Antebellum Sumter County, Alabama

Topic: Early Versions
Sumter County, Alabama, where Ruby Pickens Tartt collected a version of "Come by Here" in 1938, was still a frontier town a hundred years earlier. The river port of Gainesville, at the northern end of the county’s fertile black soils along the Tombigbee river, was its economic hub.

The panic of 1837 had had some effect on land and cotton speculators, but small land owners still were dominant. Slaves comprised only 30% of the population in 1840. [1]

When depression arrived in 1839, the state of Alabama passed a law making it illegal to imprison individuals for debt. [2] It was probably between then and 1845 that Jeremiah Brown was able to buy out his neighbors and amass his "immense holdings." [3]

By 1850, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few cotton planters. The number of slaves had more than doubled, to 14,881, while the number of whites dropped by more than 46%, from 13,901 in 1840 to 7,369 in 1850. [4]

On the eve of the Civil War, in 1860, 121 individuals living in Sumter County or their estates [5] owned more than half the 18,116 slaves in the county. [6] Three were women. [ 7] The others, who reported forty or more slaves, represented less than 8% of the white, adult, male population over age twenty. [8]

Brown was the largest owner, with 540 slaves [9] spread over six plantations. [10] Others, who probably were absentee owners, were men who had spent time in Gainesville when money was easy, and then migrated into politics. Reuben Chapman, who served as governor from 1847 to 1849, owned 106 slaves in Sumter County. [11] His sister, Mary, married Edmund Pettus in 1844. [12]

Pettus had practiced law, which meant land speculation, in Gainesville between 1842 and 1847. [13] He was a cousin of John A. Winston, [14] who served as Alabama’s governor in the 1850s. [15] Winston still had 110 slaves in Sumter County in 1860. [16] Turner Reavus, Pettus’ law partner, [17] had 98 slaves in the county. [18] The man who took Pettus’ place as Circuit Judge, Augustus Coleman, [19] owned 53 slaves in 1860. [20]

The 1860 census indicated 81 people in the county had been born outside the United States. Robert Spratt’s memoir suggested they were harassed, and that tales of those incidents lived on in the county’s collective memory. He mentioned a Swede named Olsen who was forced to go by the name George Wilson. When he persisted and named his son Olsen Wilson, people promptly changed it to Anson Wilson. [21]

Social control before the Civil War took different forms for whites and slaves. As mentioned in the post for 15 September 2019 and 22 September 2019, former slaves recalled the use of violence and the threat of violence by patrollers who rode by plantations at night and challenged all Black individuals they met. If there were 913 mulattos in the county in 1860, [22] one can estimate the number of rapes that had occurred.

Ostracism and intimidation were the preferred tools for managing whites. Spratt recalled a group of young men donned masks and rose horses in parades. The official view is the Indomnitables were organized in 1857. [23] However, Spratt claimed:

"During the Mexican War the horseback parade went to Gainesville and greatly alarmed the Gainesville people, who took them to be Mexicans." [24]

The war with Mexico occurred between 1846 and 1848, just before Irish and German immigrants were arriving in this country. The port of Gainesville used slaves to push cotton bales down a ramp to the landing where steamboats docked. The actual loading was done by Irishmen, because the work was too dangerous to give to valuable slaves. [25] Robert Mellown didn’t indicate when Irishmen began to be used or if they were local, or came with the boats. One suspects the latter, and that the parade was meant to ensure none stayed in the area.

Narrowing the range of acceptable occupants of the county wasn’t limited to immigrants. In 1847, the Indomnitables, or other young men of the same ilk, described as a "few of the young men of the place," [26] bullied a school teacher who had just moved from Connecticut. She was not attractive, and had offended local mores by expecting "the little girls, who had been petted by their fathers and mothers like doll-babies," to learn. [27]

They sent Sam Hele to scare her off. He began by disparaging the morals of the local population. When he was met with polite responses, he began describing ways they abused their slaves. When she maintained her poise, he change from tall tales to direct threats:

"They mobbed a Yankee school-mistress here, some time ago, for saying something against slavery: but I believe they only tarred and feathered her, and rode her on a rail for a few squares. Indeed, I heard some of the boys at the grocery, the other night, talk of trying the same experiment on another; but who it was, I did not hear them say." [28]

The war with Mexico had reopened the slavery question. In 1846, when the war began, David Wilmot introduced a bill to prohibit slavery in any conquered territory, thereby abandoning the Missouri Compromise of 1820. [29] People in Sumter County already were expecting to expand into Texas and saw this as a direct threat to their livelihoods.

