Tracing my ancestor’s footsteps

The Rev. George W. Richardson
1824-1911

For a number of years, I've been working sporadically on a biography of my ancestor, The Rev. George W. Richardson (1824-1911), who was Methodist circuit rider in the mid-19th century and the white chaplain to a black regiment in the Civil War. He went on to found a school for freed slaves, what is now Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, one of the historically African American colleges.

For several years I've been retracing his footsteps, and I've written about this for the Alicia Patterson Foundation of Washington DC, which is a terrific journalism foundation that funded me in 1993 to write a book about Willie Brown, the powerful speaker of the California Assembly.

My biographical essay on my ancestor has just appeared on the Alicia Patterson Foundation website this week, and appropriately as we mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

I hope you'll get a chance to read it, and please lend me your thoughts either on this blog or on the APF website. You can read the full piece by clicking HERE. I greatly indebted to Margaret Engel and the foundation for its continued interest and support of my work these many years.

Here is the beginning of piece:

My journey to the crossroads
of race, faith and family in America:
Tracing my ancestor’s footsteps 

By James Richardson

CANTON, Mississippi – Federal Union soldiers fought here in 1864, riding south from Memphis looking to ambush and kill rebel troops, and disrupt their supply lines. Moving swiftly on horseback, the Union soldiers slept on a bluff on the night before a surprise raid on a Confederate-held bridge. It was not a particularly notable engagement and never made the history books. It was just one of many sharp and lethal encounters that would eventually dismantle the Confederacy and destroy slavery.

What was extraordinary about this engagement is that the Union troops were ex-slaves – an all-volunteer “colored” regiment. And one of my ancestors, The Rev. George Warren Richardson, a Methodist circuit-riding preacher, was the white chaplain – and also a volunteer – to this black Union regiment.

Not long ago, I traveled to Mississippi to walk on the same ground where my ancestor and his soldiers slept on the night before the raid. I was brought to this place by his writing; I was especially moved by his journal description of the camp that night:

“The voice of prayer from so many at the same time, made the place seem wonderfully sacred. I said ‘Surely God is in this place.’ This circumstance impressed me deeply.”

I could not be sure if this was the exact spot that he had described. But all that I learned on that trip convinced me he was here, or in a place like it near here.

My journey to Mississippi was one of many trips I have made in the decade attempting to retrace my ancestor’s footsteps. Other trips took me to Tennessee, Illinois and Texas, and to the banks of the Sacramento River north of where I’ve lived much of my life in California. Remarkably, George Richardson wrote about all of these places in his handwritten journal that has come down through my family and to me.

To read the rest, please click HERE.

A trip to Appomattox, a reminder of the consequences of war

Lori and I, and our house guest, Tony, took a road trip Friday. We were much in need of a day off, and realizing we have not done much to explore our new surroundings, we set out to rectify that situation.

Our tour guide for the day was Bill Bergen, a member of St. Paul's and an accomplished Civil War historian. We went to Appomattox Court House, the place where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysess S. Grant in April 1865, drawing to a close the most lethal conflict in American history.

Bill described for us how Grant's army chased Lee's army westward, finally surrounding Lee at this obscure stage coach stop in the rolling piedmont of central Virginia. The final battle was sharp and short, and Lee gave up rather than face certain annihilation.

Grant and Lee met for 90 minutes in a small parlor inside a house in the town of Appomattox Court House. What they said is lost to history, but Grant offered a "parole" to the Confederate soldiers, allowing them to surrender their arms and flags on the promise they would fight no more, and then he let them go home.

Lee accepted, and the next day his army marched into town, unit-by-unit, stacking their guns and shrouding them with flags. It took seven hours to complete the disarmament of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

The Appomattox Chamber of Commerce has long ago ballyhooed their town as the place "where the nation reunited," but it is really much more than that. The nation was reunited not as it had been before. Appomattox is where a terrible war ended, where slavery ended, and where Abraham Lincoln's vision triumphed "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Yet there is a sadness to this place. The sadness is in the graves of soldiers. The sadness is embedded in the historical markers that were attempts, long after the fact, to cast the war as a noble clash of noble principles. As Lincoln more aptly put it, "the prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully."

