“He wanted to retire at fifty so he could drive himself bonkers losing at gin rummy and getting drunk every afternoon at the Lakewood Country Club,” Bob finally said. “When he decided he needed to give me a way of supporting myself, we started a bowling-supply store.”
I pressed him, and Bob began to reveal more about my grandfather.
“He was an all-purpose bigot,” Bob said, speaking quietly, as if someone else might hear. “At different times, he would go off on anybody, and when he came to Dallas, the chief of police was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. That is a known fact. I don’t know if my father was ever a member, but he certainly had some sympathy for them back in the twenties and thirties. He became slightly more tolerant as time passed, but it was still right there. R.E.L. was a good southern man always loyal to the cause, so I guess we know where it came from.”
It was hard to hear that my grandfather’s racism ran so deep. In my heart, I wanted my family to be above the fray. There has always been a liberal intellectual tradition in the South, and I wanted that to be my heritage, not the desperate and twisted world of racist populism. But I was finished with fantasies; I wanted to know the truth, no matter how ugly.
Race relations were on my mind when I watched Barack Obama, the African-American senator from Illinois, clinch the Democratic presidential nomination. When Obama had visited Kenya in 2006, his public speeches had impressed me, but I had dismissed talk of an Obama presidency because I didn’t think the people of the United States would elect a black man president.
I listened to Obama’s victory speech, which was absent of rancor, full of hope, and reached out to anyone who would join him. He reminded me of Nelson Mandela, whom I had met while covering the 1994 presidential campaign in South Africa. In his campaign, Mandela had resisted political expediency and taken the high road; the one that required true leadership to bring substantive change to his country, rather than just transferring power from a white tyrant to a black one. He was not the demagogic African dictator that whites had expected and feared. Mandela’s speeches were not filled with sarcasm and vitriol like those of many American politicians. Mandela exemplified grace.
Obama was following Mandela’s example, trying to disarm the less committed bigots and win over everyone else. After spending most of my adult life overseas, I found myself comparing race in America to the ethnic massacres I’d observed in Rwanda and Congo. This new political development fueled my desire to delve deeper into the legacy of Tomlinson Hill. If America was ready for a black president, I hoped it was ready to come to terms with its past.
CHAPTER
TWO
I am afraid you have got the negroes to like you and not fear you. If it is the case, you cannot get on, nor take care of anything.
—Churchill Jones
I began my research open to finding acts of heroism, dark secrets, and things in between. But investigating events in the mid-nineteenth century is quite different from interviewing witnesses to a recent massacre. What books or resources existed that might help me understand the Tomlinson story, white and black? The only option was to start Googling and digging, to thumb through book indexes, and to search university databases. I sent e-mails to historians, asking for their help in understanding what had happened and why.
The first things I needed were family trees. That led me to Ancestry.com. I filled in a few blanks with R.E.L.’s name, my grandfather’s name, and my own, and soon I had my family tree. I gained access to census forms, draft-registration cards, and old phone books. Scrap by scrap, I put together an outline of my ancestors’ lives. I searched for LaDainian’s family and found a tree started by a “TorshaT,” LaDainian’s wife, LaTorsha. She had not logged in for some time, but her tree gave me a starting point for the black Tomlinsons.
I found a few books about Falls County. A sentence here and a reference there helped me add to the family tree and create a time line. I scoured the Falls County Library in Marlin. I spent days in the Falls County courthouse, collecting deed and probate records. Slowly, I pieced together why the Tomlinsons had come to Texas from Alabama.
In 1848, James Kendrick Tomlinson (known as Jim) was living in Conecuh County, Alabama, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War. The peace deal opened a territory four times the size of France to American settlement.1 It wasn’t long before land speculators were visiting Alabama and promoting the virgin lands in Texas, California, and the other territories the United States had acquired at the end of the war.
