Tag Archives: Civil War

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.”


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).

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.