The three major yellow fever epidemics during the decade of the 1850s and the increasing conflict between the South and North with threat of war undoubtedly affected the enrollment at the Minden Female Boarding School. The school did not close during those years, however. A Cheneyville native, Esther G. Wright Boyd, attended Franklin Ford’s boarding school until shortly after the war began. She related in an interview:
Went in fall to Minden, La. [after graduating from Mansfield Boarding School] because Miss Brainard was teaching there. I was there three years, going home every vacation and graduating in July, 1861. Minden Female College was undenominational & our Pres. was the Rev. Jesse Franklin Ford [Presbyterian]. Miss Brainard’s health failed & she returned to Brooklyn before I left Minden. I always roomed in the building called “Miss Brainard’s house” and roomed next door to her.
She was a fine woman, yet I did not become especially attached to her. As I look back on the five years I was off at school I understand perfectly why Mr. Boyd was so sure boarding schools were bad places for girls. I had a fine time, but with a mob of girls whose rudeness was hardly neutralized by the refinement of the teachers. It must have been during the John Brown episode that for several nights we were much alarmed by talk of negro insurrections. A dozen or more girls were gathered in my room one night with the door locked talking over the reports of such insurrections when there was a knock at the door & the voice of a mulatto woman who waited in the dining room was asking for me. We thought the tragedy was at hand! My recollection is that it was only an ordinary message.
My sisters and brother at school in New Haven [sic] [CT] heard of some of the agitation over ‘bleeding Kansas,’ and Miss Dutton, the Principal at Grove Hall, presented a flag to someone & made the presentation remarks. I do not remember that there was any sectional feeling aroused among the Southern pupils.
On my graduation day there were few young men in the audience for they had gone to the war. Their drills before leaving were of great interest to us but we had no idea of the seriousness of the situation. After examinations were over, my roommate, Annie Conway, and I were notified one day that we were wanted in Mr. Ford’s study. We went down & he informed us that I had received the Valedictory address & she the salutatory. The other girls of the class came over to congratulate us. We wrote our compos—every word, & therefore they were honest at least. And so my school days ended. I was anxious to go to school, but was prevented. Sally Stafford went back to Minden the following session, but as the war grew more serious she was sent for & returned before the close of the session. Before we came home in 1861 her father (my bro.-in-law) and brother (17-years-old) had joined the Army of Virginia. From Minden we went by carriage to Mr. McFarland’s plantation, which was on Red River. The river was very low and we stayed there several days waiting for a boat. Mrs. McFarland was Bro. Leroy’s half sister & was a handsome woman with black eyes & black hair. She had been married before & had two pretty brunette children—Ruffie (Ruffin, I suppose) & Nina. On the Sunday we spent there, July 21, the Battle of Bull Run was fought, but we knew nothing of it then. [Boyd interview. Esther Wright Boyd was the wife of LSU President David French Boyd. A transcript of the interview is available in the Jesse Wright Collection, LSU Archives.]
86. Peter Baillio Compton was born April 17, 1818, the son of John Compton and Amelia Baillio. He married Esther Eliza Tanner, daughter of Lodowick and Ann Martha Tanner, who owned Tiger Bend Plantation in the same area where Edwin Epps would buy land later. Although Peter Baillio Compton was born on his father’s estate at Meeker, three miles south of Lecompte, his own plantation was located on Red River thirty miles away. Unless the property was a part of his father’s vast estate of 6,200 unimproved acres and 2,300 improved acres, no slaves are listed for Peter Baillio. He could not have operated a plantation without slaves. The John Compton Estate (his father’s property) included 377 slaves, so probably there were some living on his son’s plantation [See Stafford, Three Rapides Families . . ., 153; and Menn, 377].
87. Tibeats owed William Prince Ford $400, and Northup himself was the collateral for that money. Later in the narrative, as Northup implies, the existence of the mortgage of $400 literally saved Northup’s life as Tibeats became enraged and planned to hang him.
