Jesus Movement

Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
The word “beatnik” began as a reference to Beat poets and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. [1]  The theme of his 1957 novel was at least as old as Huckleberry Finn. [2]  Television producers transformed it into Route 66 in 1960. [3]

Hippies replaced beatniks in 1967 as romantic outsiders.  Many in the nation first became aware of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in January, when the local underground newspaper staged a mass protest against California’s ban on LSD.  The Human Be-In featured Timothy Leary, who endorsed LSD; Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who promoted Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, and local music groups like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. [4]

Youth from around the country began descending on San Francisco over spring break.  They kept coming.  It became the Summer of Love when flower children and hippies and drugs were everywhere. [5]  The Monterey Pop Festival in June gave acid rock bands a megaphone. [6]

The word “hippie” became a generic term for a persona, wearing jeans and letting one’s hair grow long.  While the term was associated with the drug culture of marijuana, it covered everyone from those, like Janis Joplin, [7] with serious problems to ones who continued smoking recreational pot.  In between were people like Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary who experimented, but rejected it in 1969, [8] and those who saw the effects on their friends in junior high school and never tried any substance.

Evangelists responded to the proliferation of drugs with techniques that went back to groups like the Salvation Army, [9] who had opened missions on Skid Rows in the nineteenth century to save the souls of alcoholics by reforming them.  Arthur Blessit ran a nightclub on Sunset Strip in 1965 to convert prostitutes and drug addicts. [10]  Ted Wise opened a coffee house near the intersection of Haight and Ashbury in 1967. [11]  Both were Southern Baptists. [12]

Lonnie Frisbee was the prototypical convert.  He had a vision of Jesus calling him to proselytize when he was on an LSD trip. [13]  Wise found him preaching on the streets, and took him back to his religious commune north of San Francisco. [14]

Later, John Nicholson gave Frisbee a ride when he was hitchhiking south.  Nicholson’s girlfriend’s father wanted to meet a real hippie, so he introduced the two. [15]

Chuck Smith was pastor of a small church in Costa Mesa in Orange County.  Both he [16] and Calvary Chapel had been associated with Aimee Semple MacPherson’s Four Square Gospel Church, but had left it. [17]  Smith hired Frisbee to help run a half-way house for drug users, the House of Miracles. [18]

Frisbee went into the streets to bear witness to Christ, and took his converts back to Calvary Chapel. [19]  The usual meeting began with “two hours of music and testimony”followed by forty-five minutes of Bible study led by Smith. [20]

Smith’s theology, like that of many involved with the Jesus People Movement, was premillennial. [21]  Their belief that the apocalypse was near mirrored protest movements against the War in Vietnam and in the South.  Barry McGuire’s recording of “The Eve of Destruction” [22] had reached the Billboard charts in 1965. [23]

Premillennialism hadn’t disappeared after the Holiness manifestations in the 1890s. [24]  Matthew Sutton found supporters of Prohibition turned to its philosophy when Franklin Roosevelt was elected.  The head of First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood wrote: “The results of the past election in our beloved country tend to confirm the conviction that we are living in the end days of human government in the earth. . . . Surely the Lord must be at hand!” [25]

The founding of Israel in 1948 reignited it.  Frisbee believed the Six-Day War of 1967 marked the beginning of the final days.  He cited Joel, who had predicted that, after a battle, God would “pour out my spirit on all flesh,” that “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” and “your young men shall see visions” as the explanation for the Jesus People. [26]

Speaking in tongues was not an attempt to contact the world of the spirits, as it had been in Los Angeles in 1908 when William Seymour was holding his revival on Azusa Street. [27]  It was a sign, one among many, that an individual would be among the protected when Doomsday arrived. [28]

This was the same division that had occurred after Cane Ridge, when Presbyterians rejected the emotional aspects of the revival and groups like the Cumberland Presbyterians broke away. [29]  The same cleavage yawned in the early 1900s when middle class whites shied away from what they saw as the excesses of Seymour’s revival.  The leading Presbyterian theologian argued the age of charismatic gifts had ended with the Apostles. [30]

When an Episcopal minister in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles reported “he had received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit” in 1960, he was forced to resign. [31]  Likewise, George Bradford was forced out of his Presbyterian pulpit in 1968. [32]

Many of the cities in Southern California had welcomed large numbers of Southerners who came to work in the shipyards, war production plants, and military bases in World War II. [33]  They aspired to the middle class, and many associated speaking in tongues with lower-class people back home.  Another of the Jesus Movement leaders declared:

“We don’t believe in wild-eyed fanaticism.  We’re not holy rollers.  We don’t toss babies up in the air or handle snakes.” [34]

Attitudes were changing.   The son of a Hollywood Presbyterian minister admitted people in his Bel Air congregation were speaking in tongues in 1963, [35] but doing it in private groups, not in public meetings. [36]  When another minister appealed his firing for speaking in tongues in 1968, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church ruled that espousing charismatic gifts was not grounds for termination. [37]  It formed a committee, who recommended they be accepted, if properly interpreted. [38]  After all, Calvin had not ruled them out, only said they had disappeared from lack of faith. [39]

Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Four-Square Gospel Church, had been ambivalent about public manifestations of religious experience.  She set aside a separate space for individuals who were overtaken by the Holy Spirit, so they wouldn’t disturb the larger crowd she was attracting with her faith healing. [40]

Smith had a similar aversion to public, rather than private, displays.  He felt that outbursts of glossolalia “demonstrated insensitivity to decorum and common sense” [41] and that “teaching of the word is an ‘act of prophecy that edifies the whole body and is superior to speaking in a mysterious tongue’.” [42]

Frisbee’s earliest religious experiences had been in his grandmother’s Pentecostal church.  He remembered a Calvary Church meeting where the musicians had “ushered in the tangible presence of God into our midst—which is the absolute goal of worship.” [43]  He left in 1971. [44]

End Notes
1.  Jack Kerouac.  On the Road.  New York: Viking Press, 1957.

2.  Mark Twain.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.

3.  Dennis MacNally.  Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America.  New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979.  272.  Cited by Wikipedia.  “Route 66 (TV Series).”

Katie Mills.  The Road Story and the Rebel; Moving Through Film, Fiction and Television.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.  Cited by Wikipedia.  “Jack Kerouac.”

