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Posted on Sun, Feb. 06, 2005
Secrets of the Sword
My journey into my family's past began 25 years ago. My mom said: You need
to know, your great-grandmother was black.
JIM MORRILL
Staff Writer
I held the sword for the first time last month.
The brass hilt has darkened with age. A filigree of twisted wire wraps the
sharkskin grip. The steel blade curves gently to a point, etched with vine
leaves and grape clusters and the letters "USC," for U.S. Cavalry.
At the bottom of its scabbard is a brass fitting. On each side is engraved a
name: E.D. Morrill.
My great-grandfather.
It was the sword he carried through the Civil War, and it was finally coming
back to his family. Until five years ago, I didn't know it existed.
The sword stayed with E.D. and his son for years, a silent witness to their
public and private trials. It disappeared almost a century ago, about the
time my grandfather did. Recovering it is a story of lost and found history,
played out over three generations and shrouded in racial taboos and family
secrets.
Searching for that history became a small obsession. Over the years I combed
through genealogies and courthouses, pored over census records and
microfilm. There have been discoveries and dead ends and moments of pure
serendipity.
Finding the sword was one.
Last month I drove up to the snowy Appalachian town of Princeton, W.Va., to
buy it from a collector. The trip took three hours.
Getting there had taken years.
An unexpected ancestor
When I was about 30, my mother confided a secret: My great-grandmother --
the mother of my dad's father -- was black.Growing up with blond hair and
blue eyes in a Midwestern family of Germans and Swedes, it was not something
I'd suspected. I thought it was interesting, but to mom it was serious
business. She thought I should know before I got married, lest some stray
gene pop out of the family pool and surprise us.
My dad refused to talk about it, and I knew not to press. He died three
years later, before I was curious enough to ask again.
By then there were no other relatives to ask. So I set off to find out
myself.
Around that time, my uncle had given me a copy of E.D. Morrill's regimental
history. A typewritten sheet inside gave a brief sketch of his life and the
story of his Civil War unit, the 15th Battery of Massachusetts Light
Artillery.
Edward Danforth Morrill was born on the Illinois prairie on July 29, 1837.
His family had migrated from New England but soon moved back. He was a
25-year-old mechanic in Lowell, Mass., when he enlisted in 1862. E.D. stood
5 feet 7 with brown hair and a beard that framed his gray eyes and broad
forehead.
He was the quartermaster sergeant in the 122-man unit commanded by a Lowell
attorney who also happened to be his brother-in-law. In March 1863, they
left Boston by steamer for New Orleans, captured by Union forces under
Admiral Farragut the year before.
To Northern eyes, the Crescent City was exotic but trying.
"This is the land of loose morals and easy virtue, hot weather, mosquitoes,
alligators, secessionists and other such vermin," wrote an officer named
Lorin Dame.
The 15th Battery saw 25 desertions the first month. Some blamed the captain,
described by Dame as a man of "ignorance, mulishness, vanity and folly."
E.D. was arrested after a dispute with an officer. Still, he was promoted to
second lieutenant that September, a commission that allowed him to buy a
shiny new officer's sword with a sharkskin grip.
The battery spent the rest of 1863 and most of 1864 in and around New
Orleans. For the last six months of the war, E.D.'s unit crisscrossed the
South from Little Rock to Memphis to Pensacola. In April 1865, it took part
in the siege of Fort Blakely outside Mobile. The fort fell April 9, six
hours after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Then the 15th Battery sailed up
the Alabama River and helped capture Selma.
Their war was over. The men returned to Boston and were mustered out.
Six months later, in January 1866, E.D. joined a new army of Northern
carpetbaggers who rushed to the conquered South in search of riches and
adventure. He took his wife back to Alabama and settled near the town of
Camden, in a bend of the Alabama River.
History in a sleepy town
More than a century later, in 1993, I drove down to Camden, halfway between
Selma and Monroeville, setting for the fictional trials of Boo Radley and
Atticus Finch in "To Kill A Mockingbird." A sleepy town in the heart of the
Black Belt, Camden is far removed from the antebellum prosperity that once
came from cotton and paddle-wheelers.
I went by the Wilcox County courthouse to look up old property records. Then
I drove out to visit a local historian who'd helped me gather contemporary
news accounts from E.D.'s era. She lived at the end of a dusty road in a
large decaying house with white columns, as much a part of the Old South as
she was.