88. Bayou Boeuf and the land surrounding it are accurately described here:
Bayou Boeuf rises in a cypress lake near McNutt’s Hill, and, after receiving several clear streams from the pine woods, becomes a bold, broad bayou some six or eight miles below Alexandria, and so continues throughout its course. Its total length to the junction with Bayou Cocodrie is not much less than eighty miles. It receives, as a distributary from Red River, Bayou Robert, which debouches from the river . . . and enters Bayou Boeuf twelve miles from that place. Three miles farther it sends off Bayou Lamourir [sic] through an extensive swamp back to Red River . . . The Boeuf has at all seasons a steady current of pure water and is one of the prettiest bayous of Louisiana. On either side of the Boeuf and Bayou Robert throughout their length are, or rather were [before the four years of the Civil War] some of the finest plantations in the state. The front lands of Bayou Boeuf are fertile in the highest degree—light, sandy, reddish colored, and easily worked . . . The Boeuf and the Cocodrie by their junction form Courtableau, . . . [See Lockett, 78] and,
The northern section of the Bayou Boeuf to which Northup was brought as a slave was not settled until around 1812 because of its remoteness to New Orleans when Louisiana became a state. Supplies had to be obtained and farm products shipped on the Boeuf. After the inland port of Washington developed on Courtableau Bayou, large warehouses were constructed in which cotton, sugar cane, molasses, and other products from the Boeuf plantations were stored to wait for a steamboat coming from New Orleans to transport crops to market and secure farm and family supplies. The Bayou Boeuf region developed a busy commerce, serving as the lifeline of the pioneer families migrating to establish plantations there. [See Eakin, Washington . . .,3-9. See a present-day photo of Bayou Boeuf taken at the old William Prince Ford property in the Extras & More section of our website at www.TwelveYearsASlave.org]
89. Peter Tanner, who was the son of Robert Tanner, one of the founders of Cheneyville, with his wife Providence, became an influential planter, first owning a plantation south of Cheneyville adjoining that of his brother, Jabez. The Ford children crossed a small bridge across the bayou to attend private school at the Peter Tanner plantation “Big House” [See Bennett, S.P.B.; see a present-day photo of the Big House owned by Jabez Tanner and a sugar cane field on the property in the Extras & More section of our website at www.TwelveYearsASlave.org].
Porter and Barbra Wright’s detailed account of people buried in the cemetery of Bayou Rouge Baptist Church, Evergreen, Louisiana, in their The Old Burying Ground, provides insights into the person who was Peter Tanner:
Wheeler dealer Tanner was a big man even among the Grandees on the Rio Boeuf. 3,400 acres it is said, his home and all, he sold because he and his next door neighbor, brother Jabez, in 1859 had this violent disagreement over who was the rightful owner of a $5 gin pole. That was the cause, as handed down to Great Grandson Dan Brunson, for the sale and the move to Tanner Hill in Evergreen. The Tanners were known to have these outbursts among themselves. But for an outside intruder, caveat! We have no reason to believe the two brothers were not reconciled. Both were extremely religious. Jabez was the founding father of the Christian Church in Cheneyville and Peter was a deacon at Beulah Baptist Church there. They often preached at their respective meeting houses. The church book at Bayou Rouge Baptist does make mention of an 1846 resolution requesting Peter Tanner ‘to preach here as often as convenient . . .’ Peter Tanner served in the Louisiana Legislature from Rapides Parish. [See Wright, 74-75]
90. Anderson Leonard Chafin [spelled “Chapin” in text] married Sarah Ann Providence Rutledge and lived at the edge of the Great Pine Woods about a dozen miles from the settlement later called Lecompte. He was in the tann
ing business [See Stafford, Three Rapides Families . . ., 33).
91. The term “Great House” reflects a misunderstanding of what was meant by “the Big House” originally and then elaborated upon by people without knowledge of plantation country. The “Big House” was probably first applied by slaves on plantations, and it was adopted by people mostly outside the South in its literal meaning. In reality, the expression meant to slave workers the designation of the site of the home of the planter, or master. Some of these houses were modest log buildings when Northup arrived on Bayou Boeuf. The inference of wealth comes from use of the term by outsiders, but planters often had little or no wealth. Thousands of acres of land were awarded to some men by the Spanish government for surveying land, but it took years of work to convert the land into cultivation. Land appreciated from a nominal value of fifty cents to several dollars in the first decade, beginning in 1812 when Louisiana became a state, to $40 or $50 an acre by the 1850s. When unsettled lands lay from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, land was either there for the taking or bought for a pittance [See Eakin and Culbertson, 194].
