My “coolest ancestor” kept people in slavery

I’ve mused a little bit before on this blog about how much we should look to our ancestors as a source of pride or shame. And honestly, I derive more pride than is probably warranted from some of the admirable things I've uncovered in my family's past. A case in point is Martha McFarlane McGee Bell, who I enthused in a post a few years back was “Quite Possibly My Coolest Ancestor.” Martha Bell was a nurse, midwife, and the richest woman in her county in North Carolina. Two of her children, John and William McGee, became preachers and helped launch the Second Great Awakening. Most awesomely, she is said to have been a spy for the patriots in the American Revolution.

But I'm writing on Memorial Day after a day of thinking about the Civil War and my family’s role in it. I recently confirmed that my great-great-great-grandfather William Burrow—Martha’s great-grandson—died fighting for the Union in the Battle of Fayetteville, which is another source of pride. I was totting up the Union soldiers and sympathizers and the Confederate soldiers and sympathizers and feeling good about mostly being on the right side of history.

Then, I started thinking beyond the war to slavery. I have known for years that one of my great-great-great-grandfathers in Arkansas, William Shumate, kept people in slavery; it is mentioned casually in a couple of accounts of his family. His son Bennett, my great-great-grandfather, is the only Confederate soldier in my direct ancestry. Beyond them, though, I had always had a vague notion that my Scots-Irish, hill-dwelling ancestors were not prosperous enough to have held people in bondage.

Today, though, my thoughts turned to prosperous Martha and William Bell, who owned a mill in North Carolina. Nothing I had read about them had ever mentioned that they held people in slavery, but what are the odds that they didn’t, I suddenly wondered.

The answer came too easily. I went to Ancestry.com and found that someone had transcribed Martha’s will. She died before her husband, so it seems to have gone unsaid that he—the executor of her estate—would inherit most of her property. But the will is otherwise concerned with only one thing: her bequest of 11 human beings to her grandchildren.

After I found Martha’s will, I found this 1847 newspaper account of old revolutionary times that, while remarking on Martha’s spirit, casually mentioned the Bell’s “negroes.” Raleigh (NC) Register, 11 Sep 1847.

Reading this straightforward, seemingly casual dispersal of living people as property was a gut punch. “First I give to my grandson, William McGee, the son of John McGee. one Negro boy named Charles. Then I give to my grandson, John McGee, the son of William McGee, one Negro boy named Sampson. Then, I give to my grandson, John Welborn, the son of Jenny Wellborn, one Negro woman named Fan, with the youngest child she now has.” It goes on until she has gifted 11 people to 10 of her grandchildren.(My great-great-great-great-grandmother Martha McGee Burrow is not among them.)

I had put Martha on a pedestal. I saw her as a feminist pioneer—looking after women's health not for money but as a calling—and a champion of liberty in her efforts for the Continental Army. But as with so many heroes of that era, we have a terrible contradiction to live with: the fact that they espoused liberty—and risked their lives for it—while holding people in a sickeningly cruel and unjust system of bondage.

I’m still trying to assimilate all this. For years, I have had idle thoughts about trying to write a novel about Martha, but that story would now be darker and more complicated.

I should add that you don't have to find slaveholders in your family tree to find yourself complicit in our nation’s defining sin. My white family benefited for generations from systemic advantages denied to black people, beginning with slavery and suffrage but continuing through the Homestead Act, Jim Crow, the Federal Housing Act, the G.I. Bill, and more. Our nation owes African Americans a tangible debt for these centuries of systemic theft of their wealth, and I for one support a national program to make it happen. (If you haven’t already, read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s excellent article “The Case for Reparations” for an excellent argument along this line.)

I just want to end by remembering the people that Martha enslaved. Here are the only names I know for them: Charles, Sampson, Fan and her youngest child, Becky, Solomon, Absalom, Judy, Gains, Jacob, and Fanny. May light perpetual shine upon them, and may they have their reward in Heaven.

William Burrow, 1833–1863

William Burrow’s headstone at the
National Cemetery in Fayetteville.

It's been a minute or two since I've posted anything new on this blog. But I wanted to report on some new confirmation about an ancestor whose Civil War story had been a little sketchy to me up to now. I had for years seen references to William Burrow, great-grandfather of Blanche Vermillion Branch, having died fighting for the Union at the Battle of Fayetteville in Arkansas in April 1863. But I was unsure if the William Burrow who is buried at the National Cemetery there was the same one in our family.

