Hidden Fortunes And Family Ties: The Civil War
And After
Nancy Daniels Sleeper's 1860 will
was the last testament written by a woman in Amite County before the Civil
War. In the next five years the lives and fortunes of Mississippians, indeed
all southerners, would change forever. While Amite County had little strategic
military value, it lay within the overland route between Baton Rouge and
Jackson. The courthouse in Liberty survived the war unscathed, but the
Female Seminary in the town and a few of the prominent homes were burned
by passing Union troops. The area's farms and livestock helped feed the
armies that moved through, and many local sons enlisted to fight in one
of the eleven companies formed in the surrounding area.
The married women's wills reflected
the changes wrought by emancipation and Confederate defeat. Whereas before
the war the most valuable portion of women's bequeathments were the slaves
divided among the family, after 1864 this investment in human beings was
lost. Postwar legacies consisted of land, money, and personal items, but
not the slaves often included in wills written before the war but probated
afterward. (87)
Despite the dangers of going off to war, many men did not write wills before
enlisting. Eighteen men's wills were probated between 1860 and 1864; a
further seventeen were proven between 1865 and 1869. The Amite County files
hold papers pertaining to the estates of several young men who died intestate
during the war and for a surprising number of civilians who died with no
wills following the conflict. After the 1860s, the number and frequency
of wills written by everyone dropped dramatically, hitting its lowest point
in the 1880s, and did not rise again until the turn of the century. In
the five years after the peace, only four women, all widows, probated wills
in Amite County. Five women, four of them widows, probated wills in the
1870s; and between 1880 and 1900, only six women, five of whom were widows,
appear in the will books.
Several factors probably influenced
this decline, including the political climate in the ten years after the
Civil War and the later economic instability as indicated by recessions
in the 1870s and 1890s. Amite County residents may have convinced themselves
that what they had was no longer worth bequeathing; several of the wills
written in the decade after the war had, in fact, been written before 1863.
Without slaves to distribute among heirs, only personal items and property,
if it was still owned, remained to be distributed. These commodities could
easily be allotted without the hassel and fees involved in writing a will.
Yet for a few individuals, the economic
and social conditions of Reconstruction era Amite County were not as bleak
as subsequent generations believed. The surviving estate inventories of
women whose wills were probated between 1866 and 1870 enumerate farms well
stocked with livestock, fodder, and foodstuffs and indicate that some families
continued to cultivate cotton. Many who had been wealthy before the war
continued to enjoy a relatively high standard of living afterward. (88)
Thomas Street, Victoria Street's eldest son, was able to maintain his mother's
plantation, buildings, and most of the family lands; his descendents still
farm that property today.
While the number of people whose wills
were probated in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s declined significantly, the
families of the eleven women who wrote wills and died in these decades
were financially secure. (89)
Most of their incomes came from farming rather than from the practice of
a profession, and all but one were decended from early county pioneers.
Unlike their married antebellum counterparts, these late-nineteenth-century
women will writers were not neighbors and did not seem to have any discernable
associations with each other through church or family. Only two of these
eleven wills were written by women who were married at the time they died,
thereby reflecting the general paucity of late nineteenth century testaments
in Amite County. These were the years, ironically, in which all disabilities
of coverture were eradicated by Mississippi lawmakers. After a series of
legislative changes in 1868 and 1871, the 1880 revision of the Mississippi
Consitution declared that marriage "shall not be held to impose any disability
or incapacity on a woman" in regards to property, contracts, wills, and
the ability of a husband and wife to sue each other. (90)
NANCY SITES
Nancy Estes Sites's 1870 will was
the first written by a married woman since 1860. Hers is the first to reflect
the drastic changes brought on the area by the Civil War, Reconstruction,
and emancipation. At the time of her death in early 1871, Louisiana native
Nancy Sites had been married to her husband, Leonard Sites, for nearly
twenty years. Thirty seven at the time of that marriage, Nancy may have
been married before in Louisiana. She did not, however, bring any children
with her to Amite County; if she and Sites had any, none lived to be documented.
Sites, a widower from South Carolina, was sixteen years older than his
bride. He had filed two claims for land in the southern part of the county
in 1833, so he had been in Mississippi for at least fifteen years at the
time of his second marriage. His son George was already an adult and two
years after the 1848 marriage farmed with the Sites' next door neighbors.
George's departure may indicate that he did not get along very will with
his stepmother or else he wanted to live away from his father's authority.
The 1850 census indicates that Leonard Sites and his wife had $1800 worth
of personal property. While the couple were not as wealthy as their neighbors
the Streets and the Crafts, they would have lived comfortably. None of
the available records indicates whether the couple owned any slaves, thus
it impossible to determine the effect of emancipation upon their monetary
situation.
In her will dated November 2, 1870,
Nancy Estes Sites divides her estate equally between her husband Leonard
Sites and Sarah D. Kinabrew, the wife of Dr. William Kinabrew, "share and
share alike." This is a most unusual bequeathment because while many women
chose to remember their friends, rarely did they grant them a portion equal
to that given relatives, especially husbands. This legacy proved to be
a very valuable cache of U.S. currency, gold, and silver coins worth $3485.25. (91)
Her legacy may have been secreted away in advance of the invading Union
troops or, more likely, never invested in Confederate bonds. Clearly, the
Sites had enough forsight, while perhaps lacking some patriotism, to refrain
from converting their savings into that ultimately ruinous currency. In
an unusual decision, Nancy Sites named Dr. William Kinabrew, instead of
her husband, her sole executor. Her actions suggest that she felt comfortable
excluding her husband from this important last duty and may indicate that
Leonard Sites, then aged seventy-four, was not in very good health. (92)
Dr. William Kinabrew lived near Ebeneezer
Baptist Church, where his family and the Sites worshipped, and he was probably
her attending physician. He had also been her neighbor; at the time of
the 1850 census, the twenty-four-year-old bachelor doctor lived with Elizabeth
Johns and her family next door to the Sites, while he set up his practice.
