Tomlinson Hill
Page 4
In September 1853, typhoid struck Alabama hard and delayed Churchill’s departure. The fever killed two of Jim Tomlinson’s brothers-in-law, Nicholas and Calloway Stallworth. The Tomlinsons, Stallworths, and Joneses lived near one another northwest of Evergreen. That closeness led Churchill to encourage the Tomlinsons and Stallworths to follow him to Texas to escape the illness. But Churchill was having a hard time getting his family to Texas. The summer yellow fever season along the coast was especially bad that year and lasted longer than usual. Churchill wrote on August 28 to tell his son James that he did not know when the family could leave Evergreen without risking yellow fever in New Orleans. He also informed James that the Stallworths had contracted typhoid, and they had also lost six slaves on their Alabama plantation.31
While there is no doubt that slaveholders brutally controlled the lives of their slaves, those same people represented as much as 50 percent of an average planter’s wealth. Slaveholders were always concerned about the health of their slaves and sometimes spent up to eight dollars a year per slave in medical costs, a considerable amount in those days.32 To lose “valuable negroes” to illness was a major financial loss for any planter, and from his letter, Churchill considered the death of Nicholas Stallworth’s slaves a major financial loss for his widow. So it was not surprising that Churchill was upset to learn from his son James that several of his slaves at the Falls Plantation were ill. Churchill wrote on September 5, 1853:
You spoke of a good deal of sickness which I am sorry to hear, though you say there is no serious case. Give all the attention you can to all the sick. You can manage the cases by cleaning the stomach well first with emetics and then with pills made of equal parts calomel [mercury chloride, a laxative and disinfectant], aloes and rhubarb, and then followed up with bitter teas. That bitter weed you showed me down in the bottom last December is very good. Have a tub full made at a time and make them drink it rapid all the time. After the stomach is well cleaned, should the negroes be taken with dysentery or bloody flux [another term for dysentery], you must not use calomel or blue mass [another mercury-based medicine]. It is perfect death. I wrote you before about this and do not forget. Oil, spirits of turpentine and laudanum [an opiate]—begin with 2 spoons full of oil, 1 teaspoon of spirits of turpentine, and 30–60 drops of laudanum—then small doses of soda and salts. One half teaspoon of carbon of soda and two teaspoons of salts mixed together in sage tea given as the emergency requires. If bad cases, give often, and use astringent teas made of post oak bark, running dewberry briar root. The tea should be made strong. Give anything that will heal the bowel, eat little and drink no cold water. Give injections of soapsuds and oil with some laudanum in it.33
In a letter dated October 17, Churchill was pleased to hear that the sickness in Texas had passed, but he was still worried about when he could safely move his family, predicting it could be late December. He also noted that James had complained about his letters:
You seemed to think in your last letter to me that I was grumbling a good deal. All I said was intended to bring your and George’s minds fully to bear on the importance of looking well to the interest of the business there generally, and not allow yourselves to be deceived by trifling white men. It is your interest more than mine to look well into these things and take care.34
The illnesses in Alabama and Churchill’s enthusiasm for Texas made Jim Tomlinson reconsider following Churchill and Susan. But Jim was looking after the Stallworth widows and he was managing slaves belonging to his sister-in-law, Mary Stallworth Travis, who also became a widow at thirty-four when her husband died from fever.35 Jim and his wife, Sarah, decided they needed to stay close to her family, and they told Churchill and Susan they would stay put for the moment. Jim concentrated on his new steam-driven sawmill.36
For his part, Churchill closely monitored the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans and Galveston. His letters became more detailed, adamant, and angry as he continued to delay their departure. He worried that after three years of living in frontier conditions, James and George were not keeping “the negroes under the right management.” He feared they were becoming too friendly with their only real community in Falls County. Churchill wrote, “Unless they do fear you, they will not obey promptly; they will parley, twist, and turn about and get you to believe they are doing all that you wish, and when you come to find out right, it is all to no avail.”37
He repeated his concern in subsequent letters:
I am a little fearful George is trying honey [to] coax the negroes to work. If this is the case he had just as well quit. No man on earth can have business done unless he knows how to make negroes move under the proper fear, and go to the top of their speed. A man to be a business man must be a full judge of what hands can do at the different branches of plantation business, and then he must ask them no odds about their doing of it, make them do it at a word, if the whip is needed give it to them in full … I want rigid and strict government among my negroes … Tell George to recollect his father’s management among negroes. He was a little too severe but not much.38
But Churchill also believed in positive reinforcement:
The next thing is when you get them to discharge their duty fully and faithfully on all occasions, treat them fairly and with humanity. Allow them all that is right on their part, and they will then like you. When they fear you and like you both, you may do anything in reason that you want, but you must hold a tight rein at all times.39
The old slaveholder knew blacks were not happy to be slaves. Some chose to fight back or flee, but few were successful. Instead, most offered passive or subtle forms of resistance. Malingering and conniving were acts of subtle rebellion. They feigned ignorance, pretended to be ill or injured, or, as Churchill feared, tried to manipulate young and impressionable whites in order to get better treatment. The slaves had no stake in the success of Churchill’s newest project, but they knew he had a financial stake in their well-being. Many whites didn’t recognize the slaves’ passive resistance to their orders for the civil disobedience that it was, and instead labeled all blacks as lazy and deceitful, a stereotype that persisted for generations.40
Churchill’s clan finally left Alabama in December 1853, after the cold weather killed most of the fever-carrying mosquitoes, and they arrived at the Falls Plantation in January 1854. The cabins were built and ready for habitation, and the slaves quickly moved into their own cabins along the river bottom. Churchill’s eldest daughter, Sarah, brought her new daughter, Sue, and her husband, George Green.41
Susan Tomlinson Jones settled into her new cabin, which was quite a step down from her large, well-appointed home in Alabama. But she’d been through this before as a child and as a young wife. She looked out on the fallow fields, visited the spring, where sweet water flowed from the limestone, and looked down on the wide, muddy Brazos. Susan saw the potential to build a fortune for her children on the frontier. She rode north from her cabin to see the land her husband had purchased, whereupon she came to a rise that offered a view of Marlin to the east. She became the first Tomlinson to stand on what would become Tomlinson Hill.
