I hope it prints here with paragraphs rather than being all run together.
1 February 2023
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"Reckoning with A History Fraught with Violence and Injustice"
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In the Washington Post on 22 November 2021 Ken Burns wrote: "Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.” Reckoning with history is precisely what I had been doing for a year and a half, after the murder of George Floyd. On 22 November 2021, four days before I turned 86, I had written half of this book, An Okie's Racial Reckonings, my private part of the national "history fraught with violence and injustice"--but sometimes tempered with understanding and what passes with us for glory.
AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS
HERSHEL PARKER
1 "GODDAMN OKIES"—HOW "OKIE" BECAME A HATE TERM
2 WHO THE OKIES REALLY WERE
3 OLD FAMILY STORIES NONE OF US KNEW
4 RACIAL DOCUMENTS
5 CAROLINA KINFOLKS AND THE WAR ON THE CHEROKEES
1759-1783
6 JEFFERSON, COCKE, INDIAN TREATIES, & THE SIMS SETTLERS
7 ERRATIC OBLIVIOUSNESS AT TRAP HILL, WILKES COUNTY:
THE SIAMESE TWINS, THE ROARING RIVER BAPTISTS,
THE UNIONISTS, & THE REBEL GESTAPO
8 1850S UTAH AS A MILITARY THEOCRACY:
ROBBERIES, MURDERS, & THE ULTIMATE AMERICAN ATROCITY
9 SLAUGHTERING FAMILIES FOR PARLEY, BRIGHAM, & JESUS—
BUT HOLDING SOME LITTLE CHILDREN FOR RANSOM
10 WHITES, INDIANS, & NEGROES--
THE TRAJECTORY OF AN INNOCENT TEXAN, JESSE SPARKS
11 ATROCITIES IGNORED (GRANT'S EXPUSION OF JEWS & OTHER VAGRANTS)
& ATROCITIES FABRICATED (COUSIN MILTON SIMS "SENTENCED TO BE HANGED")
12 FLETCHER HILL—ESCAPE HERO, PROMOTER OF VETERANS
13 CAPT. J. H. MATTHEWS, STAR WITNESS FOR THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU
WHOSE LIES BECAME HISTORY
14 RECONSTRUCTION FOES:
ALBION TOURGEE VS MONTFORD MCGEHEE
15 COUSIN WILLY SIMS CAUSES THE DANVILLE MASSACRE—
& CAUSES JIM CROW?
16 DICK COSTNER—AMID THE MASSACRE,
GALLANTRY AT WOUNDED KNEE
17 THE GLENN-TUCKER LAWSUIT:
THE JARNDYCE VS JARNDYCE OF INDIAN TERRITORY
18 HOW ONE BAD COP CAUSED THE "LARGEST MURDER TRIAL IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES."
19 DOVEY COSTNER—BEING BLACK IN THE CAROLINAS, TEXAS, INDIAN TERRITORY, AND OKLAHOMA
I am a Depression Okie, born near Comanche but taken at once to the Rio Grande for four years. In 1940, jobless, intermittently homeless, we hunkered down for Christmas in Hebbronville, Texas. In 1942 we wintered in Pryor, Oklahoma, in a big tent across from the Dupont Powder Plant until a cyclone blew the town apart, killing what Collier's called "70-odd Oklahomans." We rode on a Henry Kaiser mixed train to Vanport, Oregon, and then moved to the new East Vanport. The little red dirt berm holding back the Columbia River would collapse if you dug into it (one boy I knew died and another was dug out but went around with green hollow eyes). It finally slid away when the river rose a few feet in 1948, as it could just as well have done in wartime. Who would have thought I would live to be sought out by Oregonian historians as a living authority on East Vanport? In 1952, at 16, after the 11th grade, I left the farm in eastern Oklahoma to become a railroad telegrapher. I sent my money home while I was depot agent and telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad in Singer, Louisiana, then elsewhere along the Sabine. In DeQuincy, my landlady explained to me her glorious descent from the First Families of Virginia—the first person I had met who exalted herself about her ancestry. During two years in the mid-1950s, sick with tuberculosis, I took correspondence courses from three state universities. In the first five months of 1956, released from a sanitorium into compulsory bedrest, I read nothing but Shakespeare's plays, over and over, from a one-volume edition I had bought in New Orleans in 1953. In June 1956 I was an ambulatory tubercular high school dropout with a professor's knowledge of one writer. Early in 1957, injected with pneumo-peritoneum, I played Cassio in a little theatre production of Othello.
From August 1957 to August 1959 I worked 8 at night to 4 in the morning as telegrapher on the KCS in Port Arthur. I got up five mornings a week to go to classes at Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont. In August 1959 I graduated from Lamar "with highest honors"; in Houston young Dan Rather read my name aloud—on the radio. Then I relinquished seven years of seniority on the railroad to take a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship at Northwestern University, where I earned a Master's degree the next summer. In Harrison Hayford's seminar in the fall of 1960 I wrote a paper on Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man that was published in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "The Metaphysics of Indian-hating." Harold Bloom republished it. I republished it--twice. That article started a Melville career that lasted from 1960 to 2019. I already knew how to work so I became a scholar--"quite simply, the most important Melville scholar of all time," Harrison Hayford said in 1996, on the dust jacket of the nearly 1000-page first volume of my biography of Melville. Maurice Sendak did the cover picture of Melville.
