Page News & Courier
Heritage and Heraldry
A review of the family profiles of the antebellum African-American population
in Page County
Article of September 2, 1999
As mentioned in the previous article, out of the free black/mulatto male heads-of-household in Page County in 1860, over 30 had been listed with occupations and resided with family. In addition to that, there were another eight free households headed by four free black and four mulatto males without any occupations listed. However, what is more striking is the number of women that had been listed as the heads-of-household. Specifically, of that number, seventeen were shown as mulatto and five as black - the majority of these residing in the Massanutten Districts of Page. What is more interesting is the fact that the majority of these women were young, with children even under the age of 1, identifying the very possibility that their spouses were still held in slavery - not uncommon considering the fact that even Bethany Veney, while a slave, had married a freedman herself.
However, another aspect to examine is the fact that there were interracial relationships taking place in the Page Valley even before the foundation of the county in 1831. While it is generally assumed that the above shown women living alone with their children were the spouses of slaves, it can also be seen in some instances, (remembering that interracial marriages were illegal) that some of these women may have been the concubines of white men that did not reside with them. Only one white male, Haley Morris, was shown to reside with a mulatto woman and five mulatto children, ages one through nine, in 1860. Morris, a 29 year-old white laborer, resided in Shenandoah Iron Works, and, what is even more interesting, in May, 1863, enlisted in the �Page Grays� of Company H, 33rd Virginia Infantry. It is a possibility that he may have been conscripted/drafted, however, there is no evidence stating that possibility in his service record. No matter what the circumstances of his enlistment, on July 3, 1863, he was counted as one of the killed among those that fell in action on Culp�s Hill at Gettysburg.
On a reverse note, there were at least five illegal �marriages� between mulatto men and white women. However, three out of those five relations included men with the surname of Campbell - tracings to ancestors of earlier white Campbell men that settled in the county. The result of a few of these relationships brought about what the census taker recognized as, in some cases a mixture of both white and mulatto children.
Taking a step back into my personal ancestry, the census taker didn�t always pay close attention to the job at hand. Specifically, in the case of Emily or Amelia Richards. Emily had been the former daughter of Reuben Cave, the Revolutionary War veteran, and, by the 1850 census, was the widow of Aquilla Richards - a former all-white household. However, in 1850 the census taker had mistakenly assumed that with the widow Richards (60) residing with the mulatto Jake Hughes (also age 60) in a primarily mulatto residential area (with the families of Hughes, Bundy, Berry,Marshall, etc. in the neighborhood), all of her children, except one, were also mulatto (granted this was the middle of summer). Perhaps Emily had found a romance with Mr. Hughes after the death of her husband, or perhaps he was a former slave of the Richards family. Nevertheless, the two oldest boys, Joseph (15) and Howard (6), might have been brought up in a multi-racial family and neighborhood. In 1861 the two boys joined the ranks of the Dixie Artillery. But then, with this as their background, were they fighting to preserve the institution of slavery or home and country in a second �War of Independence?�
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