He would join the family of another neighbor, Aletha Dixon, when he married
Aletha's daughter Sarah D. Atkinson in 1855. The Kinabrews continued to
live in the neighborhood after her mother's 1858 death and doubtless knew
most of the surrounding families through church and his work as a physician.
Sarah Kinabrew may have assisted her husband in giving comfort to the dying
Nancy Sites or may have simply acted out of neighborliness and Christian
charity by supporting the Sites family. Regardless, Sites' bequest to Sarah
Kinabrew and the granting of executive powers to Dr. William Kinabrew remain
unusual gestures.
REBECCA GALTNEY
Over ten years elapsed between the
will of Nancy Sites and that of the next married testatrix. Rebecca Buckholtz
Galtney, whose will was probated in 1881, was the elder daughter of Victoria
Street and Abel Buckholtz. When she was only three years old, Rebecca and
her sisters Harriet and Amanda had received a portion of their father's
estate when he died intestate in 1833, and the three sisters had been given
over to the guardianship of their stepfather, Henry Street. While their
father was alive they lived on his property near the county seat of Liberty,
but after their mother's remarriage, the family returned to Victoria Street's
family lands in southern Amite County. Rebecca married her husband James
Galtney in April 1848 when she was eighteen years old and moved about twenty-five
miles away to the northern part of the county near the community of Zion
Hill, where they lived for the next three years. In 1851 the couple moved
closer to her family and reinstated their membership at Unity Presbyterian
Church, where the Streets worshipped. There Galtney became a church elder
and Rebecca attended the baptisms of her many relatives.
When her mother died in 1858, Rebecca
Galtney inherited two slaves, six large spoons, a silver ladle, a pair
of candle sticks, one pair candle shades, a candle tray, and snuffers appraised
at $1391.00. Her sister, by then Amanda Buckholtz Norwood and living in
West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, inherited items of similar value. (93)
Galtney too had inherited from his mother Nancy Buckles, who had died a
few weeks after Victoria Street in the summer of 1858; he and Rebecca had
a house full of furnishings left to them by Nancy. (94)
After the Civil War broke out, forty-three-year-old lawyer James Galtney
did not serve, but both of Rebecca's half brothers Thomas and Charles Street
fought. Thomas enlisted, despite first hiring substitute John Boggs, and
survived the war; eighteen-year-old Charles was killed in battle at Franklin,
Tennessee, in October 1864. (95)
Rebecca and her husband had no surviving
children, so she chose to include her extended family in her bequest. She
remembered her nieces first, leaving them the items that had been bequeathed
to her by her mother, Victoria Street. The silk quilt she left to niece
Mary Pipes may have been stitched by Rebecca or else may have been one
of the seven quilts mentioned in her mother's 1858 inventory that could
have been given to her in addition to her inheritance. Niece Julia Redhead
received her grandmother Victoria Street's silver candlesticks, and Rebecca's
gold watch and chain went to Mary C. Lyon. (96)
All of her remaining real and personal property was bequeathed to James
Galtney "for and during his natural life." After Galtney's death, Rebecca
stipulated that the 180 acres "known as Bloomfield place now cultivated
by Stephen Tobias" be given to her surviving brother, Thomas P. Street. (97)
The remainder of her estate she left to James Galtney's niece, Mary Jane
Inge, and her heirs. No inventory of Rebecca Galtney's estate survives;
few of the estates in this survey from after the 1870s contain this revealing
account of the deceased's property.
The wills of Rebecca Galtney and her
mother Victoria Street seem to highlight differences in personality between
the two women. Unlike her active and businessminded mother, Rebecca Galtney
seems to have been retiring; she probably relied upon her husband to manage
their affairs. When she was a widow and again after the 1839 legal reforms,
Victoria Street's name appeared frequently in the land conveyance records
when she bought and sold land and slaves. The plantation was in her name;
and even on the 1850 census, the records show that she, not her husband
Henry Street, owned and managed the estate. Rebecca is listed only as "James
Galtney and wife" in a few transactions pertaining to her inheritance after
her mother's death. One reason for her lack of economic activity may stem
from the fact that unlike her mother, Rebecca Galtney did not own a large
plantation. She may have run the domestic side of James Galtney's household,
but once the Galtney's moved to lands adjoining those owned by her mother
and later her half-brother, Rebecca may have simply assisted Victoria with
the management of the family estates. Rebecca may not have had the talent
or interest Victoria obviously possessed and may have faced a third factor
that her mother did not: James Galtney, unlike Henry Street, may have preferred
that his wife manage his household in a less observable manner. Despite
belonging to one of the county's most prominent families and having a remarkably
independant mother, Rebecca Galtney appears as her own person only within
the text of her will.
After Rebecca Galtney's estate was
probated in 1881, no more married women left wills until the turn of the
century. Few individuals, male or female, chose to write them at all; only
eleven people who died between 1880 and 1895 left testaments for probate.
Then as suddenly as the number had dropped in the mid 1870s, more people
began to leave wills again. As the collection in Will Book Two expanded,
the new testaments reflected the changes and challenges Amite County faced
at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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