You can check me out on Wikipedia or Google or Amazon Books. I had a Northwestern University Fellowship in 1960-1961, one of the new Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowships in 1962-1963, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974-1975, and a Delaware Research Fellowship 1981-1982. I am on the Pulitzer Prize site as Finalist for my Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins, 1996). That 1996 volume also won the top Richard R. Hawkins award, the highest award in the "Literature and Language" category in the Association of American Publishers' Professional / Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Awards. My second volume, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins, 2002), also won the top Hawkins award, this time in "Biography and Autobiography" (a new, more appropriate category). Last time I looked no one else had won twice in biography but hard-driving Robert Caro may have won three or four times by now.
When I retired from the University of Delaware in 1998 I knew more about Melville's life than anyone else ever had. A few old scholars delighted in my findings but the new generation of professors were New Critics, disdainful of biographical research and incompetent at it when they tried to do it. At meetings I was often embarrassed by a high-function moron who called out, "There's Hershel, who hails from Oklahoma." I was still ashamed of being an Okie, ashamed of having my accent mocked by associate professors (even in the 1970s), ashamed of the poverty of my childhood and the consequences of the lack of medical care, and ashamed of my ignorance of family history. I was busy on Melville. I had made no effort to see if I could identify any ancestors beyond all four grandparents, whom I had met. I knew one small anecdote about my great grandfather father Parker and another even tinier anecdote about a great grandfather on the Costner side (a Bell).
Until the early 1980s I used "Costner" as my secret password for my bank account. Then a young actor commandeered the name. I joked in 1989 that we must be kin when the actor announced the same aesthetic credo I had put into print six years earlier: "Sometimes, More is More." I asked my Uncle Andrew Costner if he knew who this was, and he said, "Sure do. He is one of Uncle Mode's grandson Bill's sons." That clarified it all. Later in 1989 I walked out at night during a rushed research trip to New York high on discovering an unknown Melville letter at the NYPL, and chuffed that I had gambled with precious minutes by calling for a folder labeled "Undated Letters by Unidentified Correspondents." As I walked in the darkness I came upon a now-iconic image, the lighted billboard for Field of Dreams, my second cousin's actor son with left leg straight, right foot lightly touching the ground across in front of it. I could not match such grace, for my right leg by then was an inch or two longer than the left, but for a Costner this was a good end to the day.
Kevin Costner's success told me nothing about ancestry. In 1976 and for years afterwards I had scarcely opened my two copies of a typically amateurish self-published volume of Covington and Kin, by Elbert Covington, Aunt Cora Lee Costner's son, who had repeatedly directed to his aunts longhand inquiries folded two or even three times into small envelopes. Elbert's book shows what--the bravery and folly of undertaking such a study without a typewriter? That was then. I did not see a computer that could move a sentence from one paragraph to another until 1978, at a trade show in Los Angeles, and the price was ten or eleven thousand dollars. I did not see a computer that could move a paragraph from one file to another until 1982, when I had access to a Wang. In 1979, I looked into Elbert's book and saw family names new to me—Bell, Tindall, Stewart, Boyd. I did not know that many other names should have been there. In 2007, in Texas, I gave one of the copies to a Costner-Bell double-cousin, James Head, because he was a more active genealogist than me.
Most urgently, after my retirement in 1998, I needed to publish the second volume of my biography of Melville. William Manchester in 1983 and 1988 published the first two volumes of his projected three-volume of Churchill. He talked of working 50 hours straight, but it became clear that he would not succeed in completing the third volume. He was on my mind, back then, in the early 1990s, as I got up for 2 or 3 hours at night to transcribe Melville family letters, the way I had worked in Port Arthur during the night shift. I had been a runner since 1978. I could work long hours. With an eye on Manchester's progress, and seeing how massive my new biographical evidence was becoming, how many new episodes I had found, I took the precaution of drafting the second half of Melville's life before writing the first part. I was thinking then of the halves of a single volume, so when the first volume was published in 1996 I had left over a rough draft of much of the second volume. I would not "do a Manchester." I would not die before publishing the second volume. But after 1998 I needed, first, to redo the 1967 Norton Critical Edition before Hayford died. My first copy came on 10 September 2001. I had the rest of the day to revel in it.
In 2002 I published Herman Melville 1851-1891, another thousand-page book, but I did not belatedly dedicate my life to study of ancestors the way I wanted to do. I had been blindsided by Ivy League reviewers who lied about me in the New York Times and the New Republic, saying I had invented two lost books. First was Melville's The Isle of the Cross, the existence of which had been known for years but the title of which I found in 1987 (to the awe of the three great old scholars still alive, Leyda, Sealts, and Hayford). The other was "Poems" (which everyone had known about since 1922). The reviewer in the New Republic published a critical "biography" of Melville in 2005 in which he mentioned the existence of both books but did not remember that he had accused me of making them up. This is what Yale and Columbia professors could get away with against someone who was merely an Okie grubbing in the archives. They damaged my reputation and damaged my health, and turned me toward finding more about who I was. I lost sleep until 2007, when I began writing about their campaign to discredit me.
