Mary Ann Elizabeth (Mae) Powell Bass, my gg Grandmother

 For women's history month, March 2022

A repost of a blog already written about one of  my great great grandmothers.

Mary Ann Elizabeth (Mae) Powell Bass (1825-1871)

Mary Ann Elizabeth Powell was born on 21 Feb 1825 in Perry, Alabama, where her father had received a land grant from his service in the War of 1812.

Pitts' Folly (no relation to the Bass family) is a historic antebellum Greek Revival residence located in Uniontown, Alabama. The house was built by Philip Henry Pitts as his main house. It was designed by architect B. F. Parsons, who also designed the nearby Perry County Courthouse in Marion. Many local legends detail how the house gained its name, but they all center on the people of Uniontown believing it to be folly, or foolishness, that Pitts was building such a large house.

Mae met and married (at age 14) Richard Bass (later to be called Col. following the Civil War) in her home town, (see Here for more on him) but they started a migration to Texas, stopping along the way for several years. By the time she was in a census at age 25, she had a daughter, Julia (9) born in Alabama, and a son, James (7) born in Louisiana, and daughter, Ellen (5) also born in Louisiana.  That census of 1850 showed the family living in Union Parish, LA.

Lowry-Ford House & Kitchen, (no relation to Bass family) Washington Street (County Road 45), Marion vicinity, Perry, AL. Now known as the Henry House and listed on the National Register of Historic Places

In the 1860 census the family lived in Walker County, Texas, with a 5 month old baby Elizabeth, who was born in Texas, but they could have moved there at any time since 1850.  Ellen is no longer listed, and another daughter, Nancy C. is 6 years old, born in Louisiana.  There's a cousin living with the family as well, whose name is Emily W. Traylor.

What is interesting about both the Union Parish LA census and especially the Walker County, Texas census, is the listing of various relatives along the same road...all farmers at this time. I'm pretty sure her parents lived on the next farm, but her younger brother who was a physician is also in the neighborhood.

Woodland, home of Sam Houston in Huntsville, Walker County, TX. Built in stages beginning about 1847, it was the residence of Sam Houston from 1847 to 1859.

My great grandmother, Elizabeth "Bettie" Bass Rogers was born in 1861.  (More about her HERE)

In the 1870 census we see a mixed family, with the youngest Bass daughter at 5. And Sarah is back, 16, and below the 2  servants' listing is James at 27.  Col. Richard (Dick) Bass is now a merchant, and son James is a clerk in Dry Goods.  I wonder if James worked with his father, but he is still in his father's household.  Emily Trayor is now 23, still living with them.

Mary Ann (Mae) Powell Bass died on 12 Oct 1871, at age 46.  Was she forgotten, or perhaps just her real name was...when daughter Elizabeth died, and when Mary died, neither of their survivors could give her name as their mother, (on their death certificates) though they both knew Richard Bass had been their father.


 

  

Here's her headstone in the  Old Waverly Cemetery, Walker Co., Tex

Her parents were buried nearby, James Moore Powell (27 Feb 1791 Bertie County, NC - 27 Feb 1868, Walker County, TX) 
and Nancy Jones Traylor Powell (16 May 1804, Oglethorpe County, Georgia - 27 Jun 1881 in Old Waverly, Walker, Texas)  

James Moore Powell (1791-1868)

Nancy Jones Traylor Powell 1804-1881

Waverly Cemetery

Historic marker

"Waverly Cemetery This cemetery is situated on the land originally purchased in 1853 by Mary M. Lewis, James E. Scott, Laura A. Scott, and Milly D. Scott. The first recorded burial was that of John Andrew Jackson (1822-1855), a pioneer settler of Waverly. Three gravestones dated 1852 indicate reinterments rather than earlier burials. Hamlin F. Lewis, John Elliot Scott, and Robert Lindsey Scott left Alabama for Texas but fell victim to cholera in 1852 and were buried along the way. Relatives of the men had their remains placed in this site in 1859. In 1857 Waverly Institute purchased 200 acres of land which included the burial ground. Through the efforts of Henry M. Elmore (1816-1879), President of Waverly Institute Board of Trustees, twelve acres were officially set aside for cemetery use in 1873. The town of Waverly was a cultural, educational, and religious center before the Civil War. When New Waverly was founded on the railroad in the 1880s, Waverly declined, but its cemetery remains in use. The burial ground has always been associated with the pioneer settlers of Waverly. In 1965 descendants of the settlers formed a cemetery association to maintain the site." Source: Walker County Historical Society Location: GPS Coordinates: 30.53308, -095.36353 

I also am aware that this family may well have enslaved persons in their various farming ventures.

