1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [182]
Slaves, too, were part of the ancestral legacy. Among the tattered folios in the county courthouse could be found a deed, dated at Hampton on the 18th of December, 1696, by which a certain William Mallory—the present colonel’s great-great-great-grandfather—granted unto his son Francis “one negro Lad nam’d Will and one Gray Mare & their Increse to him & his heirs for ever.”21
All through the pre-Revolutionary decades, slave ships called frequently at Hampton—sometimes dozens in a single year—almost all of them direct from the West Indies, often bringing just three or four Africans for sale, but now and then forty or fifty at a time. There had been occasional annoyances over the years—during the two wars against Great Britain, local slaves had showed a disconcerting eagerness to flock to the enemy, who had promised freedom to any cooperative bondsman. But the British departed, the overseas slave trade ceased, and by the eve of the Civil War, the county’s population remained more or less the same year after year: half black and half white; and, it so happened, half slave and half free, apart from a small community of free Negroes, some of whom had even won a degree of prosperity. Each of the town’s handsome old mansions had behind it a little lean- to shanty where the slaves lived and where they did their masters’ cooking and washing.22
Slavery wore a more human face here than among the industrial-scale cotton and sugar plantations of the Gulf Coast, where each Negro man, woman, and child might be little more than an anonymous line in the absentee owner’s ledger book. Around Hampton, people knew one another. Even the largest planters rarely owned more than a couple of dozen slaves—Colonel Mallory possessed thirteen. The county had its old black families as well as old white ones. Indeed, these were quite often intertwined. Outsiders noticed what the locals seemed not to: very few of the area’s so-called blacks were anything approaching black in color, and the physical resemblances to their white neighbors (and masters) could be striking. Occasionally, tangled relationships emerged into the open; forty years before the Civil War, a local white man left half his estate to the daughter he had conceived with a black woman, the slave of a close friend of his. Much more often, things went unspoken. “Well, ah ain’t white an’ ah ain’t black, leastwise not so fur as ah know,” an octogenarian farmer named Moble Hopson would tell an interviewer in the 1930s. “Fo’ de war dere warn’t no question come up ’bout et.”23
At least one of Colonel Mallory’s three fugitives was an instance of such ambiguity. Shepard Mallory was the only one described consistently as a mulatto; he was also the only one who claimed the colonel’s surname as his own, as he would continue doing for the rest of his long life. (It is unclear whether he used the Mallory name while still in slavery.) Shepard Mallory was born when Charles King Mallory was in his early twenties, either not long before the colonel’s marriage or not long after it.24 Such facts hint at the possibility—intriguing even if speculative—that in leaving his master, Shepard Mallory might also have been leaving his cousin, his uncle, or maybe even his father.*
In years to come, philanthropic Northerners would be surprised (perhaps in a few cases secretly disappointed) to learn that