Southerners lost faith in the Whig party. One of its politicians, Joseph Baldwin, had moved to Gainesville in 1837. [30] In 1846, just before the Hele incident, he lost an election to Congress to Democrat Samuel Williams Inge, who had moved to Livingston in 1844. [31]

In 1852, Baldwin begin publishing comic sketches about life in Mississippi and Alabama in the Southern Literary Messenger. [32] They appeared in book form the next year as The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi. [33] He included a description of the 1847 event.

Sam Hell was a pun on the name of Samuel Hale, who had moved from New Hampshire to Tuscaloosa to edit a Democratic newspaper in 1837. [34] He was not partisan enough during the Wilmot controversy, when Baldwin was sitting in the state legislature as a Whig, and lost his job. He moved to Livingston in 1846, [35]

As events unfolded in the 1850s, he became a suspicious character. In 1852, a New Orleans newspaper reprinted a rumor that John Parker Hale, who was running for President for the Free Soil Party, [36] "has a brother who is a practicing lawyer in Livingston." It then confirmed the fact that "Senator Hale has a brother named Samuel Hale in Alabama who was at one time a prominent politician and editor, and was esteemed as a gentleman of ability and integrity." [37]

The use of the past tense in the last sentence indicated that he had lost his social position.

The conflict between Baldwin and Hale was about more than politics and ethnicity. They represented different economic classes.

Hale married Mary Ann Bolling, [38] the daughter of William Ransom Boling [39] by his first wife. [40] He died in March 1860, and his estate of 47 slaves was administered by I. James Lee, [41] who had married Bolling’s daughter by his second wife, [42] Ellen Belle Lee. [43] After Hale’s first wife died, he married "Ellen Lee, widow, reckoned the richest woman in the county." [44]

Baldwin had to buy his thee slaves: Jacob, purchased in the 1830s; Malinda, bought in New Orleans in 1844; and James, acquired in 1846. [45] This placed him among the small-time slave owners who had been squeezed by wealthy planters in the 1840s.

Adam Tate suggested Flush Times celebrated that period when " the traditional social order, with its hierarchies, castes, and long-established conventions, had not yet taken hold" and "individuals who would have been trapped in the lower ranks of society in established communities to rise to prominence." [46]

Baldwin left Livingston in 1854 for California [47] before people realized he wasn’t just making fun of Charity Woody and Sam Hele. The tales Hele conjured of slave abuse, like the master who killed a man because he had blinded a dog that bit him, [48] were probably as rooted in the life of the county, as much as was Hale.

End Notes
1. Willis Brewer. "The County of Sumter." 525–533 in Alabama: Her History, Resources, War Record, and Public Men from 1540 to 1872. Montgomery, Alabama: Barrett and Brown, 1872. Pages 526–527 containing the census data are missing from the online copy. Jeanne Kalkwarf transcribed them for Genealogy Trails’ Sumter County website.

Brewer listed a total population of 19,923 in 1840, while Wikipedia’s entry for "Sumter County Alabama" had 29,923. I’m using this one because it’s based on the racial breakdown of the population.

2. "Alabama History in February." Landmarks of DeKalb County, Alabama website.

3. Jud K. Arrington. "Sumterville." Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama. 38 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama. Edited by Charles Walker. Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005. Brown was mentioned in the posts for 1 September 2019 and 22 September 2019.

4. Brewer.

5. Tom Blake. "Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." Ancestry website.

6. Brewer.
7. Susan Lee had 83 slaves, Anna Travis had 54, and Mary Williams had 54.

8. My calculation from the 1860 census of white men aged 20 or more. Classified Population of the States and Territories by Counties on the First Day of June, 1860. Section on Alabama posted on United States Census website.

