Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Massa and missus argued all the way to Texas. She was scared most of the time, and he always said, “The Lord is guiding us.” She said, “It is fools guiding, and a fool move to start.” That’s the way they talked all the way. And when we got in a mud hole, it was an argument again. She said, “This is some more of your Lord’s calls.” He said, “Hush, hush woman. You’re getting sacrilegious.” So we had to walk two miles for a man with a yolk [sic] of oxen to pull us out of that mud hole, and when we were, our massa said, “Thank the Lord.” And missus said, “Thank the men and the oxen.”20

  Ben Simpson’s owner was fleeing legal trouble in Georgia and was cruel to the slaves:

  He chained all his slaves around the neck and fastened the chains to the horses and made them walk all the way to Texas. My mother and my sister had to walk. Emma was my sister. Somewhere on the road it went to snowing, and massa wouldn’t let us wrap anything around our feet. We had to sleep on the ground, too, in all that snow.

  Massa had a great, long whip platted [sic] out of rawhide, and when one the niggers fell behind or gave out, he hit him with that whip. It took the hide every time he hit a nigger. Mother, she gave out on the way, about the line of Texas. Her feet got raw and bleeding, and her legs swelled plumb out of shape. Then massa, he just got out his gun and shot her, and whilst she lay dying he kicked her two, three times, and said, “Damn nigger that can’t stand nothing.” Boss, you know that man, he wouldn’t bury my mother, just left her laying where he shot her at. You know, then there wasn’t any law against killing nigger slaves.21

  When slaves arrived on a new plantation, they lived under tarps, in tents, or in the back of covered wagons. While a successful slaveholder would live in a cabin only until he could build a better home, the cabin was as good as it would get for a slave. Amos Clark recalled building everything:

  Marse and missus found where they wanted the house and we got the axes out and in a few days there a nice log house with two big rooms and a hall between them almost as big as the rooms. We had been on the road about six weeks and Missus was sure proud of her new house. Then we made logs into houses for us and a big kitchen close to the big house. Then we built an office for old marse and made chairs and beds and tables for everybody. Old Miss brought her bed and spindly, little table, and we made all the rest.22

  The average slave cabin was twenty by twenty feet, with a dirt floor and a fireplace for cooking and heat.23 The cabin would accommodate a single family, perhaps more depending on the slaveholder and the quality of the plantation. The structures were minimal because slaveholders spent as little money as possible on them. Nails, hinges, and other iron building materials had to be ordered from other states and were expensive. Glass windows did not come to Falls County until the early 1850s. The only piece of furniture the slaveholder would supply was a bed built into the wall. Otherwise, the slaves were left to their ingenuity to improve their quarters and to make their own furniture with the little free time available to them. Sylvia King said most of this work was done in the winter, when days were short and the long nights were spent spinning thread, singing, and smoking pipes.24

  Henry Broadus, who worked on the Falls Plantation, started his oral history describing my great-great-great-aunt Susan Tomlinson Jones:

  Up ’til I was ’bout ten years old, I wore a long shirt like a girl’s dress. No pants at all. Used to watch the geese; they would catch me by the shirt. My first pair of shoes had brass on the toe. I thought I was rich with them on. When I got them muddy, I’d wipe them off real carefully. White mammy made me behave; she used to cut me around the legs with a switch. I was shore a bad young’un. But just let anybody else try to whip me, and I yelled so loud white mammy come running and say “Don’t touch that child.”25

  Broadus, who was a child during the Civil War, also recalled Churchill:

  Ole Man Jones was good to the pickaninnies on his place. There was a lot of them. Ole man wear a long white beard, reach ’bout to his waist. He used to let us climb around him an’ I kin recall ’bout a dozen of us, sitting on his knee and plaiting and twisting on his beard. He shore was a fine ole man.

