WHILE INVESTIGATING the history of Manly McCauley a couple of years ago, I came upon a broader realization that I wasn’t looking for at the time.
Mr. McCauley was an 18-year-old Black farmhand when he was lynched just west of Chapel Hill in 1898. His name is on Orange County’s monument at EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice. After the Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition (OCCRC) formed, we’d discussed the likelihood that Manly McCauley, born in 1880, would’ve had family and ancestors who’d been enslaved by the white McCauleys integral to the university’s and town’s start.
As it turned out, Matthew McCauley — an original McCauley here with his brother, both land donors at UNC’s founding and prominent participants in the 1793 cornerstone ceremony — had lived in the same area where Manly McCauley was lynched by neighbors. So did Matthew McCauley’s descendants. So did the people he and they enslaved.
The lineage of those white McCauley brothers are the McCauleys for whom McCauley Street, the Cameron-McCauley Historic District, and much else are named. (A great-grandson named McCauley Street for himself.) More of their land later became UNC’s and was transformed into University Lake, our main water source. The university maintains a McCauley family cemetery next to the lake where Matthew is buried.
The document that resulted from that research gives a detailed accounting of Manly McCauley’s life and murder. In addition to the university’s founding, his story intersects in some peripheral ways with Frank Porter Graham, James Taylor, John Edwards, and Dean Smith, via geography and the men in the lynching posse.
AS I WORKED to pin down the slavery connection between Manly McCauley and the white McCauleys, I went over a lot of old census pages for Orange County from the 1800s. As I did, something else jumped out at me. Many of the people who were recorded as enslavers had names familiar to me. This wasn’t surprising. But it was clarifying.
They were names not only of people of historical note whom I’d read about someplace or another, but also names of people I’d never heard of with surnames presently reflected on the local landscape. They were names of buildings and streets, of neighborhoods, subdivisions, and developments. They were names we see and say every day.
They didn’t stand out simply because of individual enslavers who are still memorialized in our community. It was more than that. The family names signified generational wealth and real estate, status, and the origins of that prominence in the forced free labor of humans they’d held captive. As I connected the dots between Black and white McCauleys, the 19th-century handwriting on those old census rolls ended up connecting much more.
In 1850 and 1860, the U.S. created “Slave Schedules” that more thoroughly documented the 4 million enslaved people just before the Civil War. However, the names of the enslaved were not recorded, only the names of their enslavers. Yonni Chapman commented on that silence in his dissertation about local Black history.
“In the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, slave burials are designated by unmarked fieldstones. In the federal manuscript census, slaves have no names. Each Chapel Hill slave is indicated by a slash mark beneath the owner’s name. The old rock walls surrounding the campus are silent concerning the lives and labors of their slave builders. In contrast, buildings, portraits, monuments, and university histories trumpet a one-sided celebration of the university’s slave past.”
Also …
“While the President’s house and the Soldiers Monument affirmed the virtues of slavery and the Confederacy, the debt to African Americans remained unacknowledged and unpaid. In this way, the university taught a culture of denial that was essential to the maintenance of white supremacy in a nation that traded on its democratic creed.”
It was the generational wealth and power, the lives built on a foundation of chattel slavery, that stood out. The town and university built on bondage.
Several of the enslaved people listed in Chapel Hill and Orange County were designated as being held in trusts for minor children not old enough to own property outright. All over North Carolina, UNC claimed enslaved people from estates with no heirs and sold them to pay its bills. UNC rented enslaved people from local enslavers, including president David L. Swain, who self-dealed in this manner as did other university employees. UNC students, sons of the slaveholding gentry class, paid as a line item in their student fees for use of enslaved servants. Wealth and power. Institutional and family.
The 1860 slave schedule for Chapel Hill recorded 480 enslaved persons, by my count. Their ages ranged from 1-month to 90-years-old, all marked by a slash. Some of their enslavers were important names familiar still today: Carr, Pool, Swain. Elsewhere in Orange County, there were the Ruffins and Camerons among many more. (Paul Cameron, of Cameron Avenue and Thomas Ruffin’s son-in-law, was the largest enslaver in North Carolina at the time of the Civil War with more than 1,000 human beings.)
Nearly 40 percent of Chapel Hill’s permanent residents were enslaved in 1860. Almost half (48 percent) of Chapel Hill was Black.
Below is an alphabetized list of enslavers recorded in 1860 Chapel Hill, with a few of the most prominent noted. More information follows, including a more personal discovery.
What names do you recognize?