A plantation was a place employing a kind of farming involving a relatively large work force on a relatively large area of land. It was also a lifestyle. There were many plantations of 200-1,000 acres of land in the Lower Red River Valley. When Solomon Northup was in the area, land was still being cleared of woodlands and made ready for cultivation, which meant that even large landholdings ordinarily did not indicate the size of the area cultivated.
For the pioneers among whom Northup lived, land was of relatively little value at a time when thousands and thousands of acres to the Pacific were open for settlers. Land on the Boeuf sold by speculators to settlers ranged from about $1.25 an acre to $5.00. As late as the early 1900s, the railroad companies issued large numbers of booklets to promote settlement along their lines. The available land not yet settled included some in the Bayou Boeuf area. One of the monthly brochures, The New Southwest Devoted to the Great Southwest—actually a tabloid-sized, slick-paper publication of about twenty-eight pages—was published by the Missouri Pacific-Iron Mountain System in Saint Louis, Missouri, and advertised such things as “Special One-Way Colonist Excursions” and “Winter Tourist Rates for Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico,” emphasizing the vast amount of unsettled land that was available. In the March brochure, the Missouri Pacific Railway and Iron Mountain Route also advertised “Homeseeker’s Excursions” through Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Kansas, Missouri, Indian and Oklahoma Territory.” [See The New Southwest Devoted to the Great Southwest, published by Missouri Pacific Immigation Bureau]
92. .“Piazza” is not a word used by people in Bayou Boeuf country. “Porch” or “gallery” would have been the words used by people in this area. Wilson may have substituted “piazza” for one of the local words.
93. The editor has found no account of the details of this incident.
94. Cook and Ramsay, as overseers, probably were overstepping their authority to make a decision to hang the rebellious Solomon, but they were acting under the mandate that a slave must not be allowed to strike a white man. There was the belief that this could incite more violence between blacks and whites within the tightly controlled plantation society. Since plantations formed the base of all Southern society, this control was critical. In such an encounter of a slave with a white man, the danger to the black slave was overwhelming. A Louisiana law passed in 1806 provided the death penalty for striking a master, mistress, or one of their children so as to cause contusion or effusion of blood. A similar act in 1814 included striking an overseer with similar effect [See Gray, 517].
Dr. Edgar Thompson, premiere plantation scholar of Duke University, called the unwritten code that ruled plantation country, “The Plantation Survival Code.” This code was required in the caste society where maintaining the status quo had much to do with securing the base of the economy: the plantation and slavery. The code included rules developed to maintain plantations with a dependable slave work force, and breaking them was not permitted—whether by a white or black dissenter.
Gray confirms the role of neighbors and the community regarding the control of slaves:
The actual well-being of slaves, however, was dependent not so much on laws as to the humane instincts and economic interest of the master, and the power of neighborhood opinion. The latter was undoubtedly an important source of protection.
Sir Charles Lyell declared, “The condition of negroes is the least enviable in such out-of-the-way and half-civilized adventurers and uneducated settlers, who have little control of their passions, and, who, when they oppress their slaves, are not checked by public opinion as in more advanced communities.” [See Gray, 517]
James Cook, one of the overseers mentioned in this chapter, was married to Mary Eliza Robert, daughter of Alonzo and Tuzette Eliza Pearce Robert. He managed his father-in-law’s plantation south of Cheneyville [See O’Neal, 95-97]. Ramsey, the other overseer mentioned, was a partner in Ford’s sawmill venture, as previously noted.
95. Tibeats, an itinerant carpenter, would have had low status in the plantation community partly because he had not learned to live by the rules such as the one enunciated by William Prince Ford and overheard by Solomon Northup. Such a person was almost as unwelcome as an abolitionist in planter society.
Chapter Nine
96. John David Cheney married twice: Elizabeth Martha Fendon, by whom he had two children, and Henrietta Polhill Audebert, by whom he had two other children. His progenitor, according to Stafford, was John Cheney, who was a resident of Newton, Massachusetts in 1637 [Stafford, Three Pioneer Families . . ., 406].
