The Invading Past, 46th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): In 1865 (Gregorian calendar; 365 by the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar), after the end of the Civil war and the death of Abraham Lincoln, the discpicable Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the united snakes of amerika. A lifelong slaveholder, Johnson purchased his first slave, Dolly, when he was 14 years old. 

That same year, Hannah Lide Hart, the estranged widow of Captain Thomas E. Hart, owned and operated the Plantation at Cashua Creek. She kept 35 slaves on her plantation, some as young as 9-year-old Furman, a field laborer who most likely picked cotton. Another field laborer was named Eli, born in 1835. Eli wasn't emancipated from slavery until 1865, two years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, as the nationwide abolition of slavery didn’t occur until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865 when Eli was 30 years old. 

Eli had married Henrietta, another slave, around 1859, and a year later she gave birth to a son, Silas. This next part is extremely indelicate, so I'm just going to blurt it out and try to move on through it as quickly as possible: Eli may or may not have been Silas' father. Plantation rape was a thing, and in the one photograph I've seen of Silas, he had notably light skin. He didn't look like the son of two African slaves in the picture. Among the possibilities regarding Silas' parentage, Eli may have married a pregnant Henrietta after she had been raped by a plantation owner or employee, kindly providing her support, stability and a measure of respectability. Alternately, her rapist may have impregnated her shortly after their wedding. Another possibility is that either or both of Eli and Henrietta were themselves products of plantation rape and either or both had already inherited the light pigmentation of the owners. I've not seen photographs of Eli or Henrietta.

I bring this up only because Eli and Henrietta are my great-great grandparents. I'm an old man, but it still blows my mind that I need only two generational "greats" to reach all the way back to the Andrew Johnson administration and the 1860s. Many people hold many strange opinions about me, but to date no one has ever assumed I was anything other than white. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. once noted, "the inheritance of melanin is an uneven business." 

As I pointed out yesterday, I inherited my last name, but not necessarily my blood, from Captain Thomas E and Mrs. Hannah L. Hart. However, it's more likely than not that someone on that Plantation at Cashua Creek managed to get some Caucasian DNA into my bloodline. It might have been the old Captain himself, or it might have been his son, Dr. Robert Lide Hart, who ran the plantation with his mother, Hannah, after the Captain died in 1842. For that matter, it might have been any random white guy on the plantation with access to the enslaved. 

There's uncertainty about the specifics, but any way I look at it, I probably got my last name from the men who raped by great-great grandmother.

I said yesterday that these were not good people. 

After the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau, officially known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was given the task of drafting labor contracts between the newly emancipated freedmen and the former slaveholders. Genealogical research on African Americans typically encounters an “1870 brick wall.” Prior to 1870, the U.S. Federal Census did not include African American slaves, and the Freedmen’s Bureau labor contracts are frequently the only window through that wall. 

Some, but by no means all, of the records for the labor contracts are posted on line. They're handwritten  and unsorted, making review an extremely tedious and difficult process. However, I had the extraordinary good luck to almost randomly find the 1865 records of the Darlington Field Office of the Freedmen’s Bureau on line, and some kind and patient person had even typed out all the names. For Hannah Hart's Plantation at Cashua Creek, 35 "laborers" were identified, and by first names only. Those first names included Eli.

Following emancipation, many former slaves adopted new names and surnames. As explained by one ex-slave in the 1930s:

The master's name was usually adopted by a slave after he was set free. This was done more because it was the logical thing to do and the easiest way to be identified than it was through affection for the master. Also, the government seemed to be in a almighty hurry to have us get names. We had to register as someone, so we could be citizens.

Therefore, and following the naming convention, the "Eli" that appeared in the 1865 Field Office records at Hannah Hart's Cashua Creek Plantation was most likely the "Eli Hart" later identified in the 1870 Federal Census for Jacksonville, Florida. Eli's son, Silas, was also listed in the Census, and later biographical information on Silas notes that he was originally from Darlington, South Carolina. 

Eli and Henrietta had three children, Silas, Julia, and Sarah during their time on the plantation. Even after emancipation, Darlington County could not have been a pleasant or safe place for the family. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment did nothing to address the myths of racial hierarchy that underlie slavery. Black people were free under the law, but that did not mean whites recognized them as fully human. Nationwide, but particularly in the South, white identity was grounded in an assumption that they are inherently superior to African Americans. In South Carolina, as elsewhere, white Democrats lead a postwar campaign to maintain their white supremacist empire. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865, entrenched itself in the state.

 

By contrast, Jacksonville and parts of northeastern Florida had been under Union control for much of the Civil War, and the area was the site of a large Union garrison. After the war, Jacksonville and its neighboring suburbs attracted many freedmen, some of whom had left rural areas and plantations to relocate there. By 1870, Eli fulfilled whatever remaining obligations he had on his Freeman’s Bureau contracts and moved his family out of South  Carolina, and took them down to Jacksonville and out of harm’s way.  

Hansontown, a Jacksonville neighborhood characterized by its narrow street grid and shotgun houses, was the brainchild of one Daniel Dustin Hanson, a surgeon with the 34th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry. Established in 1866 as a communal farming community for freedman and black Civil War veterans to grow and sell crops, Hanson’s vision never materialized due to his death in 1868.  Nevertheless, Hansontown grew, eventually earning the nickname “The Bottom.”

 

Eli found work as a brick mason and settled his family into a home in Hansonville at the corner of Orange Street and Julia. Due to subsequent development and urban renewal, Orange and Julia no longer intersect today, and the downtown campus bookstore of Florida State College now occupies the likely location of Eli’s former home.

One can imagine these were happier times for Eli and Henrietta, although being happier than slavery is setting the bar pretty damn low. While in Hansonville, Eli and Henrietta welcomed two more daughters, Josephine and Carrie, into their family. Julia, their oldest daughter, eventually got married and moved out of the family home. Once he came of age, Silas, their son, joined his father in the masonry business.

Henrietta passed away on October 9, 1879. Impermanence is swift. Eli remarried, this time to Millie, around 1883. Millie (maiden name unknown) was originally from Tennessee and was 51 years old at the time of the wedding. Eli was 48. By 1886, Eli and Millie had a home on State Street in Hansonville and all of Eli’s children except for the youngest, Carrie, had moved out of the house. 

Eli and Millie left The Bottom in 1893 and moved to Clay Street near West Ashley in the relatively upscale neighborhood of LaVilla. The population of LaVilla was mostly Black, and many African Americans were elected to positions in LaVilla's government, including mayor and councilmen.  LaVilla developed as a distinct neighborhood of Jacksonville and was recognized at one point as “The Harlem of the South.”  

Eli followed Henrietta to the grave on June 13, 1894, age 59. Impermanence is swift, but he managed to live long enough to see at least one grandchild, Silas Junior, be born in 1889. 

One final note about skin color. The 1870 Federal Census listed Eli and the rest of the family living in Hansonville, The Bottom, as “Black.” The 1880 Census listed the children using the antiquated term “mulatto,” although Eli himself was still listed as “Black.” However, an 1885 Florida State Census listed Eli not as “Black” but as “mulatto.” 

Race is largely a social convention rather than a fixed ethnic identity, and I have no idea about the training and guidance that 19th Century census workers were given in the postbellum South. My suspicion is that a family living in The Bottom were identified as "Black," because that's where Black people lived. The later Census identified the non-threatening (to them) children as "mulatto," but the adults as "Black," and once the family was out of The Bottom and in a more upscale neighborhood, they all appeared "mulatto" to the Census counters.