4.  Danny Goldberg.  “All the Human Be-In Was Saying 50 Years Ago, Was Give Peace a Chance.”  The Nation website.  13 January 2017.  The newspaper was the San Francisco Oracle.

5.  Wikipedia.  “Summer of Love.”

6.  Wikipedia.  “Monterey Pop Festival.”  The festival was organized by John Phillips, then of the Mamas and Papas.  He was discussed in the posts for 13 October 2019 and 20 October 2019 as part of The Journeymen.

7.  Wikipedia.  “Janis Joplin.”  She died in 1970 from an overdose of heroin.

8.  Paul Stookey was converted in 1968. [45]  He often used the name Noel Stookey or Noel Paul Stookey on his Christian songs.

9.  Lonnie Frisbee recalled “we got the concept for the Living Room of ‘soup, soap, and the gospel’ from General Booth, the man who established the Salvation. Army.” [46]  Booth was William Booth.

10.  Edward E. Plowman.  The Jesus Movement in America.  Elgin, Illinois: David C. Cook Publishing Company, 1971.  46.

11.  Plowman.  43–44.

Mark Ellis.  “Communal ‘Hippie House’ in S.F. Bay Area Was Ground Zero for Jesus Movement.”  God Reports website.  30 August 2018.

12.  On Blessitt:  Plowman, 46, and Larry Eskridge, “Jesus People Movement,” World Religions and Spirituality website, 15 October 2016.

On Wise: Eskridge.  The commune-coffeehouse was run by four couples: “Ted and Elizabeth Wise, Steve and Sandy Heefner, Jim and Judy Dopp, and Danny and Sandy Sands.” [47]

13.  Lonnie Frisbee.  Not by Might Nor by Power: The Jesus Revolution.  With Roger Sachs.  Santa Maria, California: Freedom Publications, 2017, second edition.  42–43.  Paul Fahy brought this to my attention in “Lonnie Frisbee: The Problem of Charismatic Hypocrisy.”  Understanding Ministries website.  2016.

14.  Frisbee.  44.
15.  Frisbee.  66–67.

16.  Randall Balmer and Jesse T. Todd. “Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, California.”  1:663–98 in American Congregations: Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities.  Edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.  1:673–674.  Cited by Wen Reagan.  “A Beautiful Noise: A History of Contemporary Worship Music in Modern America.”  PhD dissertation.  Duke University, 2015.  155.

17.  Wikipedia.  “Calvary Chapel.”
18.  Frisbee.  68–69.
19.  Frisbee.  69.

20.  Ronald M. Enroth, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and C. Breckinridge Peters.  The Jesus People. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eermans Publishing Company, 1972.  86–87.

21.  Enroth.  Chapter 9.

22.  P. F. Sloan.  “Eve Of Destruction.”  Copyrighted by Trousdale Music in 1964.  Recorded in July 1965 by Barry McGuire.  “Eve of Destruction.”  Eve Of Destruction.  Dunhill D-50003.  Released 12 August 1965.  [Discogs entry]  McGuire turned to religious music after meeting Arthur Blessitt in the streets of Hollywood in 1970. [48]

23.  Wikipedia.  “Eve of Destruction (Song).”
24.  The post for 22 March 2020 discussed the premillennialism of the 1890s.

25.  Matthew Avery Sutton.  “Was FDR the Antichrist?  The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age.”  The Journal of American History 98:1052–1074:2012. Quotation on page 1062 from Stewart P. MacLennan.  “Crumbs from the King’s Table.”  King’s Business 24:2:January 1933.  Ellipsis in Sutton.  MacLennan led the church from 1921 to 1941. [49]

26. Enroth.  12.  Joel 2:28, King James version.  Much of this premillennialism drew from Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth.  Zondervan published it in 1970.  Zondervan’s interest in premillennialism was mentioned in the post for 9 August 2020.

27.  Seymour and Azusa Street were discussed in the post for 7 December 2017.

28.  I’m using Doomsday as a neutral, generic term for the end of the world.  Terminology is difficult, because the Bible offers few details.  Men, going back to Thomas Nelson Darby in the 1870s, [50] have distilled the allusions into a simple chronology.  Life will be marked by chaos and strife that are the prelude to the arrival of the antichrist.  Seven years of Tribulation will follow, before Christ returns for the battle of Armageddon.  Some believe all true Christians will be whisked away before the Tribulation in the Rapture.  Others think they will suffer persecution for three and half years, and then be removed.  Still others think the Rapture will occur after the Tribulation but before the battle of Armageddon. [51]

29.  The Cumberland Presbyterian Church was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.

30.  Vinson Synan.  The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997 edition.  209.  The theologian was Benjamin Warfield of Princeton Seminary.  His book was Counterfeit Miracles.  New York: C. Scribner’s, 1918.

31.  Wikipedia.  “Dennis Bennett (Priest).”
32.  “History of PRMI.”  Presbyterian Reformed Ministries International website.

33.  For instance, “Costa Mesa surged in population during and after World War II, as many thousands trained at Santa Ana Army Air Base and returned after the war with their families.” [52]

34.  Tony Alamo.  Quoted by Enroth. 195.  Alamo and his wife Susan Alamo founded the Alamo Christian Foundation in Hollywood in 1966. [53]  Both were raised in Jewish families. [54]  The same language was used by the curate who denounced Bennett: “We’re Episcopalians, not a bunch of wild-eyed hillbillies.” [55]

35.  PRMI.  Louis Evans, Junior, was pastor at Bel Air Presbyterian.  His father, Louis Evans, was pastor at Hollywood Presbyterian from 1941 to 1953. [56]  The Hollywood church spawned the Bel Air one in 1956. [57]  Frank Farrell may have confused the two when he claimed 600 were speaking in tongues at Hollywood in 1963. [58]

36.  Synan, Tradition.  232.  Frisbee described the difference.  He said he first saw a private display when he was staying with a friend who started to speak in tongues while praying by his bed.  “I had never in my life heard anybody speak in tongues, well, at least the way he did.  I really didn’t know what speaking in tongues was all about.  When I was saved as a little boy and around my grandmother’s church, there were people in the meetings and shouted out with shrieking glossolalia—you know, the typical Pentecostal, fanatical, shrill utterances.” [59]

37.  Vinson Synan.  The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901-2001.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001.  No pages in online version; The Robert Whitaker Case section.  Whitaker was dismissed by the elders of the Chandler, Arizona, Presbyterian Church.

