“It was midsummer, and the sun was too hot for them to travel by day, so, though it was dangerous, they journeyed at night. Thieves hid along roads, waiting to ambush and abduct slaves. Throughout the trip, the guard held the family at gunpoint so that they would not try to escape. When Charles cried from hunger and fear as they rode through woods so thick no moonlight shone through, the guard shoved the gun into Elizabeth’s chest and whispered harshly, ‘If you want everybody to get to Texas, you better shut that boy up.’ Charles learned to cry silently.
“The three-week trip seemed endless. At one point, a wheel came off the wagon, and it took two days for the men to find another one. Finally, the Madisons arrived in Cedar Creek. They were starving and dehydrated. Blood oozed from Emanuel’s wrists. The boys sat listlessly on the wagon floor. Nevertheless, Elizabeth felt blessed her family was alive and together. Barely able to remember her own father and knowing that many slaves, including her husband, had lost their loved ones forever, Elizabeth would marvel at her good fortune for the rest of her life. She said over and over, ‘God is good. God is amazing.’
“Jeptha might have done a good deed by keeping the family together, but it was to his advantage to acquire six healthy males and a fertile woman who were at home in a cotton field. He was horrified to find them in such poor condition when they arrived in Cedar Creek, covered with dirt, too weak to walk, and insects crawling through their hair. His investment was in jeopardy.”
The family had left Tennessee without adequate food and water, and no one had given any thought to their personal needs. Years later, Elizabeth described how embarrassed she was that her boys had seen her during her “time of the month” and how helpless she felt when the guard and driver laughed. Though not being able to hide the flow of menstrual blood is a small problem in the face of all the hardships and degradations Elizabeth endured as a slave, Mom and I, as women, felt her humiliation.
In the cherished photograph, Elizabeth’s hands are empty, and she is alone, without Emanuel or any of her many children. I never met my great-great-grandmother, but in my childhood, I loved that picture, imagining myself climbing onto her lap and placing my hands in hers. As an adult, I see the gentle strength in hands that picked cotton, created a home, and nurtured children. Her hands had purpose. While Mandy was the mother of our African-American family, Elizabeth was the first of our ancestors whom we could actually see. When Elizabeth sat for her photograph, she left a gift: an image of resolution, love, and faith in God. I keep her picture with me at all times.
Elizabeth Madison (1815–1921)
15
Free!
On January 13, 1857, Jeptha Billingsley granted his son Jesse, a former senator representing Bastrop County in the Texas Legislature, legal charge of my enslaved ancestors. One of the items in the cardboard box my mother brought to me is the deed that bound my family to Jesse. It reads
Jeptha Billingsley . . . is the bonafide and actual owner in his separate right and property of the following named negroes slaves for life, to wit: A Negro man of dark complexion named Emanuel aged fifty two years and his wife, a woman of yellow complexion named Betsey aged about thirty seven years and their eight children all boys of the following description to wit: Shelby of copper color age about twenty two years, Mack of the same color aged about nineteen years, Henry same color, aged about seventeen years, Giles of same color aged about fifteen years, Young of same color aged about thirteen years, Charles of same color aged about eleven years, James of same color aged about nine years, John of same color aged about four years . . . Now the party of the first part, the said Jeptha Billingsley, doth for and in consideration of the sum of nine thousand dollars sell transfer and deliver to the parties of the second part, the said Jesse Billingsley . . . all of the aforesaid Negro slaves . . . into the complete possession and controle of the party of the second part.
Jesse, born in Rutherford County, Tennessee on October 10, 1810, was eccentric, a character straight out of the legendary Wild West. He was a renowned Indian fighter, and from 1836 to 1837, he served in the House of Representatives of the First Congress of the Republic of Texas. During this time, he reputedly wore a buckskin suit taken from a captured Indian and at night slept on the floor of the state capitol building. He claimed that he’d supported eighty men on the frontier with wild game and clothed his troops in the skins of animals they had killed. Jesse boasted of his company of rangers: “We were only chargeable to the government for one sack of coffee and one sack of salt.” Davy Crockett, a close neighbor in Tennessee, was his hero.
In the battle at San Jacinto in April 1836—a decade before Emanuel and his family arrived in Texas—Captain Jesse Billingsley commanded the first company to meet the Mexican forces. During the fighting, he suffered a wound that would end up crippling his left hand for life. Evoking Crockett’s death at the Alamo the previous month, Jesse coined the famous battle cry “Remember the Alamo!”*
In the cardboard box is a copy of the November 1939 issue of Frontier Times, which includes the story “Captain Jesse Billingsley: A Texas Patriot.” At the lower left corner of the magazine article is a photograph of a thin-faced man with bushy eyebrows, unruly dark hair, and a white-streaked beard. His eyes are fierce and direct, his formal attire—dark coat, high collar, and wide bow tie—incongruous with his tempestuous face and hair. When he died, on October 1, 1880, the Billingsley family discovered a document stating his desire to be buried with his horse Gofer and his parrot in the front yard of his house in McDade, Texas. Jesse’s family complied with his wishes. In 1929, he was reinterred in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
Jesse Billingsley (1810–1880)
The box of family memorabilia now in my care also contains a copy of an 1860 slave census, the last one before the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Under Jesse Billingsley’s name are the ages and genders, but not the names, of Elizabeth and Emanuel and their growing family. The parents, nine boys, and a baby girl are on the list. From their ages, we can tell that the five oldest of those boys were Shelby, Mack, Henry, Giles, and Charles, the ones who had traveled from Tennessee with Elizabeth and Emanuel. The other children were born in Texas. Three of the younger boys are James, Young, and John. What happened to the ninth boy and the baby girl is not known; they likely died young or were sold away.
