Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  William Tomlinson lived to be taken off the field. He said that he did not want his friends to think he was a coward because he was shot in the back. He was a brave and noble boy loved by all who knew him. I know his death will nearly kill his parents but such is the fate of some of our soldiers—and it seems that the best men always go first.25

  Will’s comrades buried him at Yellow Bayou. The Fifth Texas Cavalry never fought another significant battle.

  James Tomlinson fared better than his brother Will. His myopia worsened while he was in Galveston, and five days before Will died, on May 13, 1864, a Confederate surgeon declared James unfit for duty and sent him home to Tomlinson Hill.26 The first news he received upon his return was that of his brother’s death. With his father, Jim, away conscripting slave labor, James managed the plantation and supervised the construction of a separate home so he could start a family.

  That left only one Tomlinson still serving the Confederate cause.27 Jim was based in Galveston in the summer of 1864, which was experiencing one of the worst yellow fever epidemics in the city’s history. Magruder ordered the city quarantined and slaveholders stopped sending their most precious property into harm’s way, especially after Union forces burned Atlanta and Lincoln was reelected.28

  Jim returned home in the spring of 1865 suffering from fever.29 We’ll never know exactly what disease Jim carried back to Marlin, but it was most probably malaria or tuberculosis, both of which can drag on for months. He was at home on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered at Appomattox. After that, Confederate troops began walking away from their units.

  Almost the entirety of the Confederate force in Texas had deserted by June 2, 1865, when Magruder and his commander, Gen. Kirby Smith, boarded the Union steamer Fort Jackson in Galveston harbor. Texas was the last state to surrender to Union forces, and Magruder’s and Smith’s signatures officially ended the Civil War. An estimated 24,000 Texans had died, about two-thirds of them from disease.30

  Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and eighteen hundred occupying troops did not arrive in Texas until two weeks later. On June 19, 1865, Granger issued orders declaring Texas within Union jurisdiction and negating everything the state legislature had done since secession. Because Texas was the last Confederate state occupied by Union forces, Texas slaves were the last to gain their freedom, which was granted by General Order Number 3:

  The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

  The Galveston Daily News published the order on June 21, and distributed it across the state. The order formalized that Union troops were in charge and slavery abolished. But Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation covered only the parts of the Confederacy that were still in rebellion in January 1863. Technically, slavery was still legal in border states that had never joined the Confederacy. This fact, combined with Lincoln’s assassination and the ascendancy of President Andrew Johnson, a devout white supremacist, led a few southerners to suspect slavery might be restored. That Union officers ordered former slaves to remain with their masters bolstered the theory. Some slave plantations in the East Texas interior simply ignored the proclamation until Union troops arrived and forced the slaves’ release at gunpoint.

  Former slaves told remarkably similar stories about their masters gathering them together and formally releasing them. On Tomlinson Hill, Jim called his slaves together under a giant live oak tree about halfway between the slave quarters and his house. Jim was very ill, so slaves likely carried him to the meeting point. Jim explained the Emancipation Proclamation and assured them that anyone who wanted to remain and work for pay was welcome.31 Many slaveholders said, “You are now as free as me.” Ned Broadus described those early days of freedom:

  And then they say de niggers is free. They gave part of the third crop to us. My white folks give me a cow and some pigs when us was freed. We most of us, stayed on the Jones plantation and helped farm it on shares with the owner. Marse Churchill depended on me to see that the rent was paid and he told me to look after the farm. I been called “Jones”’till freedom, then I took my daddy’s name “Broadus.”32

  Just as Ned and his father had used the surnames of their former masters, it appears at least two of the former slave families on Tomlinson Hill took the Tomlinson name as their own. One of the families consisted of Milo and Phillis, along with their children, Peter and Martha, as well as Milo’s father, George. Phillis worked inside the Tomlinson home, and George was the white Tomlinsons’ closest neighbor.

  Jim’s slaves had been the collateral on his debts, and he was now bankrupt. Theoretically, Jim and his family were in no better financial position than the former slaves. But the family retained ownership of their land and had some key advantages. The most important was the color of their skin.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  The blacks are the most docile, industrious, orderly, free from serious crime, and with all the substratum that goes to make the good citizen.

  —Brig. Gen. Edgar Gregory

  Just a few weeks after telling the African-Americans on Tomlinson Hill that they were free, Jim Tomlinson died, leaving Sarah responsible for the estate and dependent on her brother-in-law and neighbor, Churchill Jones.1 She also owed Jones for most of the loans Jim had taken out to establish Tomlinson Hill. Sarah’s son Will was buried at Yellow Bayou and twenty-two-year-old James suffered from poor eyesight. Her next two boys, Augustus, seventeen, and John, fifteen, worked the farm, and the youngest son, R. E. L., was only four and had no memory of his father. Amanda had just turned eighteen and Little Sarah was only six. Sarah had a house full of children, very little money, and a workforce of fifty-five newly freed blacks.