38.  Special Committee on the Holy Spirit.  The Work of the Holy Spirit.  New York: United Presbyterian Church, 1970.  5–7.  Cited by Levi Bakerink.  “The Charismatic Renewal in the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition.”  Student paper.  Evangel University.  21 April 2014.  6–7.

39.  Synan, Century.  Section: The Presbyterian and Reformed Renewal.  The post for 26 January 2020 mentioned Leigh Eric Schmidt’s belief that pastors tolerated the ecstatic experiences that appeared in Scots Presbyterian kirks so long as they didn’t attract the attention of authorities.

40.  Daniel Mark Epstein.  Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson.  Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1993.  172.  Cited by Wikipedia.  “Aimee Semple McPherson.”  McPherson was active in Los Angeles from 1923 [59] until her death in 1944. [60]  Her secretary attended Calvary Chapel, where Frisbee talked with her about McPherson. [61]

41.  Charles E. Fromm.  “Textual Communities and New Song in the Multimedia Age: The Routinization of Charisma in the Jesus Movement.”  PhD dissertation.  Fuller Theological Seminary, 2006.  155.

42.  Smith.  Quoted by Fromm.  155.
43.  Frisbee.  126.
44.  Wikipedia, Frisbee.
45.  “1968.”  Noel Paul Stookey website.
46.  Frisbee.  50.
47.  Ellis.

48.  John Cody.  “From New Christy to ‘Living Christ;’ Barry Mcguire’s Ongoing Journey.”  Canadian Christianity website.  October 2008.

49.  “Our History.”  First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood website.
50.  Sutton.  1056–1057.
51.  Enroth.  186.
52.  Wikipedia.  “Costa Mesa, California.”
53.  Enroth.  61.
54.  Enroth.  61.
55.  Synan, Tradition.  229.
56.  First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.
57.  “Our History.”  Bel Air Presbyterian Church website.

58.  Frank Farrell.  “Outburst of Tongues: The New Penetration.”  Christianity Today 13 September 1963.  The article is only available by subscription.  Synan quoted it on page 231 of Tradition.

59.  Frisbee.  58.
59.  Synan, Tradition.  200.
60.  Wikipedia, McPherson.
61.  Frisbee.  84–85.

Sumter County, Alabama, Railroads

Topic: Early Versions
The Selma, Alabama, naval yard, which was destroyed by Union troops in 1865, [1] used steel from the Elyton, Alabama, area.  After the Civil War, outside investors acquired control of an 1853 charter for a railroad from Meridian, Mississippi, to Elyton.  It had reached York Station in Sumpter County, Alabama, in 1860, and was leased to the Selma and Meridian Railroad during the war. [2]

The Selma and Meridian is the red line numbered 168 going east from York through McDowell.  The initial line to Meridian is the segment from York to Cuba.  The unbuilt line is the red line numbered 168 going northeast from York to Eutaw.  It was merged into the Alabama and Chattanooga in November 1868 after Republicans won the elections. [3]

The line was completed in May 1871, and, in June, Elyton was renamed Birmingham. [4]  An Englishman, who rode from Meridian to Eutaw in January 1871, heard construction had created a shortage of Freedmen [5] willing to grow cotton.  One imagines that, once recruited, the men moved to the next section when the one in Sumter County was completed.

The two railroads attracted the attention of the Ku Klux Klan who objected to them hiring Freedmen as firemen.  John Taylor Coleman told Congressional investigators on 18 October 1871 that he had heard “from others—from the baggage-master and the train hands.  They said it was a common thing to take a negro fireman off and whip him, and threatened the engineer that if he brought him back again over there he might look out for similar treatment.” [6]

Sumter County gained little from the rail lines crossing it.  Robert Spratt said the Livingston Episcopal church lost members “when the mineral region of North Alabama began to develop.” [7]  Livingston didn’t build a cotton warehouse near the depot until 1886.  [8]

Conservatives were successful in creating barriers against alien influences.  When new ideas did arrive, they came from the rail center in Meridian in neighboring Lauderdale County.

The Southern Railroad expanded its reach to Cincinnati in 1891. [9]  This opened new markets for produce.

Morgan Lynn experimented with beans in 1890 near Cuba Station.  His success led to a migration of new farmers to the area.  Jack Vaughan said they included Rainers. [10

John George Riner had migrated to Rossner through South Carolina from Württemberg. [11]  While several of his children relocated to Lauderdale County before the Civil War, [12] one went to the larger city of Selma. [13]  It was children of the latter who moved to Cuba. [14]

Cuba’s population nearly doubled between 1900 and 1910 [15] when Floyd McElroy opened a factory that produced crates for cabbages and hampers for beans and peas. [16]  The Holmon Strawberry farm shipped to Cincinnati.  It hired 300 to 400 African Americans to pick the fruit, and used Black women to sort and pack the fruit. [17]

Blacks were temporary seasonal help, not tenants or sharecroppers who were provided with homes.  Wage earners were expected to leave when the work war over.  Rich Amerson, who was born near Sumterville and settled west of Livingston, picked fruit. [18]

It was during these temporary periods when individuals were assembled from different parts of the county mixed that new songs like “Come by Here,” if they were sung, were spread.

The strawberry harvest was the consequence of another industry that developed with the railroads: logging.  Nelle Jenkins said that, in the early years around Ramsey Station, “after the forests were cleared and the cane cut. strawberries sprang up around the edge of the forests.” [19]

The forests grew on acidic soils, not the limey ones near the river that had supported large cotton plantations.  These were the ones to fail first, [20] prompting people to abandon them and move west, first to Mississippi, then to Texas.  The war contributed to the reversion of the land to wilderness. [21]

Evan Allison opened a sawmill between York and Livingston, [22] which he sold to the Alexander Land Company in 1899. [23]  John Alexander had retail lumber yards in Chicago.  His partner, George Cooley Hixon, was the son of a Wisconsin lumberman. [24]  They ran the company as Sumter Lumber until 1912, [25] when they moved to Mississippi leaving behind stumps on clear-cut land. [26]

Allison began a new logging operation in 1900 near Lilita. [27]  In 1902, [28] he recapitalized with money from Frederick Richardson of Alpena, Michigan. [29]  In 1905, Allison moved his operations to Bellamy 1905 on a railroad he constructed (number 169 on the map). [30]