I haven't found any slave listings to see if they did have enslaved persons. But just look at a plantation house, and it smacks of having servants. The Bass family did have 2 servants in the 1870 census, when Col. Richard had become a merchant instead of a farmer.

Ada & George Rogers Sr. and granddaughters Mary Elizabeth and Barbara Booth Rogers 1948 Houston TX. I'm adding this photo to posts in the George Rogers Family Tree.

Part II, where the VA Indians disappeared to, including my Bass ancestors

 Published in the Jamestown-Yorktown Museum blog...

A HERITAGE DENIED: Virginia Indian Resilience and the Racial Integrity Act, Part II

Posted on April 23, 2021, by ciniva

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I know other races . . . have a hard time. But fortunately nobody ever tried to deny them their heritage. Nobody ever tried to deny they existed. — Bernard Beverly, Monacan Indian Nation

In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act, which determined that anyone who had even one Black ancestor (thus “one drop” of Black blood) could not be considered white and “racially pure.” The Act would be extended to include Virginia Indians, Virginia’s first people, and is an introduction to Jamestown Settlement’s special exhibition, “FOCUSED: A Century of Virginia Indian Resilience.” This photographic exhibition, presented in collaboration with Virginia Indian tribal communities, honors the resolve of Virginia’s Indian population over a century of change, from the passage of the Racial Integrity Act to state and federal recognition today.

Many prominent white Virginians wanted to claim descent from Pocahontas but did not want to be classified as “colored” under the 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Young Chickahominy girl, 1919. Frank Speck photograph collection, N12623. National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution.

The chief proponent of the 1924 Act, Walter Plecker, served as registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946. He acknowledged only two races in Virginia, white and Black (or “Negro”/“colored”) and believed the two should be segregated in all aspects of life. The 1924 law specifically reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage. Plecker, a white supremacist who personally considered an individual “with even a trace of negro blood” to be “colored,” extended this definition to most Virginia Indians, because he believed they had intermarried with Blacks.

While the Virginia legislature debated passing the new law, some prominent and influential white Virginians realized a dilemma. Those specifically of mixed-race white and Indian who proudly claimed descent from Virginia’s most famous Indian, Pocahontas, were obviously not pure Caucasian. The new law wriggled around this issue by creating the “Pocahontas exception” — “persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the Native American and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed white persons.” This exception benefited whites who descended from Pocahontas’s prestigious bloodline — they then could have it both ways.

In 1930, the Virginia legislature refined its racial definitions. Although under the 1924 law anyone with “any ascertainable degree of negro blood” was considered “colored,” Virginia Indians, led by Pamunkey Chief George Cook, opposed classification as “colored.” The new 1930 law redefined “Indianness” as referring to a person who had no “colored” blood and one-fourth or more of Indian blood. Further, those Indians who lived on the two state reservations and had one-fourth or more of Indian blood and less than one-sixteenth of “Negro” blood, were given special consideration as tribal Indians as long as they remained on their reservations (only the Pamunkey and Mattaponi people have reservations in Virginia). George Cook and other leaders opposed this reservation exemption because it did not protect Indians who did not live on reservations. He pointedly commented: “You have taken our land, taken our forests, taken our fishing grounds – and now with one last stroke of the pen you are trying to take our very name.”

Pamunkey Chief George Cook lobbied and testified before state legislative committees on behalf of Virginia Indians. Photo shows George M. Cook and Bob Nelson, Indian Neck, Virginia, 1920. Frank Speck photograph collection, N12692. National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution.

Virginia Indians fought hard to maintain their identity as “Indian.” Like whites, Indians vehemently did not want to be considered “colored.” But, proud of their indigenous heritage, they did not want to be classified “white” either. They did want access to facilities, privileges and freedoms that came with being white. Walter Plecker thought they were trying to pass as white since he expected non-whites to jump through the loophole created by the “Pocahontas exception.” Consequently, he methodically began collecting old county and census records to create a “Racial Integrity File” in which he noted people’s ancestry.

Plecker next made a list of surnames of people he considered to be “Indian” (and therefore not white) and then instructed clerks of court, hospital personnel and school administrators to prevent persons with these names from association with whites and admittance to white facilities. Some county and state officials complied with his directives while others disapproved. He could not affect the Indians on the state reservations who were wards of the state, but he set out to establish that other Virginians who claimed to be Indian were not.