Newspapers told stories of poor men who traveled west and became fantastically rich by clearing a few acres of land and throwing some seeds on the ground. But Jim wasn’t sure Texas was the right place for his family. At the age of thirty-five, he already had a large plantation and owned thirty-three slaves to tend to his cotton and cattle.2 His wife, Sarah, had borne three sons and a daughter, and while Jim wasn’t the wealthiest of men, he had a comfortable life. He had plans to build a steam-powered sawmill on the Conecuh River to diversify his business.3
Jim was also close to his elder sister, Susan Tomlinson Jones, who lived nearby. Jim and Susan were born in Georgia, but their parents had moved to Alabama when they were teenagers. That was in the 1830s, when Alabama was the land of opportunity. Jim met his wife, Sarah, in Conecuh County, and her family, the Stallworths, lived nearby.4
Susan’s husband was Churchill Jones, who had amassed a fortune by developing plantations across the South. Churchill was born on Cherry Walk, his father’s tobacco plantation near Bowling Green, Virginia. He graduated from Rappahannock Academy and Military Institute and moved to Evergreen, Alabama, where he became a schoolteacher and developed a cotton plantation. He had a reputation for being “proud and aggressive.” He was prominent in the community and had served in the Alabama legislature, representing the Whig party.5
Before the Industrial Revolution, entrepreneurs made their fortune buying land, developing it, and then selling it at a profit. Jones had already lived in three states, and when he heard that cheap land was available in Texas, he went on a prospecting tour in the upper Brazos Valley in 1849.6 He found a virtually untouched territory. The Mexican-American War had discouraged pioneers, but the military activity had driven off most hostile Native Americans. The soil in the valley was rich and fertile. The Brazos is Texas’s longest river, stretching more than twelve hundred miles, from the New Mexico border through the middle of Texas, and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico at Freeport. The water is almost always brown with silt. Wide and relatively shallow, the river frequently floods and produces rich alluvial soils perfect for farming. But the violent floods prompted the Spanish to name it Rio de los Brazos de Dios, or the River of the Arms of God.
Churchill wasn’t alone in looking for opportunities in Texas. Between 1848 and 1860, tens of thousands of families from Alabama and Tennessee hung signs that said GONE TO TEXAS or simply G.T.T. on their old homesteads, abandoned their worn-out farms, and took their slaves to Texas.7 But unlike many people moving to Texas, Churchill was not buried in debt. He was looking to expand his empire, and that desire would change the lives of dozens of his relatives and their slaves.8
Cheap land and cheap labor were the keys to Churchill’s success. Land in Texas cost nearly nothing, and Texas was a slave state. State officials consistently flirted with bankruptcy, and the only way to avoid economic collapse was to attract settlers who could bring capital, grow crops, and pay taxes. As a forty-four-year-old established planter with a fortune and eight children, Churchill was exactly the kind of man Texas wanted.9
THE FALLS PLANTATION
During his Texas tour, Churchill saw several properties he liked. His first purchase was Lake Creek Farm in Montgomery County, about forty miles north of Houston. But the land along the Brazos River impressed him more, particularly at the “Falls of the Brazos.” The red soil was perfect for cotton farming and stock raising. Most important, the price per acre was a fraction of what he would have had to pay in the Old Sou
th.10
The falls marked the northern limit of barge navigation on the Brazos. Floating cotton down to Galveston for sale and export would be easy, and Churchill saw a potential business there, too. There was also plenty of room for a water-powered cotton gin to maximize profits. He soon dreamed up a plan to build the largest cotton plantation west of the Mississippi, and the only integrated operation for growing, milling, and selling cotton in the West. Churchill was certain that pioneering Texas would provide a return on investment he couldn’t get anywhere else. He returned to Alabama a Texas evangelist.11
In July 1850, Churchill met Christopher Sterns on a hill overlooking the falls. Sterns’s wife had inherited the land, but they lacked capital. Sterns sold Churchill 28,000 acres on both sides of the river for fifteen thousand dollars. Churchill named it the Falls Plantation and returned to Alabama.12