Earl M. McGowin remembered Allison “employed only black help with the exception of a few key personnel.” [31] The company housing was segregated, but Hillard White remembered “the houses were painted red and green in the Negro neighborhoods.” [32]

Over time, differences increased as white housing was improved and more houses were built for Blacks.  In 1969, only eight homes rented to African Americans had bathrooms and running water. [33]

Allison opened a new logging camp in Whitfield in the late 1920s.  Locals described the houses as “the old boxcar dwelling.” [34]  In the late 1960s, James Williams observed “Whitefield gives the impression of houses being put down in the woods and left to decay by themselves.” [35]

If one were looking for a place where new secular music could enter the county, it would be the more isolated environments like Whitfield.  In the late 1930s, Amerson told Ruby Pickens Tartt:

“Oh, yes, I left out of there after my uncle died, it was so lonesome like, and I went ramblin. That’s how come I’s down here.  Been at the sawmill.  First I was totin water for the swampers, then pullin lumber off a dry chain.  Then workin on the pond gettin logs out, hookin ’em with a chain, sendin ’em up in the mills.  Put ’em in the water to keep the worms out.  Then I was on the lumber hog.  Pull a lever this way and the saw squared the lumber.  Next I was stackin lumber, then I was the millwright. [36]

His repertoire included blues. [37]

The railroad remained the province of white men.  A 1930 photograph of the Alabama, Tennessee and Northern crew taken in Bellamy showed a line of white men standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the tracks.  All were wearing hats.  At the left side, a group of eleven men with dark faces are standing or squatting, with a slight space separating them from the whites.  They were wearing caps or high brimmed hats.  [38]

That railroad was built to Panola from the north in 1902, where it built a roundhouse and shops. [39]  The line, numbered 9 on the map, passed through Geiger in 1909, [40] reached Emelle in 1910, [41] and moved south through York in 1911, [42] where it constructed an engine and repair shop in 1913. [43]

Jimmie Rodgers’ paternal grandparents lived in Geiger, where he spent time as a child.  By age ten, he was living in Meridian, [44] where he developed the blue yodels that made him the first dominant country music singer in 1928.  Musical innovation, like everything else, happened just beyond the Sumter County’s lines.

Graphics
Selection from “Alabama.”  Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas.  New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948.  49.

End Notes
1.  Wilson’s raid and Forest’s response were discussed in the post for 30 August 2020.
2.  Wikipedia.  “Alabama Great Southern Railroad.”
3.  Wikipedia, Great Southern.

4.  Herbert J. Lewis.  “Birmingham.”  Encyclopedia of Alabama website.  8 January 2008; last updated 3 April 2017.

5.  Robert Somers.  The Southern States Since the War.  London: Macmillan and Company, 1871.  159.  This was brought to my attention by Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  732.

6.  John Taylor Coleman.  Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama.  18 October 1871.  United States Congress.  Joint Select Committee.  The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States.  Alabama.  Volume II.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872.  1053.

He got a threat that said “our Grand Cyclops has just arrived.”  A probate judge in Hale County, north of Marengo County, said “on the Selma and Meridian railroad” the Klan had “absolutely gone so far as to forbid the company from employing negro firemen on the line of the road at all.” [45]

7.  Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.  23.

8.  Spratt.  91.
9.  Wikipedia, Great Southern.

10.  Jack Vaughan.  “History of Cuba.”  26–28 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.  28.

11.  David Sprinkle.  “John George ‘Riner’ Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  20 December 2010.

12.  David Sprinkle.  “Charles Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  29 December 2011.

13.  David Sprinkle.  “Judge Thomas Gilbert Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  11 December 2011.

14.  Vernon McElroy.  “George Norris Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  17 July 2001; updated by David Snow.

Vernon McElroy.  “Myra Elizabeth Rainer Vaughan.”  Find a Grave website.  6 September 2001; updated by David Snow.

15.  Wikipedia.  “Cuba, Alabama.”  United States census for 1900 reported 384; in 1910 the population had increased to 650.

16.  Alan Brown.  Sumter County.  Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.  113.

17.  Alan Brown.  117.

18.  Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  154.

19.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  127.  Ramsey Station was close to Emelle, and was displaced by it when the railroad reached Emelle and its merchants transferred to the rail town.

20.  G. A. Swenson, et alia.  Soil Survey of Sumter County, Alabama.  Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, May 1941.  

21.  Somers.  159.  He noted in 1871 that much of the cotton bottom lands were fallow and added “when the hand of man ceases to till and dress it, the strong and untamed soil begins to work and wanton in its own way, and is now sending up over large tracts a wild herbage, and, where ditches and watercourses have not been kept clear as formerly, displays a tendency to develop little germs of swamp.”

22.  Hillard White, Ollie Coleman, Edward Hardrick, Gabriel Jenkins, and Eunice White.  “If Bellamy Had a Memory.  24 in Heritage.

23. Jud K. Arrington.  “History of Railroad in Sumter County.”  In Thomas Lawson, Jr.  Logging Railroads of Alabama.  Birmingham, Alabama: Cabbage Stack Publishing, 1996.  Adapted by Charles Walker.  “Allison and Smith.”  131 in Heritage.

24.  “George Cooley Hixon.”  Yale University.  Obituary Record of Graduates Deceased During the Year Ending July 1, 1923.  New Haven: Yale University, 1923.  782.  Steve McDonald posted the names of the principals in a 4 September 2004 post on Forestry Forum website.

25.  White.  24.

26.  Gil Hoffman.  “Sumter Lumber Co.”  Mississippi Railroads website.

Gene Allred.  “Electric Mills, MS.”  Mississippi Gen Web website.

27.  Charles Walker.  “Sumter & Choctaw Railroad.”  139–140 in Heritage.  139.
28.  Gil Hoffman.  “Allison Lumber Co.”  Mississippi Rails website.