She was cordial at first. But the more she talked about my
great-grandfather, the frostier she got. She didn't like what she'd found.
After the war
When he moved south, E.D. bought 4,000 acres on the Alabama River and
planted cotton. In 1869, his wife, Mary, died.E.D. got involved in politics,
becoming education superintendent in 1871 and tax assessor three years
later. In 1875 he rose to Deputy Grand Worthy Patriarch of the Sons of
Temperance.
Postwar Reconstruction was a tumultuous time in Alabama. With white
Democrats virtually disenfranchised, Radical Republicans like E.D. and their
black allies were in control.
In the 1870s Democrats began regaining power. In 1876 Republican Rutherford
B. Hayes won a disputed presidential election after promising to withdraw
Union troops from the South.
The next year E.D. stopped farming. He bought a tannery that turned leather
hides into boots and shoes.
One of his employees may have been a black shoemaker named John Haywood.
Haywood lived in Camden with his wife, Aggie, and six children including a
stepdaughter named Bellephine Palmer.
Sometime that decade, E.D. and Belle Palmer began a relationship. He was
about 40 and she was some 20 years younger.
In 1879, Belle gave birth to a son, Samuel Danforth Morrill -- my
grandfather.
For E.D.'s political enemies, still threatened by his coalition of white and
black Republicans, his relationship with a black woman was ammunition.
"The question for every intelligent and responsible white man to answer ...
is whether or not we should allow such a creature as Ed Morrill to name our
next congressman," Camden's newspaper, the Home Ruler, wrote in 1886. "Shall
he again be permitted to throw his dark mantle of niggerism over the homes
built in purety and honesty by our fathers?"
Days later the paper gleefully reported a split among Republicans that
included attacks on E.D. by members of his own party.
"They denounce him as the man who disgraces the negro race by living in
adultery with a black woman," the paper wrote. "One speaker was in favor of
a committee waiting on him and demanding him to skip [town]. ... The power
over the black race that he holds makes him a dangerous character."
Whether E.D. got run out of town or simply decided it was a convenient time
to leave, he and Belle were gone within weeks, taking 7-year-old Sam and the
sword with them. They eventually moved to Washington and settled into a
Capitol Hill row house.
Belle's family
A decade ago, I found their home, a narrow brick flat in a gentrified
neighborhood not far from the Capitol. A few blocks away, in the Library of
Congress, I found a genealogical chart E.D. had written in Alabama.
"The Morrills of the Seventeenth Century" traces the family back to two
brothers who came from England to Massachusetts in 1632. E.D. spent a lot of
time on family history. He once told somebody he'd compiled the names of
10,000 relatives.
While E.D. traced his family across an ocean, Belle probably couldn't have
tracked hers beyond Wilcox County, Ala. Years later, records from the
Veterans Administration helped explain why.
In Washington, E.D. clerked for the government while Belle worked as a
domestic. After he died on Christmas Day 1906 at age 69, she applied for a
widow's Civil War pension. But a minor discrepancy gave officials pause.
Their marriage certificate showed E.D. and Belle were married in Washington
in 1890. It gave her age as 30, which would mean she was born in 1860. She
claimed she was born in 1856, but said the only proof was in a long-lost
family Bible.
"There was no public record of births in the town," she wrote.
In an affidavit, she said she lived in Camden in 1860 and 1870. Pension
officials asked the Census Bureau to check. Her name didn't show up in
either census.
"If the pensioner was born in slavery," one official wrote, "her name would
not appear on ... the census of 1860."
The marriage certificate identified Belle as quadroon, or one-fourth black.
Recently I found Belle's mother, Aggie, in the 1870 Census. It said she was
black. Born in Camden in 1828, she, like her daughter, was almost surely a
slave.
A widow for 37 years, Belle lived modestly in Washington. One of her few
luxuries was an old pedal organ she would later leave to her church. She
died in 1943 and was buried on a hill alongside E.D. in Arlington National
Cemetery.
At the time of her death, she hadn't seen her only son in decades.
A little-known grandfather
We never knew much about Belle and E.D.'s son.I never even saw my
grandfather's picture until I'd graduated from college. All we knew was that
Sam Morrill attended Ohio's Oberlin College at the turn of the century.
