All of the women's wills examined
from Amite County display a cornucopia of important features about what
it meant to be a woman in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Women in patriarchal southern society were able to leave behind a permanent
mark in history by controlling their family's fortunes. This activity conveyed
more than the simple matter of transferring money; the evidence of the
wills suggests that once married women acquired the right to control and
dispose of their property, they were able to verify their deep love and
trust for their husbands and, when appropriate, to appoint an outside guardian
for their children. These women carefully distributed their possessions
among their heirs whom they named in full and indicated their relationship.
Except in those cases when potential heirs had already received their inheritance
or the testatrix perceived a personal injustice, the women divided their
estates in a seemingly equitable manner. The simple acts of deciding who
inherited the family's silver, showing concern for the guardianship of
a particular child, and recognizing the human value of their slave "property"
allowed these married women of Amite County to leave an indication of their
personality and their ability to make independent decisions after 1830
in ways that were unavailable to them previously. Only through property
law reform did an unusual transformation occur. Through her death, a woman
was reborn briefly as a legal entity with real and important rights to
the dispensation of property.
Other aspects of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
life are evident within this study. Multiple marriages and blended families
are not a late twentieth-century phenomenon. Because medical attention
was primative and often unavalable, many families lost either their male
or female head. Women were at a premium during the first third of the century
when Amite County was first settled; most women married at least once.
The only known spinsters in the survey died after the turn of the twentieth
century, belonged to large wealthy families who could support them, and
may have acted as companion and caretaker to parents and siblings. Despite
their relative economic independence, widows were not allowed to remain
single for long. Social pressure and, if they were well off, a string of
suitors enjoined them to marry not long after their initial loss. Several
widows in the survey remarried though they were over seventy years old.
Some men would stipulate in their will that should their widow marry again,
she would lose her income from his estate. These restrictions forced a
few women, such as Julia Sleeper Anderson's mother Margaret Stribling Sleeper,
to raise her family alone.
Regardless of restraints and social
dictates, nineteenth century women were fortunate if they outlived their
husbands. In an age without reliable birth control, women could annually
risk complications, infection, and death from pregnancy and parturition. (123)
Of the fifteen married women studied, Aletha Dixon, Elizabeth Craft and
Nancy Sleeper's deaths may have been triggered by these factors. (124)
Widowers, such as B.F. Dixon and Gideon Sleeper, were often eager to remarry
in order to acquire a housekeeper and a mother for their children.
While the women who died after the
turn of the twentieth century were able to take advantage of better health
care and lived to be comparatively old women alongside their only husbands,
they themselves often grew up in households lacking one parent. Amanda
J. Robinson Spurlock and Julia Ann Sleeper Anderson are good examples,
for their fathers had died when they were still little girls. If, as in
their case, the deceased parent was their father, they would have realized
their inheritance early and would have already owned property at the time
of marriage. Most of the women who died in the nineteenth century had been
widowed at least once and had children from each of their husbands. While
these disjointed families were the result of death, not divorce, the presence
of multiple living children from different marriages created the real possibility
for interfamily conflict before and after a woman's death. For example,
Aletha Dixon's son Andrew Jackson, Jr., from her second marriage did not
continue to live with his stepfather B.F. Dixon and half brother William
K. Dixon after his mother's death, choosing instead to live with his half
sister Sarah D. Kinebrew. The presence of a will bequeathing special items
of economic and sentimental value may have helped circumvent posthumous
family squabbles.
The importance of neighbors, community,
and church life is also apparent in this study of married women, for most
of them knew each other either through proximity or religious activity.
With the exception of Tennessee resident Nancy Williford, East Fork Baptist
member Amanda J. Spurlock, and mystery woman Elizabeth Reid, all of these
women attended one of only three churches at some point in their lives
and in many cases lived within a few houses of each other. Victoria Street,
Elizabeth Wren, Ann Reams, Aletha Dixon, Elizabeth Johns, Nancy Sleeper,
Nancy Sites, and Rebecca Galtney all lived within a few houses of each
other inside Township One North, Range Three East, in the southern part
of Amite County. Street, her in-law Wren, daughter Galtney, and later Nancy
Sleeper's widower all worshipped at Unity Presbyterian Church located just
off the main road leading to Liberty. Reams, Craft, Johns, Sites, Dixon,
and Dixon's daughter Sarah Kinebrew were all members of Ebeneezer Baptist
Church, located about four miles away from Unity Presbyterian. Of the five
women who died after the turn of the century, Julia Anderson, Susan Webb,
and Louisa Bates were members of Liberty Baptist Church at the same time
when all lived in the county seat after their marriages. Both Anderson
and Webb would eventually move to Gloster, where they probably attended
the same church and are buried in the same cemetery. Is it a coincidence
that most of these women lived near and worshipped with each other or is
it possible that some of these women realized from their peers the benefits
of writing their own testaments?
