Slaveholders in your family?

[samgrant]

Anyone want to address this topic?

If you know of Your slaveholder ancestors, what do you know and what do you think about it?

If you are unsure, as I am, do you want to find out about it? I'd like to know about it.

I wonder what you all think, as my only relative involved in the CW as far as I know, was a Tennessee Unionist, but was he a slaveholder? I can't tell by the only info I have:

Here it is:

"The situation in West Tennessee was similar, if marginally less severe. The ordeal of Franklin D. Cossitt, a wealthy LaGrange cotton planter and merchant, was revealing, if undoubtedly extreme. Before evacuating Fayette County in late May 1862, Confederate agents forced Cossitt to lead them to several caches of cotton that the planter had stockpiled on his three plantations. They then burned the cotton - a total of "two hundred and sixty odd bales," worth $20,000 dollars in gold if a penny - to prevent it's confiscation by the approaching Federals. Not long thereafter a Union army of 10,000 men camped on his largest plantation, remaining there for several weeks. "After they finally left," recalled Cossitt, a Connecticut born unionist, "I found everything gone - it was a general cleaning up; it was stripped of everything.""


- One South or Many, by Robert Tracy McKenzie

That Cossit was my great-great-grandfather, my only ancestral link to the war.

He was victimizd by both the Rebs and the Yanks!

After leaving LaGrange, Tennessee, he went to Chicago and started a wholesale grocery business.

That business was destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871.

A resilient type, apparently, he went on to develop a community just SW of Chicago which he named LaGrange.

At which place I was born and lived most of my young life.


But was he a slaveholder? He was, according to the above, a "cotton planter", and I doubt he went out and harvested that cotton himself.

And there is this, as a footnote to the McKenzie passage above:

On his claim before the Southern Claims Commission "Cossitt estimated that the Union army confiscated nearly $32,000 worth of nonslave property between the summer of 1862 and the spring of 1863, including 45 mules, 500 hogs, 83 head of cattle, 1,350 bushels of potatoes, and nearly 14,000 bushels of corn."

It's that phrase, "nonslave property", that bothers me. Does that mean he also had "slave property" that was confiscated? Or is that phrase just a "boilerplate" phrase of the times?

Would anyone else like to explore their possible or factual ancestral slaveholders?

[samgrant]

I must say that I find it odd that no one has responded to this thread.

Might it be a reluctance of some to admit that their ancestors might have been slaveholders?

There are many folks on this board of the Southern persuasion who defend the South and downplay the slavery issue. None as far as I have found have mentioned that their ancestors might have been slaveholders.

I don't believe that the "sins of the father should be visited upon the child", but with all the interest and research done by our members, I find it hard to believe that none of us had ancestors who were slaveholders.

I am not looking for anyone to 'confess', so to speak, but just if anyone has info about their slaveholding ancestors, it would be interesting to know about how those folks thought about those things.

As I mentioned on my original post, I have questions about my ancestry, and wish to pursue it to wherever it leads. My G,G, Grandfather while a Unionist, may have actually been a slaveholder! I have no reluctance to explore that possibility.

[blue_zouave]

Not ashamed at all, Samgrant, just usually check messages at work where I can't write a tome.

I was raised on the family story that my grandfather's grandfather had a plantation, with 1000 acres and 100 slaves. The truth came out a few years ago when I looked at the census records... He had 100 acres and 1 slave!

The rest of the story is that Allen P. Wells was a miller. He was too old to go to the Civil War, and his children too young. His slave was named Ben Wells, and I believe Ben's wife was called Sarah. Ben helped in the mill. After the war, Ben and Sarah stayed on with the family and lived on the place. When Allen's wife died, Sarah took over raising the youngest children, including my great-grandfather George. My grandfather remembered Ben's son, who was an older man when Grandpa was a boy.

This, friends, from the Unionist who bleeds blue.

Zou

[lrd89]

I had ancestors on both sides of the war. I think that my southern ancestors owned slaves at the time of the war but I need to do more research on that side of my family. I know that on my Dad's side, my family owned slaves in Virginia and North Carolina in the late 1700's and early 1800's.

[tarheel]

Of the 9 ancestors I have that fought in the war, 6 of them are from the same family. All members of units from Alabama. The census records I have read concerning this family showed none of them to be landowners and showed no evidence of slavehoding.

