Suggested Reading
Publications which reference Redbones with excerpts
Stacy R Webb, RHF 3rd Annual Conference
Carnegie Memorial Library
Lake Charles, La.
 
The Emancipation of the Slaves

http://arkansastoothpick.com/?p=196

By admin | February 2, 2008

“The Emancipation of the Negroes, January, 1863—The Past and the Future,” Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1863, pages 56-57.

History, we have been taught, says that the right to vote for Black Americans came with the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, after the Civil War. In New England, several states had given the right to vote to free men well before this law. After the Revolution some New England states took away the right to vote from many Blacks. But did you know in the Slave South that in some places free Blacks could vote?

There were nearly 150 in Herford County and 300 free black voters in Halifax County, North Carolina, until 1835. In 1856, voting by the free black people (present day Red Bones) of Ten Mile Creek Precinct in what is now Allen Parish, Louisiana, became a source of public concern. Several were tried for illegal voting for free Negroes did not have the franchise but they were acquitted when their colored ancestry could not be proven and the judge would not permit the jury to evaluate them by their appearance. In Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee free blacks had the right to vote up until 1835. In one parish in Louisiana, free blacks went to the polls from 1838 to 1860.

Roger W. Shugg, "Negro Voting in the Antebellum
South," Journal of Negro History, XXI, (1936).

Publication Information: Book Title: Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives. Contributors: Lillian Schlissel - editor, Vicki L. Ruiz - editor, Janice Monk - editor. Publisher: University of New Mexico Press. Place of Publication: Albuquerque. Publication Year: 1988. Page Number: 212.

Faced with generally implacable opposition from their white families and friends, many mountain men simply hid their associations with Indian women. Kit Carson lived with an Arapaho, a Cheyenne, then a Mexican woman before ending his days with Taos-born Marie Jaramillo. Harvey L. Carter, Carson's modern biographer, writes that "Carson habitually concealed these connections from the women of the family, in accordance with the standards of the time." But families could be understanding. Lancaster Lupton and Tomasina, a Cheyenne woman, married in 1839 and in 1846 settled in the mixed-blood community of Hardscrabble, Colorado, with their three children. The next year Lupton wrote his parents, breaking the secret he had allowed his marriage to become. His father replied:
Why have you kept this truth from us thru all these years? Had you but told us of your marriage, then we should have understood much. Nothing could have been more disappointing to us than for you to desert your wife and family. The knowledge that you have acted like a man in accepting your parental obligation is a great satisfaction to us. We are so grateful now for understanding. Our only hope is that you can rear your children as you would had you married a white woman, that you will give them all the advantages a father can bring. That is our dearest wish. God bless you, my son, and the blessings of His generous hand be ever over your wife and children. 23
Accepting parental obligations forced other mixed couples to seek a different way. During the 1830s, before the American Oregon emigration, a considerable number of French-speaking mixed families clustered along the Willamette River, at French Prairie and Champoeg. In 1839 they were joined by a group of Anglo-American trappers, including Joseph Meek, Robert Newell, and Caleb Wilkins, the three of whom had married a set of Nez Perce sisters, who with a dozen other families created a similar settlement for English-speaking mixed families nearby. In the southern Rockies, at Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn, and LaPorte, other communities of mixed families formed in the forties. Other centers of mixed families included the environs of the future city of Denver, and the area north of present-day Kansas City, where Jim Bridger settled with his third Indian wife and children, including his daughter Virginia, in the 1850s.
In the Green River country of Wyoming, near Fort Bridger, during the 1880s, traveler William Barrows encountered clusters of mixed families, and towns composed almost entirely of mixed bloods. Here, in the northern Rockies, as William Swagerty notes, was one of the last strongholds of mixed families seeking to prevail against the narrowing racial standards of the West. Barrows was impressed at the "color blindness" of these men and women, and hoped aloud that "we are building a nation, not only in a new world, and under a new system of government, but with a new people.... We are no longer English; that expresses but one of our polygenous ingredients. We are Americans." In some, the old Jeffersonian dream remained alive. 25 But Barrows was mistaken, for these Far Western mixed communities were overwhelmed by white settlement in the late nineteenth century. Despite their failure, however, we must recognize that mixed-blood communities had a long and complex history in North America. In the Southwest, the site of considerable mixture among white, red, and black peoples, there exist dozens of "third race" communities with long histories as distinct groups: Melungeons in Tennessee, Ramps and Issues in Virginia, Lumbees and Smilings in North Carolina, Brass Ankles, Croatans, and Yellowhammers in South Carolina, Freejacks, Sabines and Redbones in Louisiana, Creoles and Cajuns in Alabama, to name but a few. In the Old Northwest, Chicago, Peoria, and Detroit, Prairie du Chien, Greenbay, and Mackinaw all enjoyed fascinating early histories as racially and culturally mixed communities. In Canada, a large community of English- and French-speaking half-breeds or Metis grew up along the Red River of the North. When Manitoba entered the Canadian Federation in 1869, its population of 12,000 included 10,000 Metis. 26 "Had the Americans not come," Howard Lamar suggests, "possibly a line of Metis or halfbreeds would have existed from Oklahoma to Saskatchewan," a fascinating historical "what-if." For historians, the western Canadian metis's success at achieving a separate and distinct identity, and the existence of "third races" throughout the American South, suggests a new way to formulate questions about mixed marriage in the fur trade. One should properly view the successful or unsuccessful struggles of Far Western mixed families in the broad context of the problems of ethnic reformulation and the maintenance of self-sustaining communities. The conditions required for ethnic identity and political success are far too complex a problem to analyze here. Let us simply observe that the mixed marriages of mountain men and Indian women and the fate of their mixed blood children -- the "mestizos of North America" -- present an historical problem of the first order.

Publication Information: Book Title: North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation. Contributors: Terry G. Jordan - author. Publisher: University of New Mexico Press. Place of Publication: Albuquerque, NM. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: 188.

At the same time, westward expansion along the coastal prairie occurred. About 1820 Cajun, Anglo, African, and assorted mixedblood cattle raisers and cowboys began crossing the Sabine into the prairies of southeastern Texas, bearing a herding system well preadapted for the western grasslands. The Cajuns, more tied to place and kin, would not accompany the Anglos beyond the lower Trinity River in any substantial numbers, but they nevertheless assisted greatly in the prairie readaptation. Southeast Texas would, accordingly, belong mainly to the Carolina-derived Anglos. Perhaps representative was Micajah Munson, a stock raiser born in South Carolina about 1789, who came as a child to Mississippi, resided in Louisiana in the early 1820s, and entered the Atascosita District on the Texas coastal prairie about 1824. Fully 86 percent of the cattle raisers of the prairies west of the Sabine immigrated directly from Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama. Concealed in these totals were some thoroughly creolized genealogies and diverse ethnicities. For example the largest cattle raiser in early Jefferson County, Texas, bordering the Sabine, was a "redbone" of mixed white, black, and Indian ancestry.
Clearly the Louisiana grassland readaptation of the pine-barrens cattle herders yielded success. By 1850 the Texas coastal prairie between the Sabine and Trinity rivers was home to thirty-eight persons owning five hundred or more longhorn cattle, including five Cajuns and four "redbones." Travelers even as early as the 1830s reported "immense herds of cattle," including five thousand head owned by Taylor White, a rancher on the eastern shore of Galveston Bay. To the present day, cattle still rule the salt marshes east of the Bay. Many of the early southeast Texas graziers continued to use slave cowboys, just as they did back East, but they had been converted into mounted herdsmen skilled in the use of the rope. 35 The prairie coastal Carolinian herders, by now diverse in genealogy and even more so in techniques, were in many important ways ready for the West, a readiness acquired east of the Sabine.