In 2002 I still needed to do a new edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and I could not give up my day job, writing Melville: The Making of the Poet, then The Powell Papers, then Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, and preparing new editions of several books, notably the 2017 edition of the Norton Moby-Dick, which took two years to do. Sporadically, in stolen moments, I looked for information about my family. I amassed files in manila envelopes as I found more surnames and copied hundreds and then thousands of files on the computer under the label "Ornery People," knowing what "ornery" used to mean, "ordinary." I found dozens of families of my ancestors and other kinfolks on this continent. My father's ancestors mostly had come from England, in the 1600s, some of them indentured, all of them like my exalted landlady in 1955, first families of Virginia. In fact, however you came to Virginia in the 1600s, in the next generation or two you became kin to everyone, it seemed. Many of my mother's ancestors like the Costners were Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch) who had come in the mid-1700s and soon taken the Great Wagon Road down to North Carolina. Her other ancestors came directly from Scotland or more often were Scots who came from long exile in rack-rent Ireland. DNA shows I am more than half Scottish, enough more that I think of myself as a Scot.
I received my copy of James Webb's Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America on 15 February 2005, four months after it was published. This was the first book I knew that showed a passionate love of ordinary Southern family stories as well as an understanding of the history of Southern migration. Webb knew what defines many in the South today: impoverishment by the Civil War. We had not recovered from that when the Great Depression flattened us again. Webb described my people: "They had endured whole generations of poverty. They knew the certain dread of having nowhere to turn when the cold wind howled against the door." Webb knew the forces that crushed family memory but he was privileged: he got to “witness and cherish the times on porches and firesides when kinfolk gathered and told stories.” He elaborated lovingly: “I thirsted to hear these kin-people talk. I could sit entranced through magic hours in the stark kitchens and quiet, dusky living rooms of those who were willing to reach back like those ancient tribal elders and help me understand that my life is in some sense a continuum that began before I was born, and will carry me with it long after I am gone. Their revelations came in dribbles, sometimes coaxed and at others dropped casually into a conversation like a sly but knowing confession. The tough, enduring men and women who went through this cauldron did not speak openly or even willingly with each other about the bad times when I was growing up. It seems an unspoken axiom that people who have really had it hard are the last ones to sit around and reminisce about how hard they really had it. In fact, I know there are some who will not be happy that I’ve touched on those days here, however lightly. And I have lightly trod, for they did indeed live hard.” Webb was part of “the near-biblical storytelling tradition of the culture of the Scots who came from Ireland.” In that tradition, the “personal becomes history, and history becomes personal,” he said. Almost miraculously, Webb's family had preserved many documents and had memorized family history.
For all his sense of how precarious family history was, Webb was an extraordinarily lucky man. Many of the eastern Okies, particularly those who had been impoverished after the Civil War and who were suffering more than ever in the Depression, had no leisure, ever, to hear stories or tell stories. Some Okies in 1920s and 1930s and 1940s worked too hard during the daylight hours to have the strength for indulging in storytelling, even if their memories had been well stocked and sharp, even if they knew about memorable kinfolks. They had no strength for sitting telling stories, in the dark or by the light of a fireplace or a lamp, if they could afford coal-oil (as we did), or a candle. Not born in one of the states but in two different territories, Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory, my parents had survived all the worst of the Dust Bowl in the worst of all places, the Panhandle of Oklahoma and the Panhandle of Texas (as Timothy Egan tells in The Worst Hard Time), yet they almost never spoke of it. Mother only spoke of stuffing rags under doors and around the window and then sweeping and sweeping. They knew few family stories and told fewer. No wonder that many of the Okies in what had been the Choctaw Nation and the Cherokee Nation in eastern Indian Territory, especially, had become a people without even the scraps of family memory John Steinbeck gave the Joads.
Families had been dispersing from the time they first arrived. Many who came to Pennsylvania quickly moved south, leave some members there, seldom or never seen again by those of the family that made the trek down the Great Wagon Road to North Carolina. They were destined to fight on opposite sides in the Civil War. The one Dellinger uncle (I learned) who made annual overland trips from North Carolina back to Philadelphia until the Revolution was a grocer needing new supplies. (He lured his second wife down from Pennsylvania on the promise of unlimited coffee, and indulgence in that luxury, the North Carolina neighbors were sure, hastened her death.) Once in North Carolina most Germans held together during and just after the Revolution, although some pushed into South Carolina and Georgia. Illiterate people seldom found someone to write home for them and even literate people could not always be sure where home was, anymore, and could not find a traveler to do them the “favor” of delivering a letter for free.
After the Revolution all families dispersed still faster. The patriarchs had less land than the earlier generations. There were simply too many children to leave plantations or small farms to all of them, as some like the Pottengers and Walkers had done in Maryland. For some soldiers, even mere militia men, not Continental soldiers, there was bounty land--most of it recently Indian land, so still risky, as western South and North Carolina had been before the Revolution. Virginians and Carolinians, went into Georgia then into what became Tennessee. Sons and daughters and then whole families in every generation headed west, Tennessee first (while it was still part of North Carolina), then Mississippi, or even Alabama, before that area was opened for white settlement soon after the War of 1812.
