the child is out of [the family’s sense of] order. In that case, the testator has concluded and made peace with the fact that the child cannot be included, for overlooking the child’s rebellious spirit would send the wrong message, perhaps cause further departure, and, most importantly, give the deceased something to fret over for eternity.
It is a stretch for sure to suggest that slave sales and other conveyances were too reckonings, yet, in opening up this possibility, observers of history might be able to see, first, how slavery fit a global cosmology, an economic stage populated by people with distinct economic interests and business ethics to say nothing of sociologies. This truth is made plain to me in studying Mrs. Hull’s Will. While none of her children are left without a chattel inheritance, it is only after they account for what is owed the estates of their father and grandfather that they would receive it. Family and blood clearly mattered, but proper and complete business affairs were felt to be just as important and intertwined.
I must conclude that the concept of business reckoning, in tandem with practice of bargaining, played no less a role in the lives of my formerly enslaved family members in their postbellum years.