 

Publication Information: Book Title: Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America. Contributors: James F. Brooks - editor. Publisher: University of Nebraska Press. Place of Publication: Lincoln, NE. Publication Year: 2002.

One portion of the answer lay in my own guiding questions and those of earlier researchers. Potential and tangible relationships between Africans and Native Americans triggered fear and fascination from the time the two groups met under the force of European colonization. Despite abundant local traditions of mixed descent ("We Sorts” in Maryland, "Cros” in North Carolina, "Mustees” in South Carolina, "Redbones” in Louisiana), the colonial incentive to keep the two peoples apart found continuity in separate historiographical traditions well into the twentieth century. The Native American experience, if treated at all, came to be known as the history of "Indian-White Relations, ” while the African American past developed primarily under the rubric of historical "Race Relations” in which Indians remained virtually invisible. Even as interest in (and funding for) pluralistic historical studies emerged after World War II, the Indian Claims Commission and civil rights initiatives encouraged "tribal” histories on the one hand and "Negro” histories on the other. 

Publication Information: Book Title: The American Race Problem: A Study of the Negro. Contributors: Edward Byron Reuter - author, Seba Eldridge - editor. Publisher: Thomas Y. Crowell. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1927. Page Number: 123.

Slavery of the native Indians existed in a number of the English colonies before the coming of the Negroes. Those captured in battle were in some cases sold into slavery in distant colonies. Others were kidnapped along the coast and sold as slaves in the more settled regions. The mention of Indian slaves and of slaves of Negro and Indian blood is frequent in the racial literature of the early slave period. With these enslaved Indians the Negro slaves came into close and intimate contact. The social status was the same and as slaves they met on terms of equality. Intermarriage followed and, as the body of Negro slaves increased and Indian slavery declined, the Indian slaves were gradually absorbed into the larger black population. The offspring of Indian slaves or of mixed Negro and Indian parentage came presently to be counted with the Negroes. Many of the broken tribes of coast Indians disappeared entirely into the Negro people. The amount of Indian admixture may of course not be known but was certainly very considerable. There is a similar trace of Indian blood in many white families of certain regions.
There is also a pronounced Negro strain in a number of the Indian tribes. Runaway slaves frequently made their way by accident or otherwise to the Indian camps. In some cases the Indians returned these escaped slaves to their masters; sometimes they were killed or otherwise mistreated. But in other cases they were protected and kept as slaves to the Indians among whom they sought refuge or were taken into the Indian tribes by adoption. The Five Civilized Tribes owned many Negro slaves whom they were required to free and admit to equal Indian citizenship at the close of the American Civil War. The Seminoles in Florida had in 1834 some two hundred Negro slaves who had gone to them as runaways from the whites and had been in turn enslaved by the Indians who intermarried freely with them. Also, other Negroes who were not classed as slaves made their way into Indian groups and many of the reservations became the joint home of Indians and free Negroes. In some cases the Negroes were more numerous than the Indians and the reservations became Negro and mulatto settlements with little more than a tradition of Indian ancestry. The so-called Croatan Indians in North Carolina, the "Redbones" of South Carolina, the "Moors" of Delaware, the "Melungeons" of West Virgina, and other similar groups of the present day are wasted Indian tribes that have been swamped by intermixture with escaped slaves, free Negroes and mulattoes, and white outlaws and rovers.
Much of the Negro-Indian intermixture has chosen to be Indian rather than Negro and so appears in the statistics. Some of the Indian tribes today are more Negro than Indian in their ancestry and many of them contain a large admixture of Negro blood.
 
Publication Information: Book Title: Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women's Fiction, 1885-1914. Contributors: Kate McCullough - author. Publisher: Stanford University Press. Place of Publication: Stanford, CA. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 196.

Moreover, by the postbellum period, outsiders often conflated Cajuns with Creoles, a term complicated enough in its own right. Albert Rhodes, in an 1873 article titled "The Louisiana Creoles," for instance, calls the Cajuns "a small portion of the Creole population" and asserts that they are "the least intelligent of the Creole population, and occupy small patches of land along bayous and the coast, which are just sufficient in extent to satisfy the wants of their simple lives". In fact, the two groups are, in derivation and later identification, distinct. As I discuss in Chapter 2, the Louisiana usage of "Creole," while originally signifying the first-generation, American-born offspring of European parents, swiftly became a complicated and contested term. Not originally racially inflected, by the 1830s "Creole" was, as Virginia Domínguez notes, taken to mean a descendent of French settlers although not necessarily white. In the postbellum period, however, in part because Louisiana shifted from its original French tripartite legal categorization of race to an American binary system, racial lines became more at issue and two competing definitions came into circulation. As Domínguez explains it, for white Creoles, "Creole" came to mean white "blood" only, of French or Spanish descent, and generally of class privilege, while "Cajun" meant the white descendant of the Acadians; for Creoles of color, however, "Creole" came to mean of racially mixed blood, not necessarily of French or Spanish descent, while "Cajun" meant of Acadian ancestry but not necessarily white. Moreover, in addition to these two groups and sometimes overlapping with them, the Louisiana population contained the descendants of what had been known in the antebellum period as the gens de couleur libre (free people of color) as well as in some areas a population known as Redbones, defined by Marcia Gaudet as "people of part Indian ancestry". Michael Omi and Howard Winant remind us that "the categories employed to differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal themselves, upon serious consideration, to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary"; both in the Louisiana of Chopin's day and in her work, these long-complicated categories were deeply intertwined with categories of ethnicity and class and were often contingent on an urban/rural dichotomy that identified New Orleans's "founding families" as Creole while locating Cajuns as specifically rural, sometimes accompanied by Creoles of color.