29.  Item about Allison Lumber Company.  Southern Lumberman.  2 August 1924.  Synopsis published as “ Historic Archives: Allison Lumber Co.”  Southern Loggin’ Times.  January 2014. Richardson got his early experience in a logging camp owned by his uncle Charles Richardson, [46] who was in business with Newell Avery in Bay City. [47]  Allison was still majority owner when he died in 1937. [48]  His son-in-law, Allen E. Grubbs, took over. [49]

30.  Walker, Sumter and Choctaw.”  139.

31.  Earl M. McGowin.  Interviewed by Elwood R. Maunder for Forest History Society on 17 March 1976.  Society’s website.

32.  White.  24.

33.  James D Williams.  “Bellamy Alabama: Company Town Revisited.”  Civil Rights Digest 2:12–19:Fall 1969.  14.

34.  White.  24.
35.  Williams.  16.

36.  Richard Amerson.  “Richard the Tall-Hearted.  Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt.  107–111 in Brown and Owens.  110.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [50]

37.  Brown and Owens.  155.  Amerson subsequently was recorded by John Lomax and Harold Courlander.

38.  Alan Brown.  106–107.

39.  Cecile Oliver Horton.  “History of Panola and Surrounding Communities.  34–36 in Heritage.

40.  Bill Gilbert.  “Geiger.”  Collected by Jud K. Arrington.  Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  32–33 in Heritage.  32.

41.  Charles Walker.  “Alabama, Tennessee, & Northern Railroad.”  132–133 in Heritage.  132.

42.  “New Railroad Reaches York.”  The York [Alabama] Weekly Press.  9 March 1911.
43.  Walker, Alabama, Tennessee.  132.
44.  Alan Brown.  33.

45.  William T. Blackford.  Testimony, Demopolis, Alabama.  24 October 1871.  Alabama.  1293.

46.  Perry Francis Powers.  A History of Northern Michigan and Its People.  Assisted by H.G. Cutler.  Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1912.  2:924–927.

47.  Clara A. Avery.  The Averell-Averill-Avery Family: A Record of the Descendants of William and Abigail Averell of Ipswich, Mass.  Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Evangelical Publishing House, 1914.  Reprinted by Higginson Book Company, Salem.  2:666  Avery and I share the same immigrant ancestor, but the lines diverged around the time of the Salem witch trials in the 1690s.

48.  Tilda Mims.  “Evan Frank Allison: Pioneer in Conservation.”  Alabama’s Forests 22:28–30: Summer 2003.  29.

49.  Obituary.  Added by Paul RouLaine on 12 September 2015 to David McCarley.  “Evan Frank Allison.”  Find a Grave website.  20 April 2013.

50.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

Reconstruction in Sumter County, Alabama

Topic: Early Versions
Republicans in Congress became impatient with Southern attempts to perpetuate Antebellum conditions, and passed the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867. It imposed military rule, and placed General John Pope in charge of Alabama. [1]

On April 16, Pope ordered judges revoke the forced apprenticeships mentioned in the post for 6 September 2020. [2] In June 1867, he replaced the county sheriff [3] and circuit judge. [4] The Freedmen’s Bureau organized the Union League to educate African Americans on their rights and to register them to vote. [5]

As the presidential election of 1868 drew near, whites began to inflate routine domestic conflicts into examples of Republican activity. On October 9, Enoch Townsend attacked Bryant Richardson with a knife in the dusk, then fled. Instead of looking for causes, people assumed the Freedman had been influenced by Gerard Choutteau. [6]

Choutteau was neither a Republican carpetbagger from the north nor a Southern scalawag. He was one of those men who bought plantations after the war in hopes they could manage them without slaves better than Southerners had before the war. [7]

He apparently came from New Orleans to make a down payment on a plantation with several slave cabins owned by Lemuel Ormond. [8] This placed him in the center of community around Sumterville knit together by marriage. The first settlers included John Evander Brown, [9] Bryant Richardson Sr, [10] and Thomas Ormond. [11]

As the map shows, they claimed land in a productive bands along a waterway marked "2." To the east was the stony watershed with the Tombigbee marked "1." Nelle Jenkins said they "built their homes on the hill tops and tilled the lower ground." After they cleared the land, the springs stopped flowing. The Ormonds were among those who had problems. [12]

When Townsend fled, neighbors obtained a warrant and headed for Choutteau’s place. [13] They obviously had been watching it, and knew Townsend sometimes visited. [14] They descended in the dark, and searched every Freedman’s cabin. They broke down the one door that was barred. When one man escaped up the chimney, they followed and shot. It wasn’t Townsend they killed, but Yankee Ben, a protégé of the Republicans. [15]

They returned other nights and shot into Choutteau’s home, until he moved to Livingston. Then they burned the house. Alexander Richardson and Stepen Renfroe were indicted. [16] Although no one admitted a formal Ku Klux Klan organization existed in the area, Renfroe was widely seen as the leader of mobs that attacked Republicans and Freedmen. [17]

He was born in Georgia, but raised in Butler County’s red clay area south of Montgomery. [18] He enlisted in a unit of Alabama’s Ninth Infantry regiment, [19] and was wounded on 30 June 1862 at Gain’s Mill, Virginia. Renfroe returned to his company in December for the Battle of Fredricksburg, then disappeared from the record. [20] He officially was listed as a deserter on 30 January 1864. [21]

Renfroe returned to Butler County, where he murdered his wife’s sister’s husband on 9 July 1867. [22] He fled to Lowndes County and then moved into the Flatwoods in southwestern Sumter County. [23] In the late 1930s, General Greenlee told Ruby Pickens Tartt he had known Renfroe.

"Heap of times Mr. Bobbie let me go along with them to Livingston to hold the horses. I be scared sometimes, but nobody never hurt me. Lot of it started down here in Moscow. That was the startin place for the devilment in them days—that and Belmont—and then they all rid up to Livingston." [24]

In 1869, Renfroe and Alexander Richardson stopped Oliver Bell’s father and plied him with questions.

