The Civil War and the Theads

Ken Burns's Civil War series aired more than 25 years ago...kind of hard for me to contemplate--25 years! Really doesn't seem that long. 

For me it was a seminal event, changing forever the way I regarded history--not just the Civil War, but HISTORY in general and the study of it. My high-school and college teachers would have applauded the moment of epiphany when I realized that history wasn't just a string of dates and facts and happenings.

One horrifying number you find when you research the Civil War is this: 2% of the population of the United States died "in the line of duty," as civilwar.org reports. https://www.civilwar.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties I include here a snip from this website:

And of course that doesn't count the number of injuries and longterm disabilities. Let us not forget that PTSD is not a new thing.
There's a ton of grim but fascinating information on the Civil War Trust website, and I can't include it all, obviously, so I invite you to look for yourself. But a couple of facts probably will get your attention:

As this website points out, "recruitment was highly localized," not just in the South but also in the North. Regiments were generally composed of neighbors, friends, relatives from a fairly small area, which meant that in a really fierce battle a whole community back home might be devastated with loss. 

This is more or less what I found to be true in the area of Choctaw County, AL, and Clarke County, MS, where the two Thead brothers' families lived. 

A quick review of the 1850 and 1860 censuses for Alex and James Thead:

1850 Clarke County MS

1860 Clarke County MS

1860 Choctaw County AL

Remember their sons' names. James, in Mississippi, had Richmond, James (I’ll refer to him as James2), and Alexander, on the 1850 census; and John O. and Hamilton ("Hampleton"), on the 1860 one.

James's brother Alex, in Alabama, had George W., Columbus Alexander, James J., and John W. I speculate that the Alabama James may have gone by Joseph--the name possibly behind the initial--because there's a Civil War record of a "Joseph J. Thead"--or possibly James J.--in the Alabama 54th Infantry. 

The brothers James and Alex didn't serve in the war. But their sons certainly did.

First, James’s:

John O. Thead, Civil War

 John O. enlisted with the 13th Mississippi—the card says 19, but the census says he was 20 in 1860, so he’d have been about 21 at the start of the war. His residence was given as Pierce’s Springs. I include one of his pay stubs—this one from July to August of 1863, just so you can see his signature. When he enlisted, he was single. Look at all the battles where he was present, on the third card: Manassas, Leesburg, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and so on. He was wounded at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg and, finally, killed at the battle of the Wilderness in 1864. Either check out Ken Burns’s telling of this horrific conflict or read about it here: https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/battle-of-the-wilderness

William Alexander Thead, Civil War

Transcription of above document

William Alexander, of Pierce’s Springs, enlisted in the 13th Mississippi in 1861 at the age of 18. He died “of disease” at Rapidan, VA, in March, 1862. His commanding officer wrote a few words about him when he died. Here’s that paper, above, with my transcription to help with the reading.

Hamilton "Hamp" Thead, Civil War

Hamilton (“Hamp,” “Hampleton”) Thead was also in the 13th Mississippi, and is shown as a resident of Pierce’s Springs. He enlisted at the age of 18 in 1863; his brother William had died during the previous year. Someone wrote that Hamp was a “good and brave soldier.” The left-hand card says he served some time in a Confederate prison for “suffering a prisoner to escape” and was released in 1864. I make a big effort not to overly romanticize the war; it was a grim, bloody tragedy. I have to wonder what an 18-year-old was going through so that he’d allow “a prisoner to escape.”

So far as Richmond Thead is concerned, I can’t find anything about him after the 1850 census in Clarke County. But in 1860, a young woman named Henrietta suddently showed up in James’s household. Up until 1880 the census records don’t tell exactly what family relationships were in a household; you have to draw reasonable conclusions from the ages and sexes of the people listed. In 1870 Henrietta is still in James’s home, living with him, his wife Rhoda and James and Rhoda’s son Daniel F. (“Frankie”). In 1880 Henrietta’s listed still there, this time as “daughter”—but now a designation of “married,” “single” or “widowed” is allowed, and there’s a checkmark in that last column! In 1900 she and Frankie are the only two in the house—James and Rhoda have both died—and again she is shown as being a widow, the mother of no living or dead children.

Therefore, there’s a possibility that Henrietta may have been married either to James and Rhoda’s son James2 or to Richmond. At any rate, neither of them was around in 1860, and she was considered a member of the family.

Now let’s consider Alex’s sons, in Alabama: 

George W. Thead, Civil War

George W. Thead apparently intended to serve with his Mississippi cousins in the 13th Mississippi. He traveled 35 miles to Wayne County to sign up in June, 1861; he was 21. The record says he was “discharged” in July, but he joined the 54th Alabama in 1862 at Ft. Pillow and served until April, 1865. In 1903 he applied for and began receiving a pension, having many infirmities, including lupus, bad eyesight (one of his eyes had been “destroyed by accident”), and chronic bronchitis.

Columbus A. "Lum" Thead, Civil War

Columbus A. “Lum” Thead joined the 17th Alabama Infantry. He would’ve been about 17 at the start of the war, so perhaps he didn’t enlist immediately. He shows up in November of 1862. He was sick in May and June of 1864 in Ocmulgee Hospital, in Macon, Georgia. Captured at Nashville, Tennessee, in December of 1864, he was first sent to Louisville, Kentucky, and then to Camp Douglas at the end of the year. For information about Camp Douglas, read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Douglas_(Chicago)
Or, if you’d rather get to the details pertinent to Lum’s stay there, read this section:

Wikipedia, Camp Douglas

As I write, it all gets grimmer and grimmer. 

James Joseph Thead, Civil War

Joseph J. (or James Joseph) Thead was in the 54th Alabama Infantry, probably with his brother George. Joseph James was captured and sent to the infamous Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio, where he died in January 1865. Read this NPR article about the camp. 
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/national_cemeteries/ohio/camp_chase_confederate_cemetery.html
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/40165/camp-chase-confederate-cemetery

Hamp came home from the war and got married, to Elizabeth Caroline “Eliza” Everett (probably the “Grannie Thead” of the article near the bottom of this post). 

1870 Clarke County, MS

Lum made it back to Silas, Alabama, along with George. Both brothers married.
By 1870 George had a four-year-old daughter with Elizabeth, who died before the next census cycle. 

1870 Choctaw County, AL

George married Louisiana Moore then and continued raising his family.

Lum also married. 

But by 1870 he had died, perhaps as a delayed result of the prison-camp existence in Chicago. His wife Martha lived near George and Alex; she was raising James Denton and Sarah C. (“Sally”), her two children with Lum. 

Both communities were drastically diminished. Out of at least 6 sons sent to battle, three returned. One of those died very soon afterwards, and the other two (the cousins George and Hamp) suffered assorted physical and mental illnesses for years. I haven’t been able to account for two other Thead men—Richmond and James2. Essentially, only two of Alex’s sons produced descendants, and only one of James’s, so far as I can tell. 

This horrifying narrative was probably repeated all over the country. And our particular version of it only concerns two brothers’ families in Mississippi. 

Yet by the early 1900's Theadville, in Mississippi, was a bustling small community with a number of establishments, businesses, churches. 

A few weeks ago I ended a post by remarking that after the Civil War, things changed for the brothers. I’m going to end this tonight with a montage for us to think about. 

Ælfwine

William Grimes, Part 2...and Some Thead Men

I had a most interesting (but brief) conversation with Ms. Regina Mason recently. As people tend to do so much these days, we "talked" via Facebook...not entirely a satisfactory communication, but it was about all I could manage at the time. Words are sometimes easier to write than to say.

Ms. Mason is the great-great-great-granddaughter of William Grimes, who wrote what most scholars view at the first narrative of an ex-slave. And, as I said in my previous post, Coleman Thead was overseer for a time at Montpelier plantation in Virginia, where William Grimes was a slave.

Page 36, Life of William Grimes

Ms. Mason, her husband Brandon, and I exchanged several messages for a couple of days, commenting on how the stain of slavery still affects American life. Like Ms. Mason--who wanted to trace her family lines and wept on discovering that her three-times-great-grandfather was William Grimes--I also had searched for a long time to find something else, anything else, about this man named Coleman Thead. As I told Gina, she experienced the high of elation--I sank to the nadir.

Though I am not a Thead by birth, this stunning piece of history found by Janis Wilson (who IS a Thead by blood) made me think these past weeks an awful lot about slavery. I bought the 2008 edition of the Life of William Grimes and read it. In the blog I'm doing for my own side of the family (allthingsalawine.blogspot.com), I talked about slavery in regards to a particular ancestor--no new revelation to me, finding it there.

But, as my daughter pointed out, it's one thing to know intellectually that your ancestors were slave-owners, Indian-fighters, or whatever, but quite another thing altogether when you find evidence of what they actually DID to people. In my own case, I had to put this book down for a while when I read that different owners would force their slaves to take different names--John, or Solomon, or what-have-you--for the owners' convenience...say, for instance, if they already had a slave by a certain name. That was just too stunning for me to process for a day or two.

I still am thinking about what this means and how we move forward from our collective pasts. Ms. Mason and I promised to stay in touch with each other.
          -          -          -          -          -          -         -         -          -           -           -         -          -
In the meantime, we're going to look at a couple of other Thead things. Janis discovered this tidbit in a London newspaper dated 1745:

One of my daughters found the "s's" (which look like fancy "f's") hard to decipher in this old print. To help you out, take a look at this "snip" from the original:

It says, "...touching the Ground, with his toes worked in the Earth so deep, as was surprizing to those that saw it."

Now, further down, it says that one Richard Thead was "convicted for a Robbery on the Highway." In the second half of the paragraph, however, the notice states that "the two former were reprieved"--meaning that James Goswell and Richard got off, for some reason; whereas Jonathan Byerly received "Sentence of Death" for breaking into the house of Thomas Shore and stealing several things. Whew. 

This was in August of 1745, you see above, and I'd LOVE to know if this particular Richard Thead was the one who ended up in Virginia later. If so, he was most likely NOT the son of the Thomas who "left England in 1733 on the Caesar, an emigrant in bondage." The Richard whose identity tantalizes me--the one in Virginia--died at some time in 1783 and had his "estate" inventoried, as I showed in the first post of this blog. But perhaps that Richard WAS the same as this fellow in England, some thirty-three years earlier; and perhaps, having been "reprieved" from the crime of "Robbery on the Highway," he hightailed it out of England and headed to the Colonies.

Well, we'll let Janis find another ancestor, perhaps!

She also located tax rolls from 1835, -36, -37, -38, and -39. Here's the 1835 one:

1835 Tax Roll, Clark County, MS

Before we talk about the Civil War in the next post, and what happened to the Theads in Mississippi during those years, here's a copy-of-a-copy of the portrait presumed to be of Columbus Alexander Thead, of Silas (or Bladon Springs--they're close), Alabama. People from Alabama tell me he was known as "Lum", instead of "Alex," which was his father's name, you recall. He didn't live long after the War.

Columbus "Lum" Alexander Thead

Janis found one more intriguing bit in a newspaper in Miles City, Montana (Montana!), in 1912. Does anybody have an idea who this musician could've been?

Ælfwine

William Grimes

This post will be short tonight and is meant to add more information to the previous one. In Janis Wilson I have a fantastic collaborator! She has located what's likely proof that I'm wrong about my assumption concerning the Coleman/Solomon Thead name.

So read on. But it's not gonna be an easy read...

Janis located this passage in the book The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave: 

Page from THE LIFE OF WILLIAM GRIMES, the RUNAWAY SLAVE, published 1825

Some quick research on my part pretty much allowed for the possibility of this Coleman Thead's being the one who served in Alabama during the War of 1812. 

You might look at these two articles.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/grimes25/summary.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grimes_(ex-slave)
  
I'm changing some details in my previous post about Coleman/Solomon. I'm still very puzzled how Dunbar Rowland's Mississippi Territory in the War of 1812 got this one wrong.

But I've written before about handwriting and faded pages, so I'm betting that a transcriber just got it wrong for that publication. It's not so far from "Coleman" to "Solomon," after all. And I definitely take the word of a contemporaneous inhabitant of the area where Coleman lived--especially one who suffered at his hands. 

I ordered the book Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave tonight and will start reading it on my Kindle before the hard copy arrives. Perhaps I'll get to the part describing the overseer Coleman Thead who worked on Col. William Thornton's plantation in Culpeper, Virginia.

And in the meantime, those changes have been made on my previous post. Thanks to Janis Wilson for her help with this one!  

Ælfwine

Theads Who Were First

[NOTE: This post has been edited 3/3/18.]

Alexander and James were the first--at least, the first I am sure of.

I enjoy thinking of ancestors as real people, so I personalize them as much as I can, without getting into fiction. On several censuses Alexander is listed as "Alex," so I'm guessing he probably went by that in his community. I never saw James listed as "Jim." So let's just keep them "Alex and James."

I'll come back to them in a while. For now, I'm going to post a few other things I've found, in the hopes that someone can help sort these people out.

First: just recently I found a Thead Revolutionary War soldier. I'm not sure yet how he fits in, but here's his record.

I'm including the original, above, but it's really hard to read because of its age. So I used a "snipping" tool to have his name appear at the BOTTOM so that you can find it easily. 

Revolutionary War--Samuel Thead, second from bottom

We'll try to get him placed later.

In the first post on this blog I put up a copy of an inventory made of Richard Thead's estate in Virginia in 1783; but I can't get Richard connected with the earliest Thead (Thomas Theed) I've found in America. In the book Original Lists of Emigrants in Bondage from London to the American Colonies, 1719-1744 (by Marion and Jack Kaminkow), this is said about Thomas:

"Thomas Theed...emigrant in bondage from Essex, England. Destination: Virginia. Name of ship: Caesar. Captain: William Loney. Number of persons: 118. Came on board January 13, 1733."

So it would appear that Thomas was what we'd call an indentured servant--that is, in return for passage to what became the United States, he agreed to work for a period of time after he arrived for whoever paid his way here.

I don't know for sure that Thomas was the great-grandfather (or maybe even two "greats") of Alex and James. There's no way for me--at this time--to say for sure. I don't know even if he had children at all, although--since there don't seem to have been any other Theads around at that time--it seems pretty likely that he was the original emigrant and that he may have been Richard's grandfather...possibly father.

I've learned not to trust just everything I find in records. The other night, for instance, as I was browsing through some individual family pages, I found these bits of information...intriguing stuff, and maybe all of it's true...but probably not.

Summarizing it, we get this family tree:

It's possible...but I don't have ANY proof for it. And it bothers me somehow, because it looks suspiciously like a family line I speculated about years ago. The real tipoff about its inaccuracy is the part where George Thead is said to have had one son, Coleman Solomon.

I've found Coleman Thead (Thede) in the rosters of people who served in the War of 1812; he was in Major Smoot's Battalion, Captain Jones's Company of Mississippi Militia.

But in the actual rolls someone transcribed his name as "Solomon"at least one time.

So, as you see--and as I've observed in my blog about handwriting and faded papers from long ago--it appears that somebody just read the name wrong.

By the way, I also discovered a George Thead who served in the War of 1812. His record is below. It's possible he is the George Thead referenced above. Notice how HIS name was spelled!

In documents I found some years ago, Coleman is said to have "deserted" or was "absent without leave." (These records were copied from microfilm, so they are more like photographic negatives, which is why they're dark.) 

Solomon ("Coleman") Thede/Thead War of 1812

The name "Coleman" for me was hard to accept, as it just wasn't typical of that time. I always felt as if it would end up being the "Solomon" of Dunbar's list, above. However, look at the next post, and you'll see I was proven wrong, as has happened many times, and will happen many more times in my life. I hated that he was located in the way he was (again, next post), but that's the way history goes. 

So if Coleman actually did desert, as the records show above, I imagine there may have been good reason for him to do so. In The Military History of Mississippi 1812-1836, we see this:

In the area of Southern Alabama (people refer to it as "Lower Alabama" these days), several battles were fought, mostly associated with the Creek Indians. Assuming Coleman was one of those men referred to in the passage above, I wonder if he didn't just decide to stay in that part of the world. For sure, there weren't any other Theads (Thedes, Theeds) around in the Deep South then...until sometime between 1830 and 1840, when Alexander and James turned up in Clarke County, MS.

Alexander lived in Beat 1 and James in Beat 2 of the county. I have no idea just where those boundaries would've been drawn at that time, but Alex ultimately ended up in Bladon Springs, AL--across the state line from James, who was older by about 2 years. Interestingly, Alex shows up in 1840 on the census, but James does not. 

1840 Clarke County MS (red arrow points to Alexander Thead)

Alexander married Sarah Miller. James was married to someone listed as "Jane" in 1850 and "Rhoda" in 1860, 1870 and 1880. It could've been the same person; censuses don't always get people's names right.

In 1850 an interesting document turns up--at least, it's interesting to me. By then, apparently, James and Alex were planting cotton, like so many other people in Mississippi. Someone must've decided it was a good idea to ask the farmers in some counties (perhaps all) how many children they had of educable age, male and female, and how many bales of cotton they'd produced that year and the weight of the bales. That particular set of questions is what makes it delightful to me--how many children and bales of cotton have you grown?

James seems to have had better luck as a farmer: he'd had five bales of cotton to Alex's one! I wonder if that encouraged Alex's later move to Alabama.

By 1853, this snip from a state census shows the two brothers and the numbers of male and female children in their households by then.

So the families were growing.

I'm going to close this particular post with the 1860 censuses for Choctaw County, AL, and Clarke County, MS. Notice that somebody--whether Alex himself or the census-taker--spelled his name "Thede"...just like in England. And it appears that James is still outfarming Alex, if you can judge by the value they give for their lands and property.

1860 Clarke County MS

1860 Choctaw County AL

 But this was before the Civil War. Things changed drastically for both brothers over the next five or ten years. I'll cover that next time.


Ælfwine