1860 census (names of slaves added by my mother)
Despite bondage, Elizabeth and Emanuel tried to instill in their children a sense of pride. Emanuel’s father, Jim, had taught him to read, and Emanuel, with the approval of Jesse Billingsley, taught his own sons this now-forbidden skill. After Nat Turner, a literate preacher, and his band of warrior-slaves murdered some sixty white men, women, and children in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, most Southern states had adopted laws making slave literacy illegal. Nonetheless, Emanuel’s family read the Bible every day. The boys learned the teachings of Jesus; they learned to be faithful to God and be dependable, trustworthy, and hard-working. And they were constantly reminded of their great-grandmother’s plea to remember their family name. They were Madisons, and they were together. Still, the threat of being sold and separated hung over them.
Four years after Jesse acquired my ancestors, Abraham Lincoln became president. He took office in March 1861, and one month later, the North and the South were embroiled in a war that would last more than four years, take the lives of more than seven hundred thousand Americans, and free more than four million slaves. What began as a disagreement over the expansion of slavery into the Western Territories finished in a face-to-face bloody battle to end the “peculiar institution” throughout the nation.
The Civil War came as a terrible shock to the citizens of Bastrop County, Texas. Most of the farmers owned only small numbers of slaves, if any, and favored abolition over war. Led by Jesse Billingsley, the county voted against secession, arguing that Texas had been admitted to the Union less than twenty years earlier, and its status as a state should not be cast off so soon. Other counties
rejected this reasoning. Bastrop had no choice but to secede with the rest of Texas.
“Little Dixie”—Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—was slavery’s last stronghold. Slave owners sought to hide their most valuable property from the Union army. During the last two years of the war, more than 180,000 slaves from the Deep South were herded into eastern Texas for safekeeping. The result was an abundance of free labor on an abundance of fertile soil in a cotton-growing state. Perhaps Billingsley hid Emanuel and his family among the slaves from other states, but it seems more likely to me that they stayed right where they were, in the mid-Texas countryside of Cedar Creek, doing what they had been brought there to do: sow, reap, and bale cotton.
In 1863, the Union was desperate for cotton, so President Lincoln allowed federal agents to buy cotton from the enemy. While the official Confederate policy was that the South would sever all commercial contact with the North, Texan planters, probably including Jesse Billingsley, betrayed the South by selling Northerners cotton. Northerners betrayed the North by giving Southerners money. In pursuit of cotton and money, Northern and Southern profiteers prolonged the war by at least a year, costing tens of thousands more lives.
Initially, the Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, freed slaves in only the ten Confederate states in revolt, which included Texas. But Lincoln had no jurisdiction in the Confederacy, so fighting continued. One of the proclamation’s ultimate powers grew out of its provision that black men could serve in the Union army and navy, a change of policy that contributed significantly to the North’s eventual victory. Nearly 200,000 black soldiers, in segregated units supervised by the Bureau of Colored Troops, fought in approximately two hundred skirmishes. Another 130,000 enslaved men and women supported the Northern cause as laborers, construction workers, caretakers of horses and mules, and cooks. Enslaved people were not mere spectators, as it often seems in textbooks.
Slaves throughout the South knew about Lincoln’s proclamation, but the Confederacy and its struggle to maintain slavery persisted. Finally, on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, who had taken full advantage of the willingness of African Americans to fight for their personal sovereignty. In effect, by helping to save the Union, slaves freed themselves.
The Madisons knew they were free but were cautious about exercising that freedom for two and a half years, until June 19, 1865, “Juneteenth,” when General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with federal troops. Then, as my mother was fond of recounting, the eight boys, along with almost everyone else around, whooped and hollered for hours.
“Emanuel smiled at Elizabeth,” Mom liked to say. “He took her hand and led her to a tree stump on the far edge of the cotton field. He sat down, then gently pulled her onto his lap and wrapped her in his arms. His voice tremulous with love, joy, and anticipation, he said, ‘I’ve always loved you. I’ve always loved our boys. But now I can love you and them even more. Nobody can take you away from me. Nobody can take our boys away from us. We’re free to love each other as much as we want to. Only God is our master now.’”
The family had come closer to separation than Emanuel knew; Jeptha’s 1862 will carved up the Madison family among the Billingsley heirs, but Jeptha died on October 25, 1863, nearly ten months after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1.