Publication Information: Article Title: Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen. Contributors: Allison Cummings - author. Journal Title: Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies. Volume: 26. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 2005. Page Number: 3+. COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Nebraska Press; COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group
As noted above, Muse & Drudge collects and defamiliarizes familiar phrases from American culture: the idiomatic phrases, official language, and slang that constitute us with each utterance. In addition to illuminating how the languages of advertising encourage women's insecurities, many phrases affirm women's beauty and independence: "black-eyed pearl / around the world girl"; "lady redbone senora rubia / took all day long / shampooing her nubia / she gets to the getting place / without or with him" (40, 51). Other lines fend off insult: "ain't your fancy / handsome gal / feets too big / my hair don't twirl"; or highlight restrictions on girls: "keep your powder dry / your knees together / your dress down / your drawers shut" (17, 38). Such phrases represent some of the many ways American culture defines women's identity and sexuality through languages of approval and disapproval.

Publication Information: Book Title: Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race. Contributors: Maxine Leeds Craig - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: 40.

of light-skinned women—or perhaps because of it—many respondents told the researchers that they would prefer a spouse with a medium-brown skin tone.
Later investigators found similar results. In a survey conducted in 1950, the majority of students at a black high school in St. Louis, when asked about their skin color preferences, stated that they preferred to be brown (as opposed to light or dark) and preferred to marry a brown-skinned spouse. 58 In a report published in 1952 based on a survey of black students attending a North Carolina college, Joseph Himes and R. E. Edwards found that four-fifths of the students stated that light skin and straight hair were “not important” in a future spouse. More men than women (17.4 versus 8.4 percent) expressed a preference for a light-skinned spouse. Like the students who in 1950 said that brown skin was the most desirable, the majority of these students answered that light skin was “not important” as a characteristic for a mate.
In a later study based on research conducted in North Carolina in 1957, Himes joined with another psychologist, Charles Anderson, to ask black male and female undergraduates what attributes they sought in a dating partner. Among the twenty-eight qualities, including “friendliness and cheerfulness” and “good conversational ability,” Anderson and Himes listed four attributes that might be construed as physical: “sex appeal,” “taller and older men,” “handsomeness,” and “redbone” (light complexion). The students placed “redbone” relatively low on the list, at position twenty-two, two notches above “plenty of money.” Rather than concluding that in North Carolina in 1957 neither money nor light skin won any advantage in obtaining a date, it would seem just as plausible that these findings indicate what students deemed self-respecting answers. In the 1950s, before the black pride movement of the 1960s, young, educated, black Americans knew that it was inappropriate to favor light skin.
In 1970, researchers returned to the St. Louis high school where the study of skin color preference had been conducted in 1950 in order to measure changes in attitudes between cohorts. Again, the majority of respondents claimed that they preferred to be brown and would prefer a brown-skinned spouse. Between 1950 and 1970, the percentage of subjects who said they preferred a dark spouse rose from 2.8 to 16.6. 
These findings cannot tell us whether the rejection of dark skin reflected black self-hatred or what respondents made of the consequences of having dark skin, but what is striking here, as in Drake and Cayton's work, is the consistent popularity of the choice of brown. If these responses can be accepted as accurate assessments of the regard with which brown skin was held, they counter a simple black self-hatred thesis. If, instead, they represent what were deemed by the respondents as appropriate answers, they indicate that, years before the Black Power Movement, many African Americans felt that it was important to demonstrate racial pride.
 
 
Publication Information: Book Title: Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860. Contributors: Christopher Morris - editor. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number:

BROTHERS AND NEIGHBORS: THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHY
One warm but windy spring day Benjamin Wailes took a leisurely ride around his neighborhood. From his home at Fonsylvania plantation near the Big Black River he headed southward, over his pasture toward Ivanhoe, an old plantation built by John Stephens forty years earlier, but recently purchased by Wailes for his niece Susan Covington. Susan had lived in the neighborhood as a girl, although she had moved to Natchez when her father died, since then visiting her childhood home infrequently. From Ivanhoe Wailes rode westward to Old Mr. Harris's place, and then on to Doc Hunt's. Finding no one at the doctor's home Wailes ambled through the fields, examining the cluster of Indian mounds south of Hunt's house. Several, he noted "have been ploughed over for a long period and the smaller ones almost obliterated." Wailes continued his tour, heading north at Mrs. Cameron's farm toward the old Valentine plantation. The new owner, a former Vicksburg miller named Austin Mattingly, intercepted the passerby and offered to sell him a load of bricks. The two men settled on a price of eight dollars per thousand before Wailes rode on, passing Mattingly's quarters and barns, near the large artificial pond graced by magnolia trees, and traveling beyond the brick kiln to a shallow creek, which he followed for perhaps two miles to the church. Bethel Methodist, more commonly known simply as Redbone church, attracted a large congregation from the neighborhood on most Sundays. Wailes usually attended, although sometimes he visited Antioch Baptist or, on occasion, if the visiting preacher happened to be a favorite, the chapel at Asbury campground. None was particularly close to Fonsylvania, each requiring a journey of about eight or ten miles round trip. One Sunday Wailes arrived at Redbone after Mr. Drake had already begun his sermon. A large crowd filled the building. Unable to get inside Benjamin listened from a window near the pulpit. After a while he left his station and wandered through the graveyard, among the "large number of handsome monuments," many of which he thought "exhibit considerable taste." He recognized some of the names, including those of several who, like himself, had come to this Warren County neighborhood from Natchez. From Redbone Wailes followed the road back to home, where he found slaves Robert and Alex clipping cedar trees in the yard.
If we take a step back from the individual households we see larger social units. In particular we notice rural neighborhoods like the one Benjamin Wailes lived in, spaces of twenty or thirty square miles containing perhaps two or three dozen households linked by friendship, family, or proximity. During the early years to be sure, but even as late as the start of the Civil War, the world for many people began at one's doorstep and ended at the edge of the small cluster of farms and plantations that encircled one's home. In time small villages and towns--urban places--supplanted rural neighborhoods as the spots where people did much of their socializing and conducted the majority of their business, although they never did so entirely. Expanses of wilderness tended to isolate the earliest settlements. Roads, steamboats, and railroads, however, eventually broke down geographical barriers between neighborhoods, linking households to distant urban centers. Nevertheless, a mesh of kinship ties formed during the early years connected households and the resources they controlled, and continued to give structure to the rural neighborhood.
When individuals and families first trickled into the Mississippi Valley they tended to settle in small clusters along rivers and streams, or upon old Indian fields, if there were any nearby, and at the junctions of wilderness pathways. Europeans and their descendants repeated this pattern over and over as they moved across North America. Along the Mississippi River, however, pioneers learned the dangers of situating themselves too close to the water's edge. In those days there were no levees to keep the river from overflowing its banks; it did so regularly. Much of the most fertile land in the country lay underwater from March through May, and was subjected to flash flooding at any time during the summer. Families built their homes, therefore, on high ground, but as close to the river, to the rich bottom land, as they dared. 
During the 1770s the first white residents of the region that became Warren County settled near the Nanachehaw hills on the Loosa Chitto River. Over the next twenty years the location selected by the original settlers remained popular. By 1800 newcomers had built homes to the north of the Loosa Chitto, along the crude roadway built by the Spanish atop the bluff that ran to the now abandoned Fort Nogales. During the following decade new neighborhoods appeared, where the ridge first approached the river, and at the Walnut Hills. Yet another cluster of farms materialized on a thin strip of highground bordering the Mississippi adjacent to the uppermost of the Three Islands
 