Many Carolinians--Pruitts, Moores, Tindalls, Pyles--just after 1800 went up the Saline Trace and other trails to become early white pioneers in Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi, then, again as early settlers, went east into Indiana. We don’t think of this, but Southerners from the western Carolinas settled much of Illinois and Indiana. Eight of my Uncle Daniel Moore’s children from the Globe in Burke County, North Carolina, went West, to Tennessee, Arkansas, Indiana, and Illinois. Four of his brother Jesse’s daughters left the Globe for Indiana, two for Kentucky, and two remained in North Carolina. Many of my folks (Sparks, Sims, McGehee, Hill) reached Texas while it was still Mexican and many more arrived while it was a republic (one was a Bell who published his true captivity narrative about the Mier Expedition). Many had gone on to western Mississippi and Arkansas even before the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws were pushed on into what was newly called Indian Territory.
You realize how very separated Southern families became by reading on the Internet, for free. The two greatest benefactors of Southern researchers are Will Graves and C. Leon Harris who have transcribed twenty-some thousands of Revolutionary pension applications from aged patriots under the 1832 law. If they highlight a dubious reading, you can try to read it yourself on Fold3. These pension transcriptions are a treasure of information about dispersal. You see old men applying from states where they had not lived before the Revolution, and learn that often they had lived successively in more than one state besides the present one. (Historians delight in these men who had not seen their fellows for half a century, for you know they did not collude in their accounts of battles or in their ranking their officers as brave or cowardly!) While they remembered the war, many of the old men were uncertain where any brothers and sisters might be (if still alive). Many Bibles with their family records, you learn, had not survived house fires. Many of the applicants did not know exactly how old they were, neither birthday nor birth year.
Above all, for me, the pension applications and supporting affidavits recounting military service very often contain incidental clues, often the only clues to family connections and more stories, as well as lost connections. Later, affidavits before the Dawes Commission in Indian Territory late in the 1800s also demonstrate how far families can be estranged. Two daughters of the same mother, Elizabeth Glenn, the children of two Tucker brothers, Wyatt and Robert) did not know about each other. Amanda knew that her mother had been married to Wyatt and that he had died or gone off. Frances did not know that Elizabeth had married again and had children with Robert. Frances’s daughter Frances McCall got the names wrong and thought she was descended from Robert and did not mention Wyatt. Frances Tucker, daughter of Wyatt, may not have known the existence of Amanda (though she used the name for a child) since Elizabeth had left Wyatt’s children with the half-Choctaw Abigail Rogers Glenn in Mississippi.
Dispersal was cause enough for loss of family stories, given the difficulties of traveling and communicating, but in the South family lives and family stories alike were obliterated by the catastrophe of the Civil War which killed so many and left many survivors impoverished and crippled. You could all but obliterate the history of the South, including family history, Generals Grant and Sherman understood. They did not have to kill everyone. All they had to do was torch every newspaper office in every town they conquered. Paper was not all that vanished, of course. Grant’s army trudged back and forth around Itawamba County, Mississippi (for example), so at war’s end the farms were devastated and fully half the men in my Fulton Township were dead or simply vanished from records, including my Great Great Grandfather Parker and his second wife and their baby daughter. Only DNA from descendants of an older Texan half-brother allows us to identify a boy born in 1858 as my Parker great grandfather, and then much later from an Internet cousin to learn an astonishing story about my great great grandfather's first courtship, in Alabama. Finding stories came hard but many discoveries were worth the effort.
My search for lost family and their stories could be paralleled by many others with families from the Choctaw Nation. Many of us from what became Oklahoma started with near-total ignorance of ancestry. Except for Parker, Costner, Bell, Glenn, and Rogers (or Rodgers), the names I mention through this introduction are all names of people I met in the 21st century--met on the Internet, the poor genealogist’s make-do equivalent of Jim Webb’s remarkable bounty of family records. Making do without the wealth of family stories that Webb had heard from living kinfolks, I found my own stories about kinfolks in a vast array of sources which I list here higgledy-piggledy: history books (really), exploration books; wills; land transfers; county records; early military records (the War of Jenkins’ ear! the French and Indian War! Lord Dunmore’s War!); military records for all wars up through World War I, my usual cut-off point; other governmental records; a few family letters in county libraries (one to a GGG Grandfather of mine mentioning Cousin Milton Sims, subject of a chapter here) and many letters in college or university collections; dozens of Silas C. Turnbo stories about the Coker family lovingly and intelligently made available online from Springfield-Greene Library, Missouri library (the magnificent Turnbo was the Studs Terkel of 19th century Arkansas); a Mexican captivity book written by a Bell cousin in Texas; dozens of legal affidavits from part Choctaw relatives in the archives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; hundreds of censuses; thousands of articles from newspapers in four centuries, starting before the Revolution; WPA interviews; hundreds of Fold3 items; and hundreds of Find-A-Grave photographs of tombstones and other information.