  Marse Jones didn’t allow nobody to whip his niggers too hard. Mustn’t leave no scars on his black folks, else he going sure roar. We’d all work and no sass, and us got along alright.26

  For the most part, the slave experience in Texas wasn’t appreciably different from slave life in other places, except in a few ways. In Falls County, they had to worry about black bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars, and the five species of venomous snakes, and instead of working in established fields, they cleared new ground, cutting through dense brush to create pasture, and clearing forests to reach rivers, creeks, and springs.27

  On a big plantation the slave cabins were grouped together, creating a small community. The Falls Plantation was typical, with the slave quarters located in the river bottoms about a mile from Churchill’s house. Slaves rarely approached a planter’s house unless they worked there, and they would see him only when he inspected the fields or their quarters.28

  The former slaves’ oral histories confirm that most planters followed accepted plantation practices. The workday lasted “from see to can’t see.” The only day off was Sunday, though some planters gave a half day off on Saturday, or every other Saturday. This free time was used to clean a slave’s quarters, and often included an inspection.29 While slaveholders wanted to protect their slaves from disease, they didn’t hesitate to use violence to intimidate them. Slaveholders often publicly ridiculed planters who did not regularly use violence, arguing they were undermining the entire institution of slavery.30

  Slaves who worked in the fields performed hard labor, often in harsh weather. Summer days in Texas regularly reach one hundred degrees, and sudden thunderstorms can bring lightning and hail. Winter storms can turn a fine winter’s day into an ice storm in a matter of hours. But perhaps nothing was more dangerous than the overseer. Wes Brady described working on a plantation in Harrison County:

  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. The overseer straddled his big horse at three o’clock in the morning, rousted the hands off to the field. He got them all lined up, and them came back to the house for breakfast. The rows were a mile long, and no matter how much grass was in them, if you left one sprig on your row, they beat you nearly to death. Lots of times they weighed cotton by candlelight.

  All the hands took dinner to the field in buckets, and the overseer gave them 15 minutes to get dinner. He’d start cuffing some of them over the head when it was time to stop eating and go back to work.… He’d drive four stakes in the ground and tie a nigger down and beat him till he was raw. Then he’d take a brick and grind it up into powder and mix it with lard and put it all over him and roll him in a sheet. It’d be two days or more before that nigger could work again.31

  House slaves, or personal slaves, developed close relationships with the slaveholders and their families. They worked and lived in much closer proximity to one another, and the house slaves were the most likely to be sexually exploited. In other cases, a mutual affection might develop. Silvia King worked as a cook and described her experience:

  I cooked and worked in old missus’ garden and the orchard. It was big and fine, and at fruit time all the women worked from light to dark serving and the like.

  Old marse was going to feed you and see that your quarters were dry and warm or know the reason why. Almost every night he went around the quarters to see if there was any sickness or trouble. Everybody worked hard and had plenty to eat. Sometimes the preacher would tell us how to get to heaven and to see the ring lights there.32

  THE TOMLINSONS DECIDE TO MOVE

  Wealthy immigrants to Texas in the mid-1850s worked hard to convince their friends and families of the wisdom of moving to the frontier. In their letters, pioneers called Texas the “Promised Land.” Churchill and Susan Tomlinson Jones wrote lette
rs to Alabama, describing a Garden of Eden and encouraging family and friends to come see for themselves. Frank Stallworth also wrote to his aunts, Sarah Tomlinson and Mary Travis. In late 1857, at Susan’s urging, Jim Tomlinson decided to start a farm in Texas.33

  Apparently, Jim didn’t need to see Texas before he decided to move there. He took a mortgage from Churchill on January 4, 1857, for ten thousand dollars’ worth of land, then traveled overland, taking with him provisions and slaves to begin work on his new plantation. He reached Falls County in early 1858 and found that his brother-in-law was prospering beyond his wildest dreams.34

  Churchill had accumulated more than 31,000 acres of land, with 1,200 acres under the plow and 120 slaves to work it. He had 27 horses, 350 head of cattle, and he was producing more than three hundred bales of cotton a year. The global cotton market was strong, and the bales that floated down the Brazos on flatboats to Galveston were sold to European buyers for bullion.35