"Then he rode on cross Horn’s Bridge and he met old man Enoch Sledge and Frank Sledge, they was darkies what belonged to Marse Simmy Sledge’s father, old Dr. Sledge. Their marsa rented them land and they was makin money. (But Mr. Renfroe, he didn’t allow the niggers to have nothin.) So Uncle Enoch and Uncle Frank was in town tradin some and when they left, they pass the Ku Kluxes right down there by the bridge. Mr. Renfroe ask him for a piece of string to fix his saddle with, and he give it to him; then he shot Enoch and Uncle Frank ran to the river, but the Ku Klux got him and killed him too. Then they rode off and left them." [25]

Enoch survived and later talked with George Houston, a Black activist who was run out of the county soon after this event. Houston recalled that the Sledges and a third man, [26] had attended a Republican meeting while there were in town. According to him:

"They were returning from this convention home, when three white men rode up to them. One of them was young Mr. Sledge and one was Mr. Renfro. Enoch knew him. The other two he didn’t know at all. Mr. Sledge stopped back and they rode ahead of them, and when they came to them again they were walking. They had got far enough to get down and hitch their horses, and one of them asked Frank, ‘You’ll report me, will you?’ with an oath; I am not certain what the word was, but an oath. I think he said, ‘You ll report me, God damn you,’ and he raised a double-barreled gun and shot Frank, who was a young preacher, right off of his horse." [27]

Whites in Sumter County made more distinctions than did Renfroe. It was acceptable to harass Choutteau, Ben, and Houston because they had made public comments. Jenkins, who documented the history of Sumterville in 1961, voiced popular opinion when she concluded they:

"incited the Freemen against the whites; the situation became so acute until the white people under the leadership of Dr. Browning, Mr. Sledge, the Richardson brothers and many more attempted to stop their dastardly, insidious acts of depredation on the whites." [28]

An attack on the Sledge brothers was another matter. They had been owned Millicent Farmer who bequeathed them to her grandchildren in 1849. Her son-in-law, Albert Sledge was the trustee. [29]

The intendant, Edward Smith, wrote to the Republican governor demanding justice. [30] Reuben Chapman’s son, Reuben Jr, claimed they were "‘the most malignant murders ever committed in this state,’ and asserted. ‘It is time an example should be made of some of these desperadoes’." [31]

Bell remembered "The niggers went down there that night and got them, and they buried up there in the old Travis graveyard right there on the place." [32] Ganville Bennett, one of the oldest Freedmen in the county, recalled Enoch stayed with Dr. Sledge until he recovered. [33]

Meantime, Townsend languished in jail. He had been caught a few days after Ben was killed. [34] Then when a mob descended on the jail to release a white man who had murdered another Freedman, Townsend slipped away. [35] He was apprehended and returned to jail. [36]

Although most Freedmen who assaulted whites were severely punished, he was left alone. Jenkins’ comments about the Richardson brothers would suggest people in the county suspected more had occurred between Townsend and Richardson than was admitted in public, and thought no greater punishment was merited.

Renfroe didn’t need to attack him. He had achieved his goal. Bell told Tart: "Them was scary times, ’cause that man had no mercy for nobody." [37] Greenlee told her:

"Them was awful times; right down in this neighborhood some scan’lous things happened, and the niggers was scared to death. But I wan’t, not much. I knowed what side to get on, and that’s the side I stayed on, the white folks." [38]

Graphics
Base map from G. A. Swenson, et alia. Soil Survey of Sumter County, Alabama. Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, May 1941. 3, "Sketch map showing topographic divisions of Sumter County." Locations approximate.

End Notes
1. Michael W. Fitzgerald. "Congressional Reconstruction in Alabama." Encyclopedia of Alabama website. 11 August 2008; last updated 24 October 2017.

2. Peter Kolchin. First Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972. 67.

3. Jud K. Arrington, from estate of J. K. Arrington. "Sumter County Sheriffs." 115 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama. Edited by Charles Walker. Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

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

5. Fitzgerald.

6. Item. The Livingston [Alabama] Journal. 9 October 1868. 3. Posted by gblount59 on 10 January 2019.

Benjamin Franklin Herr. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 31 October 1871. United States Congress. Joint Select Committee. The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States. Alabama. Volume III. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. 1670.

Herr edited The Livingston Journal. Choutteau’s name was spelled a number of ways. Allen Trelease said the newspaper was "part and parcel of the Ku Klux conspiracy until it achieved its political objective in November 1870." [39]

7. Walter L. Fleming. Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905. 717–718.

8. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1669. The transcript had L. D. Ormond. Lemuel Thomas Ormond was the nephew of Thomas Ormond. Thomas came from Greene County, North Carolina, to buy land in January 1835. [40] The land purchased by Choutteau may have belong to Thomas. He died 31 August 1868, [41] and his will was recorded 14 October 1868. [42] Thomas never married, [43] and left some land to his nieces and nephews in Sumter County. He instructed Lemuel to sell the rest and send the proceeds to his "legal heirs in the state of North Carolina." [43] Depending on Thomas’ situation, Lemuel already may have been selling assets before the beginning of the 1868 planting season, or it may have been his own land.

Charles Neal found Thomas owned 66 slaves in 1860 who lived in 16 cabins. Thirty-two remained in the census of 1866. [44]

9. John’s connections were through his wife, Asenath. Her father Simon’s brother William [46] married Edith Horn. She was the sister of Isaac Wood Horn’s father, Thomas. [47] Edith’s granddaughter married Bryant Richardson Jr. [48] John is the one who built the bridge. [49]

10. Bryan and Uney Richardson migrated from Johnson County, North Carolina. Their sons included Bryant Jr, and Furney. One of Furney’s sons was Alexander. [50] Bryant Jr’s son was Arch T. [51]

11. Nelle Morris Jenkins. Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961. Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015. 16.

12. Jenkins. 16.

13. Noone identified who issued the warrant or who headed the posse. Alabama altered its law on 24 December 1868, after this incident, to allow "any justice of the peace to issue warrants running in any part of the state, and authorizing any sheriff or constable to go into any county to execute such process." [52] I suspect this was an expansion of already existing law regarding warrants, but don’t know.

14. Herr, 9 October 1868. "As soon as a warrant could be procured, a party of citizens went in pursuit of the assassin; and, as it was known that he was in the habit of frequently the place of the notorious Dr. Chatteau, they went there in quest of him." He identified the "freedman in his employ" as "Enoch Brown, alias Townsend" as if changing a name after Emancipation were a crime.

15. Herr, 9 October 1968, and Herr, 31 October 1871. Trelease researched primary sources, and wrote: "On October 2 a party of twenty-five to thirty men went to the home of Ben Brown, the Negro president of a Grant and Colfax Club, and killed him after he had ignored warnings to discontinue meetings. Brown lived on the plantation of Dr. Gerard Choutteau, another white Republican." [53] He described Choutteau as "the Republican planter who had organized a Negro Grant and Colfax Club." [54]

16. William Warren Rogers and Ruth Pruitt. Stephen S. Renfroe. Tallahassee, Florida: Sentry Press, 1972. 31.

Reuben Chapman, Jr. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 4 November 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1953. On indictment only.

