Grandpa

                                                            Grandpa

As I mentioned in a previous post, Earliest Memories, my mother Jim was named after her grandfather, James T. Rosser. Grandpa grew up in Cedartown, Georgia, before the Civil War. His parents owned a plantation there and slaves. Grandpa had a "play boy" named Nat, a slave his age who was his companion growing up. Jim didn't say so but I wonder if he was also a whipping boy. She was told that they were as close as brothers.

When "Grandpa" went off to fight in the Civil War, Nat went with him but ran away when the fighting started. He returned home saying that his young "master" had been killed. The family told this as a joke, as if Nat was a coward. It occurred to me that he might have had conflicting loyalties, or simply decided it wasn't his fight.

After the war Nat went to Texas with an uncle of Grandpa's, and apparently visited his old playmate as a free man, and an old friend, so maybe they were as close as brothers.

Grandpa had been educated at a military school, and Jim said that he always held himself erect, "like he had a poker up his back bone," because of his military training. He enlisted on May 6, 1862, for "3 years or the War." It was about a year after Secession.

Shortly after his enlistmant Grandpa became ill - possibly with malaria? - and was taken to an island off the coast according to the story Jim was told. There he was nursed back to health by a woman who ran a kind of hospital there. Grandpa always credited her for saving his life. The records are incomplete so we don't know if Grandpa returned to his original unit, but he wasn't there on the only other muster available, September and October, 1862.

About a year later, presumably after he had recovered his health, Grandpa returned to duty, but only for six months. Then he resigned. It was about the same time that General William Tecumseh Sherman's army moved into Georgia. As Sherman made his way through Georgia, he did go through the Rosser plantation. I doubt if Grandpa was there though. It would have been too dangerous. I rather think he went to Mobile, Alabama, to join his fiancee, Emily Bass. He and Emily were married in Mobile, and then returned to Georgia after the War.

Grandpa's family was treated leniently by Sherman's army. As the story goes, Sherman was destroying the crops and most of the buildings, so Grandpa's mother decided to try and save some of the family's wealth by hiding silverware and jewelry in her bed. When an officer came to the house - I don't know if it was Sherman or not - Grandpa's mother was in bed "sick." Fortunately the officer accepted her story. She saved the silver and she saved her home. 

I think the story is pretty remarkable because the Rosser slaves apparently supported the ruse. I'd like to think they were loyal because the Rossers had been good to them, but maybe they were just afraid of retaliation.

Grandpa was always addressed as "Captain Rosser" after the War, but according to his military records he was only a sergeant. He was proud of his service with the Confederacy. Jim said that Grandpa's uniform hung in the closet "until the moths ate it up." 

When Jim was little, probably five or six, one of Grandpa's cousins visited him - I think it was a Whitehead -  wearing a Confederate uniform. Jim said that Mamma told her she could sit with them if she was quiet, so she sat with her Grandpa while he laughed and talked with his cousin.

It was Grandpa's opinion that the Civil War could have been avoided. "It was started by some Hot Heads," he said. Grandpa also had a lot of respect for Abraham Lincoln. He thought that if Lincoln had lived, the Reconstruction period would have easier for the South.

After the War the Rosser family's fortune was gone. According to the story Mamma told, when the slaves came to Grandpa's mother asking for help she told them, "I'm as poor as you are." Actually that wasn't true. The Rossers still had their land, and they recovered. Grandpa and Emily intended to stick it out in Georgia, but something happened which changed everything.  

One day Grandpa met one of the family's former slaves on the road to town, and they started talking about the upcoming elections. For a while after the war the freed slaves were allowed to vote, at least until the southern whites regained control and figured out a way to disenfranchise them again. Anyway Grandpa was talking to the man about the upcoming election, when up came a "carpetbagger," the term used by southerners for northern opportunists who came south after the War to take advantage of the unstable conditions.

The carpetbagger told Grandpa he shouldn’t be telling the black man how to vote. An argument ensued, and then a fight. Grandpa knocked the carpetbagger down, and he didn't get up. Grandpa knew he was in trouble. He didn't stop to find out if the man was alive, he just ran home. Grandpa knew that he would go to jail, and with the hostile reconstruction government in power, he might hang.

That night he and Emily packed what they could fit into a wagon, hitched up the oxen, and took off. I don’t know what happened to the carpetbagger, and I don't know whether the authorities organized a search, but Grandpa and his little family escaped. They headed west toward Texas. Grandpa's brother Ed had settled there.

They made the journey in stages, travelling a hundred miles or so at a time. Grandpa would farm for a while, save some money, and then they would move on. They never made it to Texas though. They ended up settling in Indian Territory in 1888. Their journey had taken over 20 years.