For the first time, for all African-American families, the threat of being sold and separated was gone. The Madison family saying became a reminder that five generations of enslavement had not destroyed them. They could have taken Billingsley’s name, but Jim’s promise to his mother had instilled in them who they were. For them, Madison meant family, and they were proud the name had belonged to a president. Jim, Emanuel, and Emanuel’s children had known they were Madisons, but once free, they could officially claim the name.
Gramps described emancipation as a time of great jubilation. The joy of freedom, full of expectation and hope, was different from any joy the former slaves had ever known. By law, they were human beings with rights, not someone’s property. Throughout the South, freed slaves sang and danced. They plucked banjos and shook tambourines. From the tip of Florida to the westernmost edge of Texas to the nation’s capital, celebrations erupted like firecrackers and were just as loud.
But Reconstruction, 1865 to 1877, was a time of national chaos, instability, uncertainty, and vicious racial retaliation. There was no clear plan for rebuilding the war-torn South physically, socially, economically, or politically, no clear plan for reuniting the South with the Union, and no clear plan for the welfare of millions of homeless, penniless freed slaves. The proposed allotment from the Freedmen’s Bureau of “forty acres and a mule” became a myth. No one would sell land to former bondsmen, even if they had money. There was no choice but to rent, at exorbitant prices, from former slaveholders.
Having dreamed of freedom throughout their lives, the Madisons, like nearly every other enslaved family, thought being emancipated would solve their problems. What they soon learned was that the American dream would not be theirs without a fight. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and even the new amendments written specifically on their behalf betrayed them. Southern whites—angered by the outcome of the war, hanging on to a past that had taught them they were superior, and terrified that their future was now threatened—did whatever they could to turn the slaves’ emancipation into a state of destitution and fear. The sharecropping system was impoverishing. The Black Codes, laws that restricted the lives and livelihood of former slaves, were oppressive. And the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, meant to guarantee civil rights and the right to vote to freedmen, were unenforceable. Black people, though no longer enslaved, were not in fact free.
When freedmen voted in large numbers, putting black Republicans in office on local, state, and federal levels in the 1866 congressional elections, white Democrats resolved that black people would not vote again. The South had lost the war, but belief in the Confederacy—which had lured white men and boys to injury and death in order to fight for slavery—persisted and erupted into intense hatred for blacks. Terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 by veterans of the Confederate army, threatened to beat, burn, or lynch any black man who dared to vote. Using physical and economic coercion, white supremacists regained control of the South, forcing blacks to give up their constitutional right. Blacks heard their employers say, “If you vote, don’t bother coming back to work.”
Nevertheless, according to our family stories, soon after the eight Madison brothers and their wives and children heard the Emancipation Proclamation, they sought ways to take advantage of their newly gained freedom. Emanuel told his sons, “We’ve come far, but we’ve far to go.” He said, “Your great-grandfather was president of this country. You can do great things too, so make something of yourselves, now that you have the chance. Tell your children, and tell them to tell their children: Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from a president.”
The family saying was now a source of inspiration, and the work of living up to it began. From then on, my freed ancestors knew that with every step forward there would be at least one step back. Freedom was a responsibility, and it was up to them to see to it that their families were clothed and fed. It was up to them to find a way to get their children educated. Every decision was theirs to make; the consequences, good or bad, were on their shoulders.
Henry Green Madison (1840–1912)
My great-uncle Henry, the third oldest of the boys, was twenty-three, married, and had a child when emancipation came. Right away, he decided a farm was not the place for him. He wanted to educate his children and make a better life for his family. His wife, Louisa, and daughter, Elizabeth, stayed with his parents in Cedar Creek for a year while Henry traveled the twenty-five miles to Austin to learn carpentry. He returned to Cedar Creek every weekend to have Giles and Mack help him cut logs. Once the thre
e brothers had loaded the logs onto Henry’s horse-drawn wagon, he hauled them to Austin to build a cabin. When it was finished, Henry brought his family home.
More than one hundred years later, a wrecking crew demolished an 1886 frame house at 807 East Eleventh Street in Austin and discovered an intact rough-hewn cedar cabin in the middle of the rubble. City records revealed that the log cabin was built around 1863 on the location registered as the homestead of Henry G. Madison. Henry had not destroyed the first home he could call his own; instead, he kept it as a central living space within his relatively grander house. In the summer of 1968, the city moved the log cabin to Rosewood Park, a recreation center in one of Austin’s black neighborhoods, where it stands today, a monument to the substantial roles slaves and ex-slaves played in American history.
Thirty years later, in 1998, I flew to Austin to see the state historical site I had heard about since childhood, my great-uncle Henry’s cabin. The early-morning sky was dark when I left the hotel, and the rising sun was still low when I parked the car and climbed a grassy hill. Behind me, teenage boys kicked a soccer ball and shouted to one another in Spanish. At first, I could not see the cabin, but I sensed I was headed in the right direction. As I reached the crest of the hill, the sun glinted through a sparse grove. Then I saw it. It seemed to have appeared suddenly in the open space in front of the trees. The cabin was tiny, approximately twelve feet on each side. I was astounded that a family of two adults and seven children—six of whom had entered the world in that cabin—could live in such a small place, and for twenty-one years.
The Other Madisons Page 15