What we know about our William Burrow is that he was born in Missouri in 1833, married Frances Stacy in 1853 (she died in 1863, around the time William was killed in combat), and was the father of Jane and Martha Burrow. His father was James Burrow, and his mother was Martha McGee, daughter of the Cumberland Presbyterian minister and revival leader William McGee. (Martha McGee and her granddaughter Martha Burrow were presumably namesakes of William McGee's mother, the Revolutionary spy Martha Bell.) James and Martha McGee Burrow came to Missouri from Tennessee in the early 1830s.

A few newly discovered nuggets lay out the case pretty well. Most important is a passage from a 1917 book called The Ozark Region, Its History and Its People, which contains a lot of biographies of local folks. An item about a man named Harry Moore, who would be Walter Vermillion's first cousin, begins like this:

The father of Harry Moore is Walter Moore, an old citizen of Lawrence county, who had lived to the time of his death, September 10, 1916, upon a farm north of Aurora for more than forty years. Walter Moore was born in Edwards county, Illinois, on the 9th day of January, 1846, and was left without either parent before he was one year of age. His grandparents took him to Barry county, Missouri, early in the year 1847, and here he grew to manhood, working upon the farm and thus acquiring a knowledge of that business which made him a farmer for life. Mr. Moore married Miss Jane Burrow of Lawrence county, a daughter of William Burrow. She was born in Lawrence county on the 31st of December, 1858 [sic—other sources say 1855].

William Burrow was a farmer who enlisted in the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil war, and was killed at the battle of Fayetteville, Arkansas. He is one of the honored dead who sleep in the National cemetery at Fayetteville. Shortly before Mr. Burrow's death his wife had passed away, and his daughter was thus left, as her future husband had been, an orphan. Like him too, she was taken to the home of her grandfather. This was James Burrow, a native of Bedford county, Tennessee, who came to Missouri about 1832 and bought a tract of land, on which is located the celebrated Orange Spring. He was born in 1799, and passed away in 1880, at the advanced age of eighty-one years.

We have well established that Jane Burrow was the sister of our own ancestor Martha Burrow (who married Wash Vermillion and was Blanche's grandmother). Jane Moore would later be one of the people who regularly wrote to Martha's son Ira in prison. Census records show that both Jane and Martha lived with their grandfather James Burrow after their parents' death. This biographical item, likely reported by Harry Moore himself or a family member, connects William Burrow at Fayetteville to our family.

I had been a bit confused/skeptical because William is also identified in a Goodspeed history of Lawrence County as having been a member of the Lawrence County Home Guard during the war. But I'm guessing he left that outfit to join up with the real army in Arkansas. Civil War records show that the William M. Burrow who fell at Fayetteville was a sergeant in Company E, 1st Regiment, First Arkansas Union Cavalry.

A record of a pension application from December 8, 1873, identifies William Burrow as "1Sgt E, 1 Ark Cav." The application does not name the minor dependent, but lists her guardian as Walter Moore. Walter married Jane Burrow in 1872, but she did not turn 18 until December 31, 1873. Perhaps Walter served as legal guardian of his wife (and maybe Martha as well) for the purposes of the pension. At any rate, this again connects our known family to the fallen soldier.

The only other reference I've found to William Burrow's service and death comes from an article about the Battle of Fayetteville originally published in North and South magazine and reprinted here. Relying on a battle report in federal records written by commanding officer Albert Bishop, the author writes:

About six o’clock the Confederates made their initial move toward Fayetteville, charging on horseback out of the ravine and up toward Federal Headquarters and the nearby Baxter house. This attack by Carroll’s Cavalry and Dorsey’s Missouri squadron drove the defenders back into the rifle pits and houses, where they rallied and from where they poured in a considerable fire from their long-range Whitney rifles. In the streets Cabell’s men met with effectual resistance from the windows, doorways and corners of the houses. One of the defenders, First Sergeant William M. Burrow of Company E, First Arkansas Union Cavalry, fell badly wounded. “As his comrades were bearing him from the field, he begged them to ‘lay him down and go to fighting,’” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Bishop. Burrow died from his wound two weeks later. 

Like a lot of the family history I write about here, I never heard any of this growing up. William's daughter Martha, Blanche's grandmother, died too young to pass family stories on to her own children, much less her grandchildren. And Blanche's own father died when she was still an infant, so I think a lot of family lore just got lost along the way.

The Civil War was complicated in the hills of Arkansas and Missouri, and I don't know what William Burrow was fighting for when he gave his life. But I know that Blanche, a patriotic woman, would have been proud of her great-grandfather if she had known the story.