  The Falls County Probate Court appointed Sarah the administrator of Jim’s estate and ordered an independent appraisal of his assets.2 Jim’s friends in Marlin completed the appraisal, and the court ordered Sarah to post a twenty-thousand-dollar bond to cover the estate’s debts until she could pay them back. The court provided her a $2,600 yearly allowance to support the family. The court said it would oversee all of her financial transactions to ensure that she repaid Jim’s debts as quickly as possible. Sarah had fallen from high-society wife to bankrupt widow struggling to feed her family.

  In Washington, President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to everyone in the South except for those with assets greater than twenty thousand dollars, or anyone who was a Confederate political appointee or military officer above the rank of colonel. Wealthy planters like Churchill needed to take a loyalty oath and apply directly to Johnson to regain their citizenship. Until that time, they could neither vote nor play any role in politics.3

  In Falls County, though, elections were the furthest thing from anyone’s mind in the summer of 1865. Veterans straggled home, malnourished and in poor health, and many turned to crime. Black Texans did not know yet what freedom meant for them, and whites feared gangs of outlaws and Union troops in equal measure. The folks who stayed at home hadn’t fared much better, since they’d sent as much food and supplies as possible to the troops. They’d literally emptied their cupboards.4

  Texas, though, had suffered none of the destruction wrought in other states east of the Mississippi.5 Texas farms and ranches had continued to produce cotton and cattle throughout the war, and they had product to sell as soon as the Union blockade ended. Cotton farmers in the summer of 1865 saw a healthy crop that could generate a good profit if they could harvest it. The big question was how to make money using emancipated labor. Freedmen didn’t work for free, and a quarter of the white men who had
gone to war never came home.6

  Falls County plantation owners had also lost the $800,000 they had paid for their former slaves.7 While this seems like a crude way to consider the liberation of more than sixteen hundred human beings, the wealthiest whites in Falls County saw their fortunes walk away. That most residents never heard Union artillery fire or witnessed the horrors of war made them even more resentful.8

  Emancipation also did not change white supremacy and black inferiority as the foundational principle of southern politics. Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean who succeeded Lincoln, believed emancipation did not mean equality, and he was ready to allow southern states to treat free blacks just about any way they wished. Texas Democrats, like most former Confederates, made their primary goal the creation of a legal system to coerce labor from former slaves.9

  African-Americans, on the other hand, expected the Union to keep the promise of equal treatment under the law. They knew their former masters better than anyone and understood the risks.10

  Union provisional governor A. J. Hamilton arrived in Texas on July 25 and immediately organized voter registration for a state constitutional convention. Washington expected delegates to nullify the secession ordinance, verify the emancipation of the slaves, and repudiate state debts incurred by the rebellion.11

  Washington also named Brig. Gen. Edgar Gregory as the assistant commissioner for the state of Texas, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. His primary job was to ensure that slaveholders treated the freedmen lawfully and to establish freedmen schools. Gregory arrived in Galveston on September 5, 1865, amid the buildup of fifty thousand federal soldiers in Texas, most of whom patrolled the Mexican border. Commanders in Texas also expected the bureau to make sure former slaves understood they needed to work for whites to make a living.12

  Gregory immediately toured southeast Texas to see how whites treated black Americans. Plantations closer to Houston and Galveston were more likely than those farther from the coast to have the legally required written labor contracts. He also found that whites did not believe African-Americans could take care of themselves or would work without the plantation tradition of violence.13

  When Gregory ventured farther into the Texas interior in late November, where no federal troops had gone since the end of the war, slaveholders had not told African-Americans that slavery had ended. Some whites said they had interpreted Granger’s emancipation order to be slavery under a different name. Whites also warned Gregory about rumors of a black uprising on Christmas Day, an old southern myth that seemed to spread every year. Blacks, meanwhile, believed different rumors, including one that said the federal government would give them forty acres and a mule for Christmas. Black farm workers complained that most white farmers refused to pay the wages they owed and refused to negotiate new labor contracts.14

  Adding to the chaos was the churn of refugees on Texas roads. Some slaveholders had moved west to Texas just ahead of federal troops to keep their property safe. After emancipation, many former slaves went in search of family and loved ones left behind. Whites perceived this search for loved ones as aimless wandering and proof that blacks could not handle freedom.15

  Gregory, as leader of the Texas Freedmen’s Bureau, needed to balance African-American civil rights with the needs of the Texas economy. Gregory knew Texans earned almost all of their hard currency by selling cotton to Europe and beef to the eastern states. He also knew former slaves held no property and had no education and therefore had little opportunity to earn money in the short term except by working on plantations. That meant wealthy white men still held the real power in Texas, despite three regiments of black federal infantry in the state. The sight of armed African-American men in blue uniforms might have struck fear into some white Texans, but planters and Gregory knew who controlled the money.16