CHAPTER
THREE
Some white folks might want to put me back in slavery if I told you how we were used in slavery time, but you asked me for the truth.
—Wes Brady
Falls County was only four years old in 1854, and Marlin was barely a village. The county’s founders laid out the town around a small log courthouse built from split cedar logs. The one-room structure served as court, school, and church during the day. And citizens held political meetings and dances in it at night, when the pulpit was hoisted into the rafters by a pulley system. A hotel, tavern, lawyer’s office, and a few shops and warehouses made up the rest of the town.1
Churchill Jones quickly became one of the most important people in the county, financing a new courthouse and investing in a sawmill. He and his wife, Susan Tomlinson Jones, also organized political meetings and social events.2
Importing manufactured goods from the North was a gamble in 1854. Most Texans operated on a barter economy, and there was little paper money in circulation. Most settlers never saw a gold or silver coin. Businesspeople traded promissory notes like currency, but when hard money was needed, Spanish and Mexican silver coins served as the only legal tender in Texas. Prideful Texans would hammer out the Spanish king’s profile or the Mexican eagle that marked those coins, but defacing them didn’t diminish the bullion’s value.4
Most Texans made their own clothes, shoes, soap, candles, wheels, harnesses, and crockery. The idea of buying goods manufactured on the East Coast and then shipped through the Gulf of Mexico was beyond most settlers’ imagination. Only planters could afford such luxuries.5
George and Zenas ordered goods from New York on credit and paid their debts when they visited there. Texas law prohibited banks, so there was little alternative to relying on the credit terms offered by wholesalers.6 According to their ledgers, Churchill bought most of the goods George and Zenas sold, and he was the only one to pay his bills on time. Churchill’s cotton thrived, his herds grew, and he purchased more slaves, or brought them over from his other plantations. He built a large clapboard house so that his family could move out of the dog-run. He ordered almost everything he owned, including the family’s clothes, from Green and Bartlett. The store thrived until George fell ill with tuberculosis. After months of treatments and travel to spas across the South, George died in Marlin in 1856. Zenas settled the accounts, then reopened the shop as a sole proprietor. Fourteen months later, Zenas married George’s widow, Sarah, and became part of the Jones family.7
Churchill’s plantation was the largest in Falls County and was populated with scores of slaves. He was also one of the rare men with a private, university-level education. His time in the Alabama State House had left him with a regal bearing. Churchill and other planters like him formed the top tier of Texas society, though he was only a big fish in what was then a very little pond.8
Susan wrote to her brother, Jim Tomlinson, describing their beautiful plantation and their profits. About a dozen other wealthy families from Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas had moved to Falls County, and they were establishing a planter society like the ones they’d left behind. Susan urged her brother to join her on the Brazos. She even had a plot of land in mind for him.9
PLANTATION LIFE
For the vast majority of white Texans, including most slaveholders, every day was spent working on the farm. Even planters with as many as fifty slaves would rarely hire an overseer, choosing instead to go into the fields themselves. The average farmer’s life was a drudge.10
Wealthy planters, though, were chief executives. Life on Texas plantations with fifty or more slaves followed intricate protocols and manners. The planter ventured into the fields only to inspect the work. A white overseer was responsible for watching to “see that a full day’s work is done,” as Churchill often said. Planters believed “a gentleman did not sweat.” Most wealthy planters managed operations from an office in their homes and would hold daily meetings with the overseer. The overseer might be invited for dinner, but he lived in a dog-run cabin away from the “Big House.”11
House slaves cooked the meals in outdoor kitchens and cleaned the big house, but they were never allowed to sit down while inside. Such rules maintained the social order and prevented confusion about a person’s role. The planter’s family members had no obligation to work, and their days were spent socializing, reading, or engaging in a hobby. Horse racing was the most popular sport in Texas in the 1850s, and rich men raised hounds and staged fox hunts. Texans of the 1850s fully embraced the belief that a southern gentleman should be generous, gracious, honest, and brave, though there is plenty of evidence that few wealthy Texans lived up to those standards. The myth of southern aristocracy was strong in Texas.12 As a child, I fell for it 120 years later.