Chickahominy man and son holding a splint basket, 1918. Frank Speck photograph collection, N12644. National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution.

Plecker’s offices then actually began changing vital records, such as birth certificates, by reclassifying certain families as “colored” who had self-identified as “Indian.” His actions split family members by color line. Many Indian families lost the necessary documentation to prove their continuity over time as American Indians. By deciding that there were no “pure” Indians in Virginia, Plecker committed “paper genocide.”

Some Virginia Indians tried to get the federal government to assist them, with little success. Ironically, in the same year that Virginia passed the oppressive Racial Integrity Act, the U.S. government passed the Snyder Act (Indian Citizenship Act), declaring American Indians to be citizens with the right to vote (and to be taxed and drafted); unfortunately, discrepancies allowed some states, including Virginia, to disenfranchise Indians for the next 40 years. In 1930, some sympathetic federal Census Bureau officials in Virginia allowed Indians to be entered as “Indian” in that census.

Friends and advocates spoke for Virginia Indians, including anthropologist Frank Speck, who periodically visited Virginia tribes from 1919 through the 1940s. Speck recorded the peoples’ traditional ways of life through his writings and innumerable photographs, some of which appear in Jamestown Settlement’s “FOCUSED” exhibition. Another friend of the Indians, James Coates of Norfolk, lobbied for them as well. Coates’s Virginia Indian artifact collection is now owned and curated by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

Robert Percell Byrd’s 1940 draft card, front and back. Even though he self-identified as Indian, it was noted on the back that “[Caroline] County does not recognize Indians” and he was drafted as “colored.” World War II Selective Draft Registration Card.

The 1924 Act and its consequences angered, embarrassed and oppressed Virginia Indians. Some felt they had to keep their Indian heritage secret; others left Virginia. Still others challenged Plecker’s policy through legal means. In 1942, several Monacan people questioned his right to change their birth certificates, and he was forced to admit that no evidence supported his actions. The race issue arose with the military draft in World War II. The 1924 U.S. law declaring all American Indians to be citizens also qualified them for the draft. At the start of World War II, the draft board segregated the armed forces into “white” and “colored” units and placed Virginia Indians, willing to serve their country, in one or the other. Men from most Virginia Indian groups served with whites, some through a great deal of effort. In 1943, two Monacan men, Roy and Winston Branham, challenged their classification as “colored” and won their case. When several Rappahannock men, Robert Percell Byrd, Oliver W. Fortune and Edward Arnell Nelson were drafted as “colored,” they refused to serve and were convicted and jailed. Upon release and classification as conscientious objectors, they served in the military as medics.

During the Civil Rights era, Virginia Indians continued their fight for justice. A 1967 Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, finally declared unconstitutional any laws forbidding intermarriage of the races, invalidating the section of Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act that addressed intermarriage. Yet, Virginia Indian birth certificates and other public documents still indicated their status as either “white” or “colored.” In 1987, the Vital Records office, at the request of Virginia Indians, agreed to change the race to “Indian” (if individuals provided documentary evidence that they were descendants of Virginia Indians at least back to the late 19th century); 10 years later the office dropped the fee to make this change.

Five young Mattaponi boys, 1918. Frank Speck photograph collection, N12805. National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution.

After Virginia Indians suffered decades of invisibility, the Commonwealth of Virginia began acknowledging tribal organizations in the 1980s and today recognizes 11 tribes and their members. More recently the U.S. government officially recognized seven of these. However, the scarring effects of decades of misclassified birth, marriage and death records under Walter Plecker’s oversight are still felt by Virginia Indians today. The Racial Integrity Act (1924) intended to essentially write Virginia Indians out of history. Their resilience and determination, however, has ensured cultural continuity over generations. As ethnohistorian Dr. Helen Rountree has written, “if any one person can be said to be responsible for the enduring strength of the Indian identity among . . . [Virginia Indian] core people in those years, Plecker, ironically, is the man.”

Nancy D. Egloff
Historian, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation

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Selected Sources for Further Reading

Keith Egloff and Deborah Woodward, First People: The Early Indians of Virginia. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1992, 2006.

Helen Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries. University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

The Virginia Indian Heritage Trail, 3rd edition, ed. Karenne Wood. Charlottesville, Va.: The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2009.