97. “John Gilpin” is a reference to William Cowper’s popular comic ballad, “The Diverting History of John Gilpin,” published first in 1792 in England. It is reflective of the period in which David Wilson, the ghost writer, lived.
98. Louisiana was not alone in denying a black man the right to testify in court. Solomon Northup was not allowed to testify in the case filed by him and attorney Henry Northup in the court in Washington, D.C., against the men associated with the slave pen; he was offered as a witness but rejected “solely on the ground that I was a colored man” [Twelve Years a Slave, 216]. Though Northup celebrated the arraignment of his kidnappers in New York on July 11, 1854, the trial never materialized, so we don’t know whether his testimony would have figured in the trial or not [“An Individual Identified by Solomon Northup ...”, 2].
99. Francis Myers was among the migrants to Cheneyville from South Carolina. He was married to Alma Coe “about 1840.” He is listed in the U.S. Census, 1840. He was a frequent customer at the Ezra Bennett store and evidently had a plantation in the same area as that of William Prince Ford’s place. Francis Myers went with Thaddeus Sobieski Robert to pursue the 1849 Gold Rush and never returned to Louisiana [Stafford, Three Rapides Families, 74, 95, 121. See photo of Bennett’s store in the Extras & More section of our website at www.TwelveYearsASlave.org].
100. Peter Tanner, age thirty-eight in 1850, and his brother, Jabez, forty, probably represented the best and worst of traits associated with leading planters along the Boeuf [U.S. Census, 1850]. This is especially true of Peter. He saw himself as the cocksure leader of the area, and he was certainly highly influential. He was on the board of the Planters Private Academy about fifteen miles from Bayou Boeuf at Cheneyville. The goal of the leading planters, which was passionately pursued, was not only preventing slaves from learning how to read and write, but also did not support the education of the white masses. Private academies were set up for exclusive use by the planters, using state funds for the construction of buildings under a policy of “beneficiarism.” A select few “indigents” could attend these private academies, which existed across the state.
Peter Tanner, owning a large acreage of land, which appreciated in value decade after decade, is listed in the U.S. Census as having real property valued at $17,000 in 1850, [U.S. Census, 1850] with his bro
ther Jabez listed as having a value of $30,000 in real property. Peter owned nineteen slaves, eight of these being between the ages of four to eight years. In this period when families, black or white, included a dozen or more children, nineteen slaves may have meant there were only two families on his plantation, and therefore a small farming operation despite the large acreage of land. However, Peter did operate a sugar plantation in Cuba and owned slaves there; other planters of the area also operated sugar plantations in Cuba, as evidenced by correspondence in the Ezra Bennett Collection.
Peter became a representative to the state legislature and was appointed to various positions of importance in Rapides Parish. He was known for being “hot-headed” and for his frequent outbursts in hearty laughs [Stafford, Three Pioneer Families . . ., 306].
Neither Peter nor Jabez were listed among large slaveowners (those with over fifty slaves). It was Jabez who was known among their neighbors for reading the Bible to his slaves on Sundays. Whether David Wilson transferred the story to Peter or whether Peter adopted the habit is not known.
101. The editor found no surviving stocks left on Bayou Boeuf, but did locate a set at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River, now included in a national park.
102. Providence Tanner, wife of one of Cheneyville’s founders, Robert, was instrumental in the founding of Beulah Baptist Church at Cheneyville in 1816. Both Tanner sons, Peter and Jabez, considered themselves religious, but it was Jabez who headed the historic break of many members of Beulah Baptist Church. More slaves, who sat in a balcony of the church, belonged to Beulah Baptist than white people. In the early 1840s a division developed from an intense argument over predestination, a concept rejected by Jabez. The split impacted the Boeuf community so much that a saying repeated by residents from that decade was: “The Up the Bayou Tanners didn’t speak to the Down the Bayou Tanners.” Peter did not leave Beulah Baptist, but Jabez led the dissidents and published a booklet, A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the State of Affairs in the Religious World at this Place. Jabez led in the founding of the Campbellite Church in 1842.
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