Dear Master William
by Bob Brail

          Sometime in the summer of 1859, probably in the month of August, William Ward Parsons, a thirty-two year old farmer from present-day Defiance, received a most unusual letter.  As he read the letter in his red brick home at the top of a hill overlooking Missouri River bottom land to the east, Parsons may have felt a mixture of emotions.  The letter, written July 24, 1859, was from George Mathis, who had probably been Parsons’ slave nearly his entire life and whom Parsons had recently sold to a plantation owner in extreme southeastern Arkansas.

            The letter, now in the possession of Bill Parsons of Defiance, the great-grandson of William Ward Parsons, is a rarity simply because it was written by a slave.  The fact that it was written to the slave’s former owner makes it even more unique.  The letter has several fascinating aspects, including the identity of George Mathis, the life of slaves in antebellum America, and the relationship of Parsons and Mathis. 

            A transcription of the letter, which follows, uses Mathis’s spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.  Photographs of the original letter are at the end of this article.

            Dear Master William, I send my best respects to you and your family tell my sister Ann and brother John that I would like to hear from them and giv them my best love and tell them that I am well and doing very well at this time and I have enjoyed good health since I hav been to the cuntry I am still single but I do not know long it will bea so I am among a great maney prety girls I do not think I will be single very mutch longer my master that I belong to know  he bought eight blacks when he bought me and two are dead I am selling wood for my master I like the business very well and evernow and then I drop a few cord in for myself this is a great place for meatings I hav not herd on sermon preatched since I hav been down here theire are 25 blacks living with me I have got to be a driver since I come to othis contry Stepney that use to belong to Mr. North is living with me giv my best love to Mr. Hinkle’s folks last year the weter was so high that we did not raise any corn and very near the case this season write me a leter as soon as you get this and direct it to Joseph Morris Columbia Arkansas Shicott Co I have not time or else I would give better satisfaction

            You must be sure and write to me giv my best love to my wife inparticular and tell her that I am single yet.  Aimus left St Louis before I did and I hav not herd from him since Your Dear friend George Mathis.

            Give Stepneys best respects to Mr. Hinkle’s folks.  Tell master Scott Parsons to not be in a hurray about getting married for I have got him a wife all reader picked out and tell master jacob that I would like to hear from him whether he has got a wife yet or not if he is not I have got one picke out for him.

            Early in 1827, several years before he left his native Hardy County in Virginia for St. Charles County, Missouri, William Ward Parsons’ father, Thomas Parsons, purchased two slaves from the estate of Warren Throckmorton.  One was a young woman named Jenney and the other was her son George, whose age was stated on the bill of sale as “about 4.”  This may have been the person who would eventually write the letter.  It is interesting to note that William Ward Parsons was born later that year, during the summer; it is possible the two men spent their entire childhoods and early adult lives together.

            A few years later, Thomas Parsons, his wife Phoebe, their young children, and slaves, came to Missouri and soon settled in what is now Defiance.  In the early 1840’s, they built the red brick house which now stands at the top of the hill on Lee Street in Defiance, using slave labor to accomplish the task.  According to the 1850 slave schedule, Parsons owned eleven slaves, eight males and three females, who ranged in age from thirty-five to six months old. 

            During that same year, on May 25, Thomas Parsons wrote his will.  In it he was careful to designate which of his slaves was to go to each of his children.  The will specified that his wife and daughters between them received six slaves.  The Parsons brothers each received one slave in their father’s will, including George Scott Parsons, who was given George Brown, and William Ward Parsons, who inherited George Temple. 