The local economy may have also played
a significant role in the writing of these wills. Before the end of slavery,
many Amite County residents with large landholdings invested heavily in
this labor source. Slaves were easy to distribute among survivors after
the owner died and represented a valuable and, through the slaves' increase,
an appreciable commodity. Therefore, many women who inherited from their
fathers or husbands were in possession of this human property and would
later pass them to another generation when they died. (125)
While cotton never completely dominated the area's economy before the Civil
War, (126)
those who had the land and labor took advantage of the cotton boom of the
1850s. The land in southern Amite County seems to have been more suitable
for growing cotton than that in other areas, for its soil is dark and the
topography is smoother, having been built up over eons by flooding of the
Amite River. The inventories of Victoria Street and Elizabeth Craft, each
of whom owned more than fifty slaves, suggest that they were involved in
the growing of cotton. Their neighbors who were also slave owners probably
participated in some aspect of its planting, whether through the hiring
out of their slaves or planting on their husband's property. Therefore,
each woman had very valuable possessions in the form of slaves they wanted
distributed according to their wishes after they died. Nancy Sites and
Rebecca Galtney, both of whom lived in this area, died after the end of
slavery. Galtney had inherited a slave from her mother and may have owned
others that had belonged to her father Abel Buckholtz. It is not known
whether Nancy Sites owned any slaves, but records indicate that her husband
Leonard Sites made several chattel purchases in the 1840s. (127)
The ending of slavery was probably the main reason these women did not
leave testaments similar to those neighbors that predeceased them. It may
have also been a factor in the twenty-five year gap between Rebecca Galtney's
and Julia Anderson's wills. It is possible that most of the women who still
had property of value and who might have bequeathed it were either widowed,
which would have disqualified them from this study, or were simply not
interested after the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Cotton continued to be planted into
the early twentieth century, but the women who died in the second part
of the study lived in another part of the county and tended to invest in
land and city property. Amanda Spurlock lived with her husband, physician
Thomas J. Spurlock, on land purchased by both of them after their marriage.
Spurlock, like lawyer Henry G. Street, may have practiced his profession
from the family farm and left the day-to-day agricultural concerns to his
wife Amanda. Their lands, bordering the East Fork of the Amite River, would
have been closer in quality to that owned by the earlier testators to the
southwest. In addition to cotton and possibly tenant farmers, the Spurlocks
may have used some of their property for timber production that would,
by mid-twentieth century, become the foundation of the local economy. The
husbands of Julia Anderson, Susan Webb, and Louisa Bates did not have this
flexibility; their jobs necessitated living in or near town, therefore
making it logical that the couples would chose to invest extra assets into
the family business or surrounding properties. The towns became more important
centers of county activity as the roads were improved. The community of
Gloster in far western Amite County grew larger than the county seat of
Liberty and linked the area to the rest of the nation with the railroad.
The last wills probated in Amite County
describe a series of communities still expanding and seem to reflect an
optimism for the future. Amite County, however, was never destined for
greatness and the world of these married women testators would soon change
again. Because the last testament in Will Book II was probated in mid-1920,
this study ends just before the cotton South faced a new series of crises
including the devastation of the boll weevil, the Depression, the Great
Migration, and the violent white reaction to the civil rights movement.
Just as the documents inscribed in Will Books I and II reflected transitions
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so too would the future
testaments indicate the changes of the next decades.
The evidence of the wills studied
suggests that once married women were unilaterally granted the right to
control and dispose of their property, they were able by the execution
of their last wills and testaments to send important messages of love,
concern, hope, and possible rebuke to those they left behind. Important
conditions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's lives shine
though the words of their wills and the items tallied on the inventory
of their possessions. Their wishes and opinions could be preserved on the
permanent public record in a manner impossible for a married woman while
she lived. In death a married woman could exhibit personal worth, a value
independent of their husbands, fathers, or children.
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