Chautteau claimed to have lost everything, but Lemuel Ormond said the loss really was his, because Chautteau had not paid for the plantation. [55] Herr added "there were three bales of cotton on the place at the time the house was burned. They had been removed into one of the rooms of the dwelling-house. The balance of his crop had been shipped. There were two versions with reference to those three bales. Some told me they were the share belonging to the negroes that put in the crop; some others told me they were three bales that were to go to the parties from whom he purchased the property." [56]

17. The Congressional committee investigating the activities of the Ku Klux Klan could never get answers: people either professed ignorance or couldn’t remember. When they asked the sheriff if white men were "afraid to follow these disguised bands" he answered:

"Answer. Let me ask you a question: would you go into a den of lions that you didn’t know anything about?

"Question. Your impression is that there was a disinclination on the part of the community from fear.

"Answer. From fear; nothing else in the world. They were as true and brave men as ever made a track in the dirt, and when they see an open enemy they will try as long as anybody in the world to meet him; but when they are liable to be bushwhacked at any hour of the night they are not going. That’s the fact. It’s no use to disguise the matter; I speak plainly; it’s no use to call a pot by any other name, is it?" [57]

18. Rogers. 4.
19. Rogers. 5.
20. Rogers. 5.
21. Rogers. 5.
22. Rogers. 6.
23. Rogers. 8.

24. General Greenlee. "On the White Folks Side." Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt. 83–87 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 85. Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [58] Bobby was Robert Hart. Belmont, as shown in the map on the post for 6 September 2020, was located in the bend of the Tombigbee River. A ferry existed between Moscow and Marengo County in the southeastern part of the county. [59]

25. Oliver Bell. "That Tree Was My Nurse." Transcribed by Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [60] 134–137 in Brown. 135. Simmy Sledge was E. S. Sledge. [61]

26. According to William Warren Rogers and Ruth Pruitt, the three white men were Renfroe, Alexander Richardson, and Robert Clay. They killed Caesar Davis and Frank Sledge. Enoch Sledge survived. [62]

27. George W. Houston. Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama. 17 October 1871. Alabama. Volume II. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. 999.

28. Jenkins 181. Joshua Sledge had two sons, Albert and William H. Albert’s son Mark [63] was listed with Renfroe for another murder. [64] William was the physician who cared for Enoch Sledge. His daughter Mary married Refroe on 20 November 1869, [65] after the Richardson incident. E. S., mentioned in #25 above, was William’s son.

John Bailey Browning was killed 12 August 1869 when he was part of a group who broke into Chautteau’s home in Livingston. [66] The others were never identified. The trail of blood led to the ferry at Moscow, which crossed into Marengo County. [67]

29. Millicent Farmer. Will, recorded 19 November 1849 by J. H. Gaines. 114–115 in Gwendolyn Lynette Hester. Sumter County Alabama Wills. Dallas: Southern Roots, 1998. This entry is confusing. John Horn’s wife was Anaseth; both died in 1842. [68] Their daughter Millicent married Wade R. Thomas, [69] and was counted in the 1850 census. [70] Horn’s daughter Eliza married Sledge. [71] Farmer’s will stipulated "Doc. William H. Sledge" would become trustee of Frank and Enoch if Albert Sledge couldn’t serve.

30. E. W. Smith. Letter to William H. Smith, governor of Alabama. 4 June 1869. Quoted by Rogers. 35. Edward W. Smith was intendant of Livingston for three years before being elected to the state House of Representatives in 1870 as a Democrat. [72]

31. Reuben Chapman Jr. Letter to William H. Smith. 6 June 1869. Quoted by Rogers. 35.
32. Bell. 135.

33. Granville Bennett. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 1 November 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1734.

34. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1670. "After the killing of this negro the man Townsend was arrested the following Friday by two freedmen, Robert Brownrigg and Bob Thomas, and on Saturday committed to jail."

35. Moore. 1576. W. J. Prater was the one the mob liberated.

36. Item. The [Selma, Alabama] Times-Argus. 1 September 1869. 3. Posted by gblount59 on 10 January 2019.

37. Bell. 136.
38. Greenlee. 85.

39. Allen W. Trelease. White Terror. New York: Harper and Row, 1971; reissued by Louisiana State University Press of Baton Rouge in 1995. 307.

40. Charles Neal. "The Ormond Family." 238-239 in Heritage. 238.
41. Jenkins. 36.

42. Thomas Ormond. Will recorded 14 October 1868 by James A. Abrahams. 236–237 in Hester.

43. Neal. 238.
44. Hester. 236–237.
45. Neal. 238.
46. Angus Wood-Salomon. "Simon Simms." Geni website. 13 March 2015.

47. Robert Gordon Horn. "William Horn of Nansemond and his Heirs." Genealogy website. Last updated 13 April, 2003. Edith was numbered 96.

48. Jenkins. 49.
49. Jenkins. 85.
50. Jenkins. 64–65.
51. Jenkins. 49.
52. Fleming. 695.
53. Trelease. 121.
54. Trelease. 247.
55. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1669.
56. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1669.

57. Allen E. Moore. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 30 October 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1577.

58. Laurella Owens. "Introduction." 59–60 in Brown and Owens. 60.
59. Rogers. 32.

60. For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

61. Jenkins, 114, and Spratt, 35.
62. Rogers. 24.
63. Spratt. 35.
64. Rogers. 54–55.
65. Rogers. 12.
66. Jenkins. 129.
67. Rogers. 32.
68. Robert Gordon Horn. He was numbered 91.
69. Spratt. 7.
70. Jenkins. 66.
71. Spratt. 7.

72. Edward W. Smith. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 3 November 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1955.

Emancipation in Sumter County, Alabama

Topic: Early Versions
The Civil War ended slavery while many former masters still were returning home from the fronts. Union soldiers were confronted with masses of African Americans moving to their camps or urban areas for safety.

The 1860 census didn’t record the population of Livingston, Alabama, but did note only 25 freedmen were living in the county. [1] In 1870, the town had 200 ex-slaves in a total population of 500. [2] W. G. Little bought an old mill property on Smith’s Flats to build plantation-style rental housing in what soon was called Little’s Quarter. [3]

By the next census, it was clear the Black population wasn’t evenly distributed through Sumter County. The red dots on the map below represent census reporting districts with 1,277 to 3,429 freedmen. The blue dots represent areas with 147 to 623.

