Margaret Jones Bolsterli of Fayetteville is well known in Arkansas history circles for her outstanding series of books about growing up on a plantation in Desha County. Recently she published a most remarkable account of her recently discovered black ancestors.
Titled Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree, Bolsterli's new book tells the story of her great-great-grandfather, a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis who owned a large plantation near Vicksburg, Miss. Even before 1859 when Mississippi expelled its free black population, members of the Chavis family moved across the Mississippi River and started "passing" as white.
Kaleidoscope is actually two stories. The first concerns Bolsterli's discovery that her mother descended from a slave-holding free black pioneer family in Mississippi; the second tells of the remarkable Jordan Chavis, the patriarch of a free black family that prospered in a world perched precariously between slave and free.
The Chavis family had been free since the 1600s, part of a large contingent of free blacks living in Virginia. The earliest record of the Chavis family dates from 1672 when Elizabeth Chavis, a free black woman living near Jamestown, Va., sued successfully for the freedom of her son. The family prospered through the years, owning large farms as well as slaves.
Jordan Chavis was born in 1791 in South Carolina. Little is known of his early life, but by 1813 Chavis was living in Tennessee, where he served as a private in the militia during the War of 1812. He moved to Mississippi by 1829 when he first appeared in the tax records. Tax assessments for 1833 showed that Chavis owned two slaves, a number which grew to seven slaves by 1846. He also bought land regularly, gradually building his holdings. The U.S. census of 1850 listed Chavis for the first time as a "planter."
Among Jordan Chavis' numerous children was a daughter named Jerusha. She married a light-skinned man named William L. Cason in 1848. Cason was a veteran of the Mexican War, which enabled his widow to receive an $8 monthly pension until her death in 1907. They had two children including Albert Gallatin Cason--who would become the grandfather of Margaret Bolsterli.
The years leading up to the Civil War were challenging times for free people of color in Mississippi and throughout the South. Some states, including Arkansas and Mississippi, passed laws expelling their free black population. In 1859 the Mississippi legislature adopted a bill making it unlawful "for any free negro or mulatto to reside in this state, without the special license of the Legislature." Violators were to be sold into slavery.
Members of the Chavis family responded to the expulsion law in a variety of ways. One son moved to Illinois. Several family members began buying land in Ashley County, Ark. A move across the Mississippi River offered the hope of a new life--and a new race. Hamilton and Alexander Chavis and their families were living in Ashley County when the census was taken in 1860, and they were all designated as W for white. Indeed, when the Civil War broke out, both Hamilton and Alexander joined the Confederate army. Alexander died during his Confederate service, probably of disease.
The family patriarch, Jordan Chavis, refused to give up his life in Mississippi. He convinced a group of 33 prominent white neighbors to petition the legislature for permission to stay. The petition provides an interesting assessment of the aging Chavis: ". . . he is an honest man, and good citizen and served in the War of 1812 . . ." The white petitioners concluded, ". . . he is now old and infirm and [we] respectfully submit that it would be cruel and unjust to drive him in his old age from the country he, in his youth, fought to protect."
Though he managed to stay in Mississippi, the Civil War was rough on Chavis. The Union Army stripped the Chavis plantation of its horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, 800 bushels of corn, and a wagon. After the war, Chavis petitioned the U.S. government for compensation, but there were suspicions about his loyalty during the war. Indeed, Chavis had donated a horse and $500 cash to the Confederate cause--a fact that was noted in the press. At the time of his death in 1873, Chavis was penniless save for his ill-fated claim against the government.
Within three years of Jordan Chavis' death, his daughter Jerusha and her son, Albert, moved to Arkansas. Like other family members who had moved to Ashley County before the war, Jerusha and Albert quickly and quietly passed into the white community.
In 2005 Margaret Bolsterli, living in retirement in Fayetteville after a long career as an English professor at the University of Arkansas, learned that her mother was descended from the Chavis family. It came as quite a surprise: "Growing up Southern white does not prepare one to imagine a mulatto Scarlett in the 'Big House' of your family's fantasies."
Despite the shock, Bolsterli has found her mixed-race ancestry to add a whole new component to her life, not the least being the way her friends--"all liberals of the first order"--reacted to the news. She concludes: "I am not who they thought I was. I am not even who I thought I was. I no longer have 'white eyes.'"
Kaleidoscope is published by the UA Press and costs $19.95.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 09/06/2015