Solomon Yancy Whittington and Mary A Hogins, an Expanded View

Solomon Yancy Whittington (his name was spelled Whittenton in later records) was born in Wake County, North Carolina on 20 July 1813, the eighth child of James and Frankie Whittington. He was named after his father’s younger brother Solomon, and Yancy was also a recurring family name. His older siblings were William, Richard, Agatha, Telitha, Gibson, Weston, and George, ranging in age from 14 to 2.

When Solomon was perhaps about 5 years old, the family gained a slave named Dolly from Solomon’s maternal grandfather’s estate. Soon his father purchased another slave, a young man who worked in the fields. Solomon grew up helping his father and older brothers with the farm work.

He appeared on the 1820 and 1830 census records living with his father’s family in Johnston County, North Carolina. By then the family had grown to include thirteen children, but the eleventh child had died young. Solomon’s father had sold the male slave and bought or otherwise acquired another female (she might have been Dolly’s daughter). All nine sons apparently worked as farmers and learned to do all the hard labor associated with farming in those days.

The family moved from North Carolina to Madison County, Tennessee, in about 1838 when Solomon was around 25 years old. He was living in Madison County near Jackson in 1840 with his father’s family when the census was taken that year.

The young man seemed to have gotten into some trouble over a young woman soon after the move, for in 1841 Solomon had to appear on a charge in civil court that he was the reputed father of the child of a woman named “Louvisey Manor” in McNairy County, which was not far south of the Whittington home in Madison County. However, the court ruled that since the woman and child in question had been continuously residing in McNairy County for the two years since its birth, the Madison County Court refused to have jurisdiction over the case and it was dismissed. Nothing more is known of whether this really was Solomon’s child, and it is further not known whether he ever paid anything to the mother.

There could be some truth to the story—probably Solomon did have some relationship with the woman at least, but he never did acknowledge the child as his and nothing more was ever heard about it, so perhaps he was not the child’s father after all, or perhaps he paid the woman a sum of money as was common in such cases, and that was the end of his relationship to both. A search of the 1850 census records has not turned up any possible matches for these people. McNairy County does not have any court records from that time period, so far as is known, and there are very few other records in McNairy County other than probate and cemeteries that go back before 1850.

Still, Solomon ceased living in the family home after that and his sister Agatha came to live with and keep house for him, bringing a 13-year-old girl with her whose last name matched Agatha’s married surname. In that census, Solomon was reported to be 32, which shaved five years off his age. He had no property reported but was a farmer, so it is likely that he was working for his father next door.

Solomon seemed to be poorer at this point than most of his brothers. Even the younger brothers had more property than Solomon. Was he the family “black sheep” for having been hauled into court over a matter that was seen as staining the family honor? Or did he have to pay a substantial sum of money for the child, and was that seen as his portion of the family inheritance?

Solomon was supposed to have married Mary A. Hogins soon after the November 1850 census report, but another mystery surrounds their early relationship. Their eldest daughter, Valerie, reported her age in later census records so that she could have been born in 1849 or 1850. Her birthday was in March. But her reported ages do not fit with the 1850 Census report—there was no Mary and/or Valerie in Solomon’s household, and there was no Valerie Hogins or Whittenton anywhere in the county or the state recorded on that census. If she were born in March 1851, then certainly her mother was pregnant when the census taker recorded Solomon’s household. Either they were there in the household in hiding, or nearby but not recorded on that census; or Mary got together with Solomon soon enough after the census for Valerie to be born in March 1852, and then being illiterate, Valerie was unable to figure out her correct age for most of her life. No marriage record has turned up for Solomon and Mary, although all of the rest of his family have marriage records from before and after that time. Perhaps Solomon and Mary got married in a neighboring county, or they simply cohabitated and declared themselves married. This all makes Solomon look more like the “black sheep” of the family.