A few months later, Churchill sent his brother-in-law Aylett Dean to Lake Creek Farm with forty slaves, oxen, wagons, and equipment. He gave his eldest son, James Sanford Jones, responsibility for setting up the Falls Plantation. The twenty-two-year-old led an expedition of five overseers and one hundred slaves overland from Alabama. Three of the overseers were Churchill’s nephews, including a man named George Daffan. Churchill, meanwhile, traveled by coastal steamship and was waiting for the group when they arrived at the Falls Plantation on February 18, 1851.13
Churchill told James and George to concentrate first on getting the farm operational and then to build homes for the family and slaves. Though Churchill spent most of 1851 and 1852 in Alabama, he visited the Falls Plantation each year to inspect his son’s progress and buy more land.14
By the spring of 1852, James had his first cotton crop in the ground, and Churchill was setting up other enterprises. He applied for, and received from the Falls County commissioners, a license to operate a flatboat ferry to carry travelers across the Brazos. He was authorized to charge twenty-five cents for a man and a horse, 50 cents for a horse and carriage, one dollar for a carriage with two horses, a dollar and quarter for a four-horse wagon, and a dollar and a half for a six-horse wagon. Pedestrians and loose horses were both ten cents. He was allowed to charge double if the river was flooding but was required to give Falls County residents a 50 percent discount. Churchill’s slaves operated the boats under an overseer.15
That same year, Churchill appeared on the Falls County tax rolls for the first time. He listed eighty-one slaves, valued at $38,050. A good field hand was valued at two thousand dollars at the time. Jones’s 28,000 acres were valued at one dollar per acre. In two years, his land had already appreciated 86 percent.16 Like most planters, Churchill kept most of his wealth invested in land and slaves. He was the richest man in Falls County. With 30 percent of all of the slaves in the county he was one of the wealthiest men in Texas.17
During his absences, Churchill wrote long letters to James and the overseers, describing how he wanted the plantation to operate and what he wanted built, such as slave quarters in the river bottom. From a letter to overseer George Daffan, dated July 25, 1853, it is easy to see where Churchill got his reputation for being “proud and aggressive.” His letters put to rest the southern mythology about benevolent slave masters:
James said nothing about losing my flat [boat] at the Ferry there. I suppose he was ashamed to name it, as he and you ought to be. It was pure carelessness certainly. George, I am afraid you have got the negroes to like you and not fear you. If it is the case, you cannot get on, nor take care of anything. They must know when you speak they have to obey, and to do this you have to stand square up to them and show yourself master. You cannot coax a negro to do his duty. You have to force him, and if they only like you and not fear you, they will soon hate you and get tired of you. That is the nature of negroes, but to make them fear you and like you both, you can do anything you want with them.18
Churchill’s tone was not unusual for a man in his position, particularly in addressing young relatives whom he wanted to develop into successful planters. In the same letter, Churchill instructed the men to build a dog-run, a pair of eighteen-by-twelve-foot cabins, which were typical in Texas before 1860. Dog-runs got their name from the porch created between the two cabins by the single roof connecting them. These homes were built from hand-hewn logs, cedar if the landowner was lucky enough to have it. Cedar stands up to the weather better than almost any other wood found in Texas. The state had few sawmills, and the little milled lumber available was usually of poor quality. In rural areas, squared-off logs remained the best building material into the 1870s. The slaves dovetailed the ends of the logs to fit together at the corners.19
Builders packed the gaps between the logs with mud, and they fashioned chimneys from mud and sticks. They used clapboard planks weighed down by long poles for the roof. The covered porch, or run, kept leather and iron goods protected from the elements. The run also funneled breezes between the two cabins, cooling both. Hunting dogs usually slept in the shady parts of the run, giving the cabin its name.20