Two of my ancestors were brothers from northern GA. One enlisted in a GA unit and one with a unit from Macon County NC. Census records again showed this family were not landowners nor slaveholders.

The remaining ancestor was from SC, his family name is Calhoun, son of John C. Calhoun. I don't think I have to elaborate to anyone on this board his position on slaveholding.

[larry_cockerham]

Sam, I hadn't avoided this one, simply hadn't seen it. I'm probably typical of your southern members of this post, having been born in North Carolina. In general the slave owners from more rural hill country were a couple of generations further back in time. By the 1860s only the larger 'plantations' were into slave ownership, mostly from a labor standpoint, such as the rice planters down in South Carolina. I have two families that owned slaves, but they were revolutionary war era, the Bourne family in Grayson County, Virginia and the Johnsons in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Neither, to my knowledge, retained them until the civil war. None were left for inheritance. Most, I believe, were buried with their "families".

[blue_zouave]

Originally Posted by larry_cockerham

the Bourne family in Grayson County, Virginia

Larry, I don't remember if we had this discussion before, but my people are Grayson County people, too. The Wells, Young, Perkins clans among others. We're likely distant cousins.

Zou

[nbforrest]

I don't know if my folks owned slaves circa 1861 but I do know that some of them did in the 18th century, having seen the census documents to prove it. I have a copy of the will of one of my relatives bequething eight slaves to his wife. I suspect that at least some of my relatives who fought in the war did own slaves, but can't say for certain without getting my hands on the appropriate census. I actually don't hold it against them, in a way. I mean, one must view it through the lenses of the time. Did most people think that slavery was wrong? Probably not, certainly not in the South. Probably a darker side of the family history, but not something I'm ashamed of. I suppose I'd love to say "no, my family never owned slaves". But besides the fact that they did, I have come to terms with the fact that moral issues like this must be viewed from the moral perspectives of the time.

Respectfully

[samgrant]

Wow! Lots of posts all of a sudden.

First of all, I'd like to say I wholely agee with nbforrest as that:

"one must view it through the lenses of the time. Did most people think that slavery was wrong? Probably not, certainly not in the South. Probably a darker side of the family history, but not something I'm ashamed of. I suppose I'd love to say "no, my family never owned slaves". But besides the fact that they did, I have come to terms with the fact that moral issues like this must be viewed from the moral perspectives of the time."

As to my own quest for information:

I found the info on my G,G, Grandfather in a round-about way: Having failed to find anything I didn't already know by Googling him, I entered his name on Amazon (books category) and Amazon has this thing that does 'references to' and I found that obscure book which contained the info.

The part about the Southern Claims Commission was in a footnote in that book.

Subsequently, I searched for info on this Commission and found it at the NARA (National Archives and Records Administration).

There I found my G,G,G's claim was approved (as he was judged to be a loyal Unionist, Huzzah for him!). And that it was possible that his claim info might be available. So I delved further into that site and finally (not a real user friendly website) found a place to ask if his info was available, so I asked, last Wednesday.

Last Friday they sent me this:

"Thank you for your inquiry to NARA. We have checked our holdings and located the claim that you requested. The claim for Franklin D. Cossitt commission claim # 20,459 from Fayette County, Tennessee. The total cost for the purchase of copies of this document is 444 pages x .50 = $222.00."

Well, that's a bit expensive, but how else to get info like that!

But they didn't say how to order! So I replied to the email "OK, but how do I order and pay?" Well this morning I got a phone call at my office from a person at the National Archives who offered to send me the appropriate form and instructions, etc. WOW!

Anyone interested in this Southern Claims Commission and it's records might refer to my post which I inadvisedly put on the 'Session and Politics' forum for some now unfathomable reason:

http://civilwartalk.com/forums/researching-your-civil-war-ancestry/24502-southern-claims-commission.html

There are links there to the site and also to interesting accounts of disapproved claims and the reasons why.

[larry_cockerham]

Sam, that's a GREAT post (not to be confused with some of your others). You not only gave us an insight to your research, but also offered much useful information in dealing with the archives. I salute you!

Zou, it's a small world. I recognize all three family surnames from my years of research and the fact I grew up in Ashe County, NC adjacent to Grayson Co., VA. If you aren't familiar already, you should check out cousin Jeff Weaver's NEW RIVER HISTORICAL NOTES website. We're probably not closely related, which should be of some relief, but certainly neighbors in our roots.