In 1809 the legislature for the Territory of Mississippi responded to the growing white and black population between the Loosa Chitto River and Choctaw Indian lands by organizing Warren County. Within ten years farms could be found in the northernmost corner of the new county. By 1830 farms had become so numerous as to make neighborhoods almost indistinguishable. Moreover, the pattern of settlement had changed. The majority of families no longer lived along the edges of the rivers, or even along the bluffs, but chose instead to build their homes on land farther inland, among the cane hills. The extension of roads into the interior both reduced the premium placed on locations adjacent to major water- and roadways and enabled farmers to escape the flooding waters of the Mississippi.
Isolation and economic interdependence kept social relations within Warren County's earliest neighborhoods locally and inwardly oriented. Before 1810 only two or three clusters of households, separated by large expanses of uninhabited territory, specked the 400 or so square miles of countryside north of the Big Black River. Within these early settlements--the experience of the Rapalje family and their neighbors as discussed in Chapter 2 was typical--people exchanged labor, tools, and produce with one another. They depended on each other for information, for help in times of need, for company. In 1809 a group of farmers along the Bayou Pierre in Claiborne County tried to formalize their interdependence through a "society" organized to promote "the public good individual and public economy," to "bargain contract and purchase for their own use their annual supplies," and to purchase and hold land and slaves. But the objectives listed in the society's charter merely stated the obvious. There was no need for such formality, and the society lasted but briefly. Cooperative interdependence, however, continued. 3
Of course, more than geography, a shared locale and economic interdependence linked neighboring households. Kinship and friendship also fastened people to one another. Westward migrants tended to travel and settle with associates from their former homes. The Vick and Cook families, for example, together moved to Jefferson County, Mississippi, from Virginia. When after a few years the Cooks moved upriver to Warren County the Vicks soon followed, again settling among their old friends in the Open Wood neighborhood. The Gibson family migrated in several waves from South Carolina, some settling near Natchez, others at Bayou Pierre, with descendants from both branches eventually resting in the same Warren County neighborhood. 
Warren County's rural neighborhoods were not, however, peaceable little kingdoms of family and friends happily and harmoniously working together in some cooperative eden. Isolation and need forced people into associations not always to their liking. Those who lived near family and friends, next door to people whom they both trusted and liked, were fortunate indeed. Those who did not, however, still had to live, work, and trade with people whom they did not know very well, or even disliked. No one had the luxury of associating only with friends. Rather, one either did or did not make friends of those with whom one regularly associated. When William Stephens killed a hog that wandered into his field his neighbor and owner of the hog, one Jonas Griffin, accused him of stealing it. In his defense Stephens freely admitted that he had thrown a hatchet at the animal intending merely to scare it away, but that his aim had been poor, and having killed it albeit quite by accident--the damage already done so to speak--he saw nothing wrong with helping himself to a delicious meal of pork. In another case of hog stealing James Beard, aided by his servants and several hounds, hunted down Thomas McElrath's hogs where they ran in the woods. While McElrath sued Beard in court for damages, another similarly angered neighbor took matters into his own hands, shooting several of Beard's dogs as they attacked his swine. Such bickering and feuding over property could quickly become personal, as happened in yet another case of alleged hog thievery. By one report David Pharr"had learned well his father's trade." This slight against character became the issue of dispute, provoking an assault and a suit for libel, although nothing came of that. 
Relations between neighbors could be harmonious; they could just as easily be antagonistic. Seldom were they detached. For each household's best interests depended on the mutual cooperation and support of all who lived nearby. It mattered a great deal that everyone lived up to neighborhood expectations. It is thus not surprising that failure to do so incited anger, and sometimes violence. Nevertheless, most surely made a conscious effort to keep relations friendly. Thus, newcomers found themselves warmly welcomed, sometimes even presented with gifts. Cabin-raisings were turned into social events. Camp meetings resembled fairs. The slaughtering of a steer, which no family could consume in its entirety before it began to spoil, offered an excuse for a neighborhood barbecue. Such events, in which everyone participated and those who received favors could expect to give next time, stood as reminders of the continued need for cooperation and reciprocity. But so long as people lived so close to one another their relationships would be marked by both amity and enmity, with the need for and expectations of friendship only increasing the likelihood and intensity of hostilities. 
With the continued growth of population, and the integration of local economies into a regional trading system, the character and definition of rural neighborhoods changed. The geographical isolation that had distinguished them, and the close cooperation between households that had characterized social relations within them, diminished or disappeared altogether. Where once they had enabled individuals to survive and improve their circumstances in frontier conditions of scarcity, neighborhoods increasingly functioned to serve the property-holding and wealth-accumulating interests of extended kin networks.
By 1830 the once visible clusters of homes disappeared, drowned in the mass of new farms and plantations that covered the county from top to bottom. Uninhabited terrain no longer separated one settlement from another, for they all ran together. No longer can we see merely by looking at a map of households where one neighborhood ended and another began. Our definition of a neighborhood as a visible cluster of homes will not do, unless we are to assume that they ceased to exist. However, such a conclusion would be misleading. Warren County residents continued to refer to the places where they lived as neighborhoods. If rural neighborhoods persisted as places, at least in the minds of the people who lived within them, how are we to find them, and how are we to know that the places we find were their neighborhoods? We cannot, exactly, but there is enough evidence to allow us to approximate the location and definition of Warren County's rural neighborhoods as their inhabitants saw them.
Evidence indicates that people associated the places where they lived with particular families. More than one document speaks of a Gibson neighborhood, for example, and when isolated on a map family groups do appear in clusters. A generation after arriving in Warren County, most members of the Vick family continued to live in the Open Wood neighborhood. The Gibsons gathered in the cane hills region, while the Evans family inhabited the vicinity of Redbone Creek. Of course, not all family members resided in their "home" neighborhoods. Kin networks typically spilled into precincts generally associated with other people: Moreover, throughout the period under study newcomers unconnected by blood or marriage to any other household built homes in Warren County's rural neighborhoods, around and between such established families as the Vicks, the Gibsons, and the Evans, whose relations did not even account for a majority of homes within their particular vicinities. Network densities, a measurement of interconnectedness, were surprisingly low in each of the three neighborhoods tested, the highest figure indicating that kinship linked a mere 20 percent of the households around the Vick family. 7 Of course, by reducing the size of each neighborhood we can obtain higher densities. However, doing so would be to assume what needs to be proven, that by associating neighborhoods with particular families Warren County residents had in their minds places where kinship connected nearly all nearby households. In fact, the Gibsons referred to a place that took their name but that extended well beyond the homes of their kin. The dotted line in Figure represents the border for the Gibson family as it might have been presumed had their own testimony not indicated that they understood their neighborhood to have included the territory within the solid line. Thus, while rural neighborhoods took on the identity of particular families, those families did not confine themselves to a particular place, nor did they exclude nonrelations from them.
The development of family connections between nearby households grew naturally out of the conditions in which the early settlers found themselves. Affiliation with anyone other than one's nearest neighbors was difficult. Roads were really no more than paths barely wide enough for a person on horseback, broken by sharp hills and steep ravines, and by unbridged streams and rivers. Lorenzo Dow, the Methodist preacher who built a crude home between the Big Black River and the Bayou Pierre, told how "once he met three animals, when going to a neighboring house, upon a by-way, which he hacked out through the cane; he told them to get out, and chinked his tins together; one took to the left and two to the right a few feet, and he passed between, then they closed behind." Upon reaching his neighbor's house Dow"enquired if Mr. Neal had been there, having seen his bull dogs. The family on hearing their description, replied that they were wolves!" 9 Faced with such conditions men and women, more often than not, found spouses close to home. The difficulties of traveling kept contact with outsiders to a minimum. Moreover, so long as there remained plenty of vacant land nearby, children tended to settle alongside parents. Within a few generations, nearby households became enmeshed in interlocking networks of kinship.
The conjunction of family with neighborhood, and the place of both within antebellum Southern society, can easily be misunderstood. Farm households settled as groups in western peripheries of the North as well as the South. Pioneers in both regions alleviated conditions of hardship and isolation by building homes nearby one another. With time, kinship connected households in Illinois just as surely as it did in Mississippi.
Thus, there was nothing inherently significant or special, and certainly nothing particularly "Southern," about Southern neighborhoods in either their pattern of settlement or in their development of family networks. But a single extended family could, and in Warren County frequently did, control most of the land and labor, slave labor in particular, for several miles around it, and this most assuredly gave a distinctly Southern structure and meaning to the South's rural neighborhoods. While Northern farmers had access to the labor of their wives and children, plus a few wards perhaps--minors left by deceased relations--and of course the occasional hired hand, that simply could not be compared to the Southern planters' access to slaves, those owned outright as well as those owned by kin. Moreover, the power and status that came with wealth made for a distinctly Southern politics of patriarchy for which rural neighborhoods were the main arenas. A particular family's property holdings, and the influence that gave them within their neighborhood, more than just the size of the clan or the fact that kinship connected several though never a majority of households, were responsible for the association of family with place. Property and power gave certain families notoriety beyond their numbers. 