Early pioneers cut clearings in the dense scrub that surrounded life-giving rivers and springs. They then set fire to the underbrush to clear the land for planting. For months, or perhaps years, these compounds consisted of tents, crude lean-tos, and simple cabins, with livestock, farming tools, and all manner of trash scattered around. Farmers brought horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens and allowed them to freely roam the woods and meadows. While some early settlers built outhouses, a ditch in the woods provided a perfectly acceptable latrine for most people.21 Poor subsistence farmers living in rough-cut farms were called “white trash” because of the garbage that piled up around their cabins.22
While poor settlers usually had dirt floors, Churchill insisted on wooden ones. He ordered his slaves to build a smokehouse and an outdoor kitchen and to choose a spot for his main cabin not far from a spring. He had James and George build concrete cisterns to store fresh water during the long, dry summers. While family farmers initially concentrated on subsistence crops, Churchill immediately planted revenue-producing cotton. He did grow corn to feed his family, slaves, and pigs, but from the very beginning Churchill saw his new home in Texas as a business. Cotton was a global commodity that allowed planters to inject cash into struggling frontier economies, making the planters not only wealthy but powerful.23
Meals consisted of salt pork, corn bread, sweet potatoes, and molasses. Hunters could find deer and rabbit, if they had gunpowder. Beef and honey were available, but these were reserved for special occasions. Most early settlers did not keep a vegetable garden, nor did they keep milk cows. Butter was a rare luxury.24
The slave’s diet was similar, though on larger plantations, like Churchill’s, the slaves tended vegetable gardens for both themselves and the whites.25 Meals were prepared and served in a communal kitchen managed by an overseer. Slaves were given two sets of clothing a year, and on the Falls Plantation the slaves made them.26
There were dozens of white families dotted across Falls County in 1853. Only one in four families held slaves, so they had to do the hard work themselves. Whites formed churches and often joined forces to help build homes and barns. Nevertheless, Churchill’s letters suggest that he held many of his new neighbors in contempt, and poorer farmers probably didn’t appreciate him very much, either.27
Such snobbery was typical of the era. Most of the new arrivals to Texas were Calvinists, who were taught that a person’s wealth, or lack of it, was a reflection of his virtue. They respected hard work and considered thriftiness next to holiness. Laziness was a sign of a lost soul, and there were too many of these in Falls County, as far as Churchill was concerned. In his letter to James on August 4, he was adamant that his son not hire any white laborers. He was also anxious for James to finish building the family’s cabins before Churchill brought Susan and his younger children to Texas.
I think you had better let white men alone. I am tired of feeding idle lazy loafers to do nothing and pay them big bills when they leave. Tell Ge
orge I shall want to see in his books how Tidwell could make a bill of $80 against me, at $25 for every 20 days he worked full. He was to keep account in his book of every day and piece of day that he worked.
I sent whiskey, flour, sugar, etc. to you last May. I would like to hear whether you got all safe or not. The whiskey I sent for medical purposes and not as an everyday beverage. Take [what you need] of everything. There was over 400 pounds of sugar. You will use very little of that quantity by the time we get there. The lard take care of for your Mother. You have plenty of butter for you all to use. Let me hear all about the stock, cotton, and hogs, and whether you were able to get any or not. Write me whether pork will be plenty or not next winter.28
Churchill was planning to move his family to Texas in October 1853.29 From Evergreen, they would travel by stagecoach eighty-five miles to Mobile, Alabama. From there, they would take a steamboat to New Orleans, where they would spend at least one night before taking another coastal ship to Galveston, then the largest city in Texas, with five thousand residents. From Galveston, it was a 235-mile stagecoach ride on a rutted path along the eastern bank of the Brazos to Marlin, the seat of Falls County. This part of the journey was by far the worst, since Texas had no graded roads outside of Galveston. In bad weather, the dirt paths became quagmires. The Falls Plantation was another eight miles outside of Marlin by horse or wagon.30
TYPHOID AND YELLOW FEVER STRIKE
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