A note about names. I use the women's maiden names, for simplicity and to keep everyone straight in my head (the name remains the same throughout her lifetime, rather than changing depending on whether she is married or not).
Sarah “Sallie” Elizabeth Rivers Harwell born January 13, 1824 was the seventh of Sarah "Sally" Mason Alston's nine children, all except the eldest were born in Clarke County, Alabama. Before Sallie's birth, her father, Robert Rivers Harwell, owned 20 slaves. By the time she was 6 years old, 43 enslaved people lived on the plantation – 10 boys and 15 girls under the age of 16, 3 boys and 8 girls aged 16-25, 5 men and 1 woman aged 26-44, and one woman over the age of 45. Although I do have first names, I have no information about how these folks were related to each other.
As I think about Sallie’s childhood, I wonder if she was allowed to play with any of the 25 (!) enslaved children under 16 years old. In a piece written by my great-grandmother, Lillian, she describes a scene that appears to be based on family lore. In it, Sallie’s toddlers are "watched by Easter, a young negro girl.” If this is a family story heard by my great-grandmother, then perhaps Sallie (her grandmother) was also watched by enslaved children when she was young. Although Easter is entertaining the children, she is clearly their caregiver rather then a "playmate." And in the scene, the children are simultaneously watched at a distance by the mother and grandmother who are chatting on the porch of the main house. So, Easter and the children are not left alone.
Robert Harwell died in 1833 at the age of 45 when Sallie was just 9 years old. Sally outlived her husband by thirty years and never remarried. I wonder about the effect on the family of the father’s death. I have read in my great-grandmother's stories that Sallie and her older brothers, Robert and Edward, attended school in Mobile as teens – 60 miles south to the Gulf. I assume other children were also sent away for boarding school.
After some research about women's property rights, I'm guessing Sally remained a widow to retain her assets and rights. Unmarried and widowed women had all the rights of a man, except for voting, serving in a public office or on a jury. They could own property, bring suits against others in court, enter into contracts, conduct business, etc. A married woman could do none of those activities without the consent of her husband.
According to a letter written by a relative in the early 1900s, the Harwell’s plantation was at Sunflower Bend, on the west bank of the Tombigbee River. Sunflower Bend is still on the map, but there are few roads in that area. So, I decided our first stop should be Grove Hill, the county seat, several miles from the suspected plantation site.
While enroute, I telephoned the Clarke County Historical Society and arranged to drop by. Upon arrival, I was cheerfully greeted by Kerry who had pulled some books for me to review. The museum and grounds were very well-presented and preserved. Unfortunately, the document search did not yield much, so I moved on to the County Clerk’s office. Clerk’s Offices house current – and usually historical – property, probate, marriage and birth documents.
Hope at the Clerk’s Office was very accommodating and I found many original documents related to Robert Rivers Harwell’s will. I learned from Hope that, in the time period I am researching, when a father with minor children died, the estate went to Orphans’ Court and an executor was appointed. The executor was required to show the court an annual account of the estate until the children became of age. Sallie’s older brother, Mark, was named the executor of his father’s estate and it appears that the estate did not settle until after 1843, 10 years after Harwell senior’s death. At that time, Sallie was 19 and her youngest sibling, Ishmael, was 14. Sallie inherited slaves, 175 acres of land and other items of value. Robert spelled out exact acreage in his will for each of his children and his wife – so it seems he had some time to create a will explicit to his current land holdings. Perhaps he died of an illness rather than an accident. I have not found any record or newspaper obituary about his death or location of his grave.
While most of the original documents are laminated and bound in books, Hope had two original documents in a file folder! One was the "Robert Rivers Harwell Estate Division of Land" and the other was a Dower Petition filled on January 2, 1843 by his widow, Sally. It was cool to hold the old paper with the very ornate writing in my hands! The petition concerned a long list of property parcels that totaled over 2,000 acres -- about the amount he bequeathed in his will to her and the children.
According to Family Search, “Widows had the right to refuse the inheritance given them in a will by their deceased husband in favor of their dower right (one third of the property).” Does this document mean Sally refused Robert's will? Was she trying to secure property that Robert had bequeathed to their children? I clearly need to educate myself more on probate processes! Even when I have the documents right in front of me and can decipher the words, I often do not understand the meaning of the legalese!!
