RESEARCHER PRODUCES NEW WORK ON SLAVERY IN COUNTY

When Vice President John C. Calhoun referred to slavery as "our peculiar domestic institution" in 1830, he was speaking in defense of a system of economic and social subjugation that did not recognize marriage between black people, split apart families and often assigned slaves the last name of their current owner. Those are some of the reasons for the vacuum of information for black families wanting to research their genealogy.

But 10 years ago, retired Southeast coach Marge Mates began searching probate documents, wills, tax records and anything else she could find related to slavery in Cape Girardeau County. Her findings about slavery in the county will be published by the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University early in 2000. The book will be titled "A Resource Guide to the Slaves, Slaveholders and Free Blacks of Cape Girardeau County: 1797-1865."A retired professor of physical education and coach of field hockey and softball teams at Southeast, Mates earlier had helped Scott City author Edison Shrum research the two volumes of his book about slave owners in the county. Her motivation was simply wanting to provide a source of information to those whose ancestors may have been slaves, she said."I thought I would be doing a good deed. It turned into an awful long project."The book consists largely of records compiled through many, many hours of scrutinizing and copying records at the Common Pleas Courthouse, church records, newspaper morgues, the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse and the Missouri Historical Society.

The manuscript provides a listing of slaves by first name cross indexed to the slave holder list and U.S. Census figures on slaves and slave houses. It also contains about 140 entries under "Slave Emancipations and Free Blacks" and 64 marriages by former slaves who legalized their husband-wife relationship after the Civil War.

But if you are a black family wanting to research your family background, Mates says, "you have to get entangled in white genealogy."In the probate section, the slave holder entries and their holdings number 3,840. An example: Crawford, James ... Nance/32 ... PRB 601193/sale/08/23/16 ... Purchased with her child of 7 months from John Byrd Estate. PRB refers to the probate number.

One of the listings is for Bartholomew Cousin, who laid out the city streets. He purchased a 9-year-old slave named Willis from Peter Godair.

The book provides an introduction but not a narrative, so readers will be free to construct their own stories based on the data.

For instance, what were two of Frank J. Allen's slaves doing in California during the Gold Rush.

Allen, a Jackson landowner who sold firewood to the steamships on the Mississippi River, bought and sold slaves and also freed some. When he died he owned 17 slaves that his original will freed but a codicil "unfreed." "I think he was just trying to protect his young wife," Mates said. He was 55 and she was 17 when they married, and they had two young children when he died.

Mates says this information could be useful both to black families researching their genealogy or to the families of slave owners or slave holders -- people who rented slaves.

Slaves comprised nearly 15 percent of the county population between 1810 and 1840, a percentage that gradually declined because of an influx of white immigrants. Slaves constituted nearly 30 percent of the county tax revenues in 1822 compared to nearly 40 percent for land. But by 1864, slave tax revenues had fallen to almost nothing and land accounted for more than 80 percent of the taxes brought in by the county.

One day on campus Mates saw Kenneth Sides, who worked on the maintenance and grounds crew at Southeast for 21 years, and asked him if he knew anyone associated with St. James AME Church. It turns out he was on the board. That led to the revelation that one of the people Mates was looking for information about, a freed slave who was one of the founders of the church, was Sides' grandmother, Mollie Renfroe Sides. He subsequently learned from Mates that his great-grandmother Rosie was one of 10 female slaves owned in 1860 by a lawyer, Thomas B. English and his wife Sarah. And that his great-grandfather, Spencer Renfroe, was owned by Joel Renfroe. The county records state Spencer was 12 years old in 1833 and was appraised at $300.

Sides said he heard his grandmother speak of Rosie but he didn't know any more about her. His family kept its records in a Bible but the information was lost when the Bible disappeared. He said Mates' research will help fill in some gaps about family names that have been lost in history. "I think it'll be helpful to people, especially to my people because they didn't know," he said.

Mates couldn't find any information about great-grandfather Sides, but Kenneth remembers his grandfather talking about him. He was a slave in the Allenville area. "He used to see Jesse and Frank James ride across the fields," Sides said.

Mates uses her search for Sides' ancestors as an example of how others could do the same for their family. But the first place to start looking for information is within your own family, she says.

Her acknowledgments will list a number of people she is indebted to, especially members of the Cape Girardeau County Genealogical Society who spent three years readying the county's probate records so they could be microfilmed.

There's still much to be understood, she said. "Slavery in Cape Girardeau County was a microcosm of the U.S."