Mary Hogins is a mystery to us. She was born in either North Carolina or Tennessee in about 1820–25. Her last name comes from Valerie’s death record, so it is the memory of a grandson trying to recall what his mother (Valerie) had told him, and who knows whether what Valerie said was an accurate reflection of what Mary had told her many years before. There are several Hogins families in 1840 living not too far away in Dickson County, northeast of Madison County, and one of them could be Mary’s family. All contain females of the right age, but we need corroborating evidence. There are two or three other Hogins or Hogan families in nearby counties with single women named Mary of the right age range to be candidates, and finally, there is a Hogan family right in Madison County in 1850, living very near Solomon’s and James’ households, with a 25-year-old single woman named Mary in it, and this could well be our Mary, but all is still guesswork at this point. More research is needed, and some luck.

The next year, on December 20, 1851, Solomon’s father gave him fifty acres of land in Madison County, Tennessee. But a month before that, his father had given his younger brother more than twice that amount of land. It was registered on August 10, 1853 (probably right after his father’s death). The inequity is interesting. And the timing is also interesting—assuming Valerie was to be born the next March, perhaps Solomon had married Mary and was “rewarded” for it. We really can’t know what the truth was.

I’m going to give Solomon and Mary the benefit of the doubt and assume they married about December 1850 when they were 37 and 30 years. They had eight children:

• Valerie Jane Whittenton, born March 1852 in Madison County, Tennessee.
• William Whittenton, born 1853 in Madison County, Tennessee.
• Mary Ann Whittenton, born 1854 in Madison County, Tennessee.
• Frances Elizabeth Whittenton, born May 1855 in Madison County, Tennessee.
• Mary Jane Whittenton, born 1857 in Madison County, Tennessee.
• Jos Laney Whittenton, a daughter, born June 1860 in Madison County, Tennessee.
• Thomas Jabe Whittenton, born September 1861 in Madison County, Tennessee.
• Bedford Forrest Whittenton, born 1864 in Madison County, Tennessee.

The population schedule of the 1860 Census, taken September 6^th that year, recorded that Solomon was 46 (he was really 47), Mary, was 40; Valerie was 9, William was 7, Ann was 5, Frances was 4, Mary was 3, and Jos Lane was two months old. They had one man, Alex Dixon, age 50, living with them and probably working on the farm.

Meanwhile, the 1860 agricultural schedule, taken the day before, showed that Solomon had land worth $1000. He had no slaves despite having grown up with them in his father’s family, but then, his economic situation would not have allowed him to afford buying one even if he wanted to. Solomon had 30 of his 100 acres under cultivation. He had harvested 250 bushels of Indian corn, two bales of cotton, 19 bushels of wheat, and 25 pounds of sweet potatoes. His children were too young to help and he had a lot of work put in on that farm to have that much return, so perhaps besides Alex Dixon, he hired other workers, probably slaves, from neighbors. He had a horse and 2 working oxen, 3 milk cows and 3 other cattle, and 20 pigs. They had made 150 pounds of butter; his home manufacturing was worth $40, and the value of slaughtered animals was $72. Solomon’s total worth was $1400.

The effects of the Civil War on Solomon and his family are unknown, but it is apparent that their sympathies lay with the Confederate side of the conflict, as can be seen by the name of their last son, born in 1864, who was named after the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, under whose command Solomon’s younger brother Quintillian fought in the war.

Tennessee was seen by the Union as a strategic target because of its position as the uppermost Confederate state on the western side. Only in Virginia were more actual battles fought during the War; Tennessee land endured over 2,900 battles and skirmishes with over 122,000 soldiers on both sides dying in combat within the state. Tennessee was the last state to leave the Union, and it was the first to be controlled by Union troops once the war began.

Lithograph from Harper’s Weekly, Fall 1862

The Whittentons lived outside of the city of Jackson on the southeast. Jackson had early on been taken over by Union troops who stayed in the city to keep it against the Confederates. But Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in December 1862 decided he had to stop General Ulysses S. Grant’s progress down the Mississippi River, and to do that, he took his 2100 cavalry troops across the Tennessee River just north of Jackson on his way to Memphis to destroy a Union supply depot. On the way past Jackson, some of Forrest’s troops engaged with a few Union soldiers as a sort of distraction while the rest of his force destroyed the railroad tracks both north and south of the town. Then they withdrew and went on to Memphis. That was the sum total of the Battle of Jackson, in which six lives were lost.

