"A people peculiarly blessed": Community, Identity and Confederate Nationalism in an Alabama Planter Family, 1819-1876. Marian Crenshaw Austin Submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies University of East Anglia June 2019 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 Abstract This thesis explores nationalism, state identity and community through the lens of one Southern planter family.
The Crenshaw family are traced from their origins in Virginia, to South Carolina and thence to Alabama Territory during the first wave of migration between 1816 and 1819. Establishing a strong kinship community upon migration, they fostered an identity with their new state which superseded that of American or Confederate identity. Employing genealogy as a research methodology to enhance the understanding of kinship networks, within the framework of a detailed analysis of the Crenshaw family’s archive, this research demonstrates how familial power dynamics created and redefined their identity as Alabamians, Southerners and Americans. Employing the framework of national vs.
local identity, this project reflects on the relative importance of localism over and above national loyalty and the possibilities for localism superseding national identity prior to the Civil War and beyond. Planters, lawyers and politicians, the Crenshaws belonged to the planter elite and as such accrued significant land and wealth, including a large community of enslaved people. Settling finally in Butler County, the core years addressed here examine their lives their 1817-1819 migration to the state through to the end of Reconstruction, tracing community establishment, education and the approach of the Civil War. The fortunes of the family in such a location were undeniably changed forever by their personal experiences of Civil War and Reconstruction.
Re-Appraising the established and current literature against a vast archive of newly discovered primary material, this thesis demonstrates, in contrast to some established beliefs, that family networks and community identity were an essential element in the success of family amidst this turbulent period in the 19th century United States. In the process, this project emphasizes the importance of local history in illuminating and enhancing broader historical processes. 3 List of Contents List of Illustrations 4 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 1 "The friends and comforts of an earlier life in other countries.": Motives for Migration. 19 2 "The fairest portion of America": Settling Alabama, 1816-1840.
45 3 "The power to enlighten your countrymen. 73 4 "Any personal sacrifice for the good of my state": Planters, Pragmatists and Reluctant Secessionists; 1850-1861. 102 5 "I dreaded so much a civil war": A Family in Conflict, 1861-1865. 126 6 "In a pig's eye": Loss and Gain in a Reconstruction Community, 1865-1880.
160 Conclusion: “the family racket” 188 Archival Resources 192 Bibliography 202 Appendix: Illustrations 221 4 List of Illustrations Fig. 1 The graves of Charles and Eunice Crenshaw and two of their children. Long Lane, Newberry, South Carolina, April 2017. Photograph by the author.
2 Site of the Crenshaw Plantation, Long Lane, Newberry, South Carolina, April 2017. Photograph by the author. 3 Mary Chiles Crenshaw, 1790-1874. Collection of the author.
4 Either Anderson Crenshaw, 1783-1847 or his brother, Dr. Collection of the author. 5 The home Anderson Crenshaw built in 1835 as photographed in 1949. Collection of the author.
6 The law office of Judge Anderson Crenshaw in June 1935. Historic American Buildings Survey. 7 The Womack House built by Jacob Lewis and Agnes Chiles Womack in 1848. Collection of the author.
8 Former slave house on the Womack Plantation, June 1935. Historic American Buildings Survey. Collection of the author. 9 The Womack House in the 1970s.
Photograph from the Montgomery Advertiser, 27 February 1973. Collection of the author. 10 Following the fire, February 1973. From the Montgomery Advertiser, 27 February 1973.
11 Walter Henry Crenshaw House, about 1900. Collection of the author. 12 "The Quarters" with unidentified woman, the former W. Crenshaw Plantation, ca.
Collection of the author. 13 Walter Henry Crenshaw, 1817-1878. Collection of the author. 14 Edward Frederick Crenshaw, 1842-1911.
Collection of the author. 15 Sarah Elizabeth Lewis Crenshaw, 1842-1911. Image courtesy of Annie Hadden Crenshaw. 16 Frederick William Crenshaw, 1824-1902.
Collection of the author. 17 Sallie Lewis' receipt for the purchase of Confederate Bonds, March 1864. “Alabama Estate Files, 1830-1976”. 18 Sallie Lewis' accounts showing value of "good" money over Confederate.
“Alabama Estate Files, 1830-1976”. 19 Letter to Miss Sallie Lewis, 12 May 1868 from a friend of her late brother’s. 20 "The Old Lewis House", formerly the home of George Noland and Sallie Lewis, later the home of Isaac Newton and Anna Lewis Carter. Photograph by the author, November 2018.
2121 Family tree of the extended Crenshaw, Womack and Lewis families. 6 Acknowledgements Research for this thesis was made possible in part from the generous funding of the UEA School of American Studies Postgraduate Research Studentship, the Peter J. Parish Memorial Fund and the UEA Faculty of Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Conference Grant. I am also indebted to my supervisors, Becky Fraser and Thomas Ruys Smith who have guided, prodded, cajoled and provided so much insight and encouragement.