            Of course, when writing his will, Thomas Parsons could not list his two slaves named George without last names and he could not give them Parsons for a last name, for then there would be no distinction between them.  Perhaps he chose a logical last name for each of his slaves named George: the last name of their previous owner, the man from whom Parsons had purchased the slaves.  There is no slave schedule dating prior to 1850, so it is impossible to know exactly how many slaves Thomas Parsons brought with him from Virginia or where he purchased them.  However, if George Temple possessed his former master’s name, it is possible to get an idea of where George Temple may have come from by looking at the 1850 slave schedule.  In 1850 in the entire state of Missouri, there was only one slave owner named Temple, who owned only four slaves.  On the other hand, in Virginia in 1850, there were over six hundred slaves owned by several men with the last name of Temple.  This suggests, but of course does not prove, that George Temple had been purchased by Thomas Parsons before he left Virginia. 

            This explanation of the last name, however, presents a problem.  It would mean that the young boy George, owned by Mr. Throckmorton until he was purchased by Thomas Parsons in 1827, was not the man who wrote the letter in 1859.  However, it is also possible Thomas Parsons, writing his will twenty-three years later, simply misremembered the last name Throckmorton as Temple.      

            Tax records and the 1852 Missouri census show that by his death in 1852 Thomas Parsons owned only nine slaves.  When his estate appraisal was made after his death in 1852, Parsons’ nine slaves were listed as follows: Bill ($500), Little George ($900), Solomon ($950), George ($900), John ($1000), David ($400), Eliza ($650), Ann ($700), and Sarah ($350).  George Mathis’s letter makes reference to his two siblings, John and Ann, so it is safe to say that Mathis himself was listed in this appraisal as either George or Little George.    

            So in 1852, at the age of twenty-five, William Ward Parsons owned his first slave, George Temple, also known either as George or Little George, but not as George Mathis.  By 1860, he would own eight male slaves ranging in age from thirty-five to one, but these did not include George Mathis, the writer of the letter, who had been sold sometime between 1852 and 1858 (Mathis refers to the previous year’s weather in the 1859 letter so he must have been in Arkansas in 1858).  Because Parsons was the guardian for several of his minor siblings, he also apparently had use of their slaves.  After his mother Phoebe died in January, 1860, he also had charge of her five slaves, acting as administrator of her estate.  It is safe to say William Ward Parsons had control of several slaves as the Civil War commenced.

            It is interesting to observe that George Mathis’s references to Hinkle and North can be substantiated in the slave census of 1860.  Both men farmed in Boles Township, Franklin County, which is directly across the river from present-day Matson.  In other words, these men Mathis refers to, and their slaves, would have been only a short boat ride away from the Parsons farm in St. Charles County.  Isaac Hinkle owned eighteen slaves in 1860.  Five families of Norths owned about sixty slaves.

            Mathis refers to the fact that he is still married and may marry again.  Missouri’s post-Civil War law was typical of former slave states: “In all cases where persons of color, heretofore held as slaves in the State of Missouri, have cohabited together as husband and wife, it shall be the duty of persons thus cohabiting to appear before a justice of the peace . . . and it shall be the duty of such officer to join in marriage the persons thus applying.”  In other words, marriage between slaves, until the war ended, was not a legally binding relationship.  Such a slave union could be destroyed by the owner at any time.  Mathis was simply reflecting the reality that his “marriage” was only as meaningful as he made it.

            How does one reconcile the difference in names between the George Temple, whom William Ward Parsons inherited in 1852, and the George Mathis, who wrote the letter to Parsons in 1859?  In other words, how does George Temple become George Mathis?  It was not unusual for slave owners to give their last names to their slaves.  In the 1850’s and into the war years, Martin Rhodes Peck Mathis was a planter in Planters Township, Chicot County, Arkansas.  George Mathis misspells (“Shicott”) the county in his letter, but there can be no doubt of the county he had in mind.  Chicot County is the extreme southeastern corner of the state and, during the years leading up to the Civil War had the highest proportion of slaves to whites in the entire state.  It was prime cotton country.  Mathis held various county offices and, in fact, his portrait now hangs in the county courthouse.  He owned thirteen slaves in 1860 and employed an overseer; he may have hired many more slaves, hence the “25 blacks” mentioned in Mathis’s letter.  Although it will never be known how the transaction occurred, it is very possible that George Temple was purchased by M. R. P. Mathis and then became George Mathis. 

