In the interest of bringing my Virginia trip to a close, this will be the final installment. In addition to investigating my earliest colonial origins around the Chesapeake, I also spent some time with a few Revolutionary War ancestors and kinsmen. Our revolution has always been of great interest to me. As a rule, I do not like revolutions. They are largely uncontrollable once unleashed, and along the way end up destroying lives and things that should have been cherished and preserved. I see no reason to put our revolution in a separate category all by itself. Yet, if you look at it closely, it is different, both in its inception and scope. Unlike the nihilism of the French Revolution and most every one that followed, ours was essentially a conservative revolt, if there can be such a thing. If so, perhaps it should be characterized more as a coup. Even Jefferson’s revolutionary radicalism seemed to come along later.
I discount the severity of the offenses that triggered our rebellion (and remember, a revolution is only a rebellion until it succeeds.) We American colonists were, on average, the most prosperous people in the British Empire, with little oversight and with a tax rate a fraction of that paid by our English cousins. We had been left to chart our own course for so long that it had become normative. In Virginia, for example, the colonials acted as if Charles II was on the throne during the Cromwellian Interregnum. Conversely, Massachusetts acted as if the Restoration never occurred, picking and choosing which laws of Parliament they would acknowledge.
Over the centuries, the English form of government developed in a way unlike any other in Europe. Yes, the king was, in theory, as powerful as any. But, if he wanted to invade France (again), for example, he had to look to Parliament for the funds to do so. This arrangement was aped in the colonies. The Crown could appoint the royal governors who had the power to disband colonial assemblies and veto their legislation; but, they were loathe to do so. For just as in London, it was these local assemblies that cut the checks, including the governor’s salary. And the colonials looked to these colonial assemblies, not Parliament, as the protectors of their existing rights as Englishmen. Any objective observer would have noted that England had a problem brewing, even early on.
So this was the crux of the matter, more so than the specific taxes. Which parliament ruled: the one in London; or the ones in Boston, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg? So, I think it fair to say that we were just trying to preserve the rights of Englishmen that we had always held. Talk of tyranny and oppression was just so much overheated political rhetoric and demagoguery; much as we are used to hearing today.
(Note: The rest is largely genealogical ramblings that would probably be of little interest to anyone other than my cousins who visit this site.)
On the way up, I stopped at the Guilford Courthouse Military Battlefield Park in North Carolina, to see the monument to my uncle, Richard Taliaferro. According to eyewitness accounts, he was the last American soldier killed in that battle. He was the youngest son of Richard and Rose Berryman Taliaferro of Caroline County, Virginia. By the mid 1700s, that part of the Tidewater was becoming overpopulated and the soil was being depleted. Richard Taliaferro purchased 10,000 acres in Amherst County, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There he built a home and made plans to relocate, but died in 1748 before being able to do so. The widow remained in her familiar home, but every one of the children, upon reaching maturity, made the move. The region did not suit, apparently, for many of those children, and I believe all of the grandchildren moved on to South Carolina, Georgia, and even Louisiana in the 25 years following the Revolution. But that is getting ahead of myself, for young Richard was still living in Amherst County at the time of his death in battle.
The statue is known as the Winston monument. A large granite plinth supports the bronze statue of a Revolutionary soldier. But the brass plaque on the monument actually commemorates three men: Major Joseph Winston, Captain Jesse Franklin, and Richard Talliaferro (sp.) Perhaps it should be called the Winston-Franklin-Taliaferro monument.
The other two Revolutionary War veterans that had my attention were on my dad’s side of the family—Aaron Gage and William C. Smith, both buried a few miles from each other in Lincoln County, Tennessee. Until recently, I knew quite a bit more about Gage, considering that I didn’t even know the name of Smith. Remarkably, Gage was also a veteran of the War of 1812, and I used him as my qualifying ancestor in both the Sons of the American Revolution and the General Society of the War of 1812. He was the grandfather of the two Unionist sisters I mentioned in Part One. Another granddaughter married Smith’s grandson, and those two immigrated to Texas in 1846. They were the parents of my Uncle Charles whom I wrote about, somewhat, here, as well as my esteemed great-grandmother, Mary Josephine Smith Cowan.
