Prisoners of Fate

 

James Enoch Riley Duncan (1835-1864) and Albert Pierce Mitchell (1844-?)

 

Their options were simple: surrender, or die.

 

Tuesday morning dawned foggy and cool on Lookout Mountain. Soldiers Riley Duncan and his young brother-in-law Pierce Mitchell awoke with empty stomachs and few bullets. Their 30’th Mississippi Regiment, like most of the Confederate Army, had no medicine, ragged clothing, little ammunition and, if viewed realistically, no hope. Privates like Riley and Pierce wore old farm clothes, not uniforms, which, after months of fighting, were thin and torn. Yet they fought on.

The 600 Mississippi troops deployed themselves along small piles of rocks (see photo) which wound across the mountain slope. The rocks provided little cover.  The troops’ task was enormous and also desperate: the 600 ragged soldiers were to defend the western side of Lookout Mountain against 2,200 well-armed Union infantry. The terrain worked against the Rebels – the trees and smoke of battle obscured their view of the advancing Yankees while the cliff behind them offered no chance of retreat.

The superior Union forces surrounded the 30’th and began their death squeeze of the Rebels, firing from three sides. The farmers-turned-soldiers of the 30’th began dying one by one.

Twenty-eight year old Riley thought of his 26 year-old wife Lucy and their four young (5,3,1 and 9 days) children at their small family farm in Attala County, Mississippi. Pierce, 18, remembered his brother Whitman, struck and killed by a cannonball  as he came to help a badly-wounded Pierce in a battle a year earlier. Riley and Pierce saw their dwindling options clearly and made their choice. They chose life.

They raised their arms, as did most of their unit, and surrendered to the Yankees.

The two hungry, thinly-clothed Mississippians joined other POWs in the march to the Chattanooga railroad yard. A Northern newspaper reporter later observed that the 30’th Mississippi soldiers were so thin that “it took two side by side to cast a shadow”. In Chattanooga, the POWs were locked into freight boxcars for the long trip northward. A week later they arrived at an unfinished POW camp in Illinois and stepped into a place as hellish as battle.

 

Neither North nor South was equipped to handle large numbers of POWs. A prisoner exchange program had collapsed, leaving both sides struggling with how to handle thousands of captives. There were much higher priorities than POWs and, in the case of the South, resources were scarce. Fifteen percent of soldiers died in combat. Fifteen percent of POWs died in POW camps.

Riley, Pierce and their fellow Mississippians arrived at Rock Island, Illinois and were marched in the subzero cold into a partially-completed POW camp. The camp lacked blankets, bedding (i.e., straw) and proper food. There was no infirmary and no way to treat or isolate sick POWs. The combination of unpreparedness, incompetence, disease and malnutrition would kill 2,000 Rock Island POWs over the next two years. 

Pierce wrote a letter to relatives in New York, a simple request for clothing to help him survive the cold. The response from the relatives was unsympathetic and reflected the tensions between the North and South. We do not know if Pierce ever received family help.

The barracks had been built from green wood which shrank as it dried, opening cracks through which cold air entered. There were two stoves to warm a hundred poorly-clothed men – coats and blankets were non-existent. Frostbite inside the barracks that first winter became common and several soldiers froze to death.

The cold was just part of the hell of Rock Island. Smallpox began to spread through the camp, accompanied by pneumonia and dysentery. Sick prisoners received no treatment as there were but two doctor for 5,000 POWs in the early months of the prison. POWs with the contagious diseases were left in the barracks rather than being isolated, further spreading disease. Sanitation that winter was non-existent.

In his first two months at Rock Island Riley came down with dysentery. Without treatment and left in the cold, without medical care or blankets and surrounded by smallpox, Riley lost his fight for life. He left his young wife and four very young children behind in his native Mississippi. Riley was one of 350 prisoner deaths that February.

His youngest child, Albert Duncan, was born after Riley left for the war – neither father nor son ever saw one another. Riley had chosen life in the Battle of Lookout Mountain only to die in a POW camp.

He was buried at Rock Island, far from his native Mississippi and family but in the company of 2000 fellow southerners. 