Sandra F. Waugaman and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, We’re Still Here: Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories. Richmond, Va.: Palari Publishing, 2006.

Brendan Wolfe, Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930). (2021, February 25). In Encyclopedia Virginia.

Karenne Wood and Diane Shields, The Monacan Indians: Our Story. Office of Historical Research, Monacan Indian Nation, 1999.

Where our Bass ancestors, the Nansemond of VA, disappeared...

 

JUST ONE DROP: Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act, Part I

Posted on April 16, 2021, by ciniva

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Just . . . one . . . drop. That’s all it took to define if a person was white or Black under the Racial Integrity Act, signed into law by Governor E. Lee Trinkle on March 20, 1924. This act determined that anyone who had even one Black ancestor (thus “one drop” of Black blood) could not be considered white and “racially pure” and would be extended to include Virginia Indians. The Act is an integral introduction to Jamestown Settlement’s ongoing special exhibition, “FOCUSED: A Century of Virginia Indian Resilience.”

The Racial Integrity Act as published in the Virginia Health Bulletin, March 1924.

The social and political concept of racial purity was not new in 1924 in Virginia. Virginia’s colonial Assembly began legally separating the races in the late 17th century, bolstered by a set of well-known codes in 1705 that restricted the rights of Blacks, Indians and mulattoes. More such laws would follow in subsequent centuries in Virginia and other states. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine, upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality.

The one-drop concept evolved along with the rise of the “science” of eugenics and ideas of racial purity. Although the eugenics movement began with the presumption of bettering the human species, in the U.S. it quickly devolved into a way for middle and upper class white racists to claim supremacy over those they deemed “inferior.” Proponents provided dubious statistics to prove that non-white and mixed-blood people committed more crimes and had lower scores on intelligence tests due to their “inferior” heredity, and they prepared to turn the skewed data they collected into laws to keep the races separate and make it very difficult to be considered white and much easier to be considered “colored.”

Meanwhile, white Virginians struggled to create racial definitions. In 1785, a landmark Virginia law had defined a mixed-race or “mulatto” person as a person with at least one-fourth (equivalent to one grandparent) “Negro” blood. In 1866, legislators replaced the word “mulatto” with “colored.” This same law also defined as “Indian” any person who was not “colored” but had one-fourth or more Indian blood. In 1910, the legislature more tightly redefined a “Negro” as one who had one-sixteenth or more of “Negro” blood.

Walter A. Plecker at his desk at the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, 1935. Plecker served as registrar from 1912 to 1946, requiring Virginians to register as either “white” or “colored,” preventing interracial marriage. Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 8, 1935.

In 1912, Dr. Walter Plecker arrived on the scene in Virginia. Plecker, a white supremacist, became the state registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics (State Health Board) in Richmond, the agency tasked with recording births, deaths and marriages (today called the Office of Vital Records under the Virginia Department of Health). Born in 1861 in Augusta County, Va., Plecker graduated from the Maryland Medical School and did post-graduate work in obstetrics at New York Polyclinic. After practicing medicine in Virginia and Alabama for almost 25 years, he took a position at the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Plecker modernized the Bureau and required the systematic filing of birth, marriage and death certificates to include racial designations. Whereas the General Assembly had defined “colored” in 1910 as someone with one-sixteenth or more “negro blood,” Plecker personally considered a person “with even a trace of negro blood” to be “colored.” Plecker extended this definition to most Virginia Indians because he believed they had inbred with Blacks.

Walter Plecker held strong beliefs about predetermined categories for people. Becoming heavily involved in the eugenics movement in the United States in the 1920s, he saw only two races, white and Black (or “Negro”/“colored”) and believed the two should be segregated in all aspects of life. He also believed that whites were superior, and that people of “mixed” race would produce defective children. In 1924, Plecker wrote, “Two races as materially divergent as the White and Negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher.”

Persons applying for a marriage license were to indicate if they were “white, colored or mixed.” A sentence at the bottom of this mid-1920s certificate states: “A white person . . . is one with no trace whatsoever of colored blood.” Bureau of Vital Statistics, State Board of Health, Richmond, Va. (Library of Virginia).