They made this entire process even more of a pleasure while their feedback has broadened my perspectives and improved my writing and research. I could not have asked for lovelier supervisors; they helped me greatly through a period of difficulty and more than once yanked me out of research rabbit holes. Without the emotional support of my family who assisted me through the same difficult period, this thesis would never have been written. They opened up their homes, shared their knowledge and their private archives.
In particular I am indebted to the memory of my great- aunt Myra Ware Williams Crenshaw, without her, few of the Crenshaw Family Papers would have survived. I am also greatly indebted to her daughter, Annie Hadden Crenshaw, who served as a tough but fair and inspiring advisor, editor and support throughout the entire process. She provided me access to her and her mother’s amazing archive. My cousins Thomas Alexander and Mary Lou Crenshaw gave me access to material which greatly aided my research as well as fantastic home cooking and a lot of wonderful family time.
My cousin John Noland Crenshaw provided access to an archive which surpassed my archival dreams. No amount of gratitude is possible to thank my grandfather, Dr. John Greene Austin, Sr. (1885- 1966), who first attended school at the age of 24, when he walked some 300 miles to enrol as a sub-freshman at Mississippi State College.
He believed that education was the remedy to alleviate rural poverty and to that end he devoted his entire career to education in the rural Alabama school system. He made it possible for thirteen members of his family to attend university and improve their lives; the twelfth was his wife, Modell Maund Austin who completed her BA and MA after their marriage and the last was my late father, John Greene Austin, Jr. My greatest thanks go to my wife, Helen Ryba who served as my third advisor. Without her, I would never have gotten this far in the process.
She unfailingly supported me, hosted her own supervisions with a glass of wine, read endless drafts, spent her holiday time assisting my research and now knows more about Alabama and Southern history than she ever wanted. 7 Introduction Post-graduate research must begin with a personal interest. For me, this project is intensely personal and has served to reconcile me with the past in ways that I could not have imagined when I began. With certainty, I can trace the origin of my awareness in the importance of history and preserving history to a single devastating event.
In February 1973, fire destroyed the Womack House, the 1848 home of my maternal family for six generations, the fire reached the roof in half an hour destroying the house and everything inside. Although I was very small, I remember the smell of it, the blackened chimneys standing over the piles of charred debris and the overwhelming sense of grief. It was as final as a death, the loss of visual and physical memories of our past in the countless letters, photographs and objects destroyed. The director of the Alabama Historic Commission pronounced “this fire has swept away one of Alabama’s most prominent heritage assets.”1 For all of the Womack-Crenshaw descendants, even those not raised in the house as my mother and grandmother had been, it represented our family’s and our community’s collective memory, a compass star from which we aligned ourselves to our past while placing ourselves within the context of contemporary events and modern history.
I recognise that this is a romantic introduction into why I have conducted this research. However, it is the beginning of how and why I became a conservator and an historian. It is also the ultimate origin of how I became so fascinated with the story my family’s surviving archives tells about Alabama’s history. Because everything burned up with that house, the family archive which survived in other locations became even more precious to those interested in our history.
To that end I owe eternal gratitude to my great-aunt, Myra Ware Williams Crenshaw who inspired me, albeit from afar, to become a saver of old papers and consider genealogy a worthy research methodology. She married into the family in 1943, soon discovering with incredulity that familiarity with the past had translated into static “old houses” with extraordinary collections of “old papers”. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as the wife of a farmer, mother of five children and working full time as a social worker, she courted bemused and perplexed in-laws, persuading them to lend her family papers so she could make copies of them by hand or by typewriter. With professional experience as a cataloguer and archivist, I can vouch that she documented them with autograph transcripts and an archivist’s eye for order and accuracy.
If any documents survived the burning of the Womack House, they do so through her tireless and exemplary work. 1 Colin MacGuire, “Famed Antebellum Home Lost to Fire in Ridgeville”, 27 February 1973, The Montgomery Advertiser. 8 The presentation of this thesis is particularly timely given that the completion date, 2019, coincides with the bicentennial of Alabama. In recognition of the bicentennial, “Becoming Alabama”, a state-wide series of interdisciplinary events began in 2009, focusing on the three key periods of the state’s history; the Creek War, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.2 The study of settlement immediately following the Creek War and the coming of the Civil War are essential to the understanding of the modern South and will be examined in detail in this thesis.
This thesis focuses on one planter family, the Crenshaws, from their motives for leaving their home in South Carolina, their migration to Alabama Territory between 1816 and 1819 and their settlement within the newly formed state of Alabama. The catalyst for my research stems from the pioneering research of Joan Cashin whose 1991 work A Family Venture at present remains the only academic work examining the motivations for migrations of the planter class to Alabama. 3 Using original source material from family papers in public repositories, Cashin focuses on the 1830s, the decade which experienced the greatest surge of migration: Alabama’s population swelled from 127,901 in 1820 to 590,756 in 1840.4 As the only research on the migration of planter families to Alabama, this thesis expands upon Cashin’s research even as it refutes some of her findings. The extant primary sources Cashin consulted for her research fully support her arguments and her findings may have been expanded had she access to the Crenshaw family archives, but I believe the method of her family selection serves to skew her results.