The largest concentrations were in Gainesville and Belmont. The first was a port where Union soldiers appeared and established a hospital in the Presbyterian church. [4] The other, with 2,274 colored people, encompassed the rich bottom lands in the curve of the Tombigbee river. Poorer lands, with the blue dots, lay south of the Sucarnoochee River that flowed through Livingston.

Booker T. Washington said that, after the Civil War, newly freed slaves left "the plantation for at least a few days or weeks in order that they might really be sure that they were free." [5] Charlie Johnson told Ruby Pickens Tartt in 1937 that "after the Surrender Pappy took us children and moved over about a mile from Livingston, and us stayed there about a year. Then we come back here, and ain’t never left no more." [6]

The military and Freedmen’s Bureau encouraged landowners to write cash contracts with freedmen defining mutual obligations in 1865. Sharecropping became more common because there was no currency for wages, and former slaves didn’t trust their former owners. [7]

In the fall, when crops were gathered and contracts were expiring, planters tried to reinstitute the rules of slavery. On 12 October 1865, an agent of the Freemen’s Bureau reported planters around Livingston had reintroduced the pass system to keep people from leaving their farms. [8]

Earlier, on 4 October 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau had extended existing state laws regarding vagrancy and apprenticeships to include African Americans. [9] In February 1866, the state instructed counties to report poor minors to the Probate Court, so it could apprentice them to their former masters. [10] Peter Kochin observed:

"judges used practically any excuse to bind out black children. Although in some cases the children were in fact orphans, many others not only had parents, but parents who vigorously objected to the confiscation of their children." [11]

One example was a woman in Livingston whose granddaughter was taken before "her father was hardly cold." [12] Even though she could support the child, the court ruled the girl was "well cared for by the planter" and should stay with him. [13]

Within a few years, the annual contact ritual was in place. It revealed to all, black and white, the identities of good and bad planters, and good and bad laborers. Kolchin noted that "freedmen could feel relatively free in refusing to contract on what they regarded as unsatisfactory terms or in leaving employers with whom they were unhappy." [14]

The second action Washington said freed slaves took to establish their identities immediately after Emancipation was change their last names. [15] Tom Blake ran a comparison of the surnames of the largest slave owners in Sumter County in 1860 against the list of African Americans in the county in 1870, and found only 12% of the owners’ names were used by freedmen. The most common were Smith, Williams, and Taylor. Richardson and Sledge were used by 21%, while Brown was used by 13% and Chapman by 11%. [16]

Robert Spratt hinted the modification of names was another way freedmen identified abusive masters. He believed many took "the name of some family to whom they had formerly belonged." He listed seven different names used by former slaves of George G. Tankersley [17] In Blake’s data, only 5% of Tankersley’s 115 slaves kept his name.

Walter Fleming found one other way former slaves asserted their independence: "every man acquired in some way a dog and a gun." [18] He discounted white fears "that the negroes were preparing for an uprising." He thought it "more probable that they merely wanted guns as a mark of freedom." [19]

He also thought their Yankee sympathizers were misguided when they provided arms "in the

belief that the negroes were only seeking means of protection." [20] One suspects that, after years of being spied upon, freedmen didn’t need the advise. In 1939, Josh Horn recalled the ways Isaac Horn had imposed his morality:

"about that time Marse Ike slip up on a bunch of niggers at a frolic twixt Sumterville and Livingston and put a end to the frolic. The niggers having a bid dance, and Marse Ike and patrollers having a big run, say they wanted to have some fun, and they did. Say he eased up on them with a white sheet round him and a big brush in he hand, and somehow or another they didn’t see till he spoke. Then he holler, ‘By God, I’m bird-blindin.’ And he say them niggers tore down them dirty chimneys and run through that house. He say he ain’t never heared such a fuss in a cornfield in his born days." [21]

Graphics
Base map from G. A. Swenson, et alia. Soil Survey of Sumter County, Alabama. Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, May 1941. 3, "Sketch map showing topographic divisions of Sumter County."

End Notes
1. 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.

2. Population of Civil Divisions Less than Counties. United States Census, 1870, Table III. Section including Alabama posted on United States Census website.

3. Robert D. Spratt. A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama. Edited by Nathaniel Reed. Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997. 128. A Photograph taken around 1928, which was reproduced by both Spratt and Alan Brown, [22] showed the language, architecture and layout were carried over from pre-war slave quarters.

4. History of the Gainesville Presbyterian Church. 48 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama. Edited by Charles Walker. Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005. The first duty of Union soldiers after the war was securing Confederate property. Gainesville was the last headquarters of Nathan Bedford Forest and had several military hospitals.

5. Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1907. 23. Walter L. Fleming brought this to my attention in Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905. 270. Others have used it without citation.

6. Charlie Johnson. "Reckon You Might Say I’s Just Faithful." Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [23] 130–132 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 132. Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [24]

7. Peter Kolchin. First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama’s Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972. 34–35.

8. Lieutenant General A. L. Mock. Letter to C. Cadle, Assistant Adjutant General of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Gainesville, Alabama. 12 October 1865. Cited by Kolchin. 5.

9. Fleming. 438.
10. Fleming. 381.
11. Kolchin. 64.

12. Lucy Abney. Letter to General Wayne Swayne, Livingston, Alabama. 9 April 1867. Quoted by Kolchin. 64.

13. Kolchin. 76.
14. Kolchin. 39.
15. Washington. 23–24.

16. Tom Blake. "Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." Ancestry website. He listed 123 owners. I consolidated the duplicates and removed the obvious errors to get a total of 93 names. Thomas Ormond was an example of an error that produced possibly false zero matches. His surname was transcribed as Osmond.

17. Spratt. 129.
18. Fleming. 271.
19. Fleming. 412.
20. Fleming. 368.

21. Josh Horn. "I’s Tellin You Like You Asked Me." Transcribed by Tartt. 93–97 in Brown and Owens. 97.

22. Alan Brown. Sumter County. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015. 23. He said the photograph came from the files of Joe Taylor, director of the Livingston Press.

23. For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

24. Laurella Owens. "Introduction." 59–60 in Brown and Owens. 60.