 

Pierce lived through the Rock Island nightmare and, two years later, returned to Mississippi. His civilian life was not stable, however, with his marriage ending in a then-rare divorce. His post-divorce life is shrouded in mystery. Even his year of death and burial site are unknown.

Riley’s wife Lucy remarried. She and her new husband, Thomas Gallaway, lived on to raise ten children (including those of Riley Duncan), descendants of whom live from coast to coast.

 

 

Further Reading:  

Rebels at Rock Island: the Story of a Civil War Prison

Battle of Lookout Mountain

30’th Mississippi Regiment

 

 

Murder, and then the Earth Shook

Lilburn Lewis and Isham Lewis, sons of Lucy Jefferson Lewis (1752 – 1810) and Charles Lewis (1747-1831) and brothers of Jane Lewis Peyton (1777-1822)

 

If books are written about you 150 years after you’re gone, including one by a Pulitzer Prize-winner, you were either very very good or you were horrid.

 

Welcome to horrid. Isham and Lilburne Lewis, sons of  Lucy Jefferson Lewis and brothers of  Jane Lewis Peyton,  were born into the Virginia gentry. Lucy was the sister of President Thomas Jefferson. The Lewis family looked impressive from the outside but, by the time Isham and Lilburne were born, it was falling apart on the inside.

First, the Lewis family was terrible with money.  The family was essentially broke by the time Isham and Lilburn were teenagers. Broke or not, the Lewises continued to spend extravagantly and carelessly. Second, there was an above-normal amount of mental illness in the Lewis family (a long story not told here). Third, the younger generation of Lewises learned little of “practical matters” and work, focusing instead on lifestyle and entertainment.

 

Financially desperate, in 1808 Lucy, Charles, Lilburn and another son (Randolph) borrowed money and bought frontier land in Kentucky, with hopes of a fresh start and a money miracle. They left behind the family and friends who they’d known for decades. The group (totaling 18, mostly children)  floated on barges down the Ohio River to western Kentucky, leaving the comforts of Virginia behind. Isham, unable to hold a job elsewhere, soon followed his parents and brothers to Kentucky.

 

The dream soon began to turn into a nightmare. First, Lucy passed away. Then Randolph, Randolph’s wife and Lilburn’s wife died in short order. Lucy’s husband Charles developed dementia. These deaths left one responsible adult, Lilburn, to run the farms and care for 16 children, as Isham was useless.

And there was more bad news. Lilburne’s unpaid debts and broken agreements caught up with him, bringing him into court multiple times. The local Kentuckians, who already resented the Lewises, despised Lilburne.

The strain of it all pushed Lilburne over the edge. His hidden mental illness reached the surface and his behavior became strange and abusive. Isham’s response was heavy drinking. Lilburne’s mental breakdown worsened, reaching a climax shortly before Christmas when a young slave named George tripped and accidentally broke a pitcher of water.

Lilburne dragged slave George into the kitchen and called the other slaves and Isham into the kitchen. Lilburn then killed George with a hatchet and began cutting apart his body.

Murder, whether the victim was free or slave, was a crime punishable by death in Kentucky. Lilburne ordered the slaves to finish dismembering George’s body and burn it in the fireplace, which they started to do.

Astonishingly, before they could finish, a massive (magnitude 7.7) earthquake struck western Kentucky. The quake, which was the first in peoples’ memory, scared everyone. It also collapsed the fireplace chimney and stopped the burning of George’s body. The next day Lilburne and the slaves repaired the chimney, hiding George’s body amongst the chimney stones.

The body remained hidden and the witnesses silent for seven weeks, until a final and extreme earthquake hit. The magnitude 8.0 New Madrid earthquake, the most powerful in history in the eastern U.S., toppled the chimney and exposed George’s body. A nearby family dog, possibly Lilburne’s, grabbed part of George’s body and dragged it away to a ditch next to a road. The next day a passerby saw the dog and the body part in the ditch and contacted the sheriff.

The sheriff investigated and quickly learned what had happened. He arrested Lilburne and Isham for murder. The brothers were then released on bail to await trial and so they returned home. At home they decided that their only recourse was for the two to commit suicide.