Each neighborhood had its one or two leading families. At the center of each family stood one or two men who were, in effect, the leaders not only of their respective clans but also of their neighborhood. Personally wealthier than the average Warren County household head, clan patriarchs also had direct access to the considerable wealth held by the other members of their families. To begin with, they already owned, on average, 16 slaves and nearly 400 acres of land, four times the slave- and landholding average of all Warren County household heads. In addition, extended families, of which these men stood at the center, owned an average of 63 slaves and 1400 acres. The clustering of families within the space of small neighborhoods, moreover, meant that their combined property lay close at hand, and frequently adjoined, enabling several households to combine their resources into a single operation. 
Patriarchs, by virtue of their status as such, often acquired direct control over the property of other family members. Elijah and James Pace, for example, served as executors of their father's estate, which placed in their hands their own inheritances as well as those of their minor siblings. For four years Elijah supplemented his own labor force with three slaves that belonged to his younger brother Lorenzo. James Hyland personally owned a modest amount of property, five slaves and 200 acres, but also controlled 640 acres and seven slaves as administrator of his deceased brother Christopher's estate. In addition, he acquired upon the death of his wife's brother-in-law partial interest in another 350 acres and ten slaves. In another example, John Lane wrestled the executorship of the sizable legacy left by his father-in-law Newit Vick from two other heirs, and became the indomitable head of the largest and wealthiest family in the north end of Warren County. All of the Vick family, and all the families that married into it, waited over ten long years before Lane finally distributed what remained of the estate among its rightful heirs. Lane almost singlehandedly built Vicksburg, lining his own pockets in the meantime with profits that the deceased Vick had intended for his children. 
Patriarchal control of family property did not go unchallenged, although much of the time there was little the discontented could do. Catherine Chamberlain was furious when she discovered that the $4000 left to her by her deceased husband was to be managed by her brotherin-law, and that she would receive only the interest as an annual allowance until she remarried. Doubtless concerned about whether anyone would marry her with this arrangement and obviously frustrated by her lack of control over her own affairs Chamberlain at first complained to her guardian and then threatened to decline the interest forever if she could not have her way. "I will have nothing to do with the interest," she promised, "and I will be destitute indeed, and do God only knows what, in my present feeble health." The brother-in-law was not moved. 13 In another example, Benjamin Cook and his new bride Ann received a wedding gift of four slaves from her father just before they left Virginia for Mississippi. The father, however, did not give them direct control of their gift, but rather placed it in the hands of Foster Cook, Benjamin's older brother and leader of a large Warren County clan. The young couple were to receive an allowance raised from the hiring of the slaves. Moreover, Ann's father reserved the right to reclaim the property at any time, and if he should die intestate, Foster Cook was to continue as the slaves' keeper. 
The significance of patriarchal authority and the pattern of concentration of family property in the hands of male leaders of extended families raises questions about the egalitarian relations some historians claim prevailed in some Southern planter families. Surviving wills suggest that testators often intended to distribute their property more or less evenly among their children. But conditions conspired against them. Women rarely received absolute control of the property they inherited. Moreover, early parental death inevitably meant that the equal portions of property bequeathed to minors actually fell into the hands of elder men. Wills perhaps reflected egalitarian intentions. In reality property and the power that came with it were distributed unevenly. 
Rivals of similar status and power could mount serious challenges to patriarchal authority, although at risk of tearing their families apart. As leader of his family Stephen Gibson assumed the duties of administrator of the estate left by his deceased brother Nathaniel, and of the property left to his nephews and niece. Although he permitted his wards and their slaves to live with Nathaniel's widow even after she remarried, Gibson moved immediately upon the woman's death to bring all of the estate, especially the slaves, under his direct control. Seth Caston, the widowed second husband who had had tacit control over the property while his wife was alive, proved reluctant to turn it over, forcing Gibson to go to Caston's farm and seize his wards' property. The affairs of Caston and his brother Green were in "declining circumstances." They badly needed the slaves. So the pair stole them back and carried them to Texas, where they intended to sell them out of the country and, they hoped, out of the reach of Gibson influence. Stephen Gibson, and following his death brother James, pursued the Castons in court, impounding their Warren County farm until they received the slaves plus $1200 in damages. 
James Gibson had less success in winning court approval in his bid for control of brother Stephen's property, but he did not let a judge's decision stop him from trying. Martha, Stephen's widow, remarried one Patrick Sharkey, who successfully defeated James Gibson's challenges for possession of the estate. Courts preferred to keep children together with their mothers, whom they trusted with whatever property the children had coming to them. But stepfathers, having no familial stake in the welfare of the wife's children, jurors deemed less reliable. In this case, however, Sharkey, unlike Caston, commanded some respect and faith in his financial abilities and integrity. He came from an established family of prosperous farmers, and was well connected to some of the wealthiest and most politically powerful planter families in the county. There was no reason for the court to fear he would perform his duties asguardian in any way but responsibly. Nevertheless, James Gibson, who perhaps feared Sharkey as an increasingly influential rival within his neighborhood, rejected the court's ruling. He took matters into his own hands by removing six slaves from Sharkey's quarters. Sharkey had Gibson arrested on charges of slave stealing, a serious offense for which a jury found the defendant not guilty. Upon his release Gibson, still unwilling to let the matter go, sued Sharkey for libel, claiming that the suit for theft had tarnished his reputation. Perhaps sensing that the affair was getting out of control--Gibson was a hothead, which resulted in his demise in a duel several years later--Sharkey wisely made a lengthy excursion to Texas, whereupon the court placed the estate in the hands of a third party respected by both men. Gibson may not have won his battle entirely, but he did gain a partial victory when he forced his opponent to surrender control of the property in question despite the probate court's very clear decision in Sharkey's favor. 
Perhaps the greatest turmoil occurred when the deaths of family leaders led to succession crises. This was particularly so if the patriarchs died intestate. When the sheriff seized for debt a portion of James Hyland's land plus one of his slaves, Hyland turned to his older brother Jacob, leader of the family since the death of their father. When the land came up for public auction only Jacob showed up to bid. Prior to the sale he had publicly announced his intention to buy his brother's property and to hold it for him until he could afford to buy it back. As he had hoped, several neighbors who had expressed an interest in the property demonstrated their respect for Jacob and his motives by holding their tongues. Thus the auction was, as a member of the Hyland family observed, "not a bonafide but a sham sale," in which James Hyland's creditors received considerably less than the market value for the land and the slave that were supposed to compensate them for the bad debt. Moreover, the property remained in the hands of James Hyland, or at least he continued to work the slave and the acreage as before; Jacob held the deeds. James Hyland, in his efforts to convert his rich bottom land quickly into a productive cotton plantation, continued to borrow money, only to overextend himself at least once more. As before, his brother Jacob came to his aid, again saving another portion of property from public auction. Eventually, James transferred all his property to his brother.
The change in relations between households within the county's rural neighborhoods is summarized in three models of exchange relations shown in Figure 5.4. The first model diagrams the early neighborhoods of pioneer households. Ideally, none had any particular advantage over the others in access to resources, but rather each depended upon the contributions of all. Isolation and cooperative exchange linked each household directly to all others in the group. In the terms of network analysis, each household was structurally equivalent. The second model shows the changes in exchange patterns that occurred after 1810 or so with the formation of clans and the pooling of resources by kin groups. The patriarch of the wealthiest family, however, continued to interact economically with other families. He could provide them with essential services, such as ginning or access to credit. In return, he won respect and deference as neighborhood leader. The third diagram portrays the breakdown of associations between and within families, after 1850 or so, as households acquired more of the wherewithal to free them of dependence upon others, but especially as they acquired contacts with outsiders such as urban merchants, who provided services formerly supplied by neighborhood leaders. Kinship ties remained, linking households as before, but their significance diminished somewhat when they no longer corresponded with economic associations. In particular, Vicksburg's rise as the county's economic, social, and political center signaled the demise of the rural neighborhood as the heart of Warren County.
The one constant through all phases of development was place, and as places, as pieces of common ground, the neighborhoods in which people spent most of their lives provided some continuity over time in the face of ongoing change. They smoothed transitions, linked households that otherwise had nothing joining them, and even connected the present with the past, the living with the dead. Benjamin Wailes had lived at Fonsylvania only five years when he took his ride around his neighborhood. His business ties were mostly with merchants in Natchez where he still maintained a home. But he had had kin here for three decades, had married into a Warren County family, and had visited regularly before actually moving in. As he rode around the place in which he lived he felt a part of the community and its history. Among the Indian mounds, at plantations still known by the names of bygone owners, at the cemetery where he discovered the graves of former associates, he could sense the presence of the past, his past. "The memorials of perishing humanity speak to the living and proclaim the certainty of death," he wrote in his diary on the occasion of his wandering through Redbone cemetery. In a sense by 1857 when Wailes recorded his thoughts neighborhoods had become a collection of memorials speaking to all who cared to listen. 