  Churchill had far more land than he could use himself, and after eight years, the value of his holdings had grown 400 percent. He had already set up Lucinda and Frank Stallworth with a farm. He was ready to do the same for his brother-in-law.36

  Jim took the highlands north of Churchill’s plantation, overlooking the Brazos River to the east and Deer Creek to the north. The ridge was only sixty feet higher than the river bottom, but that was high enough to put his new homestead above the savage floods that came with the spring and fall rains. On March 3, Jim signed the ten-thousand-dollar promissory note to Churchill in return for 6,500 acres. A few weeks later, he took a $392 loan from Churchill to buy materials so the slaves could begin work on his new home.37

  On April 24, 1858, a late-spring ice storm hit Falls County, covering everything with a half-inch-thick coat of ice.38 The freeze killed most of the crops, and farmers scrambled to replant. But once the ice melted, Jim returned home to prepare his family for the six-hundred-mile move from Evergreen, Alabama, to Tomlinson Hill.

  Unlike Churchill, Jim didn’t have a son old enough to start improving the land and building cabins, so he left his sister’s family in charge of his slaves. Churchill provided the labor to prepare the Hill for cotton planting the following January. Jim planned to return with his family and the rest of his slaves by then to avoid missing a growing season.39

  After three months on the road, Jim returned to find his wife Sarah four months pregnant. The couple’s third daughter, Sarah Elizabeth, arrived on August 15, 1858. Almost as soon as she was born, the family began packing their belongings. In November, when the yellow fever season ebbed, Jim loaded Sarah and their eight children—whose ages ranged from three months to fifteen years—onto wagons and stagecoaches. Sarah’s sister Mary and four of her children were part of the entourage, as well as a half dozen personal slaves. The first leg of the journey was to Mobile, where they would catch a steamboat for New Orleans.

  After a few days in New Orleans, the Tomlinson and Travis families boarded the steamship Matagorda for Galveston. They arrived on December 22, 1859, following what the Galveston Weekly News called “the Coldest Week on Record.”40

  The Galveston paper printed passenger manifests on the front page back then, alongside news of impending war between free and slave states. Dozens of slaveholding families were moving to Texas in the hopes of living in a place where slavery was unlikely to be abolished.

  While Jim and his family were making their way to Texas, the state of Virginia hanged the militant abolitionist John Brown, who had led a raid in October on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to steal weapons for a slave insurrection. Marines led by Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee captured Brown, and a state court convicted him of treason. In the North, many mourned the execution of the antislavery crusader, while those in the South celebrated his death.

  Politicians who would later lead the Confederacy were already talking openly about secession and the possibility of war. U.S. senator-elect Louis Wigfall of Texas was a combative politician who believed passionately in slavery. He also held a deep-seated hatred for Texas hero Sam Houston, whom Wigfall criticized openly when Houston ran for governor. The week before Jim and his family arrived, Wigfall gave a speech, which was the main story in the Galveston Weekly News the day the Tomlinsons arrived:

  The next presidential election decides the all important question of Union. If a Black Republican [one who opposes slavery] be elected, our army, navy, forts, treasury and swords are handed over to the enemy. We must stand firm, and not be broken down by that stupid song, “The Glorious Union.”

  Days later, the Tomlinson and Travis families boarded the Houston and Texas Central Railroad and rode 115 miles to its terminus in Millican. There, they switched to a stagecoach for the long, bumpy ride to Falls County.41 The fields still had snow on them from a blizzard that had struck on December 13. They traveled for miles without seeing any sign of human life. The frigidly cold weather and snow were unusual for Texas, but the scene must have been frightening for the hopeful newcomers from Alabama.42 When they finally reached the falls on the Brazos, they were carried across the river by Churchill’s flatboat, and three miles later, they were on Tomlinson Hill.