9. Blake transcribed "Jeremiah" as "Jerrett." He also was called Jerre. The two t’s in "Jerrett" were probably a badly written h.

10. Arlington. He claimed Brown had a thousand slaves. That may be a metaphorical number, or may hint that Brown, and others, undercounted their chattel to avoid taxes, or that some of the plantations and slaves were in a neighboring county.

11. Blake. Chapman was mentioned in the posts for 1 September 2019, 8 September 2019, and 15 September 2019. He owned more land and slaves around Huntsville. [49]

12. Wikipedia. "Edmund Pettus." The bridge in Selma, Alabama, was named for him.

jdc. "Mary Lucinda Chapman Pettus." Find a Grave website. 12 December 2012.

13. Wikipedia, Pettus.
14. Wikipedia. "John A. Winston."

15. William L. Barney. "John A. Winston (1853-57)." Encyclopedia of Alabama website. 4 August 2008; last updated 30 September 2014. In 1844, he became involved with a commission firm in Mobile that generated the money he used to buy additional plantations in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.

16. Blake.

17. Elbert L. Watson. "Edmund Pettus." Encyclopedia of Alabama website. 9 November 2010; last updated 5 January 2015. Reavis served in the state senate in 1861. [50]

18. Blake.

19. Robert D. Spratt. A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama. Edited by Nathaniel Reed. Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997. 85.

20. Blake.

21. Spratt. 93–94. Spratt rarely gave dates. However, he said Anson served in the Confederate army.

22. 1860 census. By my calculation there were 1,168 slave women between the ages of 15 and 40 in the county.

23. "DUD Parade." City of Livingston, Alabama, website. It cites Spratt as its source. The detail may be in the manuscript, but it’s not in the published version.

24. Spratt. 12.

25. Robert O. Mellown. "Steamboats in Alabama." Encyclopedia of Alabama website. 30 September 2008; last updated 16 August 2019.

26. Joseph G. Baldwin. "Samuel Hele, Esq." 284–303 in The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi. New York: D. Appleton, 1853; 1858 edition. 293.

27. Baldwin. 291–292.
28. Baldwin. 302–303.
29. Wikipedia. "Wilmot Proviso."

30. Adam L. Tate. "Joseph Glover Baldwin and The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi." Encyclopedia of Alabama website. 6 June 2008; last updated 11 July 2013.

31. Roy Parker, Jr. "Inge, Samuel Williams." NC Pedia website. 1988.
32. "Joseph Glover Baldwin." Know Southern History website.
33. Baldwin.

34. Hunter Dickinson Farish. "An Overlooked Personality in Southern Life." The North Carolina Historical Review 12:341–353:1935. 343.

35. Farish. 344.
36. Farish. 342.

37. The [New Orleans] Times-Picayune. 27 April 1852. 1. Posted by gblount59. 9 February 2016.

38. Farish. 345.
39. "William Ransom Bowling." Ancestors website. It’s also spelled "Bolling."
40. Spratt. 83.
41. Blake. He listed J. J. Lee as "exr" for the W. Boling "est."
42. Spratt. 83.
43. Ancestors.

44. Farish. 345. Spratt indicated there were several Lee families in Sumter County. Bolling’s wife, Ellen Belle Lee, was related to the Lees of Lilita. [51] I. James Lee came from Tuscaloosa and "married into this other Lee family." [52] Hale’s wife Ellen Lee is not identified farther.

45. Michael H. Hoffheimer. "Race and Terror in Joseph Baldwin’s The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853)." Seton Hall Law Review 39:725–:2009. 729–778. His source was Samuel Boyd Stewart. "Joseph Baldwin." PhD dissertation. Vanderbilt University, 31 August 1941. 155.

46. Tate.
47. Tate.
48. Baldwin. 298–299.

49. Micky Maroney. "The Withers-Chapman-Johnson House: A Plantation Cottage." The Historic Huntsville Quarterly of Local Architecture and Preservation 15:33–23: Spring 1989.

50. Brewer. 533.
51. Spratt. 83.
52. Spratt. 86.