That night the two walked to the Lewis family cemetery. They decided to kill each other by simultaneously firing rifles at each other’s heart. As they prepared to shoot each other Lilburne decided that there might be a gun misfire so they needed a Plan B.

Plan B was that a survivor would point the rifle at his chest and use a stick to poke the trigger. Isham was unsure how that would work so Lilburne decided to demonstrate. Lilburne pointed his rifle at his chest and extended a stick near the trigger. It was dark so Lilburne couldn’t quite see where he was poking his stick. He accidentally hit the trigger, firing the gun, shooting himself in the chest. He fell next to his first wife’s grave.

Lilburne died quickly. Isham did the right thing and reported the events to the sheriff. The sheriff locked up Isham and began his investigation into yet another death. Several days later Isham escaped from jail and disappeared, never to return.

                                                  +++++++++++

It is not known for sure what happened to Isham. Several historians think that he went to New Orleans and lived under an assumed name.

The fates of the 16 children were sad. Most were scattered across western Kentucky as apprentices and adoptees, never again to live as one family. They were families gone with the wind.

Your ancestor Jane Lewis, daughter of Lucy, had a better fate. Jane stayed in Virginia and married a very good man with an odd first name, Craven Peyton. The Peytons lived good lives and raised good children, one of whom, Lucy Jane Peyton married and migrated to Mississippi.

Finally, there is an excellent book,  Jefferson’s Nephews: A Frontier Tragedy which provides great detail about the decline and fall of the Lewis family. History books can be dull but this one is well-written and well-researched.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Jeffersons-Nephews-Boynton-Merrill-Jr/dp/0803282974

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Jefferson_Lewis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_George

http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-01-02-0139

https://franceshunter.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/murder-and-madness-in-the-lewis-family/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lilburn_Lewis

Name that Baby

George Eskridge (1683 – 1732), guardian of Mary Ball

You are a descendant of George Eskridge. George was a well-to-do plantation owner and lawyer in Northern Virginia. “Well-to-do” is an understatement, as he owned 12,000 acres, 20 square miles, about half the size of Manhattan. George Eskridge had an interesting life but that’s a story for another post.

George had many friends, including a neighbor couple named Joseph and Mary (no relation to Jesus). The couple had one young daughter also named Mary. Joseph passed away when young Mary was three and, ten years later, Mary’s mother died. That left young Mary, age 12, an orphan.

Before orphan Mary’s mother died she made arrangements for her neighbor George to be Mary’s guardian. Young Mary split her teen years between George’s house and the house of Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth. It is thought that much of Mary’s education and upbringing took place at George’s house.

George continued as Mary’s guardian for about ten years, until Mary married. Mary’s marriage took place at George’s house. The groom,  a businessman named Augustine, was an acquaintance of George. It is suspected that George played Cupid and encouraged the courtship of Mary and Augustine, as older people sometimes do.

The following year Augustine and Mary had their first child, a son. They named their son George, in honor of Mary’s guardian and Augustine’s friend George.

Fifty-seven years later this first son of Augustine and Mary Washington, known to history as George Washington, was sworn in as the first President of the United States. You probably have his portrait in your wallet.

 

 

 

 

Further reading:

http://www.genealogy.com/ftm/r/i/t/Donna-L-Ritter/GENE51-0001.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ball_Washington

 

 

 

 

 

Who were they ???

Who were our ancestors?

In many ways they were typical and ordinary citizens of their day. A few became minor but interesting footnotes in American history but most were everyday people. Most led normal lives, sometimes falling in love, having broken hearts, succeeding, failing and muddling through. They laughed, cried, struggled, fought, cheered, prayed and sometimes gave up. Some had large families, well over a dozen kids, while others never married. Many, sadly, saw a child die in childhood.

The large majority came from northwest Europe, mainly Britain, leaving their familiar surroundings for a strange but promising new world. They were likely young, under 35, and poor by our standards. Britain in the 1600s was in great turmoil, with wars, religious conflicts and plagues. The new world represented a possibly better life.

Some were pushed from Europe for religious reasons and at least one was a deported political prisoner. Typically, an emigrant paid for his/her cost of passage by agreeing to indentured servitude: most emigrants arrived as servants, legally bound to work for a New World master for five years in return for food.