  Jim and Sarah concentrated on creating a home for themselves and their slaves. There were only ten families on the western side of the Brazos, and they were spaced miles apart. The vegetation along the Brazos is mostly thicket, a tangle of vines and dense undergrowth, with cedar elm, live oak, and post oak trees rising above it. But there was plenty of deer and other wild game for meat.43

  The 1860 census shows that Jim held forty-eight slaves, and Mary Travis had seven. Among Jim’s slaves were Milo and Phillis, as well as their six-year-old son, Peter. Milo was born in Alabama, and Jim brought him to Texas when he was thirty-four. Phillis, age thirty-five, listed her birthplace as Georgia. Milo’s father, George, who was born in Africa in 1798, was also a slave on Tomlinson Hill.44

  Slave marriages, while not legally recognized, were common on large plantations. Slaveholders encouraged women to have as many children as possible and gave pregnant women lighter duties. Since slaveholders often encouraged the enslaved to go to church—sometimes in a segregated part of a white church—blacks practiced some of the same Christian traditions as their owners.45 Henry Broadus said he “went to church with de white folks and heard mostly white preachers, though some black folks had the call to preach.”46

  The only story I have about the black Tomlinsons’ lives before emancipation was told by Peter and passed down through the generations. Peter said that when he was a boy during the Civil War, Phillis sent him to the fields to gather a few ears of corn for dinner. It was dusk, so when he heard a crashing sound in the cornstalks, he couldn’t see very clearly who was there. At first, he thought it was just someone else collecting corn for their dinner, so he walked down to see who it was. After a few paces, though, he saw it was a black bear, standing on its hind legs and turning to face him. Peter said it was the most frightening thing he had ever seen, and that he’d never run back to the cabin so quickly.47

  There is no doubt that Falls County was still largely wilderness in the 1860s, but that also brought some advantages. Along the western ridge that overlooks the Brazos today, dozens of small springs bubble through the limestone aquifer and create short creeks leading to the river. They provided a natural irrigation system for the river bottom, where most of the cotton was grown. Jim and Sarah picked a spot about twenty-five yards from one of the fastest-running springs to build their compound. The water still seeps out of the gravel there before falling over a four-foot rocky ledge, creating a natural pool just large enough for two people to sit in. The water has flowed nonstop for as long as anyone can remember.48

  Life on any cotton plantation followed the crop cycle, which varied depending on the climate. In Texas, work began in January, with slaves plowing the fields to prepare the soil for seed. Each cotton field, which could be as large as one hundred acres, was repeatedly plowed to remove all the plant life
and to turn the soil so it could weather and make the minerals available to the plants.49 After the final frost, logs or railroad rails were pulled behind horses or oxen to pulverize the crust created by the rains. The slaves then plowed the land again, this time dropping seeds by hand into the furrows.50

  Early in the growing season, slaves would cut, or thin, the cotton, using heavy hoes with long wooden handles. They wanted only one cotton stalk to grow from each mound of dirt. This cycle of plowing, thinning, and plowing again was repeated three times during a growing season. In addition, weeding was constantly required.51

  The last plowing and hoeing was usually done in late July, and after that the cotton was considered to be “laid by.” The plants were left alone to grow during August, the hottest month, and on large plantations, the slaves enjoyed a respite from the fields. There was usually light work to be done, but the pace slowed, and many communities staged celebrations or parties on the sultry summer days. Slaveholders would allow slaves to stage their own celebrations and dances, and they were also allowed to fish and hunt for themselves.52 On smaller plantations with more varied crops, however, August marked the beginning of the corn harvest.

  Cotton picking usually began around September 1 in Falls County. One slave would walk on each side of a row, carefully pulling the white cotton from the boll. Early cotton gins did not do a good job of sorting out leaves from the cotton, so overseers put an emphasis on picking “clean cotton,” without any detritus mixed in.53

  The slaves put the cotton in huge bags they pulled between the rows. These bags became heavy as they filled up. The average slave picked at least two hundred pounds of cotton a day, though the best could tally up to six hundred pounds. The slaves loaded these bags onto wagons, which delivered the cotton to the gin for cleaning and baling before sale.54 The process was usually complete by mid-November, whereupon the slaves began preparing for Christmas and the New Year.