In fact, the war was a terrible miscalculation of Southern political leaders grossly underestimating their opponents, and a terrible miscalculation by Northern political leaders grossly underestimating the threat that they posed. The overheated political rhetoric of the time had real life consequences. Those who paid the price in blood were common soldiers and common people caught in the path of a horrific war through no fault of their own.

Here is the question for us: Can monuments like Appomattox better serve as reminders to us of the folly of resolving our differences by violence, either through arms or words? Can this terrible war long ago serve as a reminder to us that the overheated rhetoric of our own political conflicts has consequences? Can the ghosts in the soil of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, the Carolinas, and across this great land remind us of the cost of a civil war and how we should pledge to never repeat it?

Postscript: My great-great grandfather, George W. Richardson, served in the Union Army in Memphis. He was the white chaplain to a black artillery regiment. He understood well the stakes of the war for his men and for the nation, and this is what he wrote in his journal about the end of the war:

About 4 o’clock in the afternoon of April 4th the news of the surrender of Lee and the fall of Richmond reached Memphis. The city was illuminated and guns were fired and there was wild joy among all the Union men. It meant that the hardships of the field were about at an end. It meant that the soldiers, after an honorable discharge, could return to their families, and to their peaceful occupations. It meant that the thousands of prisoners who had languished in military prisons or in prison pens would at once be liberated, and breathe the air of freedom once more. It meant that the principles for which our nation had contended for four years had at last triumphed, and that America would henceforth be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. It meant that the four and a half million of men, women and children of African dessent [sic] would have a chance to become intelligent American citizens; and this class were very demonstrative in their joy.

The Saints of Autumn: Constance and her companions, the Martyrs of Memphis

This is not a pretty story, but it is a story of courage and faith, and is one of those times when the Church lived into the fullness of Christ's call to bring healing to those abandoned by the dominant society.

In 1878 Memphis was plagued by an outbreak of Yellow Fever. The city's leader's ordered an evacuation, and those who were able fled Memphis on every horse, cart and train they could find. Some 30,000 people ran for their lives.

Those left behind -- 20,000 people -- were mostly African American. They had no means to get out, and nowhere to go. They began succumbing to the Yellow Fever at a rate of 200 deaths a day. By the end of the epidemic, an estimated 5,000 people had died.

A group of Episcopal and Catholic nuns and priests stayed behind, rallied by Sister Constance at a cathedral girl's school. They tended to the sick and dying until they, too, succumbed to the plague.

Constance and her nuns are credited with saving thousands who survived. Constance and her companions have been ever-after known as "The Martyrs of Memphis." Today is their feast day in the Episcopal Church.

There is a monument and park dedicated to Constance and the Martyrs of Memphis along a bank of the Mississippi River in Memphis. It is located in an industrial part of town, on the edge of an historically African American neighborhood, and only a few blocks from the motel where Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated almost a century later. The park is located on the site of what was Fort Pickering in the Civil War.

Fort Pickering was soldiered by a black Union regiment, the 7th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. My great-great grandfather, The Rev. George W. Richardson, was the white chaplain to that regiment (all black regiments were required to have white officers), and he was posted with them at Fort Pickering in 1864-1865. He left at war's end, returning home to Minnesota, and then went to Texas where he founded a college for ex-slaves (Huston-Tillotson University in Austin).

Many of the black soldiers he served with mustered out of the Army and stayed in Memphis, rearing families and settling in the neighborhood that grew around the fort. These ex-soldiers and their families were doubtless among those who contracted Yellow Fever in the 1878 epidemic.

Finding Fort Pickering today is not easy. After the Civil War, the white citizens of Memphis dismantled Fort Pickering, stone by stone, in an effort to rid themselves of any memory that a black regiment had once been posted in their midst.

A few years ago, on a very windy day, I walked this hallowed ground where Fort Pickering had once stood. I tried to imagine the place as it must have been when my ancestor served there, but it was difficult to picture it as it once was. There was no marker showing it as the site of Fort Pickering; I needed a local historian-guide to show me the site.

Yet there was redemption in this: A monument to Constance and the Martyrs of Memphis is there at the place where Fort Pickering once stood. It seemed very right they are honored on this spot, and very right we remember them today.

The photos are from my pilgrimage to Memphis and Fort Pickering in April 2004, showing the monument and marker to the Martyrs of Memphis.