When the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924, it flipped the legal definition for races to focus on whites. The law defined white as anyone “who has no trace whatsoever [not one drop] of any blood other than Caucasian.” The law reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and required that all birth and marriage certificates include a person’s race as “white, colored or mixed” (in the decades from 1910 to 1930, nine southern states adopted “one-drop” statutes). The law’s proponents sought to find the “fundamental and final solutions of our racial problems . . . , most especially of the Negro problem.” Within a few decades Germany’s Adolf Hitler adopted this same reasoning when trying to create a pure “Aryan” master race, ultimately leading to his own extreme “final solution.”

Walter Plecker served as state registrar until 1946. During and after his years in the Bureau, Plecker and other segregationists encouraged racial purity by creating separate public facilities and schools, forcing “the other” into menial jobs, and forbidding interracial marriage. The decision made by the U.S. Supreme Court in the now familiar case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967 finally invalidated and declared unconstitutional any laws forbidding intermarriage of the races, including that section of Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act, finding such laws contrary to the guarantees of equal protection under the 14th amendment. In 1975, the Virginia Assembly repealed the remainder of the Act and, in 2001, passed a bill that denounced it, as well as eugenics, for promoting racism.

Read Part II of the blog about Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act and its impact on the Virginia Indian community.

Nancy D. Egloff
Historian, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation

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Selected Sources for Further Reading

Helen Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries. University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Brendan Wolfe, Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930). (2021, February 25). Encyclopedia Virginia.

The Library of Virginia, You Have No Right: Law & Justice in Virginia exhibition, “The 1924 Racial Integrity Act.”

From the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation Museum blog

 

1734 Bluett ‘Memoirs of the Life of Job’ to Join Rare Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo

Posted on February 25, 2022, by

‘for by his… Countenance, we could perceive he was no common slave.’
– Some Memoirs of the Life of Job… Thomas Bluett, 1734

Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, attributed to William Hoare, circa 1733. Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. JYF2014.4. Image by Glen McClure.

A newly acquired slave narrative written by Englishman Thomas Bluett will enrich our understanding of the exceptional life of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, an African cleric whose portrait hangs in the first gallery at the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown. The rare book “Some Memoirs of the life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa” was published in London in 1734.

The memoirs offer an extraordinary account with a fortunate outcome for a kidnapped African sold into slavery in 1731. There are few survivors of such printed slave narratives from the 18th century that speak to the life and times of an enslaved individual. It may be the earliest English book in print to record the life of an enslaved person who escaped a terrible term of servitude and separation from their African roots of West Central Africa to return to their homeland.

Diallo, also known in England as Job, was an educated man from a family of Muslim clerics in West Central Africa. In 1731, he was taken into slavery while travelling outside his Fulbe territories and was shipped from the coast of Africa to a plantation in Maryland in North America.

By his own enterprise and literary knowledge, and the fortunate encounters in Maryland with English judge Thomas Bluett, Diallo proved to be his own best agency for securing his release from bondage. Once Diallo arrived in London in 1733, he attracted the support of friends in powerful places who sought to obtain his release and organized a public subscription to pay the bond of servitude owed to his former enslaver in Maryland.

Recognized as a deeply pious and educated man in England, Diallo mixed with intellectuals in London and was presented to elite social groups at the English court. William Hoare’s portrait of Diallo in 1733 is the earliest known British oil portrait of a freed slave who had escaped a lifetime of servitude in North America in a British colony. The painting is the first portrait to honor an African subject as an individual and an equal, providing a fascinating insight to the 18th-century English response to other peoples and religions.

Thomas Bluett, “Some Memoirs of the life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa,” Richard Ford, London, 1734.

In the narrative, Bluett expounds that Diallo’s personal qualities were evident to him upon their first encounter at a court hearing in Maryland, speaking through an interpreter. Diallo identified himself to the judge and wrote his name in Arabic. Bluett, an early abolitionist, was committed to secure the means for Diallo to travel to England.

Upon arrival in London in 1733, Diallo was given lodging with friends and supported by the Royal African Company of London and met powerful intellectuals whom he introduced to the prime texts of the Muslim faith, the religion of Islam. Diallo’s personal magnetism and intellect impressed Sir Hans Sloan, a renowned physician and scholar whose papers and collections are preserved at the British Library and British Museum. During this time, Diallo wrote in Arabic a complete manuscript copy of the Quran from memory and presented this to Sir Hans Sloan, as well as two prominent colleagues who subscribed to his manumission payment. Diallo’s manuscript letters survive in London at the British Museum.

Unlike many enslaved individuals forcibly brought to the British colonies in North America at the time, Diallo was well known and did not have to answer to another name or lack recognition as a Muslim cleric given Bluett’s account.