  A NEW RELATIONSHIP

  Gregory insisted that planters follow federal rules that required workers to enter labor contracts voluntarily and forbade landowners from employing violence to manage their workers. Landowners had to provide housing, comfortable clothing, wholesome rations, fuel, medical assistance, schools for black children, and a negotiated salary schedule. Landowners owed half of the wages at the end of each month, with the balance paid upon sale of the cotton or cattle. Laborers agreed to work ten-hour days, five and a half days a week. Landowners could dock a worker’s salary and wages for sick days or missed work. They could also reduce a worker’s pay if the individual left the farm without permission. Once both parties signed the contract, it remained in force for the rest of the year, with a representative of the Freedmen’s Bureau assigned to settle any disputes.17

  Many whites, though, overcharged the freedmen for farming supplies, deducted pay for every conceivable breach, and exaggerated input costs to reduce the money paid to workers. If the worker complained, the planter took the worker to court, where the local white judge charged the African-American exorbitant legal fees, while the white jury ignored his or her testimony.18

  Gregory appointed subassistant commissioners to open field offices in counties with the highest black populations and charged his agents with ensuring the fairness of labor contracts. The subagents would also supervise how local governments treated former slaves, while still allowing for the enforcement of vagrancy laws to punish healthy people who refused to work.19

  Gregory knew he needed to deploy his assistants across the state as quickly as possible if he was going to fulfill any part of his mission. Initially, he asked for fifteen military officers to open the first field offices, but he had difficulty finding white men ready to spend their days fighting for former slaves. Gregory favored officers who had commanded black soldiers, because they tended to show more sympathy to former slaves. From those ranks, Gregory found about half the agents he needed to fill the first twenty-one field offices. For the other half, Gregory relied on scalawags.20 Scalawags were native Texans who had remained loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War, such as William Etheridge and Ben Shields in western Falls County. Some scalawags fled the state during the war; others remained behind and kept to themselves. With the Union occupation, scalawags sought to right the injustices they witnessed and, in some cases, take revenge on the Confederates who had discriminated against them during the war. Many of these men were ready to serve as subassistant commissioners in their home counties, where they’d have a company of federal soldiers at their side.21

  Gregory chose Asa P. Delano to serve as the agent in Marlin. Delano had already won an appointment as postmaster and planned to also work as an agent for Ranger & Co., an agricultural firm that ran several plantations and dealt in cotton, wool, and hides. Delano arrived in Marlin in January 1866, took over the Ranger & Co. storefront, and set up a post office and the bureau office in the back.22

  Delano’s monthly reports suggest that he thought the freedmen’s morality needed more attention than the whites’ respect for civil rights. Delano gave planters free rein to beat African-Americans and hang them from their thumbs as punishment. Falls County planters praised Delano in a letter to Gregory on April 3, 1866, which they also published in Flake’s Daily Galveston Bulletin:

  SIR—The undersigned citizens and planters of the County of Falls, and State of Texas, take pleasure to inform you that our farms are now in as good a condition, and our crops are as far advanced, as we ever had them in any previous year. The freedmen are making much better laborers than even the most liberal of us anticipated. If they continue in their industry, with propitious seasons, a large, very large crop may be expected from this county. We desire the freedmen shall become good and substantial laborers. We honestly believe that Capt. A. P. Delano wishes to deal fairly and justly with all, irrespective of color or condition.

  [The list of forty-seven signees included the name Churchill Jones.]

  Gregory’s staff, though, found Delano troublesome. They reprimanded him for billing the bureau for guides he continued to use to travel around the county, even after an adjutant
had told him to stop. Delano complained that he spent a great deal of his time correcting the freedmen’s “many evils” and jailing or whipping those who did not work. He insisted that freedmen marry and form nuclear families, something that many slaveholders had discouraged. He found that when he insisted that black men work to support their families, those men chose to abandon them. His choice of words revealed how he viewed blacks when he wrote, “[I]t is impossible to keep them together, as they have been accustomed thru life to a change of pastures, it’s now pretty hard to confine an old Buck.”23

  In other field offices, freedmen swamped agents with wage complaints. Those bureaus seized property from planters who refused to pay what they owed their workers. Delano, on the other hand, reported dealing with only one such complaint.24 All of the written record comes from whites, but the freedmen were probably disappointed with Delano’s protection.

  TAKING POWER BACK

  As soon as the war was over, Churchill Jones began petitioning to regain his citizenship in this letter dated September 21, 1865:

  It is true I had to give material aid during the war in the shape of money and other means, that I was obliged to do so to save my life, and barely escaped with it anyway. In my most earnest feelings I have never separated from the great and glorious old federal Union and government over which you preside. For safety, at times, I was compelled to dissemble. The Rebellion was a long, dreary and gloomy time with me, but thank God by his inestimable wisdom and justice, the light of truth and liberty appeared again in its season, placing upon that party the seal of his condemnation.

  For them to have triumphed in their scheme of an independent southern government and their idea of self-government, it would no doubt in my mind to have been the greatest calamity that could have ever befallen this people. It is true, I did not obey the order of Mr. Lincoln for all loyal persons to leave the south, my age and encumbrance here will explain that.25