            In his letter Mathis asks William Ward Parsons to send him a letter in care of Joseph Morris of Columbia, Arkansas, what was then a small town in Chicot County.  One year later Joseph Morris, a twenty-one year old farm laborer, was living in Ouachita County, Arkansas, in extreme southern Arkansas but on the other side of the state.  However, this is not problematic, since it is easy to envision a young man moving to wherever he could find work.  It is even possible Morris was M. R. P. Mathis’s overseer in 1859.

            George Mathis seems to disappear after the Civil War.  Perhaps his fate was the same as the two slaves who died who were purchased with him he refers to in his letter.  Perhaps when Union troops burned Columbia, Arkansas, to the ground in June, 1864, Mathis was freed, left the area, and then died before the 1870 census.  At any rate, the 1870 census does not list anyone named George Mathis likely to be the one who wrote the letter to William Ward Parsons.

           

            According to Parsons family oral history, the Parsons family treated their slaves well.  For example, Thomas and Phoebe Parsons taught their slaves to read and write in an informal school.  Some of the slaves, again according to oral tradition, were actually housed in the attic of the Parsons home, reaching their quarters by a staircase on the side of the house.  Documentary evidence indicates the Parsons family paid for medical care for their slaves, including one named George.  In the early 1840’s they paid for several months of medical care for their slave Solomon.  The family story is of a friendship between William Ward Parsons and George Mathis which resulted in the letter of 1859.   Some of the facts seem to point to such a relationship.  After all, why would Parsons keep the letter from the slave until his death if it did not have special meaning to him?  Why did he keep the bill of sale from 1827 if he did not have a special relationship with the slave George?  Why did his children preserve these documents and pass them on to their heirs?  Also, the letter itself suggests friendly relationship that still existed in 1859.  Mathis addresses William Ward, and also his two brothers, with the title “master,” which refers to their status as boys, not their ownership of him (William Ward Parsons would not marry until 1865).  This is what Mathis would have called William Ward and his brothers only if he had known them as young boys first and then as unmarried adults.  He also rather jokingly refers to their marital status, asks Parsons to write him a letter, and refers to himself as Parsons’ “Dear friend.”  The letter implies no difficulties or resentments between Mathis and Parsons.

            Of course, the question begging to be asked is this: why did William Ward Parsons sell George Temple, or George Mathis, probably to a planter from Arkansas cotton country sometime in the mid 1850’s, if a bond of friendship existed between them?  Did he have pressing financial problems that necessitated the marketing of his longtime companion?  The sparse documentary evidence does not suggest money difficulties for the Parsons family in the years following Thomas’ death.  His wife Phoebe actually acquired three more slaves by the time she died in 1860.  George Scott, William Ward’s brother, owned the slave bequeathed to him by his father in 1852 until George Scott died in 1863.  William Ward himself, in only eight years, increased his number of slaves from one to eight.  In a biographical sketch published shortly after his death, William Ward Parsons is described as a man of “untiring energy and industry” who practiced “good management” and died a fairly wealthy man.     

            In the end, of course, the answer to the question may be the obvious one: William Ward Parsons sold George Mathis simply because he was Mathis’s owner and, for reasons that will never be known, desired to sell him.  In spite of what was possibly a relationship spanning nearly a quarter century, Mathis may have been only a piece of property to Parsons, something he could dispose of as he wished.

Sources: Boone-Duden Historical Society Geneology Files (Parsons); Bill and Gloria Parsons interview; Civilwarbuff.org; Federal Censuses; History of St. Charles County (rootsweb.ancestry.com); Marriages of Color: Ex-Slaves of St. Charles County, Missouri, 1865-1871; Missouri State Census 1852; St. Charles County Historical Society (Civil Court Cases, Probate Files, Wills); Slave Schedules, 1850 and 1860 (ancestry.com).