Diallo became a celebrity in England as much for his intellectual prowess as for his charm and other personal qualities. Bluett recorded several episodes of Diallo’s encounters with English people in the course of his visit to England, including the 1733 commission of Diallo’s portrait from a society painter like William Hoare. His friends wished to have a reminder of his sensitive face when his bond was paid and he returned to Africa.

Bluett’s memoirs feature a chapter on Diallo’s family and kin and the region of Senegambia where he was born to a Muslim cleric, Solomon, noting the assiduous attention Diallo paid to his devotions and to reciting prayers of the Muslim religion. In the early 18th century, few Africans of free or enslaved status came to the British Isles, and fewer still returned to their native country in Africa, as was the case for Diallo.

Thomas Bluett’s narrative features a dedication to the Duke of Montague.

His cultural background of Islam and West Central Africa and the traditions of the Fulbe nation were of great interest to English scholars. Diallo was generous in sharing his knowledge of Arab texts, especially the Quran which he had memorized in its entirety. Indeed it may be no coincidence that George Sale, an English Arabist scholar, published his seminal work of the Quran converted from Arabic to English in 1734, the first translation to appear in print. While on the voyage from Maryland to England, Diallo learned the English language, which afforded him the ability to communicate with scholars such as Sir Hans Sloan and George Sale, and aristocrats like the Duke of Montague. Diallo returned to Senegal in West Central Africa in 1734, living the rest of his life there until his death in 1773.

In the early years of the 19th century, advocates for the abolition of slavery would cite Diallo as a key figure in asserting the moral rights and humanity of the African people. The narrative account of Diallo’s life written and published by Bluett, an English supporter and friend, provides a deeper perspective on this extraordinary life. The portrait, though providing an evocative presence in itself, is more meaningful with Bluett’s narrative and the knowledge of the sitter.

Together, these two artifacts bring this exceptional man into greater focus.

Sarah B. Meschutt, Ph.D.
Senior Curator, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation

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The Bluett narrative acquisition was supported by private gifts to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Inc. The William Hoare portrait of Diallo in 1733 was supported by an initial gift made by Fred D. Thompson, Jr., a member of the JYF Board of Trustees, a grant from the Richard S. Reynolds Foundation of Richmond, Virginia, and undesignated private gifts to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Inc.

Shared by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

Podcast on Enslaved Peoples at Mount Vernon

 It took me a couple of days to listen to all of these 8 episodes, which featured many voices of professionals as well as descendants of the Enslaved Peoples at Mount Vernon.

I highly recommend spending some time, over however long you might be able to do so, and listen to this podcast series. Here's the introduction and all the rest of the episodes. I may listen to it again soon, because my memory isn't that great these days.

It's called "Intertwined, The Enslaved Peoples of Mount Vernon."

I've been looking at some of my own Virginia ancestors, both before and after the Revolutionary War, trying to make educated guesses as to who might have enslaved some African people. So this podcast was right along he same ideas. After all, February is Black History Month. I've already learned a lot from other people who are sharing their knowledge with us.

Gummy's birthday

 It's my grandmother's birthday, Ada Pillips Swasey Rogers, in 1886. Photo of her in her wedding dress with her first son, Elmore. She gave birth to 6 children, 4 of whom lived to adulthood, including my father. Her grandchildren all called her Gummy. What a woman!

More Black History and my ancestors

 Alexander G. Swasey, Jr. was born in Newport, RI. His father of the same name was a wood carver, creating many figures to hang on the prow of ships. He also created an eagle which survives to this day.

But let's look at Jr. because he is well known as a ship captain...for the Confederate Navy. He was already a ship captain before the Civil War broke out and he became a blockade runner...still trying to bring supplies into Charleston SC, where he had chosen to live. It's also where he died.

But he also lived in St. Augustine FL. There his wife lived with his children on several census reports, including A.G. as well.

I've written before about his involvement in the Confederate blockade running, and how he was captured early in the war by the Union Navy. See HERE. Here's a Union report in the NY times in Jan 1862 showing how he narrowly escaped capture in the Bahamas...

"On the morning of the 2d inst. the ocean steamer Ella Warley, Capt. SWASEY, ran the blockade at Charleston, from Nassau, N.P. She was chased and fired on by the blockading squadron, without harm to her. Her passengers were all English and Scotch, except B.T. BISBIE, late a bearer of Confederate dispatches to Europe. The Nassau authorities forced the Flambeau out of the harbor to coal, which gave the Ella Warley the chance to escape."