It is estimated that, prior to the Revolutionary War, 80% of emigrants to America were indentured servants. They were not allowed to vote or marry. Typically fewer than half of indentured servants survived the five years – our ancestors were among the survivors.

 

Most became farmers, whether they were any good at farming or not, as that was about the only work available in their world. Many of the men were soldiers in wars, some as officers. At least three were prisoners of war. Religion played a large role in most of their lives, as it did for most settlers. Church was a large part of their self-identity.

Almost all of our ancestors arrived early in America, most before 1700. Most landed in Virginia while a few entered the continent through New England and Pennsylvania. Almost all moved southwestward as America expanded, first to the Carolinas and Tennessee, then to Mississippi and beyond. Their motivation to move westward was a mix of opportunity (possibly better land for farming) and necessity (the decent land in the East was owned by others).

As America industrialized the men began to move from farming into a broad range of occupations, including doctors, storekeepers, lawyers, machinists, small business owners, teachers and everything in between. Women, as was the custom of the times, built families and shaped the generations to come. A good argument can be made that the womens’ accomplishments as mothers were more important and enduring than the mens’.

Many of your ancestors born before 1800 never went to school but they did learn how to write their names. Some never did, however, and signed things with an “X”.

Despite the differences in circumstances and practices, however, our ancestors were humans like us. In so many ways they were us and we are them, alike in both heads and hearts. To see their images, however faintly, just look in a mirror.

 

Further reading:

http://www.ushistory.org/us/5b.asp

http://www.landofthebrave.info/indentured-servants.htm

 

 

 

Virginia Pioneers – the Haynes

William Haynes (1710-1781) and Elizabeth Milner Haynes (1710-1780)

Virginia, for its first hundred years, was settled only along its coast. Those early settlers struggled to survive and depended heavily on ships from England. With time, though, they learned how to live off the land, how to farm and make essential goods. There were vast amounts of fertile land available inland and so some began to move westward, away from the sea.

Those new migrants cherished independence and self-sufficiency. They sought the chance to better their circumstances, to raise and feed families and to run their lives on their own terms. They were the original American pioneers. Their love of opportunity and self-sufficiency helped give birth to a new nation, to shape its personality and its path through history. 

Among those early Virginia pioneers were Elizabeth and William Haynes, two of your ancestors. Soon after their marriage they began a series of westward moves, finally settling 200 miles inland in a forested area (Bedford County) that was deep inside Indian-held territory. They and their few neighbors did everything from clearing land to delivering babies to making soap to setting broken bones to making clothes. They farmed, raised animals, hunted, gathered fruit and did whatever else it took to survive.

William and Elizabeth had married at 24. By age 44 they’d had at least eight children, including your grandfather Henry Haynes. The total number of children born might have been higher than eight as the eight names that are known were the ones who made it to adulthood. Infant and chideaths were common in those times.

Indian raids were also common on the early Virginia frontier. William served as a local militiaman for about 20 years, occasionally fighting off Indian raids. Some of William and Elizabeth’s neighbors died in the raids, as did Indians.

Their farm was about 400 acres which was a modest size considering the era’s poor crop yields. It likely provided only a subsistence living. The main food crop was corn, supplemented  with sorghum (molasses) and vegetables. The cotton for clothes was produced locally. Hunting plus a few cattle and hogs provided meat.

William and Elizabeth supported the American Revolution. William was an officer in the Continental Army though, given his age (65), he probably was not a front-line fighter. William and his son Henry (your ancestor) provided beef to the struggling Continental Army. They were committed.

Elizabeth’s and William’s lives on the Virginia frontier took great willpower. Neighbors and church provided moral and limited material support for each other in times of crisis but their resources were meager. It took resourcefulness and determination and n ability to shrug off discouragement. The pioneers as a group were tough folk.

One final note on William Haynes – his last will and testament. He had his will prepared at age 70 – perhaps he was sick, perhaps he simply believed in preparation. My guess is that he was sick, as he died later that year.  He could not read or write and so his signature was simply a “W”.

The usual practice in this 1700s was to have a son as executor (an executor is the person in charge of the will) and to leave the bulk of his property to his oldest son. Oldest sons were important in those days. William Haynes broke those traditions in many ways.