The other battle close to the Whittentons was that of Parker’s Crossroads, over the county border in Henderson County and a little north of Jackson, which occurred when General Nathan Bedford Forrest was returning east with 1800 troops from Memphis. Two brigades of the Union Army of about 3000 soldiers surrounded Forrest’s cavalry at Parker’s Crossroads, before they could get to the Tennessee River. General Forrest ordered his army to split in two and charge both sides at once. They succeeded in forcing the Union troops to retreat, but at a cost of 500 of their own men, while the Union brigades suffered more than 200 casualties.

One of the worst battles of the war fought in Tennessee was the Battle of Shiloh, in Hardin County southeast of Madison County. To get to Shiloh in March 1862, the Confederate army under Gen. Beauregard moved southward to the west of the Whittenton lands and took the rail lines down to Shiloh. The Union army went down the Tennessee River to the east of the Whittenton lands, and the battle raged over two days in April of that year. It was an incredibly bloody battle, with over 13,000 Union soldiers and over 10,000 Confederate soldiers killed, but it was only a precursor to the three years of ferocious fighting left in the war. It resulted in a Union victory and allowed the Union army to capture Memphis right afterward. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant continued down the Mississippi River to Vicksburg, cut the South in half, and gained control over the Mississippi River. The Confederates lost General Albert Sydney Johnston, up to that time the leading general in the entire Confederate Army, at Shiloh.

Map of 1862 Western Theater, by Hal Jespersen, www.cwmaps.com

Tennessee was the site of one of the great Confederate victories, which happened in November 1864 under General Nathan Bedford Forrest, when he commanded his troops to destroy the Union naval depot at Johnsonville on the Tennessee River. Despite being a significant military coup, it was not instrumental in changing the tide of the losing battle the Confederates were waging.

All these battles within the state and with soldiers close to their own homes would have made the Whittentons very concerned about the war and its progress. Their state was under martial law and early in the war was turned over to their own Senator Andrew Johnson, who was the only Southern politician to remain in the United States Congress, and so President Lincoln appointed him the military governor of Tennessee when the Union Army gained control of its capitol.

Life was disrupted in many ways during the War. Slaves of course were set free, and although their freedom wasn’t official until the war was over, they mostly stopped working for the white masters, and the white men and women had to work in the fields as much as they could, even using little children to do adult chores to have enough food. Trade was disrupted, inflation soared, and deprivation was everywhere, even if their animals and food supplies were not seized outright by the occupying troops. There were many conflicts between the white southerners and the former slaves over how and where the newly-freed people would set up their homes, churches, and schools, and how their new labor contracts would be negotiated. All of these issues would be faced to some degree by the Whittenton family, if not during the war, then certainly during the Reconstruction period afterward. One effect of the war seems to be that Solomon came out of it poorer than he went into it, which is not at all surprising for the area, as Tennessee had been hard hit by economic problems due to the war.

Reconstruction in Tennessee was not as hard in some ways as it was in the rest of the former Confederate states, partly because Tennessee lost no time in rejoining the Union in 1866. The rest of the South was placed under federal military control. But the people of Tennessee had to struggle to learn how to work with one another, especially how to get black and white people to work together as free and equal citizens. Tennessee was the first Confederate state to give all African American men the right to vote, but the first election caused great conflict because many former Confederate white men were not allowed to vote. Many of the newly free black men voted for radical Republican measures, and nearly all the formerly Confederate white men wanted to vote for conservative Democrats. During Reconstruction, the radical Republicans won the first election and passed lots of controversial new laws, some of which were reversed when the Democrats regained power.