It was a revelation to me that some family members were literate, and some even were writers, like the Bell cousin who published a book on his Mier captivity (his papers are now enshrined at Austin). My Step-GGGG Grandfather William Cocke, who labored to create the State of Franklin, published speeches in newspapers and wrote extant letters to Jefferson and Jackson. Several of my cousins gave speeches which are preserved, two of which are brave Union speeches during the War, 1863. Several of the kinfolks were interviewed in famous books (such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s account of early Arkansas in his London 1821 Journal of a Tour). (Grandpa Coker had bearskins hanging on the walls and trees and never ate a vegetable.) Several cousins contributed to books (notably Frederick Slimp to a Civil War history). Several wrote personal accounts such as John Fletcher Hill’s descriptions of his escape from a Confederate prison; Carrol Moore wrote powerfully about the North Carolina Bushwhacker murderers who got pensioned and protected as Union fighters. A well-educated Sims cousin (the Milton I mentioned) wrote eloquent paragraphs about his imprisonment in the Civil War for issues of Confederate Veteran. A good many kinfolks wrote letters which survive, such as the 78-year-old Daniel Moore’s 1843 letter about his horseback ride from North Carolina over the hills to Indiana and Illinois, found in a drawer and published the Lenoir Topic on 7 October 1891. An Alabama Pruitt wrote letters from Cuba and Spain after his arrest as part of the Lopez expedition to free Cubans that did not want to be freed. Fletcher Hill’s 1864 letter to his brother from the battlefield survives in the family.
Dozens in my family made affidavits which survive about their Choctaw claims. Cousin Sam Glenn in Kerrville, Texas, was locally famous for newspaper printings of his fabulous stories, some of which were partly true. Men and some women (Aunt Margaret Ewart Adams, Grandma Abigail Rogers) performed feats of astonishing bravery which were recorded; the King’s Mountain boy hero Robert Hardy (stabbed by a Tory bayonet) wrote down his conversation with my obstreperous cousin David Knox once he got to Charlotte, arm still not healed; newspapers preserved many stories as told by cousins, such as that of the young Stephen F. Sparks and a friend biting down on ropes and swimming across the Buffalo Bayou twenty-one times towing Sam Houston’s baggage. Otherwise, he would not have won the battle at San Jacinto. Webb knew how important the battle at King's Mountain on 7 October 1780 was, and some of his people were there. His Samuel Cochran was one of my Cockerhams or Cochrans. I found a whole local coterie of kinsmen who joined the famed Overmountain men at King's Mountain. Uncle James Johnston, their colonel, has a big brass plate there, on the trail part way up. Once you check who sisters married, you add fast to the family heroes at King's Mountain. And more than once you are dashed with truth, as with my 90-year-old Grandfather Robert Knox, applying for his pension fifty-two years and four days after the battle, confesses or grouses that he missed the fighting because his brother-in-law James had sent him back to camp for something. That battle lasted 55 minutes or an hour and a lot of men who were near the scene missed it—all the infantry, not the mounted men. Cousin Jesse Moore, brought to the battle as a prisoner of the Tories, fired his rifle into the air. People heard the guns from more than 10 miles away. In her 90s cousin Rebecca Gilmore, wife of cousin Alexander Copeland, described the circumstances in which she heard the guns at King's Mountain in York County, South Carolina. I loved my stories so much it was as if I had heard them from gatherings of kinfolks in dimly lighted rooms. It got to be as if I had heard the guns at King's Mountain.
As the first decade of this century passed into the second decade, I continued my family research on the Internet, but I broadened my historical research. Starting in the mid-2010s I made myself into a regular American historian by writing a dozen articles for the online Journal of the American Revolution (three essays reprinted in hardcover books). My first article, "The Tryon County Patriots of 1775 and their 'Association'" (2014) predicted the way my interests have gone, for several of the brave signers of the seditious document were kinsmen of mine. When many North Carolina readers were thrilled at the article about local heroism, I enlarged it for reprinting in the Gaston-Lincoln Genealogical Society’s Footprints in Time (December 2014). Ever since then, my living cousins, now intermixed with descendants of other signers of the "association," use the article in their annual celebration. They had forgotten that they had something to be proud of. After that, I quoted my cousins in two or three of the other JAR articles.
