What’s in a Name — Analyzing Names in USCT Records
I recently traveled to Stanford U, with a new research partner who happens to be my daughter, to speak with a group of digital humanists (DHers) about ongoing projects transcribing and digitizing African Americans in Civil War era records. This work had its start in my own lastroadtofreedom website and in another research partner’s African American Civil War Soldiers project. The affinity of the two projects, one of which studies the service records of Black enlistees in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and the other which studies women, children, and elderly Black refugees in contraband or refugee camps, is the shared experience of enslavement of the two related populations.
For the Stanford talk, our focus was on the former, the USCT, and, even more specifically, on Black soldiers who exhibited in their Civil War service records one or two of fifteen names we targeted for the study. Targeted names were taken from a clan of prestigious slave-owning families from the Virginia Piedmont and Tidewater regions. Such families include well-known personas like Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark reknown) and American oceanographer Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury. (We were not interested directly in these figures but in the families from which they descended.) While we did not include Lewis in this round of study, as we anticipated the number of soldiers bearing this name would be rather large, we did include Meriwether, Maury, and Fontaine, along with twelve additional surnames.
We also expanded the list of fifteen surnames to include phonetic variations and alternative spellings (ex. Minor/Miner or Gilmer/Gilmore), making the database grow to 1,454 names.
In most cases, former slaves enlisted as soldiers would not have been able to spell their own names for the officials recording them. We believe the spellings were therefore at the discretion of each recorder and, because so, varied from enlistment site to enlistment site and from official to official. We are still in the process of considering yet other spellings.
Although the source for determining targeted names was surnames from the clan of Virginia planters, we included Black soldiers bearing the names either as their given (first) name or as a surname or last name. We suspect that in cases where a Black soldier exhibits what is usually thought of as a surname as a first name — ex. Walker Smith — that the given name points to the well-known surname and, therefore, to one of the Virginia families. For example, Fountain appears 56 times as a surname and thirty times (more than half as often) as a first name. We suspect that its use as a given name has its origin in its use as a surname. Furthermore, we believe Fountain to be a derivative of Fontaine. In other words, the fact that Fountain is adopted as a given name in this group of Black soldiers may suggest an association with the Fontaine family.
Specific goals that drove the study included determining, first, how many men we would discover who bore the targeted names, second, geolocating each soldier — based on a stated birthplace (town/city/county/state) found in the service record — third, discovering how the soldiers’ locations (taken together) would appear in time and space (e.g. would their locations be dispersed or concentrated), and, fourth, discovering possible relationships between their names and their locations. Given the location of the source data (names of slaveowners), for instance, we might have expected to find many of the soldiers to have been born in Virginia.
Despite awareness of migration on the part of the planters and enslaved people beginning in the late eighteenth century, this hypothesis continued to live in our research process. We were keenly aware, for instance, of the Walker-Thornton family, an alliance that commenced at least as early as 1741, when Dr. Thomas Walker (later of Albemarle County) married a widowed Mildred Thornton (a widow of Nicholas Meriwether).
In addition to being a notable figure in his relationship to other leading Virginians ( for instance, being a well-known physician in Fredericksburg, Va with a list of well-known patients that included Thomas Jefferson’s father), Walker was notable in his own right as a member of the House of Burgesses. He was also an early explorer into western Virginia and Kentucky.
This last activity would certainly seem to have direct bearing on our study although we hadn’t yet determined (and still have not studied) whether Walker’s exploration and even his interest in The Loyal Company of Virginia, awarded 800,000 acres of land in 1748 led to his own migration to southwest Virginia and, if so, whether he also moved his slaves there. That said, we did not know if we would find — in the nineteenth century — beyond Virginia, in great numbers, the people the Thornton-Walkers enslaved in the prior century.
What We Found — Virginia roads lead to Kentucky
Rather than Virginia being the number one birthstate provided by soldiers in this dataset, we found the number one birthstate to be provided to be Kentucky, 25% of the soldiers having stated that they were born there followed by 15% born in Virginia, 9% in Tennessee, 7% in Mississippi, 5% each in Louisiana and North Carolina. Twenty-seven percent gave other birthplaces that include Northern states, for example, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, as well as Canada. If we take Kentucky and Virginia together as birthplaces, then 40% of the soldiers — again, in this very limited dataset — were born in these two neighboring states. This percentage is not to be generalized to the group of 179,000 men enlisted in the USCT. These numbers hold true only for this small and unique dataset.
We have not yet studied birthplace in relationship to age although we are interested in following up with a study of age in relationship to place. It is important to know, for instance, the era in which the subjects were born. An enslaved person fifty years or older between 1863 and 1865 we expect to have a somewhat different narrative than a person between 18 and 21. This last happens in fact to be our largest age group. We found no significant difference between age and state of birth; a soldier was not more likely in this group to have been born in a particular state based on his age.
