4. Slave-owners

Here I must write about slavery, that stain that can never be removed from the story of my family, and the history of our country. Our Bible-loving Presbyterians from Scotland and Ireland immigrated to a place where white people could own black people, and they seem to have had no problem with that.

We don’t know how many enslaved people Robert Davis 1, the first of our line to land in America, bought or sold. We do know that when he died in 1770, he left to his only son, James, 500 acres, 40 pounds of “proclamation money” and “a negro wench” named Indi.

James’ son, Israel Pickens Davis, and his wife, Sarah Nisbet Davis, owned four slaves at the time of the 1820 U.S. Census, listed as one male under age 14, one male 14-25, one female 14-25 and one male over 45. Six “negroes” were included as property in Israel’s will: Moriah, Mascifoos, Martha, Melinda, Riley and Charlotte. Did they have last names? Did they and their descendants become Davises? We don’t know, for the family history doesn’t tell their stories except as transactions. We know that when Sarah finally settled Israel’s estate and left the Waxhaws headed west, she sold seven slaves. Two of the “handmaids” pleaded to go west with the Davis and Nelson families, family lore says, rather than be sold. So Martha was given to Sarah’s daughter, also named Sarah, and Charlotte stayed with Margaret, Robert’s wife. Charlotte was valued at $150 in a receipt filed with the settlement.

As mentioned above, that settlement produced a handsome sum to be split among Israel and Sarah’s children. Receipts show the sale of Abariah brought $275, Narcogha brought $160, Martha $125, Melinda $100 and Riley $68. It’s safe to say a significant portion of the wealth the Davises took west, money they invested in land and sawmills and churches, came directly from the sale of enslaved people.

Robert G. Davis, Sarah’s son, was a tailor by trade, and had little need for slave labor. But he also operated a farm and sawmill and, later, a cotton gin. The 1850 “slave schedule” for Lafayette County, Mississippi, has RG Davis owning three enslaved people: a female, 24, a male, 16, and a male, 1 year old. Think about that: One year old and already a slave. I don’t know that boy’s name, or his story. But I take a little comfort knowing that by the time he was 15, if he made it to that age, emancipation had come, and he was free.

William Nelson, Robert G.’s double brother-in-law, was a planter with larger ambitions and more need for slave labor. He acquired the rights to fertile delta land on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, built a plantation house and brought a large slave workforce to plant cotton. “They made big crops,” Hattie Bell writes, and “great prosperity seemed at hand. But as summer advanced, malaria struck. They knew nothing of the real cause or cure. His negroes had no immunity to the ague and chills. They died, especially all the young died. Uncle William learned he wanted no part of the Delta country. When he and Robert G. began to look around, they desired hill country.”

Hattie Bell tells a story from her husband’s side of the family that shows how slavery and emancipation played out in middle class families like the Davises. William Storey, 38, was deathly sick when the Civil War began. He went to his older brother, Robert, to ask how he might invest $1,000 in savings so that his wife, Eliza, could survive after he was gone. Robert suggested William buy a negro man named Josh, a good worker who he’d just heard was for sale for $1,000. The slave could tend to the corn and cotton crops and William’s younger brother Tom could move in to run the farm. William and Eliza dug a bag holding $1,000 in gold out of their mattress and gave it to Robert to arrange the transaction.

William soon passed, and Robert, a captain in the 2nd Mississippi Regiment, left to join Lee’s army in Virginia, promising to return soon victorious. But Robert was killed at Gettysburg, and things went from bad to worse back in Mississippi. “The summer was hot and dry,” Hattie Bell writes. “The corn and other crops were barely a living for the family. The cotton crop was a complete failure. Before Tom and the negro had another crop begun the final blow came – Emancipation Proclamation. Josh left that night, with no place to go, no place to get food, only running to and fro and crying out everywhere, ‘I’se free, I’se free.’”

Eliza didn’t blame Josh, or slavery, or Lincoln for her destitution. She blamed Robert, and went after Captain Storey’s widow, Sarah, intent on getting back her $1,000. “Sarah tried to explain that it is gone, all is gone – ‘Gone With the Wind,’ Hattie Bell writes. “That poke of gold walked away with the Emancipation Proclamation.”

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I’ve long wondered how so obviously immoral an institution as slavery could be accepted by people who considered themselves moral. What most perplexes me, a northerner who had little contact with black people growing up, is how slavery thrived given the intimacy between blacks and whites in the South. As an infant, Thomas Jefferson nursed at the breast of an enslaved black woman. As a boy, his closest companion - the only boy his age within miles of his Virginia farm - was an enslaved black boy. After his wife died, Jefferson took as his mistress Sally Hemings, who was not only his wife’s half-sister and her lifelong companion, but her slave. Their children were born enslaved, and Jefferson never freed them.

I know more about Jefferson than about my distant Davis forebears. I’ve read biographies and visited his home, where the rough quarters that housed Sally Hemings and her family have been recreated and a tour focused on how Monticello’s enslaved residents lived is now the most popular with tourists.

 The lives of the Davises, though, haven’t been plumbed by historians, and their homes disappeared long ago. We know they were religious people – they built churches wherever they moved, and my grandfather, Oma Grier, made church-building his life’s work. Within their Associate Reform Presbyterian Church there were debates about slavery, at least at the highest levels. In 1806, the A.R.P. officially rejected the idea that “man can hold property in man” and declared that slaveholders cannot be admitted to the church. In the 1830s, Erskine College, the A.R.P.-founded school revered by the Davis clan, challenged South Carolina’s law prohibiting slaves from being taught to read, on the grounds that the right to read the Bible superceded slaveholders’ property rights.

How did the Davises square these contradictions? They must have discussed slavery in Oxford, Mississippi, the educational center of the Deep South, or in the church they built in Arkansas as the Civil War loomed. What did they say? Sadly, the historical record available to me is scant. Wealthier families left behind portraits, memoirs and correspondence their descendants could study, but the Davises were yeoman farmers who left few clues. I’ve found no scoundrels on this branch of the family tree, no hint of scandal. But they owned slaves, and accepted slavery. They believed the women who cooked their food and raised their children, and the men worked their farms, were less than fully human.

Generations after emancipation, some Davises acted like there was a middle ground on the question that overshadowed the United States since its founding. A century after the Civil War, Hattie Bell saw them as moderates: “The Davises have never been large slave owners – not abolitionists, certainly – all right to own slaves, but you must treat them well.”