While I was writing for JAR I was compiling an enormous document called Glimpses--consisting of page or so snapshots of kinfolks during revealing--indeed, fascinating--moments in their lives and (often) of American history. Much was in their own words (even from the 1600s and 1700s). I had accumulated documents in random order and at odd intervals, without focusing sharply on them. Because I am (intermittently) persistent, I found genuinely remarkable documents. When you don’t know family history and family stories, you respond with joy, and even love, at new stories. Ancestors become real. Recently, as I mention in a later chapter, I could find only one 1759 newspaper story on Indian raid on the Catawba river area, but it featured my first cousin Martin Dellinger, who had the wit to lie down in his rye field, out of sight. (A modern cousin, the author of From Yale to Jail, knew nothing about Martin or his own heroic Revolutionary North Carolina ancestors: he took pride in his unremarkable Boston ancestors. Since I wrote the previous sentence, Cousin David has come back to life in the movie about the trial of the Chicago 7.) In an 1844 newspaper I found three or four precious lines about double grandfather Robert Ewart who died in 1781. “During the war Maj. John Davidson and Robt. Ewart (a good Whig) very frequently came to my father’s, Jacob Forney, sen., to consult in favor of the Whig cause--Robert Ewart lived about one and a half miles from Maj. Davison and five and a half miles from my fathers.” Old Jacob Forney’s property was devastated when Lord Cornwallis and his army occupied it in 1781 during a pause on his way to Yorktown. This letter by his son Abraham, in 1844, in his 85th year, struck me as a miraculous gift. You really have to be a hunter to find such nuggets! My cousin Frederick Slimp, a Union man, wrote much of the History of the Thirteenth Regiment Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry (which includes a photograph of him). Then (looking for Moore cousins) I found a letter from Boone, North Carolina, in the Lenoir Tropic for 21 October 1885, about a visit to Tennessee: “Fred Slimp I had not seen for 22 years; looked old and broken. We were school boys together. Fred could outrun us all at school in playing ball, base, &c.” [Sic: “base, ball”] You look long enough, you find such surprise revelations, even if they are disturbing. I joyed in the documents I was finding but had no idea what I could do with them.
In 2018 I was in Revolutionary historian mode, working on what if anything was wrong with hanging North Carolina Tories, when I had to drop everything for one last Melville assignment. The Library of America was ready for a volume of Melville's Complete Poems. They needed me, and I urgently wanted to redo the chronology. That volume took half of 2018 and half of 2019. Some editors at the Library of America wanted to refer to the white men in Battle-Pieces as divided into Americans and Confederates. No, I insisted strenuously and repeatedly, they were all Americans. You will see that point of view in this book.
We may never know whether there was something wrong with hanging Tories because before I could go back to writing for the Journal of the American Revolution. My health broke. Early in 2020 I had a complicated prostate surgery and with no interval at all began to lose my vision. The diagnosis by the greatest ocular oncologist in the West was that I had an aggressive cancer like lymphoma, and there in Stanford I learned a terrifying word, enucleation. As I am writing this, almost three years later, NBC News on 30 January 2023 runs an article on the disease still regularly diagnosed as cancer: "Valley fever, historically found only in the Southwest, is spreading. It can have devasting consequences." Indeed, it can blind you and kill you, especially when mis-diagnosed. With massive doses of the correct drug, my vision was saved, a millimeter short of the macula. Greatly enlarged, the lesion pulsated like an alligator swallowing. For five months I saw tumbleweeds along the walls, then elongated watermelons, then a small ball, then finally a Hunter Green finger ring. When the ring disintegrated against a white wall, I knew the lesion had closed. It left the eye scarred but not destroyed. What I had was Valley Fever, with two capital letters, caught from fungus in sand blown to the beach where I had run daily.
In 2020 the first challenge after being told I was going blind and dying from lymphoma was to salvage the work I had been doing at odd times on family genealogy. Before I knew the cancer diagnosis was false, I made a new Last Will and Testament. By much letter writing and great good luck I had already found a refuge for my Melville Collection. When I got sick, eighty bankers boxes were already at their new home in the Berkshire Athenaeum and 10 or 15 more boxes were partially packed and were later shipped to Massachusetts with the help of a few local friends. More will follow. Later I invited acquaintances to bring boxes and carry away books not by Melville, for the books would be impediments when I died. My true treasure was the mass of research on kinfolks, over ten thousand documents in one file in my computer. I de-accessioned as best I could—I got them out of the house by sending flash drives to grandchildren and grandnieces and grandnephews. If anyone wants to know about the Pruitts or Tuckers or Ewarts or Knoxes or Costners or Copelands or Richardsons or Cagles or Cockerhams or or Dellingers or Parkers or Gilmores or Simes or Brashers or Hendersons or Neighbors or Stewarts or dozens of other families, here are documents on each. But what of all my favorite family stories which I had dug out of old newspapers and other records rather than being told them, as Jim Webb was? My vision started to clear, thanks to massive doses of fluconazole. I ordered by two-day delivery soft eye-patches from Amazon; they took 5 days to get here and by that time I could read on the computer without a patch. I still could see, after those few days, and my intraocular implants were as good as ever, but I was bewildered at how to salvage something valuable from my trove of family documents.
Then in May 2020 George Floyd was murdered. My selection policy was determined, right then--I would focus very sharply on documents dealing with race and create my own Racial Reckonings. I sorted out hundreds of documents dealing with whites and blacks starting with 1600s Virginia. I had gathered hundreds of last wills by white kinfolks and dozens of runaway ads about slaves and a story about killing a slave and stories slaves killing masters. For those first weeks, in the summer of 2020, the documents I was sorting out were about whites and blacks, then I saw that the book had to be about Indians too. In East Vanport a Kiowa named Billy Shoemaker and I tried to meet to walk partway to school. I was more comfortable with Indians, even Plains Indians, than other children. Many of my kinfolks were much darker than me. In school in Wister, Oklahoma a Glenn classmate now long dead, a first cousin of my father's but a few weeks younger than me, was much darker than his mother, my great aunt, because she had married a full blooded Choctaw. As it turned out, in a chapter in this book I pay tribute to her older sister, a part Choctaw great aunt who died in 2001, having lived in three centuries but not very long in two of them. This is the chapter about my Glenn-Tucker cousins and the longest lawsuit in Oklahoma Territory. Here and in the other chapters I never knew what I was going to find. Two great aunts at one's 90th birthday in 1990 rued to me the loss of their Indian rights but had no idea how horrific the story was. I was appalled by what I learned. The writing of this book was An Okie's Racial Reckonings.