HAMLETS AND TOWNS: THE URBAN PROCESS
By 1860 nearly half the population of Warren County, numbering 8000, lived in or nearby Warren County's only incorporated city. 1 Vicksburg: The public wharf crammed with steamboats, barges, and pirogues so that much of the city's business district actually floated upon the Mississippi; Levee Street clogged at certain times of the year with wagons, stacks of cotton bales, and discharged freight so "that a man could scarcely get about on horseback"; avenues ascending steep hills and lined with stores, restaurants, taverns, small manufacturing businesses, and law offices; hilltop mansions with names that betrayed the self-importance of their owners--the Castle, Belmont; an imposing new courthouse with massive columns on all sides, built by slaves but symbolic of the power of the masters, standing like the Parthenon with a whole civilization at its feet. Vicksburg was by the end of the antebellum era the center of Warren County society. But it was not the county's only urban place?
Another two hundred or so people lived in the half-dozen villages that dotted the surrounding countryside. They stood as reminders of Vicksburg's humble beginnings. Warrenton, Redbone, Redwood, Bovina, Mt. Albon, Oak Ridge--such places consisted of little more than a church, one or two stores that doubled as taverns, perhaps a blacksmith shop, and maybe a post office. Some hamlets had a cotton gin and warehouse established by a local planter who made his facilities available to friends and neighbors. These hamlets might appear as little more than meeting places within rural neighborhoods, and thus perhaps were not truly urban at all. Yet as a public landing at the river, or a train station, or a simple fork in the road, such locales betrayed an urban function and process that set them apart from surrounding farms and plantations. Like the clearly identifiable cities, most especially Vicksburg, the country villages served as gathering places for rural people and produce, as collectors of goods and information, as points in a chain that stretched upward and outward from farm households to New Orleans, to New York, and finally to the great cities of Europe.
As centers for the collection of agricultural products and the distribution of manufactured goods, Southern villages and towns grew out of the countryside that surrounded them. They were as much a part of Southern society as the farm and plantation. Nevertheless, as contemporary observers and modern historians have pointed out, the Old South was not urban like the North. An economy rooted in agriculture, a low population density, and an attachment to slavery that prevented the development of a consumer market and a manufacturing sector left the South with fewer and smaller cities and towns than in the free states. Still, Southern society had its urban dimension, although historians looking for towns and cities of several thousand or more people, like those more common in the North during the antebellum years, have not appreciated this point as much as they might have had they looked for Southern, not Northern, urban places? 3 Function more than geography distinguished urban from rural in the Southern states, where urban places consisted essentially of small clusters of households. Their inhabitants made a living in some way other than by farming, usually by offering marketing or manufacturing services to rural farm households. 
Staring into the wilderness, Warren County's first settlers envisioned a capital city that would be the economic, political, and cultural center of their colony. They never realized that dream. That they even had such a dream, however, is significant. It demonstrates the equation in their minds of civilization and urbanization. As the forests disappeared before fields and furrows rather than blocks and buildings, the vision of an urban civilization persisted nevertheless. At no time did Warren County's rural residents express any antipathy toward the towns that did eventually appear, nor did they ever stop laying plans for more urban places.
Beginning in 1810 with the establishment of Warren County and its seat of government, Warrenton, town building commenced. It proceeded in earnest during the 1830s with the rush of population into the area and continued until the Civil War. Elias Hankinson offered for sale lots in a town he laid out on his plantation on the south side of the Big Black River. He found no buyers. After a fire consumed his gin and warehouse, along with 150 bales of cotton, Hankinson sold his plantation, purchased some new acreage across the river in Warren County, and tried again. There he established Mount Vernon. Although it made its way onto several state maps, it, too, never amounted to much more than a cluster of small farms and a post office. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the county, Thomas Redwood laid off lots for the new village of Carthage. This enterprise proved more successful. By 1850 Carthage, or Redwood, as it came to be known, had two stores and a post office. In addition, a cluster of nonagricultural workers--two carpenters and a dozen raftsmen who plied the nearby Yazoo River--kept homes there. At Warren County's eastern extreme lay Bridgeport, while at the far western extreme, on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi, lay Tuscambia. Both places existed more in the minds of their founders than they ever did in reality. The same was true of DeSoto, across the river from Vicksburg. The streets lay most of the year under water, but such circumstances did not discourage its founders. In 1819 Warren County's most successful town founder, Newit Vick, marked off a grid in one of his cotton fields and sold a lot later that same year. Vicksburg very quickly became the largest urban place in the county, and second largest in the state behind Natchez
Few of Warren County's towns developed much beyond the planning stage. All efforts to the contrary, Warren County society remained essentially rural, at least until late in the antebellum period. So long as material conditions--plantation economy and low population density in particular--precluded the rise of urban areas, the ambitions of town founders remained unfulfilled. 6 With the exception of Vicksburg, the most successful urban places in and around Warren County--successful in the sense that they achieved some measure of permanency--arose on their own. They evolved out of the countryside without any prior planning, appearing when a local agricultural population, in order to continue to increase its interaction with the national and international economy, needed a central place for processing, shipping, and receiving goods on their way to and from distant markets. Predicting when and where such a stage of development was about to occur required the talents of Cassandra.
Prior to the appearance of villages and small towns, planters, particularly those located on waterways, performed urban functions for their neighbors. They ginned cotton, milled corn, stored what was to be shipped to market, arranged for shipment to metropolitan merchant houses, and imported supplies and consumer goods for local distribution. Jacques and Isaac Rapalje provided mercantile services along the Big Black. Sinclair Gervais did likewise for his neighbors at the Walnut Hills. Large landowners could afford the equipment necessary to raise cotton for market. Moreover, in the absence of local merchants they developed ties with firms in New Orleans. In setting themselves up in the business of staples agriculture, however, early planters such as Gervais and the Rapaljes encouraged their poorer neighbors merely by extending to them processing and marketing services to increase production for sale. Where there were no plantations small farmers pooled resources and collectively began producing for market. 
At some point the flow of goods into and out of a new cotton region attracted the eye of distant merchants who shortly sent representatives to set up stores in the area. George Locker and Benjamin Temple, partners in a Kentucky firm, operated a store at Port Gibson, in Claiborne County, Mississippi. In 1811, believing the new seat of government in dozen raftsmen who plied the nearby Yazoo River--kept homes there. At Warren County's eastern extreme lay Bridgeport, while at the far western extreme, on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi, lay Tuscambia. Both places existed more in the minds of their founders than they ever did in reality. The same was true of DeSoto, across the river from Vicksburg. The streets lay most of the year under water, but such circumstances did not discourage its founders. In 1819 Warren County's most successful town founder, Newit Vick, marked off a grid in one of his cotton fields and sold a lot later that same year. Vicksburg very quickly became the largest urban place in the county, and second largest in the state behind Natchez.