Lincoln County lies in south central Tennessee, hard on the Alabama border; a region of beautiful rolling hills, fast-running streams and rivers, and rich agricultural potential. It adjoins Jack Daniels Moore County, but has much more to offer than just a distillery. My destination was the old 1840 Thomison plantation, a red-bricked, white-columned antebellum Southern manse right out of a Hollywood movie. My interest, however, was not in the plantation house or its history, but in the monumented grave of Aaron Gage (1758-1844), under the magnolia, not 75 ft. past the front veranda of the house.
I had a bedroom there waiting for me, for the house is now a bed and breakfast. My hosts were lovely people, originally from California, but being ex-military had lived all over. Now they were doing the bed and breakfast thing as a retirement income venture. We compared notes on the grave in their front yard. They had tried to learn as much as they could about the place and its inhabitants, so it could be part of the narrative that could be spun for their guests. Nothing wrong with that, but there were a few things that did not add up. They had heard that Aaron Gage was an old man who lived with the Thomison’s and upon his death, was buried out front. The grave placement seemed odd, however. I have seen it done before, but if so, it is usually far from the house, hard up against the road. That was not the case here. But more importantly, the widowed Gage lived with his daughter, my third-great grandmother Esther Gage Westerman. This was certainly the case at the time of the 1840 census. There was no reason for him to live with an unrelated family.
That night, upstairs in my room, I cranked up the laptop out and started researching. I accessed the online deed records and discovered that the Thomisons did not purchase the property until 1848. Thus the plantation house was not as old as the owners had been told. Consequently, Aaron Gage’s grave was there first, the house being built no sooner than four years after his burial. So there was no connection to figure out with the Thomison family. I also analyzed the slave schedules from the 1850 and 1860 censuses and was able to pass along to the owners just how large a plantation it had been in the antebellum years.
The daughter of Aaron Gage married a man named Charles Westerman, who was, as the story goes, shot by mistake while sitting on the front porch of a store in nearby Booneville in 1834. Some family members assume he was buried in the Booneville cemetery. But my inspection of that site shows that it simply did not date back that far. The body would have been brought home, I would think, and then buried close by.
So that night, I also sought clarity with this mystery, continuing my search in the Lincoln County online deed records for my ancestor’s 154 acre farm. The metes and bounds description described the tract as being on the west side of Mulberry Creek and gave the names of adjoining owners: Kelso, Waggoner, and Eaton. I was unable (so far) to locate the configuration of the tract with current land ownership from the Lincoln County appraisal maps, but I was able to roughly locate the general area of the farm. This put me about two miles south of where Gage is buried. In that locality, just east of Mulberry Creek, is the old Mt. Moriah Graveyard, which indeed does date to that period. It is now unkempt and overgrown, but filled with old fieldstones, as well as some monuments that survive from the 1840s. And in that graveyard, I found Kelsos, Waggoners, and Eatons. So here is the probable resting place of Charles Westerman, and given enough time, I will place a small monument here for him. Interestingly, the Eaton neighbor turns out to be the third great-grandfather of my oldest and best friend.
My discovery of William C. Smith (1762-1846) was harder to come by. An old cousin, now gone for twenty years, inspired my research. Cousin Mada was a dynamo, a real firecracker, you might say. We made a good research team: I had the skills, she had the drive and determination to see it through. I will always remember her energy, her good humor and cackling laugh, and most importantly, her stubborn persistence. It was she that actually placed the monument to Aaron Gage in 1995. Together we did the same thing for his daughter and other family members in Texas.
In our family lore, there is the story of the Smiths having to abandon their ranch in Llano County in 1865 after Uncle Charlie was scalped. The Comanches were taking their revenge in the absence of any postwar frontier militia. For safety, the family relocated to Bell County for a number of years. This was an important phase of life for the family: my widowed great-great grandfather took a second wife; Aunt Caroline and my Josephine found husbands there. But also during this time, Uncle John was thrown from a horse and died. A short while later, Aunt Harriet died in childbirth. These two siblings were buried nere the Bell County farm before the family moved back to Llano County.
