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THE RECENT DEATH of Civil War historian
Sure enough, Shelby Foote, a Mississippi native, was the great-great-great-great-grandson of Fielding Lewis Sr. (1725-1781), proprietor of Kenmore and brother-in-law of George Washington. And Fredericksburg was the beginning site of his Lewis line.
But what started out to be a brief column on Foote's connection with Fredericksburg-area history turned me onto a path of discovery linking me up to my own Mississippi origins.
Shelby Foote was descended from Fielding Lewis Jr., whose spendthrift ways had gravely troubled his father. He ran through his inheritance in Frederick County, and left a widow and two needy daughters from his second marriage.
After their father's death in 1803, Robert Lewis, Fielding Jr.'s younger brother, became the girls' mentor. Robert was really the sympathetic linchpin of his family. He was living on the farm across from Fredericksburg that he had recently acquired from the estate of the late James Hunter, the owner of the Rappahannock Forge.
Robert named the farm Pine Grove, as it is known today. (Because of many 19th-century rearrangements, its history has been confused with the Washington farm, which it adjoined.)
Several marriages of the next generation of Lewises took place there before Robert Lewis moved to Fredericksburg, where he served as mayor in the 1820s. On Wednesday evening, Nov. 15, 1809, according to the Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, Fielding Jr.'s daughter Catharine and Henry Chew Dade were married at Pine Grove. Shelby Foote was descended from that marriage.
By 1835, Catharine and Henry Dade were in the new county of Noxubee on the eastern boundary of the new state of Mississippi. Except for the fertile delta, Mississippi was mostly Indian territory when it was admitted to the Union in 1817. But between 1830 and 1835, the Indians lost their lands by "treaty." This accounts for the influx of population in that decade. Sixteen counties, including Noxubee, were created in one day, Dec. 23, 1833.
In November 1836, their daughter Lucinda married Hezekiah W. Foote, another newcomer from Virginia. He became a judge and a prominent landowner, as well as the patriarch of this Mississippi clan.
I was quite surprised to discover the Footes and Dades and other families from the Fredericksburg area among Mississippi's early population. The state had been patched together in 1817 from parts of the Mississippi Territory created in 1798, some of it by treaties wresting land from the Indians, and 26 miles of coastline acquired from Spanish Florida together with the Natchez area.
From my Virginia studies, I knew that the Dades and Footes had been very early (17th-century) arrivals on Chotank Creek, which flows into the Potomac River in King George County. By the 18th century, the intermarriage of Dades, Footes, Townshends, Washingtons and other families in this most interesting community had already created an interlocking genealogy.
These were the Washington cousins with whom Augustine Washington and his brother John and sister Mildred grew up when they were brought home from Whitehaven, England, in 1704 after their mother died.
George Washington was very fond of his Chotank relations. His cousin Lund was his overseer at Mount Vernon during the Revolutionary War. Just last year, Mount Vernon created a role for his wife--Elizabeth Foote--as a living-history portrayer of events there.
These genealogical digressions can become mind-numbing. Fielding Jr.'s second wife, for example, was a Dade, so their daughter Catharine was part Dade before she married Henry Chew Dade at Pine Grove. A book called "Chotankers," written in 1981 by Edwin Foote, is still available to anyone who aspires to understand these entangled relationships, which had more than genealogical consequences.
It was because of my acquaintance with the Chotank families that I recognized the Virginia names in Shelby Foote's lineage. They were part of the generation who departed from their 18th-century world, attracted to the opportunities in Mississippi being opened by treaty. With their close-knit ties, the Dades and Footes and assorted relatives created a community in Noxubee County.
With my consciousness raised, I then found that there were other early Virginians from our area in the new state. One of my high school classmates in Gulfport, after reading my book on the Washingtons and Lewises, had sent me her personal research on Washingtons on the Gulf Coast. They proved to be the descendants of Warner Washington, close kin and neighbors of Fielding Lewis' children in Frederick (now Clarke) County.
With a large number of children from two marriages, Warner Washington Jr. evidently could provide little opportunity for his younger offspring. I have a copy of an 1824 land plat surveyed by Henry Washington, one of Warner Jr.'s youngest, for a parcel in the new county of Harrison on the Gulf Coast. And there were several other Washingtons in the central part of the state, some of whom moved on to Texas.
From my own book research, I must add the unusual story of Roger Dixon Jr. , whose father, along with Fielding Lewis, had been granted permission by the Virginia Assembly to expand Fredericksburg in 1759. Lewis profited. Dixon died bankrupt. A Bristol merchant foreclosed on all his properties in 1772, but was prevented by the war from recovering them. After the war, Dixon Jr. slipped back into Fredericksburg, sold what lots and parcels he could for ready cash, and disappeared--to the Mississippi Territory. His descendants have followed our local 18th-century history with great interest and have contributed their subsequent family story.
To end our story with Shelby Foote's lineage, Lucinda Dade and Hezekiah Foote of Noxubee County produced many children, including the youngest Huger Lee, who married Kate Shelby. They were the parents of Shelby Dade Foote, who was the father of Shelby Foote, who grew up in Greenville on the Mississippi River, where there were early sparks of intellectual and artistic liveliness that must have engaged him.
Perhaps the early Mississippi families, and others from the Southern states, aspired to a lifestyle reminiscent of their forebears, for they quickly developed an economy based on cotton and a caste system dependent on a large slave population. In 18th-century Virginia, the vital crop had been tobacco, but the early laborers were indentured servants who earned their freedom; slavery came later. In Mississippi, by 1860, more than 50 percent of the population were slaves.
Mississippi's birth came at a crucial point in our country's history, when the states being created from the new territories were permitted to be slave owning. It did not take long for this to become the issue that divided the nation. Mississippi would become the second state to secede from the Union at the beginning of the Civil War.
At the end of the war, more than 4 million slaves were emancipated nationwide.
In Mississippi, there followed a devastated, bitter and enraged society, with no resources to recover either emotionally or economically. Yet within a generation or two, this tragic backdrop seems to have spawned an unusually gifted group of 20th-century writers who were sensitive to the legacy of their state's conflicted past. Surely, there is food for thought and for scholarship in the demographics and cultural heritage linking Virginia and Mississippi.
PAULA S. FELDER of Fredericksburg is a historian and author specializing in the area's 18th-century past. Contact her by e-mail in care of gwoolf@freelancestar .com.