Early 1866, Central Tennessee

An uncomfortable fact was that the Ku Klux Klan got its start over in Pulaski, Giles County, near the middle of the southern border of the state. The Klan started as a social club for young white men, but within about a year it turned to violence against African Americans, radical Republicans, and former Union sympathizers. Separate dens spread quickly throughout Tennessee, with pockets all around Madison County being especially active. Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was appointed the Grand Wizard of the Klan in Tennessee. Governer William Brownlow declared martial law against Klan violence, including in Madison County. Brownlow left office. In 1869 Forrest called for all Klansmen to destroy their robes and disband, believing they had fulfilled their purpose in driving away the hated Republican. It is unfortunately reasonable to suppose that the Whittentons sympathized with the views of the Klan and its leadership. Tennessee people had a difficult time accepting the social changes.

Researcher Diane Bollert with the website “Too Many Branches” found that Solomon was listed as a member of a church in Jackson, Madison, Tennessee, as of August 1869. Presumably this was the Primitive Baptist Church, but the record is not available to us. This is an interesting tidbit to add to the picture of Solomon’s character. Perhaps he felt the need for some kind of settled spiritual or religious connection. At this time he would have been 56 years old and his wife almost 50. Their daughter Valerie was 18, William (if he were still living) was 16, Mary Ann was 15, Frances was 14, Mary Jane 12, Jos Laney was about 9 (if she were living), Jabe was almost 8, and Bedford was 5. It could be that William and Jos Laney had died, and their deaths stirred up a need in the family to look to matters of eternal significance. The two children died after September 1860 and before November 1874.

In 1870 the county census taker for the agricultural schedule came to the farm and found Solomon doing well, but with only half the land he had owned ten years before. In 1870 he had only 50 acres of land, of which 25 were under cultivation yielding 250 bushels of Indian corn, and 25 were woodland. The value of his farm was $800, and Solomon had paid out $50 in wages to his workers. His livestock, worth $800, consisted of  three horses, two mules or asses, one milk cow, three other cattle, eight sheep,  and twelve pigs. Inflation had hit, and although Solomon’s farm was half what it was in 1860, it was valued at more.

Curiously, the 1870 population schedule, taken by the same assistant marshall, recorded a completely fictitious family under the name of “S. Whittington.” Perhaps he had forgotten to make notes on the family after getting all the agricultural information, and rather than return to the farm a second time, he made up the information from what he could remember.

Solomon’s death was reported 8 December 1874 to the county court as follows: “Solomon Whittenton died about November 2, 1874; left wife and six children.” He was 61 years old.

The map below shows District 17 in Madison County in 1877, with the farm of Mrs. M.A. Whitenton, Solomon’s widow, right next door to the widow of Solomon’s father, Mrs. K. Whitenton. Rocky Springs to the immediate southwest was where many of the Whittentons were buried. Mrs. B. Whitenton to the northeast was probably Solomon’s brother George’s widow, Martha Elizabeth, whose nickname perhaps was Betsy.

Mary and her children were recorded in the 1880 Census on June 7^th. She said she had been born in North Carolina and was 54 years old, although she was probably older. The box for being unable to write is checked, so probably she had very little schooling and was not able to be accurate with dates and ages. Her daughter “M.A.” (Mary Ann) was with her and was recorded as 23 years old, but she was actually about 26. Her sons Thomas J and Bedford F were also there, working as laborers. They were reported to be 19 and 16 years old, respectively, although Thomas Jabe did not actually turn 19 for another three months. Mary died 20 December 1886, at the age of about 65. Her children Mary Ann and Bedford Forrest died between 1880 and November 1887. 

Only four of the children of Solomon and Mary grew up to marry and have children of their own:

• Valerie Jane married James Hart and had four children.
• Mary Jane married first Barney Johnson and had two daughters. After Barney’s death, she married William Lester Munro and had nine more children.
• Frances Elizabeth married George Darling Pond and had five children, only one of whom lived to adulthood.
• Thomas Jabe married a younger sister of George D. Pond, Narcissus Jane Pond, and they had eight children.

 Next installment: What Happened to Solomon’s and Mary’s Children?

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