Walkers, Buckners, and Minors
While this database focused on fifteen surnames, whether appearing as first or last names among soldiers, we found an overwhelming number of them — 46% — to possess Walker and variations as a last name and 6% to possess Walker as a given name. While we might have expected a smaller group of men to exhibit Walker as a first name, we remain curious about its adoption, that is, how enslaved people came to a practice of using Walker as a first name.
Curiously, some of the names that are part of this study appear in the 1844 Will of Elizabeth Herndon Hull, born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia and migrating with her family to Marshall County, Mississippi in the late 1830s. In her will appear 77 enslaved persons that include “Negroes” Walker (no surname), Thornton (no surname), and Davy Buckner and Willis Buckner in addition to others exhibiting target names.
Hull’s will points very strongly to her own connection to the Thornton-Walkers, as well as to the Buckners. Some of the enslaved people listed in the will are dower slaves, having come to Hull through the estate of her husband (Brodie Strachan Hull) and the others by inheritance from her own ancestors.
Although our research team is not entirely certain, we surmise that those appearing in Hull’s will with a surname were inherited by Elizabeth Hull most likely from her father, Edward Herndon, whose own father Joseph Herndon was husband to Mary Minor. We believe the enslaved persons appearing without a surname came to Hull (for use) either from her husband’s estate, or through purchase.
Clearly, Buckner, Thornton, and Walker are conspicuous in the will as given names or as surnames. And it is this occurrence that made us ask if the names would reoccur twenty years later (a generation later), in the context of the Civil War. The short answer is yes.
In addition to looking for occurrences of targeted names as surnames or given names among the soldiers in our database, we also were on the lookout for what we refer to as “double surnames” relative to the targeted names. In other words, we thought we might find soldiers bearing not one but two of the surnames.
Although the number of soldiers bearing two of the names is not statistically signficant, we nevertheless find the existence of fourteen soldiers for whom this is the case interesting, a strong indication we believe of an association with the Virginia clan.
Five soldiers exhibit Thornton as a first name, four exhibit Walker, four exhibit Fountain, and one exhibits Miner. While we began studying Minor as the target name (rather than its variant — Miner), we believe the combination in the name of soldier Miner Gilmer points to this individual having been enslaved by the Gilmers and Minors, or his having had a mother or father (or perhaps even grandmother or grandfather) enslaved by one or the other of these families. Still another possibility is such a slave having been inherited by a daughter, a Miner, who took the surname Gilmer upon marriage. We believe such unions, as illustrated in the above genealogy, signaled to African Americans a pattern to be adopted.
The Gilmers, close associates of the Jeffersons, were also related to the Meriwethers and Minors. Dr. Walker studied medicine under his brother-in-law Dr. George Gilmer of Williamsburg, Va., according to Walker biographers Richard Beale Davis and Alexander Canaday McLeod.
Although it is not entirely clear the degree of authority members of this particular clan exercised in the naming of their enslaved people, what is clear is that many enslaved people “adopted” names of their former owners upon emancipation (just as many did not, however) and yet others adopted, even long before emancipation, their owners’ surnames as given names.
In my own family is to be found the Walker name, a grand uncle having possessed the name. Walker also appeared — either as a first name or as an accompanying surname akin to a middle name — in at least one generation before Uncle Walker.
Recently, by coincidence, I came across the familiar name of Isaiah T. Montgomery, founder of the historic Black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi in Bolivar County. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the T in Isaiah Montgomery’s full name is for Thornton. In other words, the famous African American Montgomerys, written about in Janet Sharp Hermann’s The Pursuit of a Dream and in LaFlorya Gauthier’s biography of Isaiah T. Montgomery, took Thornton as a conspicuous accompanying surname or middle name. A sibling of Isaiah was given Thornton as his first name.
The Thornton Montgomerys were last enslaved by Joseph Davis at Davis Bend, Mississippi in Warren County. The fact that the family did not upon emancipation take Davis as their surname suggests they were sold to Davis or someone else prior to him who belonged to the targeted group of families. The Davises, according to Gauthier, migrated from Georgia to Kentucky in 1793, then on to Mississippi in 1811. “In 1818 [Joseph Davis] moved his father’s slaves and his family from Vicksburg…to a peninsula in the Mississippi River,” she wrote.
Despite these very intriguing results, ones that would seem to place a definite marker for both planter and slave within the State of Kentucky, we do not yet count this result as conclusive. Rather, we hope to enlarge the database to include many more family groups belonging to the clan under study, or families who were not related necessarily by blood but who are known to have been closely associated with the clan in other ways.
We look to include for instance Washington, Madison, Jefferson and Lee as we are aware that George Washington’s ancestors are centered within the clan. And not only Thomas Jefferson but also James Madison was closely associated both with Walker, with Rev. Matthew Maury, and with the Minor, Carr, and Dabney families.
Ultimately, we believe that these connections are hidden in plain sight even in families today. My readers will perhaps ask what the T stands for in Booker T. Washington, or maybe begin studying double surnames within their own families.