First, he named his two sons-in-law, not his sons, as co-executors of the will. That was highly unusual. Second, he gave the farm and the bulk of his meager possessions to one son-in-law, not to his biological children. Had there been a family fight  that strained William’s relationships with some of his children?

Perhaps geography played a role (several sons had moved westward) or maybe there were bad feelings in the family, or maybe the motives were neither of those reasons. We’ll never know.

As a writeup (linked below) on William Haynes notes, even if he left his children no possessions, he did leave to them the pioneer spirit and the ability to live on the frontier, which they did. We can be grateful to him for that.

Further reading:

Haynes Website

 

 

 

A Preacher and a Poet

Guy Smith (c1660-1720)

Guy Smith was the first Smith in our family to emigrate to America. He appears to have been a very poor but bright child in England, bright enough to be admitted to Cambridge University around 1683.

Cambridge was an interesting place to be while Guy attended the school, as its professors included Issac Newton. Guy was a  “sizar” at Cambridge, which is basically a student servant. In exchange for doing menial work at the college he received one meal a day and a free education. He was educated in religion, as was common in those days, and became Reverend Guy Smith.

In his 30s Guy Smith boarded a ship and emigrated to Virginia. Why? We’ll never know for sure but there are several possible motives. England was in turmoil in that era and there were few opportunities for poor people. America, on the other hand, offered opportunities and was free of bubonic plague, a disease that killed about a quarter of England around Guy’s birth. Also, pastors were in short supply in the New World and that shortage created problems, as Englishmen were required by law to attend church. The English authorities offered pastors free passage to America if they agreed to minister in America. It’s believed that Guy was one of those volunteers.

Reverend Smith served in eastern Virginia, near the Atlantic Ocean, from 1702 to his death around 1719. This was an important area in early Virginia, both for its tobacco as well as the presence of many families who played important roles in the American Revolution and later provided Presidents  for the US. Pocohontas and her descendants lived in Gloucester.

Reverend Smith, a multi-talented man, served as a trustee of the nearby first college in the South, William & Mary.

He also wrote poetry, one of which survives to today. The poem is called “The Great Speckled Bird”, a religious poem . Two hundred years after Guy Smith’s death his poem was put to music by Roy Acuff and Johnny Cash, famous county/gospel singers. Their songs can be found on YouTube.

Finally, what happened to Guy Smith’s children and grandchildren? Well, most moved westward with the frontier, as new land became available for settlers. They moved into western Virginia and then our branch moved to Tennessee and then Mississippi. Below is the path of some of Stuart Smith’s ancestors. John is Guy’s son, Thomas is John’s son and Henry is Thomas’ son:

 

A Few Words about the Blog

At the top of a post you’ll see a name in blue. You are a descendant of that person.

The person in blue might be a great-grandparent or a great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent or anywhere in between. I choose to not try to list the number of “greats” – just know that the person was a direct ancestor of yours.

What I record here is based on the tireless work of many people over many years. Those amateur genealogists have done great detective work using clues like census records, wills, family bibles, gravestone inscriptions, old newspapers and so forth. My role is simply to summarize small parts of their work. I also hope to organize the detailed research for anyone interested in a “deep dive” into their ancestry.

A number of the posts tell stories of your ancestor’s brush with a famous person or event. That’s because such people and events are known and there’s a good bit of information available on those. Details on everyday people who lived years ago, which describes the large majority of our ancestors, are much harder to find and largely don’t exist. In those cases I’ll try to offer glimpses of their world, as revealed by historians. My goal is to give a sense of the people and their times and to do so in ways worth reading.

 

Stranger Danger

 Lucy Peyton’s niece Sarah Jane Peyton

One of our Smith/Duncan grandmothers was Lucy Peyton. Lucy moved from Virginia to Mississippi in 1834. However, most of her siblings and their children remained in Virginia, including an unmarried niece named Sarah Jane.

Sarah, a spinster, lived quietly with her brother Randolph in the small town of Port Royal, Virginia. Here is their house today, boarded up and abandoned:

One ordinary Monday evening many years ago Randolph was gone from the house, leaving Sarah alone. Around dark three men arrived on horseback. One, a man named Willie, was known to Sarah. The other two were strangers.