Churchill’s distaste for white laborers exposed his higher respect for slaves, when they were well managed. In general, planters were more likely to accept Jews and Roman Catholics into their homes at a time when both groups were despised by poor whites. But planters didn’t think twice about murdering or torturing a black man who would not grovel before them. They defended their “peculiar institution” by arguing that it had always existed, that it was economically necessary, and that blacks were racially inferior.13
One of the excuses often made for my ancestors is that they didn’t know any better. But planters knew they could not defend slavery on moral grounds, and they almost never used the word slave, being embarrassed to do so. They referred to slaves as “negroes” or “hands.” They used the word nigger in conversation, but they rarely put it in writing. Every slaveholder knew in the 1850s that Europeans and most Americans condemned slavery. They knew Britain kept battleships off the coast of Galveston and New Orleans to intercept slave traders. Southerners understood that most cultures they respected abhorred slavery, yet they practiced it anyway for personal gain.
When Churchill rode his horse along the western bank of the Brazos in 1854, he was painfully aware that slaves outnumbered whites by three to one on his plantation. But this was the life he wanted, to settle new territory and convert wilderness to civilization. His neighbor Benjamin G. Shields, who went by the title General even though he had never served in the military, was improving his land just two miles northwest of the Falls Plantation. Like Churchill, Shields was an itinerant planter. He was born in South Carolina in 1810, but he moved to Alabama to make his fortune in cotton farming. He served as a congressman, representing Alabama from 1840–1841, where he was a close ally to President John Tyler. He was also a close associate of President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun, a leading defender of slavery. Shields and Churchill were both Whig party members.14
In 1844, Shields supported James K. Polk’s campaign for the presidency, and Polk rewarded him with an appointment as the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Venezuela. The country profoundly changed Shields’s worldview by allowing him to see firsthand what he called “the salutary effects of the abolition of slavery.” He wrote that “slavery was not only wrong from a moral stand-point but a curse and blight on the section that maintained it.” In Falls County, Shields was surrounded by slaveholders trying to re-create the lives they had enjoyed in Alabama, North Carolina, and Missouri. Despite his views on slavery, he became Churchill’s close friend.15
In the mid-1850s, when Churchill’s daughter Lucinda reached her late teens, her parents wanted to find her a suitable husband. None of the families in Falls County provided reasonable prospects, so they reached back to the families they knew in Alabama. They found Francis Marion Stallworth, the son of Nicholas Stallworth, whose death from typhoid Churchill had lamented in 1853. The Joneses had known Frank since birth. His family shared the same values and social status as the Joneses and the Tomlinsons. At twenty-one, Frank was a year older than Lucinda, and the two had grown up together. To give Frank a step up after losing his father, and confident in the match, Churchill and Susan arranged the marriage. Frank and Lucinda married at Falls Plantation on June 15, 1856. Lucinda gave birth to their first daughter, Martha, two years later.16 Frank was also Jim and Sarah Tomlinson’s nephew. With two sets of relatives writing to say how wonderful life was in Texas, the Tomlinsons began to reconsider their decision to stay in Alabama.
THE SLAVE’S VIEW
Accounts of slavery in the 1850s range from praise
for a system that civilized African barbarians to tales of unmitigated cruelty. Based on county tax rolls, there were 48,145 slaves in Texas in 1850, and that number rose to 169,166 by 1861. Federal census data from 1860 places the number at 182,000, a small number compared to that in other slave states.17 Historians believe that observations by Anglos are better understood as a reflection of their personal attitudes toward slavery, rather than as an accurate view of the world around them. Most slaves couldn’t write, so few contemporaneous accounts exist of slave life in Texas. The best accounts, though still imperfect, come from oral histories collected between 1936 and 1938 by the Federal Writers’ Project. The Work Progress Administration project set up by President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression sent writers to collect oral histories from both blacks and whites across the United States.18 At the time, the writers were encouraged to transcribe the stories phonetically, but to make the narratives easier to read, I’ve used texts where the spelling and grammar have been corrected.
The white people transcribing some of these accounts clearly influenced them. Realistic accounts of slavery appeared to make some of the interviewers uncomfortable in the 1930s, when whites idealized antebellum Texas. One former slave from Washington County, Wesley Burrell, told a WPA supervisor, “A white lady was here the other night, wanted to know about slavery time and when I started to tell her she said she didn’t want to hear that stuff. I told her the half hadn’t been told. If she didn’t want to hear that, it wasn’t nothing to tell.”19
Many of the accounts start with how a former slave reached Texas. While most wealthy Anglos traveled via stagecoach, steamboat, and railroad, the majority of their property, including slaves, went overland by ox-drawn wagons. They followed a trail blazed by average southerners making the same trip. Usually only personal slaves traveled with their owners by boat and rail. But for most, it was a long, tedious trip by foot or wagon. Eliza Holman described the trip with her middle-class owners: