Magruders & allies in P.G. County

I have been doing a lot of research lately, focusing on Magruders in Prince George’s County, Maryland, on those they intermarried with, & on those they enslaved. Though I don’t usually focus on genealogy, per se, I’ll post anything I find that seems to correct a common error, fill in a gap, disambiguate a confusion, or open up a new line of inquiry into old questions. If you want to add something, or argue for a different interpretation, it’s probably best to contact me, rather than simply post a comment. In any case, please include the sources you are relying on. I’d love to engage, but can’t do much with unsupported assertions. First posted 8 Oct 2022.

Maryland Magruders & the Civil War #2

For an introduction to Maryland and Maryland Magruders in the Civil War, see my post of January 23: Maryland Magruders & the Civil War #1

A great resource for researching Marylanders in the Civil War is Kevin Conley Ruffner’s Maryland’s Blue & Gray: A Border State’s Junior Officer Corps. In-depth studies tend to focus on specific regiments or higher ranking officers, while simple lists and rosters provide no biographical detail. Ruffner’s book is a happy combination of the two approaches–a thorough discussion followed by a hundred pages of biographical sketches. His study sample is not exhaustive–it’s limited to the Eastern theater and excludes various categories, including career officers in the U.S. Army–but it’s large enough to show patterns.

Who Fought?

Sons of Maryland’s landed gentry did not exactly flock to the defense of the Union. Though the junior officer corps (lieutenants and captains) is just where we might expect to find the sons of planters and lawyers, in Ruffner’s roster of the Union’s junior officers we find few familiar names from Magruder family trees. A few sons of prominent Unionist politicians accepted commissions but in large part the junior officer corps was made up from the middle classes of northern and western Maryland–skilled workers, merchants, managers, and laborers. They claimed descent not from Maryland’s colonial families and Revolutionary patriots but from later arrivals who had settled in Baltimore or moved west from the original counties in search of land. The majority were born in Maryland, some in adjoining states, and some were immigrants, mostly from the German communities of Baltimore and western Maryland.

As you would expect from these demographics, their education level was not impressive. As noted by Ruffner, “More brigade officers were hotel or tavern keepers than lawyers.” Just four are known to have graduated from college before the war and five described themselves as students when enlisting, including two who were studying law. Lacking the wealth and connections of old families in Maryland’s southern counties, yet rich in skills and ambition, these men represented the future of Maryland and of the nation. As a group they had more in common with Union officers from the Midwest or Northeast than with Maryland officers who served in gray. In 1864, they voted heavily for Maryland’s new constitution and for Lincoln’s reelection.

Colonial families and the southern Maryland gentry made a better showing as junior officers in the Confederate States Army (C.S.A.). Nearly ninety percent of Ruffner’s Confederate subjects were Maryland natives, almost a third from Baltimore—notably from its most affluent wards, with none living in the heavily Irish or German sections. Just seven had been living in Washington, D.C., before joining. Of the eighty-seven men for whom prewar occupations were discovered, twenty-two were farmers or farm workers and four were singled out as planters, totaling just twenty-six who derived their living directly from agriculture. More than sixty percent can be classed as professional or paraprofessional, including nine lawyers, fifteen clerks, three bookkeepers, three engineers, an architect, a teacher, a medical doctor, and thirteen students, including two military cadets. Just seven Confederate junior officers in Ruffner’s study were skilled workers.

Accordingly, and in contrast to their Union counterparts, they present an impressive educational level. A dozen had attended or graduated from Georgetown College and another dozen had attended elsewhere, including St. John’s College, the University of Virginia, Princeton, Oxford, and Yale. Others had attended the top rank of Maryland’s “classical schools,” military schools, and academies. Though few junior officers owned slaves, many were the sons of enslavers, lived in homes staffed by enslaved servants, were supported by enslaved laborers—including blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, field hands, drivers, seamstresses, and nurse maids—and expected to inherit human property. Like other Confederate officers (and not a few enlisted men), many would have taken an enslaved body-servant with them into wartime service. As a group they represented the old Maryland, where land, slaves, and family connections defined a man’s status and his expectations.

The Magruder-Hilleary Connection

Young Prince George’s men descended from the marriage of Revolutionary War hero Henry Hilleary (1726-1783) and Cassandra Magruder (abt 1722-1808) seem to have been especially enthusiastic about risking all for the Confederacy. Cassandra was the daughter of John Magruder (called John Magruder of Dunblane); granddaughter of Samuel Magruder and his wife, Sarah [MNU, maybe Mills]; and great-granddaughter of Alexander Magruder the Immigrant and his first wife, Sarah [MNU].

We are going to meet a pair of Hilleary brothers and three of their cousins, the Gwyns. Just one of these five young men was an officer, but all fit Ruffner’s demographic profile of Confederate volunteers from Maryland.

Brothers George H. Hilleary (1835-abt 1865) and Washington M. “W.M.” Hilleary (1837-1862) were doubly descended from Henry and Cassandra—through their daughter Anne (1762-1855), who married Samuel Magruder (1765-1826), son of Haswell Magruder Sr., and Anne’s brother George (1755-1815), who married Sarah Smith (abt 1759-1806). In the tradition of marrying cousins, two of George and Sarah’s sons then married two of Ann and Samuel’s daughters. The union of George Washington Hilleary and Rebecca Hilleary Magruder was childless but the other set of siblings–Matilda Magruder (1801-1871) and Henry Hilleary (1806-1858)—produced at least eight children, including George H. and W.M. Hilleary. (In case you can’t sort that out, three of George & F.M.’s grandparents were descended from Cassandra and Henry.)

** See footnote about identity of the Samual Magruder who married Anne Hilleary.

These Hilleary brothers served together in the First Maryland Light Artillery, George as a corporal and W.M. as a private. In the 1860 census W.M. Hilleary is identified as a physician though he never served the C.S.A. in a medical capacity. He may have joined the artillery to serve with his brother. W.M. was killed in 1862 in one of the Seven-Day battles around Richmond. George survived the war but died soon after.

In 1850, the brothers’ parents, Henry and Matilda (Magruder) Hilleary, were among the largest slave-holders in the county, holding forty people in bondage. Henry died in 1858 but in 1860 Matilda and her remaining sons together held a similar number in slavery. On 25 August 1865, a few months after the war ended, Matilda Hilleary went to the courthouse in Upper Marlborough and manumitted Abraham Henry and Archibald (alias Hannibal) Henson, two men she had formerly enslaved and whom she knew or believed to have joined the U.S. Army. In this she joined nearly fifty others in the county who hoped that manumission-after-the-fact would qualify them for compensation. Her claim may have failed, as two years later, when many of her neighbors filed claims for the enslaved people they had lost to Maryland Emancipation in 1864—the Slave Statistics of 1867—Matilda did not join them.

Magruder + Hilleary + Gwyn

In 1797, Susannah Hilleary (1758-bef. 1807), another daughter of Henry Hilleary and Cassandra Magruder, married Bennett Gwynn (1758-1826), descendant of a Welsh family that established itself in Maryland in the early eighteenth century. Their son John Hilleary Gwynn (1797-1857) and his wife, Ann Eliza Dyer (?-1855), lived in a large two-story house between the villages of T.B. and Piscataway, in southern Prince George’s, which they christened Pleasant Springs. (No one knows why T.B. was called T.B.) After the older children were married and settled, John’s will passed the property to their youngest son, Andrew Jackson Gwynn (1835-1908), with the proviso that he provide a home there for three of his four sisters, two of whom were young widows.

With Pleasant Springs lying near the Prince George’s / Charles County line, Gwynn family relations entwined through both counties. In the neighborhood of Bryantown, Charles County, lived Sarah Frances Dyer, a first-cousin-once-removed of Eliza (Dyer) Gwynn. Frances, as she was called, was the wife of Dr. Samuel Mudd. In 1865, this connection would bring to Andrew and Bennett Gwynn the unwelcome attention of Federal authorities investigating Dr. Mudd’s role in the escape of John Wilkes Booth.

Though never implicated in the Lincoln assassination plot, in August 1861 the Gwynn brothers had spent a few days camping in the woods on Mudd’s property in the company of other young men who were “dodging around” at that time for fear of arrest for their Confederate activities, including their second cousin Jeremiah Dwyer, who was Dr. Mudd’s brother-in-law. As Bennett would testify at Mudd’s trial: “I was there with my brother, Andrew J. Gwynn, and Mr. Jerry Dyer. At about that time General Sickles came over into Maryland, arresting almost everybody. I was threatened with arrest; told I was to be arrested, and I went out of the neighborhood a while to avoid it. I went down into Charles County; stayed about among friends there for a week or so, as almost everybody else was doing. There was a good deal of running about that time.”

In Bennett Gwyn’s telling, he and his brother Andrew slept for four or five days in a pine-woods near a spring, their bedding and food supplied by the household of Dr. Mudd. From there, they crossed the river to Richmond where Andrew enlisted, not to return home till the war was over. Bennett, however, quickly grew tired of exile and in November traveled north to Washington to give himself up, only to be told that no charges had been brought against him. He took the oath of allegiance to the U.S. and returned home to Prince George’s County.

Another line of questioning revealed that Bennett had seen Mary Surratt twice in Prince George’s County in the month before Lincoln’s death, including the morning before the assassination, and had acted for her as a go-between in a land sale. Nearly all witnesses at Dr. Mudd’s trial agreed that once Andrew Gwyn went south he had not returned until the war was over.

What occupied Andrew in Richmond over the winter of 1861-62 we do not know. He enlisted the following May and in October was elected Captain of Company F in the newly-organized 1st Maryland Battalion, renamed in 1864 as the Second Maryland Infantry (C.S.), commanded by Brigadier General George H. Steuart (known as “Maryland Steuart” to distinguish him from Jeb Stuart). After fighting at the Second Battle of Winchester, in June 1863, the Marylanders made a 130-mile forced march to Gettysburg, arriving late on the battle’s first day, July 1.

On the morning of the 2nd they were part of the attack on Culp’s Hill. On the 3rd, starting from their advanced position of the previous day, they were ordered forward in a suicidal bayonet charge (to which Steuart and others objected—one of his majors called it murder). In all, at Culp’s Hill the 2nd Maryland Infantry suffered almost fifty percent casualties, some by friendly fire after dark on the first evening. Among their opponents were Marylanders serving in blue.

Ten months later, after fighting and campaigning in Virginia, the regiment could muster just 324 men, versus 2,200 who marched to Gettysburg. Just fifty-nine survived to surrender at Appomattox Court House. The psychological toll of such losses, and the guilt of surviving, can hardly be imagined. Through it all, Andrew Jackson Gwynn remained Captain of Company K. Though three times wounded—at Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Peebles Farm (during the siege of Petersburg), the last being the most severe—he survived the war and later would relocate to South Carolina.

In his absence, the Gwyn family’s involvement in Confederate espionage had resulted in the burning down of Pleasant Springs–a story for another day.

The Youngest Casualty

Unmentioned in the trial of Dr. Mudd, and nearly lost to memory, was Bennett Gwynn’s eldest son, Clarence. Just seventeen when the war began, he ran away from school in Alexandria, Virginia, enlisted in the First Maryland Infantry (C.S.), and was posted to Fairfax County. In the weeks following the Union occupation of Alexandria on May 24, skirmishing was constant, as both sides rushed to build fortifications, establishing their lines just twenty-five miles apart. Clarence Gwyn was shot on a picket line at Munson’s Hill, a Confederate artillery position on the Little River Turnpike, one of just twenty deaths in Northern Virginia before the mass slaughter at Bull Run in July.

Though forgotten by all but their loved ones, young men like Clarence were immortalized in a popular poem of 1861, Ethel Lynn Beers’s “The Picket Guard.”

“All quiet along the Potomac to-night!”
     Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro,
    By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
Tis nothing! a private or two now and then
    Will not count in the news of the battle…”

** Sue Emerson and nearly every other genealogist identifies a Samuel Magruder in Montgomery County as the husband of Anne Hilleary. Her husband was the Samuel Magruder who was the eldest son of Haswell Magruder and Charity Beall of Prince Georges County. He is easy to miss because he does not appear in his father’s will and must be identified through land records. Lands given to him by Haswell and Charity appear in his tax records, then in the tax records of his heirs, then in Anne’s records, including her will. Read the detail in my post “Why should you obsessively check every possible source?”
___________________________________________________________________

Kevin Conley Ruffner,.Maryland’s Blue & Gray: A Border State’s Union and Confederate Junior Officer Corps (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).

Daniel D. Hartzler, Marylanders in the Confederacy (Westminster, MD: Willow Bend Books, 2001), 161, 175.

W.W. Goldsborough, The Maryland Line in the Confederate Army 1861-1865 (Baltimore: Guggenheimer, Weil, & Co., 1900), 86. Reproduced as Archives of Maryland Online, Vol 371, with Mrs. Charles Lee Lewis, Index to The Maryland Line in the Confederate Army 1861-1865. (Annapolis: Hall of Records Commission, 1945).

Effie Gwyn Bowie, Across the Years in Prince George’s County (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1975 [1947]).

The Hilleary Brothers

The Gwyn Brothers (& Sisters)

Re: the Gwyn sisters… In 1849, Margaret Emily Gwynn married Walter Alexander Edelen, who died the following year from the accidental discharge of a gun. Susan Ann Maria Gwynn was married to Alexander St. Clair Heiskell for ten years, until his death in 1851. They, plus a third daughter, Ann Eliza Gwynn, were the three sisters Andrew J. Gwyn was obliged to maintain at Pleasant Springs. After the war, Emily and Susan built a small house and remained on the property. Ann Eliza joined the order of Our Lady of Mercy in Baltimore. An older daughter, Harriet Clotilda, was the second wife of her first cousin, George Washington Hilleary, after the death of his first wife Rebecca Magruder.

“All Quiet Along the Potomac,” Civil War Poetry: Songs of the Confederacy.

  • Ethel Lynn Eliot Beers, “The Picket Guard,” first published in Harper’s Weekly on 30 November 1861, under the initials “E.B.,” was set to music in 1863 by John Hill Hewitt, becoming the popular song “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight.” Though others claimed authorship (including a Confederate soldier named Lamar Fontaine) Harper’s confirmed Beers as their “lady contributor.”
  • In a private letter, Beers said she wrote it on a “cool September morning after reading the stereotyped announcement, ‘All quiet,’ etc., to which was added in small type, ‘A picket shot!’” “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight,” Wikipedia.
  • Text, in slightly differing versions, widely available.
  • Regarding authorship, see Kathy Warnes, “Who Wrote All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight—the Confederate Soldier or the Yankee Poet?,” History? Because It’s Here
  • One version of the sheet music, with attribution to Lamar Fontaine, bears the slogan: “Dedicated to the unknown dead of the present revolution.”


Magruder Nurses in the Civil War?

Thousands of women volunteered as nurses during the Civil War. Thousands more visited the sick and injured soldiers, distributing food, clothing, books, and small luxuries, often stopping to pray or to write letters home for the disabled or illiterate. And yet, even though my family was in Washington DC, a veritable city of hospitals throughout the war, no stories were handed down of women nursing or even visiting the wards. This could be because most of the patients were Yankees and the family leaned South in allegiance. Or maybe the stories simply weren’t passed on.

What about your family? Did your female ancestors play a part in the war? If so, I would love to hear about it.

Maryland Magruders & the Civil War #1

Marylanders in the Civil War

As the largest slave-owning border state, deeply divided between its slave and free economies, Maryland passed through a secession crisis in 1861 but ultimately remained in the Union. Slave-owning, Southern-sympathizing, but ultimately pro-Union men were a feature of Maryland politics (they had a lot to lose) and their influence helped prevent secession. Once the fighting started, they mostly tried to stay out of it but their sons and younger brothers did not necessarily agree.

As the war began, thousands of Confederate volunteers ran the Union blockade to reach Virginia and enlist. The thousands of Union volunteers had a shorter trip to a recruiting office. On the Union side, perhaps as many as 60,000 served in a total of forty-two Maryland units of various sizes. Others served in the U.S. Army, the Regulars. On the Confederate side there was no direct enlistment from Maryland and relatively few men served in Maryland-identified units. This makes identification difficult but estimates run around 25,000 in Confederate uniform.

If you have been told that Maryland was really, at the heart, a Confederate state, pause for a moment and consider those numbers. It was easy for white Marylanders to stay safely north of the Potomac while running their mouths (or their printing presses) about Southern rights and Lincoln-the-tyrant. Men who actually fought for the Confederacy were not fond of that kind of Marylander. After the war, many stay-at-homes were magically transformed into Rebels—including a few Magruders.

Magruders in the Civil War

Magruders began emigrating out of Maryland in the 18th century. By 1861, their descendants, of various surnames and scores of family lines, were sprawled across the country, mostly in the south. It is impossible to estimate their numbers, let alone their Civil War service. Searching only for those named Magruder or McGruder provides a cross-section of their allegiances and choices. Ancestry’s database of “U.S., Civil War Soldiers 1861-1865,” for example, yields 275 Magruder and McGruder men, of whom 150 were Confederates. An impressive sixty-eight served in regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), leaving just fifty-seven white Magruder soldiers for the Union.

Most accounts of war service focus on officers, but the “contrasting dye” of Magruder descent cuts through that bias to uncover the lives of at least a few enlisted men. Here are two of them.

Edward W. Magruder & Arthur Robinson

Among Maryland Magruders who served as privates in the Confederate army was Edward Walter Magruder (1840-1886), son of Caleb Clark Magruder (1808-1884), a prominent Prince George’s County attorney who would raise his voice in defense of Maryland slaveowners throughout the war. In 1860, C. C. Magruder owned $50,000 in real estate and $40,000 in personal property, including thirty slaves.

Edward, a graduate of Georgetown College, served first as a bugler in the 1st Maryland Artillery. In March 1863, still a bugler, he transferred to Company E of the 1st Maryland Cavalry. Two months later, on 12 June, as the Army of Northern Virginia was advancing toward Maryland on its way to Pennsylvania for what became the Gettysburg campaign, his detachment was surprised by Union troops near Winchester. Of ninety-two men, the Baltimore Sun estimated that twenty-five were killed or wounded and twenty-nine taken prisoner, Edward among them. Two days later the prisoners reached Baltimore where they were confined at Fort McHenry until the twenty-sixth, when they were sent to Fortress Monroe—the Union toehold in Virginia at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay—for a prisoner exchange.

POW records describe Edward W. Magruder as a musician, twenty-two years old, five-foot-four, with dark eyes, hair, and complexion. Though exchanged, he was not quickly back in the saddle. In August he wrote to a friend requesting help getting reimbursement for the horse, sixty-dollar saddle, and hundred-dollar brace of Navy repeaters lost to the Union at Winchester. These valuable possessions (more than $4,000 in 2026 dollars, plus the horse) highlight the fact that Confederate cavalrymen, even privates, had to supply their own horses and weapons. Poor men didn’t ride for the South. “I am entirely dismounted,” Edward wrote, “and unless you can do something…why my cavalry days will have ended.” Edward W. Magruder survived the war, married twice, and died in 1886.

When the war broke out, Edward’s brother, Caleb Clark Magruder Jr. (1839-1922) was just completing his law degree. He would stay in Maryland to follow in his father’s footsteps. When the Federal draft was instituted, in March 1863, he signed an oath of allegiance to the Union, registered as required, and in 1864 found himself drafted. No worries for Caleb though—he would quickly take advantage of one of the Lincoln policies so hated by his father: the inclusion of African Americans in the pool of eligible recruits.

The most common way to escape the Union draft was to find a substitute. You could pay someone directly to take your place or cough up a $300 bounty for a substitute to be found. This led to a popular belief among Southerners that a majority of Union soldiers were cynical “bounty men” with no interest in the issues at stake in the war. Scholarship debunks that, but can’t stop Lost Cause adherents from passing it around the internet as fact.

In Confederate states, draftees had no such option. By the end of the war, all men from eighteen to fifty were subject to the draft. Money and class still counted but the bar was well above $300. The hated “twenty n____ rule” exempted men who owned or were overseers over twenty or more enslaved workers. Benjamin Henry Magruder, a Virginian whose parents had left Maryland in the 18th century, was among those who pushed the bill through the Confederate legislature.

In Maryland, meanwhile, no man of means would ever need fight unless he chose to. C. C. Magruder Jr. chose not to. In his place went another Marylander, thirty-seven-year-old Arthur Robinson. Records I have seen do not specify whether Robinson was free or enslaved. Maryland enslavers who were drafted sometimes sent one of their own captive laborers to fight in their place but we don’t know if C. C. Magruder was one of them.

Enrolled on 27 August 1864, Arthur Robinson would have just fifteen days to get used to army life before joining his unit, Company H of the 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, in the trenches at Petersburg. He was fortunate to join after General Grant’s bloody Overland Campaign, when the 19th endured six battles in two months, and after the disastrous Battle of the Crater, at Petersburg, where black troops were mercilessly slaughtered. Though twice hospitalized he also evaded death by disease.

Like many black soldiers Robinson would serve well beyond the surrenders of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox and Joseph E. Johnston in Georgia. In Texas, where a few die-hard leaders hoped to pull Mexico into the rebellion’s death-throes, fighting simmered on. With a three-year enlistment commencing in 1864, Robinson—like thousands of other black soldiers—would serve longer in Texas than anywhere else, at last mustered out with his regiment on 15 January 1867.

If you are a descendant of any of these men, or know more about them than I do, I would very much appreciate hearing from you.

Sources

1860 Census, Maryland, Prince George’s, Marlboro, p. 484 (no stamp), line 30, dw 999, fam 1022, C.C. Magruder. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7667/records/53991592 : 13 Jan 26.

1860 Slave Schedule, Maryland, Prince George’s, District 9, page 452 (stamped) , C. C. Magruder https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7668/records/91870149?tid=&pid=&queryId=0c9ca8ca-cc64-4b3e-8328-b00f50e3fbe9&_phsrc=RJs39&_phstart=successSource : 13 Jan 26.

Civil War Service Records (CMSR), Confederate, Maryland, 1861-1865, pub. M321, NARA, RG 109, Company Muster Rolls, First Maryland Cavalry, Edward W. Magruder, Fold3, https://www.fold3.com/file/113328025 : 25 May 25

CMSR, Prisoners of War record, 26 Jun 63, Edward W. Magruder, Fold3, https://www.fold3.com/image/113328031/magruder-edward-w-page-7-us-civil-war-service-records-cmsr-confederate-maryland-1861-1865 : 27 May 25.

Edward W. Magruder to Waller S. Taylor, 25 Aug 1863, Fold3, https://www.fold3.com/image/113328036/magruder-edward-w-page-12-us-civil-war-service-records-cmsr-confederate-maryland-1861-1865 : 27 May 25.

Robert  J. Driver Jr., First and Second Maryland Cavalry, C.S.A. (Charlottesville: Howell Press, 1999), 257.

“Local Matters: Confederate Marylanders Killed, Wounded and Captured,” Baltimore Sun, 15 Jun 1863, 1, Newspapers.com.

“Benjamin Henry Magruder, by His Children,” ACGS Yearbook, Gathering of 1921, edited by Egbert Watson Magruder (Charlottesville, Mitchie Co., 1922), 55.

Robert Summers, Maryland’s Black Civil War Soldiers: 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, Kindle edition (N.p.: self-published, 2020), 9-11, 933.

19th US Colored Infantry, Misc. Cards, D-Y, CMSR-Union-Colored Troops 14th-19th Infantry, 1861-1865, NARA, RG 94, Arthur Robinson, Fold3.com (https://www.fold3.com/image/264866247/robinson-arthur-page-1-us-civil-war-service-records-cmsr-union-colored-troops-14th-19th-infantry-186 : 12 Jun 25).

The “Contrasting Dye” of Family

So, I was lying on the table as a tech got me ready for a CT Scan, and asking questions. He confirmed what I had assumed: that the intravenous contrasting dye goes everywhere your circulatory system goes. How the results are read depends on what the radiologist looks for, which in turn depends on what the doctor asked for. If he needs information about your kidneys, the report won’t mention your lungs.

This got me thinking about genealogy and family research–the question of “what’s there” vs. “what we’re looking for.” Some people inject “Magruder” into archival records, into a community, into the body politic, to find illustrious connections. I get a small but steady trickle of messages from people interested in royal descent, for example, which doesn’t interest me at all. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some just want to identify a great-grandmother. Sometimes I can help with that, not always.

When I started my Magruder book project I wanted to see what an injection of “Magruder” would show about my family’s involvement in slavery. As neither family trees nor archival records have a natural boundary like that of a single human body, I decided my circulatory system would be limited to Maryland and D.C., with occasional excursions to Virginia.

Within that body of evidence, I would look at two questions.

First, would I find that my relatives and other Magruder descendants had taken part in every aspect of the pernicious institution, from manumissions to slave trading?

Some answers so far:

Claims by descendants (including my grandmother) that an ancestor “freed his slaves” far outnumber manumissions that are visible in the records. The 19th century requirement that free blacks in Maryland carry papers proving their status means that, at least within the time span of that law, the answer is not ambiguous. (My great-great-grandfather, it turns out, was living in D.C. at the time in question, so I am still researching his story.)

And, so far, I have found just one man who (according to one of his half-siblings) signed on as driver for a slave trader trafficking people to the Deep South. Magruders did do business with slave traders, however, both buying and selling human beings. More than a million people were trafficked from the Upper South to the Deep South between 1808 and Emancipation, including a substantial percentage of people enslaved in Maryland and Virginia, and the sale of healthy, young workers was lucrative. Magruders did not stand apart from this reality. In a few cases, Magruders who advertised people for sale (in between ads for hay, cattle, furniture, and shoes) took steps to ensure that they could not be removed from the state.

Second, would my search paths illuminate the lives of any of the thousands of people who were enslaved by Magruders and descendants, from the 1660s to the 1860s?

The answer so far:

A few. The best resources are the so-called Slave Statistics compiled from 1864 (date of Maryland Emancipation) to 1869. These are the affidavits sworn by enslavers who hoped that either the state or the Federal government would compensate them for the loss of their captive laborers. Filing required a second affidavit affirming that the filer had remained true to the Union and not supported the rebellion–which, of course, many could not or would not swear to. The whole process was voluntary and aspirational–compensation did not materialize–so the record is partial, but the affidavits provide each enslaved person’s first and last name and age. This is a tremendous head-start for descendants who are researching their family trees–full name, approximate age, and last enslaver. In some cases, family groupings are clear. Once those relationships have been established, the next question is: how do we get to the next generation back?

A large part of my research in the last ten years has focused on helping with that question by connecting the Slave Statistics for Prince George’s County to the probate, land, and tax records of enslavers. In some cases I have been able to assemble known or likely family lines and siblings by tracing them through several generations of white family records. I have posted about this before and will do so again. In my book, I sometimes pause the narrative to provide explicit information about “Following the Lines” of these families.

And then, of course, I am too curious for my own good.

People, places, events…things surface in my reading that I just have to learn more about. Rabbit holes turn into tunnels. Or should I say that what I thought was a capillary turns out to be an artery.

Which is how the Civil War / Emancipation era came to dominate my research for the last…well, it might be three years. Working title for that section of the book: “When Everything Happened.”

So, it’s time to share. Starting now, I will try to post at least once a week about something in my research. I’m starting with Civil War soldiers–both Yanks and Rebs, most white, two black–whose lives I never would have known about had they not been illuminated by the “contrasting dye” of Magruder descent.

Passing of Lucille Osborne, Presiding Spirit of the Alabama Black McGruders

It has been a very sad year for McGruthers, McGruders, Magruders, and all who care about our history. In February, we lost Sue Emerson, author of the monumental genealogy project, Magruders in America. In October, Duncan (Don) McGruther left us. Back in the 1990s, Don’s thorough search of Scottish records disproved the American belief that Alexander the Immigrant was a member of Clan Gregor. He actually set out to prove the relationship, but found nothing to support it and much to suggest it was impossible. Along the way he uncovered the details of MacGrouther history–all 500 years of it.

(Both Don’s book, Wha’s Like Us? : MacGrouthers in Scotland before 1855 and Sue’s Magruders in America will soon be available through this site. Watch for an update.)

Now Lucille Osborne, matriarch and grand spirit of the Alabama McGruder tribe, has departed this earth.

If you don’t recall Miss Lucille, you can meet her in my 2021 post “Miss Lucille & the Alabama Black McGruders win an Emmy!” or read her profile in the pages of J.R. Rothstein’s 2022 book, The Alabama Black McGruders. Through decades of shared research by the family, Lucille’s memories and discoveries, her encouragement, her persistence, and her positive attitude helped keep the ball rolling and the work joyful.

A memorial mass will be celebrated on Saturday, January 3, 10:00 Eastern time, at the Church of the Holy Family in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and live streamed on the church’s YouTube channel.

I understand that Miss Lucille’s obituary will be published after the service. I will update here with a link.

Magruder’s Landing Is Back!

Sincere apologies to everyone who has supported this site over the years, and to new visitors who may have been wondering if it has gone dead. 2025 was a very bad year for me personally, but I think I have my head back above water and can start afresh with the new year, once again posting research news, queries, and Magruder news.

Let this be a reminder to those of you who persist in believing that Magruder’s Landing has staff. Oh, don’t I wish! Maybe a professional genealogist, maybe a correspondence editor? No, friends, it’s just me–my obsessions, my curiosities, my hope to help those looking for ancestors and the contexts in which they lived.

Despite not posting, I have tried to keep up on messages and approving comments. If I missed you, please write again. And please keep the messages coming.

As you’ll see in my next post, it has been a hard road, as well, for the whole McGruther / McGruder / Magruder community. We have lost three trailblazers, visionaries who were also indefatigable researchers. They have given us the foundations, so let’s work together to keep the discoveries coming.

Sue Magruder & “Magruders in America”

Last month, Duncan (Don) McGruther let us know the very sad news that Sue Emerson, who compiled Magruders in America, the most comprehensive Magruder genealogy ever attempted, died on February 22.

I have been looking for an obituary, but without luck. I also have emailed her husband, Tim, at Sue’s email address, but received no reply. If anyone is in touch with Tim or other family, please let me know. Among other things, many of us would like to know if Magruders in America is still available.

Sue’s project–to find every recorded descendant of Alexander Magruder the Immigrant–took nearly twelve years of work and devotion. Long before comprehensive resources were available online she ransacked countless genealogies and local histories. She purchased records from the DAR and other organizations. She traveled the country with a scanner, visiting scores of archives and courthouses, piecing together the fabulous quilt of Magruder families. The resulting publication, Magruders in America, is a 1758-page PDF which Sue sold as a CD bundled with Duncan’s Wha’s Like Us: MacGrouthers in Scotland before 1855.

What an amazing gift she has left us!

Sue’s goal was impossible to achieve perfectly–imagine the number of names! of families! So, yes, there are errors. I use her work as a starting place, then look for documentation that proves or disproves her information. She has saved me hundreds–maybe thousands–of hours versus starting from scratch. And guess what–when someone gets in touch and asks if I can tell them something about their ancestor So-and-So, I always turn first to Magruders in America before moving on to other sources.

Those researching Alexander Magruder’s African-American descendants will not get the same kind of help from Sue’s work. Census records have preserved some evidence of people’s actual lives, but the persistence of anti-miscegenation laws meant that many generations passed before mixed-race marriages were legally recognized. Maybe your folks will be there, in more recent generations, but more likely the ancestral thread back to Alexander will have gone unrecorded and therefore undiscovered by Sue Emerson. However, few people find out much about their enslaved ancestors without also researching the people who held them in bondage, and for that work Magruders in America is invaluable. My personal approach is to look at entire extended families of slaveholders, tracking the multiple ways enslaved people were recorded and moved around among relatives. Needless to say, without Sue’s work mine would be infinitely more laborious and less productive.

Not everyone leaves a mark in this world. Magruders and other genealogists will always owe a debt to Sue Emerson.

Why should you obsessively check every possible source?

Because the answers aren’t always where you expect them to be. Because random stuff happens. Because an unrelated record may point to what you need. Here are four illustrations.

Proving a small but interesting detail: Reading estate papers for my g-g-grandfather’s older brother, Oliver Barron Magruder, who died in 1852, I found a receipt from the court for 25 cents for an unpaid fee at the courthouse, dating back to 1849. It confirmed that Oliver had been guardian to my ancestor, Fielder Montgomery Magruder, after their father died. In 1849, Oliver had distributed to Fielder what he had coming on his 21st birthday, but forgot to pay the 25-cent fee. It was paid by his estate in 1852.

Proving parentage: Fielder M. & Oliver B. Magruder’s grandfather was Haswell Magruder (1736-1811). One of Haswell’s sons, Samuel, was not mentioned in his will so most genealogists have missed him entirely. This causes additional confusion when researchers see his marriage, family, census, land records, tax records, etc., in Prince Georges County, and don’t know who this Samuel Magruder was. Some then conflate him with a different Samuel Magruder, from Montgomery County. I found confirmation of my Samuel’s existence and parentage in some of Haswell’s land records.

From 1789 to 1800 Haswell transferred slaves by name, and tracts of land by name to his children. For tracts of land surveyed in colonial Maryland the property’s name was part of its legal description and for generations continued to be recorded when properties changed hands. In 1789, Haswell gave part of “Berry’s Folly” to his son Samuel. (Two years later, he gave another piece of “Berry’s Folly” to another son, William, who is in the will.) Samuel died in 1826 and the estate was not quickly settled, so the 1833 tax records for Prince George’s (published by the P.G. County Historical Society in 1985) show “pt. of Berry’s Folly” as one of the tracts owned by “Samuel Magruder heirs,” close to land owned by William and another of their brothers. Samuel’s various records (including references to “part of Berry’s Folly”) then provided pathways to the estate of his widow, Anne, who wrote a detailed will in 1855. I am working on tracing enslaved families to emancipation through this line of inheritance. (I also, eventually, found records to confirm that the other Samuel Magruder stayed in Frederick and Montgomery counties and never moved to P.G.)

Proving divorce: From years of researching Roderick McGregor and the rest of the Prince George’s County family whose name was changed from Magruder to McGregor in the 1820s, I was convinced that Roderick and his wife, Anne E. E. Berry (widow Eaten or Ayten) had divorced. As I accumulated various records about them circumstances pointed to the year 1843. Unfortunately for me that was just after the legislature (whose records are online) delegated divorce cases to the county courts. County clerks did not index the Prince George’s court records at the time and case folders had been haphazardly boxed when the county transferred them to the Maryland State Archives, so a search was going to be daunting, if not impossible. Eventually (by which I mean in about twenty years) I narrowed the time frame to just a few months in 1843. With the help of an MSA archivist I found the court dockets for those months and–Eureka!–there was the McGregor divorce case!

Discovery! Vindication!

The archivist said that, armed with a date and case number, he could find and pull the case. You can imagine my excitement waiting for his next message! Sadly, he emailed with bad news: many folders were missing and McGregor v. McGregor was one of them.

So, what to do?

On my next in-person visit to the archives I combed many years of court dockets, noting every case showing either of their names. Most were irrelevant, but then…(drum roll, please!)…twelve years after they divorced, Roderick sued Ann and her brother. I pulled that case. Roderick wanted the court to stop Ann and her brother from digging a ditch that could have flooded part of his land. As part of the case his attorney submitted the entire transcript of their divorce case (presumably as evidence of ill-will) and it was duly entered into the record, with certification that it was accurate and complete. Hallelujah! I finally got to read the McGregors’ dirty laundry.

Finding an enslaved ancestor: A correspondent sought my help to identify the mother of an ancestor who was born in slavery and still a child at the time of emancipation. Her death certificate was unhelpful and those of siblings proved no more useful. We knew the last slaveholder’s name but probate records turned up nothing. Dead-ended there, I searched the name of a different slaveholder in the same family and found a newspaper advertisement listing people to be sold as part of an estate settlement. The little girl who started our search–the known ancestor–was named there as part of a family group with a woman and a boy. Since we knew the girl’s surname, I searched for the boy’s name with the same surname and found him in city directories after emancipation doing the same work he was noted for in the slaveholder’s records. It wasn’t proof that the woman in the ad was their mother but it was strong circumstantial evidence. The family was not sold, BTW, despite that advertisement–I found them in later records with the same slaveholder.

When AI Transcription Fails, Try Another Site

If you search on Ancestry for the sons of Haswell Magruder (1736-1811) in the 1810 census, you will probably find only Fielder (1780-1840) and William (1773-1842). Paging through the census images will reveal the other brothers, Samuel (abt 1765-1826) and Edward (1778-1842)–both quite readable, by the way.

Haswell’s daughters are also there, under their husbands’ names: James Moran, husband of Hester Beall Magruder (abt 1764-1832) and Adam Crawford (or Crauford), husband of his Sophia (abt 1771-1836). (Honestly, it looks like the girls just married the nearest man. Their choice or their father’s?)

All are in the “Scotland Ocean & Bladensburgh Hundreds.” The “hundreds” were the original districts, a terminology held over from colonial times.

But even knowing they were there, no amount of searching and no search engine trickery would cough up a result for Edward or Samuel.

…Until a big duh moment today, when I recalled the very different format on Family Search. It opens up a sidebar for transcriptions instead of a separate page, so you can scroll through both simultaneously. All I had to do was find Fielder and Haswell, on p. 53, and then scroll back to p. 50, where I knew the missing brothers were lurking. Both cleverly concealed, it turns out, under the transcriptions: “Ewd Maginden” and “Saml Maginden.”