Sarah Jane invited them in. Willie explained that the two strangers were former Confederate soldiers, one wounded, who needed a place to stay the night. Robert E. Lee had surrendered just two weeks earlier and the two soldiers were headed home.

Sarah Jane considered the situation. Her sympathies were Southern and she likely wanted to be kind to travelers but this situation would put her in a house with several unknown men while her brother was gone. She decided that they had to leave the house.

The men understood. Sarah Jane and Willie discussed options and agreed that the party should try the farm house of Richard Garrett, about two miles away.

The men remounted their horses and left, moving down the road to the Garrett farm. Farmer Garrett allowed the three men to stay the night in his house. The next day the farmer told the men to sleep in the barn that night and then move on. The men bedded down in the barn.

That night, well after midnight, riders arrived at Garrett’s house, looking for two men. Garrett told the riders that there were two travelers sleeping in the barn. The riders dismounted and surrounded the barn that contained the two strangers who earlier wanted to stay at Sarah Jane’s house.

The rest of the story is well-covered by American history books. The riders, who were federal cavalry, surrounded the barn. They ordered the two travelers to leave the barn and, when one of the travelers refused to come out, they set the barn on fire. The reluctant traveler, trapped in a burning barn, finally came out with his pistol drawn. The soldiers shot, hitting him in the neck.

They placed the mortally-wounded traveler on farmer Garrett’s front porch where, several hours later, the mysterious traveler, John Wilkes Booth, died.

Farmer Garrett suffered from housing John Wilkes Booth. The fire destroyed his farm equipment and supplies, his means of feeding his large family. He became a public villian and his family said he suffered emotional wounds that never healed.

I imagine that cousin Sarah Jane, and the Peyton family in general, was thankful that Randolph had not been home on April 24, 1865.

Teeny-Tiny Tattle-Tales

 

Clues come in sizes large and small. The smallest source of ancestry clues, microscopic DNA, can give us hints about the origins of our ancestors.

I’ve had my DNA tested and, if (like me) you’re a descendant of Smith/Duncan or Greer/Russell, I can tell you a few things about the 50% or 100% of ancestors you and I share.

• 99% of my ancestors came from Northwest Europe (British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia and France).
• There’s no Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, African or other non-European.
• There is little indication of Italian, Greek, Spanish or other Mediterranean Europeans. Britain, Germany and Scandinavia were the homes of my ancestors.

That same Northwest Europe background applies to the 50% (or 100%) of the genes you got from your Smith/Duncan or Greer/Russell ancestors.

I was hoping for some Indian blood, or Attila the Hun. Oh well.

DNA provided one final tidbit, this one about Stuart Smith’s ancestry.  y-DNA is what males inherit from their father, so I have Stuart Smith’s type of y-DNA. My DNA test showed that I (and Stuart Smith, and his father, and his father’s father and so on back hundreds of generations) have y-DNA that’s called “E-V13”. E-V13 is most commonly found today in Albania and Greece. What’s up with that???

In a nutshell, Albania and Greece were sources of Roman soldiers and craftsmen. There are concentrations of E-V13 in the parts of Britain that had Roman soldiers and craftsmen two thousand years ago. So, a reasonable guess is that the original Smith male in Britain was likely a Roman soldier or craftsman. The “original” Smith probably arrived in Britain as part of the Roman invasion about two thousand years ago.

Who Cares about Dead People?

That’s a fair question. Why should anyone be interested in people who died many years ago? After all, there are lots of interesting people around us who are still breathing.

As I see it, a look at our predecessors is a chance for us to learn a little more about ourselves, to help us put ourselves and our world “in context”. Our ancestors and their world largely shaped us and our world. Learning a little about our ancestors, their characters, choices and world, helps us learn a little more about ourselves.

Also, seeing how our portion of the world has changed might give us hints about where it, and we, are headed.

Finally, there’s a sense of connection, a sense of family, that often arises from knowing a little of the lives of those who came before us. We are part of a family that spans time, stretching across the past and into the future, including those we never knew and those of the future we won’t live to see. We are family.

 

I’ll try to keep this interesting.