Kerry and Hope suggested I stop by the library, so that was my next stop. Luckily, in this little town, everything was within blocks of each other. At the library, I found a very helpful book that showed parcels with owner's names. This was great! Several parcels were labeled with Robert and Mark Harwell.
Although I found many legal descriptions of actual land parcels owned by Robert Harwell, I was unable to determine which was the exact location of the plantation. Sunflower Bend is actually in a different county, which confuses things even more. I will have to spend much more time culling through the documents and digging for more information to figure out which parcel or parcels held the plantation and home. We did drive through the land identified in the photo and it is now owned by a paper mill.
At school in Mobile, Sallie’s brothers became friends with John Bachman Lee, from Carlowville – about 85 miles northeast of the Harwell plantation. Several years later, John and Sallie were married.
Before marrying in 1846, Sallie and her husband-to-be signed a contract detailing her assets and clearly stating they were to be used for her benefit only. This aligns with a movement at the time in the southern states to pass statutes establishing rights for married women in order to protect family assets. This strategy was in response to an 1837 financial crisis. I had originally thought Sallie was an astute business woman, but now it seems this was a strategic move to protect family assets against future loss. She later successfully sued her husband for mismanaging her assets and was awarded $10,000. Since her husband did not have the money (ie they had lost their plantation and assets), the court awarded her a “mortgage” that her husband was required to pay to her. Perhaps the case was the exact scenario for which they were preparing and they were able to “save the farm” with the prenup.
According to the census, newly-wedded John and Sallie settled next door to widowed Sally in Clarke County. After four years of marriage and three childbirths, Sallie and John left their childhood home state of Alabama and moved to Opelousas, Louisiana – from the land of the Tombigbee River to the shores of the Bayou Teche. Sadly, their third child died as an infant shortly before or after their move. Either way, Sallie (and the rest of the family) dealt with the death of a child and moving their entire household across the frontier within a short period of time. Sallie moved her inherited slaves, as well – uprooting them from family and loved ones, I imagine. Did she care? Did she have any empathy for them and their situation?
In February 1864, Sallie’s mother died in Alabama. I wonder if Sallie learned of her mother’s death soon after it happened. At about the same time, Sallie and John moved from Opelousas northwest to Keachi – still in Louisiana – to escape the approaching Union Army. Did their ex-slaves, now (possibly) “employees” go with them?? Fighting was still all around. Even in Keachi, the War was still nearby, the Battle of Mansfield on April 8, 1864 happened just 20 miles away from the their home and Sallie gave birth to her tenth child one month later. The loss of her mother, an upheaval of house and home, a war, the birth of a child – there was a lot going on in Sallie’s life in 1864.
After the Civil War
In Louisiana, I also found court documents describing a suit Sallie brought against a buggy salesman and repairman. All I know is that her buggy was repossessed by the sheriff at one point. He noted that he took possession of "one fine buggy." I could never figure out exactly what the suit was about and who won the suit in the end. Those documents are written in very convoluted ways!
While visiting the graves of Sallie and John in Keachi, I noticed the grave of the buggy repairman, Frederick Dick, only a few yards away. I had to laugh! All that arguing and they ended up 6 feet under just a few yards from each other.
At age 51, Sallie lost two daughters – aged 28 and 19 – within six weeks of each other. Ten years later, her 65-year-old husband died. She lost two more adult children before she herself died in 1915 at the age of 91 – outliving her husband by 30 years. By the time Sallie passed, only four of her ten children were still living.
Sallie’s obituary notes she “had retained her faculties to a remarkable degree” and “she was keenly alive to all public affairs of the day and could converse on current topics with a knowledge that few younger women possessed.”
Though the struggle for women’s suffrage began decades before, she died just five years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. It sounds as though she would have been aware and knowledgeable of the movement, but was she a suffragette? She was a southern woman through and through who seems to have managed to successfully navigate and negotiate in a man's world. I wonder if she thought she needed the right to vote.
Those “mortgage” payments are fascinating. I had never heard of them. — Heber