Few of Warren County's towns developed much beyond the planning stage. All efforts to the contrary, Warren County society remained essentially rural, at least until late in the antebellum period. So long as material conditions--plantation economy and low population density in particular--precluded the rise of urban areas, the ambitions of town founders remained unfulfilled.  With the exception of Vicksburg, the most successful urban places in and around Warren County--successful in the sense that they achieved some measure of permanency--arose on their own. They evolved out of the countryside without any prior planning, appearing when a local agricultural population, in order to continue to increase its interaction with the national and international economy, needed a central place for processing, shipping, and receiving goods on their way to and from distant markets. Predicting when and where such a stage of development was about to occur required the talents of Cassandra.
Prior to the appearance of villages and small towns, planters, particularly those located on waterways, performed urban functions for their neighbors. They ginned cotton, milled corn, stored what was to be shipped to market, arranged for shipment to metropolitan merchant houses, and imported supplies and consumer goods for local distribution. Jacques and Isaac Rapalje provided mercantile services along the Big Black. Sinclair Gervais did likewise for his neighbors at the Walnut Hills. Large landowners could afford the equipment necessary to raise cotton for market. Moreover, in the absence of local merchants they developed ties with firms in New Orleans. In setting themselves up in the business of staples agriculture, however, early planters such as Gervais and the Rapaljes encouraged their poorer neighbors merely by extending to them processing and marketing services to increase production for sale. Where there were no plantations small farmers pooled resources and collectively began producing for market.
At some point the flow of goods into and out of a new cotton region attracted the eye of distant merchants who shortly sent representatives to set up stores in the area. George Locker and Benjamin Temple, partners in a Kentucky firm, operated a store at Port Gibson, in Claiborne County, Mississippi. In 1811, believing the new seat of government in Warren County "promised to become a place of some considerable importance," they opened a branch store in Warrenton. 8 Similarly, Eliphalet Frazier, also of Port Gibson but with ties to the Natchez firm run by Abijah and David Hunt, opened a store on the Big Black River. The Hunt brothers, whose mercantile connections stretched to Philadelphia, New York, and London, traded on the same river. 9 Edmund Reeves and Thomas Grymes arrived about 1809. Their long-distance trading connections are not known. They opened a store at the Palmyra community on the Mississippi River among a cluster of small farmers, all of whom raised cotton for market. 
Warren County's earliest storekeepers were not all outsiders. Local residents reached outward as surely as distant merchants moved in. Hartwell Vick, the son of the planter who established Vicksburg, owned a mercantile, saw-milling, and planting business at the Walnut Hills, as did his cousins Willis B. Vick and Anthony Durden. 11 Anthony Glass, another Walnut Hills planter, arrived in the county during the Spanish period, and worked as a carpenter on Fort Nogales. He managed to obtain a patent for some land. After the Spanish left he remained and took up cotton planting. He also worked as a local producer and shipper of agricultural products. At various times he owned a mill and gin at a landing on the Big Black River and on the Mississippi River at Palmyra. 12 His son also combined cotton planting with a dry goods business. 13 Yet another Glass, Anthony's brother Andrew, engaged in mercantile activities more directly. With Edmund Reeves, who closed the books on his Palmyra business, and John Hyland, a planter's son, Andrew opened the doors of his trading company for business at Warrenton. At the same time he was a partner with Matthew Sellers in a second Warrenton store. By 1820 A. Glass and Company was one of the busiest firms in the county. In that year the enterprise sold over $18,000 in merchandise. Meantime the firm of Glass and Sellers transacted an additional $6000 in business. The next year this homegrown merchant bought out Locker and Company's Warrenton operation, including their three town lots, warehouses, and gin. As testimony to Glass's financial success, he was one of Warren County's first residents to pay a luxury tax. 
Local history persisted in local elections, and apparently in state contests as well, much to the dismay of national party organizers. On one occasion the leaders of the county Whigs called a meeting to discuss the prospects for nominating party candidates for local offices, sheriff in particular. Worried at first about maintaining party unity, leaders left the meeting secure in their belief that "all jealousy about the selection of candidates" had been quelled, that "every portion of the county [was] to be represented." But before a second meeting could be held to nominate party candidates men from around the county stepped forward on their own and announced their intentions to run for office. The local Whig convention never happened. Party leaders reluctantly concluded that "the people seem disposed to let matters take their own course, without the aid of nominations." Candidates for county offices ran without party affiliation. Overall, for reasons discussed below, Warren County voters found the pull of the Whigs strong enough to give the party their continued collective support. But Warrenton and Milldale voters took with them to the polls the additional considerations of family and neighborhood
Rural neighborhoods endured through the period of party competition as discrete social and political entities, with their unique structures of patriarchal authority embedded in the slave plantation economy. Deference came naturally to Warren County's small- and nonslaveholders; leadership came just as naturally to planters. Both parties respected the priority of this arrangement because it was in their material interests to do so. Nonslaveholders depended on neighboring planters who controlled valuable productive resources for both access to and protection from markets. Planters in turn relied on the support of dependents in struggles with competing elites for access to the privileges of government. Within this context democracy and electoral politics acquired a unique meaning: dependents and clients were free to support their local patrons in contests with elites from elsewhere, from the other side of the county, from Natchez, from the North.
The framers of the new state constitution endeavored to remove some of the effects of patriarchy and deference on electoral politics. slaves. Similarly, the county's great planters, the Joseph Davises and Henry Turners, men who possessed hundreds of slaves, rarely held elected office. They campaigned only on occasion; voters tended to reject them when they did, perhaps because they appeared as simply too aristocratic for a supposedly democratic society. Nevertheless, most officeholders were slaveholders, and large slaveholders at that. In 1850, for example, masters elected to a position in county government sometime during the preceding decade owned on average twenty slaves, a figure that nearly placed them among the richest 10 percent of the county's household heads. Throughout the antebellum years, Warren County's public officials, elected and appointed, consistently came from at least the richest 20 percent of the county's household heads.
Thus the new constitution and the opening of electoral politics did not really remove the slaveholding elite as a group from public office. Indeed, as late as 1850 the difference in property-holding between officeholders and nonofficeholders was greater than in the years preceding the reforms. Moreover, the new constitution did not stop patriarchs from rallying their kin and neighbors on behalf of particular candidates, as the returns at Warrenton and Milldale indicate. Variation in precinct election returns continued despite constitutional reforms.
The continued selection of leaders from the wealthiest strata of the local population is particularly remarkable, for it contradicts the usual picture of the expansion of democracy during the Age of Jackson. What it indicates, however, is the persistence of hierarchical social structures and corresponding ideas of deferential government. Change did not occur overnight. In his study of political transformation in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts historian Ronald P. Formisano described a deferential-participant politics resulting from "the existence of clear social distinctions which continued to shape behavior even as formal and outward displays of deference weakened.''  Nowhere did social distinctions persist as they did in rural neighborhoods in the South's plantation districts. A yeoman's or small slaveowner's deference to the local planter was more than just an old habit. It reflected the continuation of patriarchal structures of authority within the face-to-face world of the rural neighborhood even as democracy expanded in electoral politics.