Later he lived in Minnesota, where he married Esther Anderson on Christmas
Day 1909. The second of their two sons, my dad, Edward, was born in 1912.
Two years later Sam disappeared.
His wife took her sons back to her small hometown, 75 miles west of
Minneapolis. She died a few years later. The boys -- my father and my
uncle -- went to live with different relatives.
E.D.'s sword disappeared as well, falling to a succession of private
collectors in Minnesota, forgotten to our family.
Sam's story
Sam was probably drawn to Minnesota by some distant cousins. A 1906 family
newsletter reported that he was visiting relatives when he heard of his
father's final illness. He got back to Washington hours after E.D. died.
He returned to Minnesota, the sword probably in tow.
In 1993, I asked Oberlin College for any records on Samuel Danforth Morrill.
A college official told me they were marked confidential. I explained my
search and he agreed to release them.
A couple of weeks later, a thick packet arrived in the mail. Inside were
transcripts and yearbook pages that showed a husky young man in a football
uniform. The files, kept in the school's African American archives, also
contained notes to and from an alumni official who decades earlier had tried
to track down the lost member of the class of 1906.
"When in college," one note said, "Morrill was heavy-set, with dark
complexion and dark curly hair. He had a small amount of negro blood but
passed for white."
The description suggested a man caught between two worlds. No one knows why
Sam abandoned his family. But his biracial heritage may have had something
to do with it. "Passing" may have been a temporary disguise.
The correspondence included rumors that Sam lived under an assumed name
after leaving Minnesota. Another said he'd been shot in a card game in
Detroit. A note from the Detroit police reported no such record.
Like a buried time capsule, the file also contained two letters my dad had
written the school in 1939. At 27, he was looking for the father he never
knew.
"Any information you have that would help in locating him would be kindly
appreciated," my father wrote.
His second letter came two weeks later. It was marked `Confidential.' It
hinted cryptically at some discovery he had made.
"Please," he wrote, "don't under any circumstances try to look up dad's
mother."
For years my dad had known Belle only through letters. My mom once told me
that sometime that year, in 1939, he visited her for the first time in
Washington. When he realized the black woman who answered the door was his
grandmother, he nearly fainted.
Stumbling onto the sword
Five years ago, when I first asked the Veterans Administration for E.D.
Morrill's records, I was told they'd been checked out to St. Paul, Minn.,
for research by a man named Gary Bettcher. I didn't know him. So I
called.Why are you interested in my great-grandfather? I asked.
"Because I have his sword," he said.
Bettcher, who lives near Minneapolis, got the sword years ago after trading
a few World War II guns to another local collector. He's not sure where it
was before that. Our guess is it was sold by either Sam or the family he
left behind.
Bettcher, an amateur historian, knew the sword belonged in E.D.'s family.
After years of on-and-off negotiations, we finally met at the business
college he owns in West Virginia.
The sword links me to family members I've never known. It also connects me
to part of American history I had no idea I was part of. As a Peace Corps
volunteer in the 1970s, I lived along West Africa's Slave Coast among people
whose ancestors had been sold off in chains.
On Senegal's Goree Island, I walked by old stone cells that warehoused 20
million Africans waiting to sail into slavery. I didn't know that some of my
own ancestors might have been among them.
Family secrets aren't always revealed. Mysteries don't always get solved.
But now, holding my great-grandfather's sword, I know that what's lost can
sometimes be found.
Jim Morrill grew up near Chicago. He came south in 1979 and has worked at
the Observer since 1981. Contact him at (704) 358-5059;
jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com.
Looking for Civil War Ancestors?
Finding information is easier than ever. Here are some ways to do it.
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Has Union and Confederate war records and allows you to order them online.
Pension records are available only for Union veterans. But there are links
to state archives for access to more Confederate records as well as links to
other genealogical Web sites. Includes lists of private researchers. Go to:
the Civil War records page
THE CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SYSTEM
Run by the National Park Service, Web site contains the names of millions of
soldiers and sailors. Search individuals by name or get the official history
of their unit. Go to: http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/
soldiers.htm
ANCESTRY.COM
Subscription-only Web site offers access to census records, Social Security
death records and more.
Mormon libraries
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contains millions of records
of family histories. That's where I found microfilmed letters from a Civil
War veteran. In Charlotte, call (704) 509-6407.
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