My book, I saw pretty soon after sorting out documents, would be absolutely original although sharing some spirit with Jim Webb's. No other high school dropout tubercular telegrapher had retrieved thousands of stories from old newspapers and other records. No other Depression Okie was "quite simply, the most important Melville scholar of all time." No other Depression Okie had won two Richard R. Hawkins Awards and no other Depression Okie had brought to life so many lost kinfolks in so many different historical circumstances. There would be no rival to my book: I just had to live to write it. Before 2020 got half done, I had a blood clot in a leg and was sentenced to blood thinner and a pressure stocking. I worked between trips to the ER. Later that year came falls from hallucinatory vertigo. There were other painful falls and newly damaged rotator cuffs. In 2022 I began running out of breath on the beach and finally fell down, having fainted. I thought hearts were supposed to last a lifetime. It took months of being tested and delayed, but in October 2022 I had heart surgery. The next day I got up and made bread. The surgeon, I was sure, had given me three more years. I should have thought five, because my goal had been to outlive mother, Martha Costner, who died at 92. Now I was sure I could finish the book, Racial Reckonings. It took me into January 2023 and I still need to review it, but it's done and I am writing this preface.
I consult the Guidelines for Prospective Authors. To whom will An Okie's Racial Reckonings "matter"? Hundreds and hundreds of people. I know because just by word of mouth in 2014 and for years afterwards people kept learning about the article on the Tryon County "association" of 1775. Many excited notes are attached to the original article online, most from cousins of mine. (We don't often do "distant" cousins in the South. A cousin is a cousin.) And, as I said, the locals near Bessemer, North Carolina recognized that they had forgotten something in 1775 they should have been proud of and asked to reprint my article on the "association," expanded, and they do use it in their new annual celebrations. There is a great interest in local history. Many other Americans have done searches such as I did and many have visited more graveyards and court-houses. I made only one cemetery tour, in 2007. Internet genealogical research now may be (as is casually reported) almost as popular as gardening or pornography. Oregon historians searching the Internet have found me from my blog. People, too many people came to Iowa with their polluting cars in my cousin's movie. I have built my Reckonings with hundreds of names and hundreds of unknown stories. I have built it, and buyers will come.
Every chapter here is an unknown, forgotten, or suppressed story lost from American history, and every chapter is about members of my family, the way the true story of the Tryon "association" was lost (on the Internet, even the signatures were chopped up and disordered). The research and writing of the two chapters on the Mountain Meadows Massacre cost me almost unbearable grief. Some people will deny those chapters and denounce them, but they are true. If Will Bagley had lived a few months longer he would have vouched for them. The chapter on the displacement of blacks experienced by Dovey Costner also cost me great pain. I was shocked and disturbed by what I learned in writing many of the chapters. I keep referring to my talk with two great aunts in 1990 (on one's 90th birthday) about their folks' long losing struggle for their Choctaw rights. This talk was momentous for me even though they knew little: it was my only talk to kinfolks about our history. As I got into the chapter I was astounded to see that the start of it all was my folks being Union supporters (who would have thought it?) and stripped of possessions repeatedly by a succession of McCurtain governors who were lifelong Confederates. Historians joked about our trials as the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce of Indian Territory, but no historian had an inkling of the multi-million dollar fraud unleashed by Theodore Roosevelt. It pains me that I cannot tell my aunts about all this. I warn you, you will read with a dropped jaw.
Every chapter here is built on information which will be new even to historians.
Ch. 5, "Carolina Kinfolks and the War on the Cherokees 1759-1783" begins with my discovery of the only known 1759 newspaper report of a Cherokee raid in the Catawba area. I had learned to be a scholar on Melville, so now I hunted many hours before finding an account of a farmer who saves himself by lying down in his field of rye. He's a Dellinger, my first cousin several times removed. This book is stuffed with such discoveries. The first page of this chapter will astonish many, for the Dellingers are still all around us, including Cousin David, who is played by John Carroll Lynch in the 2020 Trial of the Chicago 7. Then I build the bulk of Ch. 5 on the words of my cousins who fought the Cherokees in the Revolution. In the JAR I have crusaded to get historians to pay attention to the more than 20,000 1832 (or later) pension applications Will Graves and my Cockerham cousin Leon Harris have made available online, free. (In case of doubtful readings I verify by the original images in Fold3.) I use the voices of more than one Sample, a Costner, a Forney, more than one Sparks, a Fowler, a Jamieson, a Pruitt, a Rose, a Coffee, a Murrell. I did original and quite appalling research on the slave-accumulating leader of the South Carolina expedition against the Cherokees. There is a perfectly good 2021 article in the JAR, "The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective," but it is lifeless and my chapter is propelled by my new "perspective" and by the previously unheard new historical voices of my cousins and uncles. Compare the chapters and you will see.