Very fuzzy photo of Alexander G. Swasey JR. in the book "Lifeline of the Confederacy, Blockade Running During the Civil War." by Steven R. Wine.

He is noted for having only begun being a blockade runner in January of 1862, and captured on April 25, 1862 on the Ella Warley...captured near Abaco, one of the islands of the Bahamas.

The nautical records regarding this capture, and what the freight (weapons) had been, can be seen HERE.

But let's look further at his involvement in the Slave Trade. The following statement was made by my cousin, John Rogers, when visiting Charleston SC.

"Here's some verbiage based on what the docent at the Charleston Slave Mart told me.  I can't verify that my memory is totally correct, or the historical veracity of what he said without researching it more.  But this is my best recollection - feel free to edit however you want:

 

Captain Alexander G. Swasey was a ship captain as well as a Confederate blockade runner during the Civil War.  Although he was based for a time in Charleston, South Carolina (and ultimately died there), the historical record shows he made trips between Charleston, New Orleans, and the Caribbean.  According to information provided by a docent at the Charleston Slave Mart Museum, this was a common triangle for slave runners.  Once the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves took effect in 1808 (the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution), slave states continued to smuggle slaves by claiming that any slave brought from Africa who even set foot in the Caribbean was no longer considered "imported."  

Charleston and New Orleans were two of the most important slave ports at the time, so the triangle among those two cities and ports in the Caribbean would have been a common route for slave captains such as A.G. Swasey."

 

John Fitz Rogers

December 29, 2016

And there were several ships in which Captain A.G. Swasey did carry enslaved persons.

The Schooner Calluo was his ship sailing from Charleston SC to New Orleans...as shown by the following manifest. 

The only enslaved man on the manifest is Francis, a male age 30, height 5' 8", and I can't make out the shipper's name. A.G. Swasey signed that he was the captain, going to New Orleans, where Francis A. Foygurt (or something like that) received the enslaved man. Left Charleston on April 6, 1743, arrived New Orleans April 28, 1843.

Here is another manifest with 8 slaves described leaving Charleston SC. June 6, 18?3, arriving in New Orleans June 29, 1843.

A.G. Swasey signed that he was agent for Mr. Cotter of Charleston. His (or very similar) handwriting shows their names, genders, ages, heights and coloration. And I would guess he also wrote "Eight in all" and "Charleston 6th June 18?3," with a signature "AGSwasey" with quite a flourish.

The next handwriting is different, stating "Examined and found correct, (unclear words, maybe English Turn) signed Francis A. Foygurt (or something like that) then date June 29th 1943.

A schooner is not a very big ship. The trip took most of the month of June. And if it stopped in any Caribbean islands, that might have been why it took so long. We don't know those details.

The records on Ancestry seem to have disappeared, but back when I first wrote about Capt. Swasey's involvement with the slave trade, there was a ship's manifest from somewhere in Europe as well. It is no longer in my records. I thought perhaps my other relations had decided to "white wash" the family from some of these historic records...but apparently they also have lost these as well.

He spent the years after he was captured in a Union Prison in Boston Harbor. I don't know how he returned at the end of the war to Charleston, but he died in 1866 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

His son Alexander John Swasey was born in 1853, in Charleston SC.  I don't know when his mother died. He had older sisters. His mother, Anna J. Zylstra Swasey was a second generation Dutch American. She had some family in Charleston also, but I'm not sure what their relation to her was. Young A.J. grew up from his 9th birthday in the privations of the war. His father's death was when he was 12. The next record I've found shows him getting married at age 29 in Texas (probably Galveston as that was where his bride lived). He is listed in the Galveston city directories for 1884, 86, and 1889 (without any trade listed.) He had two daughters, one of whom was my grandmother on my father's side of the family. The family still lived in Galveston until my grandmother married in 1905. Then A.J. Swasey was listed in the Houston city directories until his death, working as a clerk and bookkeeper in oil companies. He died in 1913.

Captain Swasey was involved in the terrible trade of shipping enslaved people from one port to another. He then tried to break another law by bringing in needed materials and shipping out the Confederate's crops through the Union blockades to English owners of his ship, the Ella Warley. I can't say he is my most notorious ancestor, but he's at the top of the list of those that I know of.  Yet many of my ancestors also fought and lost in the Civil War, living in other southern states. (I will search for more stories about them soon.)