Time passes. In 1923, my Uncle Henry (Mada’s grandfather) and Uncle Carey got together with my grandfather (their nephew) to search for both Uncle Charles’ grave in Gillespie County, and Uncle John and Aunt Harriet’s in Bell County. They could not find the lone grave for Uncle Charles. They did, however, find the site of the Bell County graveyard, but it had been turned to pasture and the grave markers themselves were no longer visible. I figured the trail, already cold in 1923, was unfindable seventy years later. But Mada did not. She actually found the graveyard site, now just within the outer boundaries of Fort Hood. Last year, I put two small markers there for the siblings. When she died, she was still interviewing folks down in Fredericksburg, trying to get a lead there on Uncle Charles’ 1865 murder.
Our Smiths were something of an enigma to us. It was a proud, even stiff-necked family, by reputation. But not a lot was known of the ancestry. Siblings Drury Jackson, Carey P., John M. and Malinda left Lincoln County, Tennessee in 1846 for Texas, supposedly in tow with D. J.’s in-laws, the Westermans. We knew that the older siblings were born in South Carolina, while the younger ones in Tennessee, placing their moving there about 1817 or 1818. We had one final clue. Uncle John M. enlisted in the Confederate Army as John M. Smith, Jr. The apparent father was obviously John M. Smith, Sr., though this fact was unknown among descendants. I am sure that the children of these siblings knew the name of their grandfather, but not a one of them passed it on to their children. So, that was that, for decades.
So, I was in needle-in-haystack territory, looking for a John Smith in one of the more populous Tennessee counties of that period. Earlier this year, when the cold weather kept me inside, I pondered this particular genealogical dead-end, and wondered what could be done. Indeed, what would Mada have done? Well, for one thing, she would not have given up. So, I kept looking at the census records from 1820 through 1850. Up until 1850, children’s names are not listed, only their sex and ages. So, I start doing what you usually end up doing on these sorts of problems; the process of elimination.
And so, I sorted through all the John Smiths on the 1820 census, and boil it down to only one who could possibly be my ancestor, given what I knew about his children and their birthdates. Then I started looking at the neighboring families, searching for clues. There were other Smiths nearby; possible brothers, one with the family name Drury, and another named Larkin. Then there was a William C. Smith old enough to be the father. I repeated this process in 1830 and 1840, finding the same clumps of Smiths with the same neighboring families. Then I found a deed from my John M. Smith to Larkin Smith, who can be proven to be the son of the William C. Smith.
And so, a web of relationships began to take shape. William C. Smith was the father of Drury, John, Larkin, William F., and probably Henry. But the real goldmine was yet to come. I also discovered that William C. Smith applied for a Revolutionary War pension in 1833, and it was available online. He was 71 at the time, but his very detailed sixteen-page account (which I have since transcribed), sounded like that of a vigorous young man. In it, he stated that he was born on March 4, 1762 in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. He kept up with this date because, as he stated, he copied it out of his mother’s prayer book. So, somewhere along the way the family transitioned from Virginia Anglicanism to frontier Presbyterianism. He volunteered in Wake County, North Carolina when just barely seventeen years old. Along the way he fought in a number of small skirmishes with the British, was wounded, was captured but led an escape, helped rescue the Governor of the state, and participated in the battle of Guilford Courthouse. His affidavit further recounted that he was living in Wilkes County, Georgia in 1790 when he joined the militia again in their campaign against the Indians, helping rescue a pair of captured frontier women. He moved to Pendleton County, South Carolina in 1791, and from their to Lincoln County, Tennessee about 1817, which fit perfectly the SC/TN division of birthplaces for his known grandchildren. He presented a fulsome biography, omitting only to mention the names of his parents (and so the Smith roadblock remains; just moved a generation or two further on.)
U. S. pension records record his death on August 15, 1846. Smith was not a man of means, and he no doubt lies buried under a now long-forgotten fieldstone somewhere in Lincoln County. But I do kind of know where he is buried. Again, I analyzed his neighborhood from the census records, then compared that with the incredible online resources at findagrave.com. Several of his near neighbors, including two other Revolutionary War veterans, lie buried in an historic, but now unused graveyard on the south edge of Fayetteville. This is the likeliest spot for the burial place of William C. Smith. And indeed, it is good enough for me. I visited with the local monument company. They will receive the government veteran’s marker I ordered for Smith and place it in an empty part of this graveyard. I hope to visit it on my way back from the Jamestowne Society gathering next May.