Ch. 7, "Erratic Obliviousness at Trap Hill, Wilkes County: The Siamese Twins, the Roaring River Baptists, the Unionists, & the Rebel Gestapo" is a grab-bag chapter united by examples of Wokeness and Blindness. It features two first cousins, William and Colby Sparks. Colby became notorious when he officiated at the marriage of two Chinamen to two North Carolina sisters. The grooms were mistakenly known as Siamese, not Chinese, and their problem was that they were conjoined. Colby and his neighbors were farm people who understood that men needed to lead sexual lives. It was the outsiders, especially newspaper editors such as Frederick Douglass, who denounced my poor cousin Colby as a profligate. Here celebrity had trumped race: Colby could not have married blacks to whites, but he could unite the Siamese Twins with white North Carolina women. The white northwest North Carolina natives rarely owned slaves, but they made judgments if someone was accused of mistreating slaves, as one (but only one) of the Siamese Twins was. Cousin William made a heroic public pro-Union speech in 1863. He was pro-Union but not anti-slavery. He had not thought much about slavery, it being so rare where he lived. After the war he had to flee to the most extreme abolitionist county of Virginia although it was the Union he cared for, not abolition. After the war, people near Trap Hill met and, with slavery ended, voted to send blacks back to Africa. Earlier, a few months after William's Union speech some of his young Sparks and Pruitt cousins who had heard him were slaughtered by Confederate raiders over in Tennessee, on their way to fight for the Union. A Slimp cousin of mine (Schlemp, on my mother's side), author of many pages of the History of the 13th Regiment Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, could not bring himself to record the most gruesome details of the murders of these boys, my cousins on the Parker side. This is a very provocative chapter about how we can be alert to one or more moral issues and blind to another, or others. It's about how I can be obviously superior to you, morally, while you know you are morally superior to me.
Ch. 13. "Captain J. H. Matthews, Star Witness for the Freedmen's Bureau Whose Lies Became History." Over and over again historians quote Captain Matthews' on the murder committed, he said, by John H. McGee--one "which would challenge the world for an equal in studied brutality." According to Matthews, "The negro was murdered, beheaded, skinned, and his skin nailed to the barn." This accusation lives on. Let me see what I find on Google, just for this letter about the manuscript. I start with Thomas E. Eliot's speech in the House of Representatives on 23 May 1866. The accusation was printed on the same day, the Congressional Globe p. 2777. It was repeated, for a few examples, in Leon F. Litwack's "Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, 2010; in Christopher M. Span's "From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education," 2012; in David Christopher Willard's North Carolina dissertation (2012); and repeated by Robert B. Mitchell in the Washington Post of 27 March 2015. Mitchell's use of the slander in the Post reached many thousands of readers.
John McGehee, the proper spelling, is a cousin of mine. Matthews was accusing a wholly innocent McGehee, as I showed by studying Mississippi newspapers (some in fragments), the few which survive Grant and Sherman's torching of newspaper archives. The accusation is totally false, although based on something innocent and admirable in the lives of two other McGehee cousins. The true story is a tender one about a father's love for his son shot repeatedly at Shiloh. John McGehee was a lucky man, for a black warned him and he evaded Matthews's attempt to capture him. I discovered (from a single document) that Matthews' crew had shot an innocent cousin of mine, in a different place. No one ever attached this to Matthews' record. This chapter demonstrates how a lie can become history. Now it can never be corrected. And it demonstrates what can be found by dogged as well as inspired research. The atrocity turns out to be a father's devoted attempt to continue his injured son's interrupted education in grisly circumstances.
Ch. 14. "Reconstruction Foes: Albion Tourgee vs. Montford McGehee." McGehee vs Tourgee! My cousin the Harvard-educated North Carolina Democratic politician Montford McGehee in 1878 was held up as the natural opponent of the Radical Republican Yankee Albion Tourgee, a very distant cousin of mine. Tourgee I knew from 1962, when I read Fool's Errand and Bricks without Straw. He is now honored as the author of the best but losing arguments in Plessy vs. Ferguson. In this chapter I look at events which put the two men at odds. Tourgee was trying to achieve fair play for liberated blacks, and failing. McGehee triumphed in his great cause—giving amnesty to all North Carolina men who had been in the Ku Klux Klan after the war and on through the first years of the 1870s. Here I trace acts of violence (including rapes and murders) by the KKK, quoting in detail from contemporary reports. None of the KKK members here looks like or behaves like Ashley Wilkes. They were violent, mainly in mobs, and all their violence was forgiven, the way a former President wants to pardon all 6 January 2021 insurrectionists. Modern readers will not know the evidence I present here, and will be shocked by it. I do not castigate the courtly McGehee who seemed never to get his hands dirty. I think of my gentlemanly cousin (through the Tuckers), Lamar Alexander, who voted against impeaching a corrupt president. Have you read Senator Alexander's statement on impeachment witnesses? He would be the ideal actor to read Montford McGehee's speeches aloud. I do not belabor parallels to our political crises now. Readers will make their own.
An Okie's Racial Reckonings is complete. It existed mainly on my computer, but I have now printed all chapters. It looks like a book now. Do you want to see it?
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