When I entered those names on Ancestry, up they popped. I’ve entered alternate names for both, so hopefully future searches there will succeed.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9YY1-9YB4?view=index&action=view
Family Search link to p.50, Edward & Samuel — free
https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/91784:7613?tid=21996598&pid=1166242063&queryId=91e69e0f-145b-4239-a0f8-c8c129c6d69e&_phsrc=Gzo3198&_phstart=successSource
Ancestry Link to “Ewd Maginden” — requires a subscription

Adding one more person known to have been enslaved by Magruder descendant Walter W. W. Bowie

For those researching family among people declared by “Three W’s” Bowie in Maryland’s 1867 Slave Statistics, here is another record–and another surname–to consider. It surfaces just over the line in Washington, D.C.

Those enslaved in the District of Columbia were emancipated by the Compensated Emancipation Act of 16 April 1862. All slaves were freed immediately and slave holders had 90 days to file a petition for compensation. The website Civil War Washington has transcribed and indexed those petitions, with images of the original documents attached. When I posted about this, several years ago, I emphasized that because both owners and the enslaved frequently moved back and forth across state lines, this source should be searched for those with Maryland or Virginia roots…and here is a good example.

In 1862 one of those petitioning for compensation was a black man named Gabriel Coakley (or Cokely). Coakley had previously purchased the freedom of his future wife, Mary Calloway, and another woman, possibly his sister, Ann M. Coakley. Ann was purchased from John Larcum (or Larcombe) of Washington, D.C., in 1857, for the sum of $1. Mary Calloway was purchased in 1850 from Walter W. W. Bowie, of Prince George’s County. Petition of Gabriel Coakley

Like many before him, Gabriel Coakley’s earnings were devoted to freeing family members–an expensive but effective form of bootstrapping by which some families reached freedom. Those purchased were usually manumitted–often immediately–but ownership could also provide protection, especially in Washington, where the kidnapping of free blacks was terrifyingly frequent. Should a loved one need rescuing, proving ownership could be easier and more effective than proving freedom.

From Bowie’s deed to Coakley, it looks like Gabriel required help to get up the $350 he needed to free the woman he wished to marry, and thus protect their future children from being born into slavery. The deed mentions “current money to me in hand paid” as well as promissory notes from Gabriel Cokely and two other men. Gabriel discharged his debt to those men just one year prior to D.C. Emancipation.

More helpful to genealogists is that Bowie’s deed identifies Mary Calloway as “the same servant girl who belonged heretofore to Mary Weems late of Prince George’s County Maryland.” Mary Hall Weems was Bowie’s grandmother, through his mother Amelia Hall Weems, who married Walter Bowie.

Mary Weems wrote her will in 1840, but lived until 1849, with the inventory completed in 1850, the year Bowie agreed to sell Mary to Gabriel Coakley. The will names only a few enslaved people, and does not mention Mary Calloway, but she shows up on the estate inventory as Mary, age 21, valued at $500. From this we learn that though Bowie was not willing to free Mary for a token sum like $1, he did agree to let her go at a bargain price. What was his relationship with Coakley? I don’t know, but investigating that question might lead to more webs of family.

For Mary Calloway’s antecedents, you can take a deep dive into Mary Weems’ will and probate records, and then through her family. Vertically, her parents were Richard Bennett Hall and Margaret Magruder. Laterally, her brothers were Francis Magruder Hall and Richard Lowe Hall. You can start on my page, An Enslaved Community: Tracing Ancestors from 1867-68 Slave Statistics in P.G. County, where you will find links to key probate records and further info on how some of the enslaved were moved around among the white families–not always in ways you could predict.

By 1862, Mary and Gabriel Coakley had six children, from eleven down to one-and-a-half. Because Gabriel had never manumitted Mary, the children too were slaves in the eyes of the law. His petition for compensation thus included eight people–Mary, Ann, and all the kids–for a total of $3,300. In the formulaic language of the petitions, he describes their roles in the family.

  • Ann M. is an excellent nurse and chambermaid and at this time hired by Dr J C Riley of this city at $8 per month in his family. She is a moral, and a well behaved servant, stout & healthy.
  • Mary does all my cooking washing and ironing together with all my house-work [and is] moral industrious and temperate.
  • Mary Ann [eleven years-old] is a good childs nurse and is employed in my family.
  • All the rest of the above named servants are living in my family and I know of no moral, mental or bodily defect in either of them to depreciate their value.

Few petitioners received the full amount they requested–Congress had budgeted a million dollars, and commissioners had to parcel that out amongst claimants–so we should not assume that Gabriel got anything like $3,300. Even so, whatever sum he received can be looked at, however ironically, as a form of reparation.

Which is where this story began, for me, with an episode of Trymaine Lee’s podcast, Into America, “Uncounted Millions: The Power of Reparations,” in which he and family members explore what Mary and Gabriel Coakley’s descendants have accomplished, and continue to accomplish, through “the legacy of service and Black Liberation.”

Most emancipated people started with nothing, so it didn’t take much to get a leg up. Be it capital, literacy, or land, a family that received something–anything–got a running start at freedom. Lee’s podcast helps us imagine what might have been, had all freed slaves received…anything at all. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Most former slaves in D.C. left their enslavers immediately, and by 1870 70% of those emancipated had left the city. So even if your family has no known connection to D.C., I urge you to take the time to search these petitions. They are cross-indexed, with names of both enslavers and enslaved, and supporting documents are attached. In addition, each petitioner had to explain how they came into possession of each person–a researcher’s goldmine.