Publication Information: Book Title: World War II and the American Indian. Contributors: Kenneth William Townsend - author. Publisher: University of New Mexico Press. Place of Publication: Albuquerque. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 140.

Of the cultural differences that endured, few captivated whites as much as Indian spirituality. When questioned, Indian recruits recounted religious ceremonies practiced by their families or tribes, such as the Blessing Way ceremony, that sought protection for the Indian soldier in combat and his safe return from war. Others spoke of purification rites, which they anticipated upon their return home. Through these ceremonies, Indian veterans would be purged of the hatred for the enemy they carried into battle, the responsibility of their actions in combat, and the horrific memories of war. For varied reasons, soldiers commonly gathered souvenirs from battlefields; Indians did so for ceremonial purposes. Purification rituals required some object from the enemy to be used in the cleansing process. Normally the item was buried and a prayer given for the separation of the Indian from the symbolic hold the article possessed over the veteran. Through this process, the returned Indian warrior placed the past behind him and regained harmony with the earth. ³⁸ Many Indians carried items over which prayers for protection had been made, and some kept a pouch of peyote as a guard against injury or death in combat. While fighting in France in 1944, Frankie Redbone, a Kiowa, was captured and placed in a German prisoner-of-war camp. As a rule, German guards destroyed all personal possessions of their prisoners. Redbone placed his belongings on a table as ordered by his captors. A guard inquired about the contents of the small bag that Redbone withdrew from his pocket. "Indian medicine," Redbone replied. Everything the Indian put on the table was scooped up and taken away but the pouch. He remained in the camp for the next eight months, and upon his liberation he contended that the protection afforded him by the pouch prevented his own death while a POW. ³⁹

Extracted Records for Redbone Related Surnames