Slave Schedule, Orange County, N.C., Chapel Hill District, 1860 U.S. Federal Census
Anna Ashe — 3 enslaved persons, ages 5 to 48
R.J. Ashe — 19 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 39
Mary P. Battle — 7 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 37 [grandmother of future UNC president]
J.M. Blackwood — 1 enslaved person, age 20
Julia Blackwood — 1 enslaved person, age 14
Mary Blackwood — 1 enslaved person, age 19
Sam Blackwood — 2 enslaved persons, ages 2 to 45
T.D. Blackwood — 1 enslaved person, age 3
Adline Bowles — 1 enslaved person, age 47
Anderson Brockwell — 1 enslaved person, age 55
J.W. Carr — 9 enslaved persons, ages 3 months to 40 years [Julian Carr’s father]
H.M. Case — 25 enslaved persons, ages 6 months to 68 years
Betsy Cheek — 1 enslaved person, age 14
James M. Cheek — 4 enslaved persons, ages 2 to 25
Morgan Closs — 4 enslaved persons, ages 11 to 50
Ann Craig — 4 enslaved persons, ages 2 to 38
John M. Craig — 10 enslaved persons, ages 2 to 76
F.A. Davis — 4 enslaved persons, ages 5 months to 33 years
J.G. Davis — 50 enslaved persons, ages 6 months to 70 years
Jessee Durham — 1 enslaved person, age 28
Manuel Fetter — 12 enslaved persons, ages 1 month to 70 years
Eliza Grant — 1 enslaved person, age 45
H.B. Guthrie — 17 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 63
Louisa Hardy — 2 enslaved persons, ages 19 and 28
M.J. Hargraves — 33 enslaved persons, ages 2 to 81
W.B. Harrell — 1 enslaved person, age 6
J.T. Hogan — 8 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 52
William J. Hogan — 18 enslaved persons, ages 2 to 48
William T. Hogan — 1 enslaved person, age 45
John Hutchings — 8 enslaved persons, ages 2 to 39
S.S. Jackson — 3 enslaved persons, age unknown to 12
Martha Kirkland — 3 enslaved persons, ages 5 to 29
C.A. Lewis — 5 enslaved persons, ages 12 to 85
Sallie Mallett — 3 enslaved persons, ages 10 to 55
William P. Mallett — 11 enslaved persons, ages 1 month to 58 years
Sarah Mason — 3 enslaved persons, ages 13 to 34
A.J. McDade — 10 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 60
P.H. McDade — 5 enslaved persons, ages 7 to 27
A. Mickle — 6 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 27
Margaret Mitchell — 1 enslaved person, age 18
Maria Mitchell — 5 enslaved persons, ages 21 to 90
C.A. Morrow — 21 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 60
Sarah O’Daniel — 3 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 30
John Partin — 2 enslaved persons, ages 12 and 19
Charles Phillips — 3 enslaved persons, ages 32 to 70
James Phillips — 1 enslaved person, age 60
Solomon Pool — 4 enslaved persons, ages 5 to 40 [soon-to-be UNC president]
Eason Pritchard — 5 enslaved persons, ages 2 months to 45 years
G.W. Purefoy — 54 enslaved persons, ages 2 months to 60 years old
David Ryan — 2 enslaved persons, ages 16 and 39
J.B. Shearer — 1 enslaved person, age 13
H.H. Smith — 4 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 58
H.J. Stone — 3 enslaved persons, ages 9 months to 25 years
D.L. Swain — 32 enslaved persons, ages 1 month to 50 years [UNC president]
Eliza Thompson — 28 enslaved persons, ages 1 to 35
Ann L. Watson — 1 enslaved person, age 44
James Watson — 2 enslaved persons, ages 55 and 65
John H. Watson — 3 enslaved persons, ages 5 to 38
Jones Watson — 1 enslaved person, age 45
Nancy Williams — 1 enslaved person, age 18
E.L. Yancy — 4 enslaved persons, ages 6 months to 21 years
THAT’S JUST for 1860. And only the Chapel Hill district, which in area was much smaller than now and didn’t account for the bulk of local farm land. The Chapel Hill slave schedule was 6 pages long. Each page had lines for 80 enslaved persons. All of Orange County took 72 pages. There were 22 pages for “South Side of NC RR” (outside of Chapel Hill), 16 pages for Hillsborough, and 28 pages for “not stated”.
That’s more than 5,700 enslaved persons, a third of Orange County’s permanent residents at the time.
Here is a sampling of some surnames of enslavers in those other Orange County districts in 1860: (Many surnames from the Chapel Hill schedule appeared elsewhere in the county too, but aside from Battle no repeats are included here.)
Alston, Barbee, Battle [father of future UNC president], Bingham, Brewer, Brown, Cabe, Cameron, Carmichael, Carrington, Carroll, Clark, Cole, Craig, Duke, Forrest, Graham, Green, Harris, Henderson, Henry, Holden, Johnston, Jones, King, Lindsay, Lloyd, Long, Mangum, Mebane, Merritt, McAdams, McCauley, Morgan, Morrow, Nevill, Nunn, Parker, Patterson, Phipps, Ray, Riggsbee, Robertson, Robeson, Rodgers, Ruffin, Shelton, Snipes, Strayhorn, Stroud, Taylor, Teague, Trice, Turner, Umstead, Umsted, Walker, Weaver, Webb, White, Whitted, Wilson.
DOING THAT research not only illuminated Chapel Hill a bit better, but also stirred me to look into my own family’s history.
Without thinking deeply about it, I’d long figured my ancestors were unlikely to have been enslavers despite the fact that I grew up in Virginia. My mother is a Hungarian immigrant, and my father’s family didn’t come from much. They also went back generations in mountainous and hilly areas (southwest Virginia) where slavery was less common. (Note: Non-slave states and areas were still plenty tied up in the economy of slavery and the slave trade.)
All I had to do was piece together my father’s family tree to realize how naive my assumption had been. On my father’s side, I had 16 grandfathers who could’ve been potential enslavers just in the generation most likely to have been adults from 1830 to 1860. (Men were typically listed in the rolls as owners; women appeared but less frequently and usually as a result of inheritance.) The number of grandparents doubled, of course, with every generation, and I tried to identify as many as I could who’d been alive and of age in that period. I couldn’t identify all 32 names in the generation I especially targeted, nor did I check kin who weren’t direct grandparents.
I made a list of all the counties where I knew my ancestors had lived, and I searched those slave schedules. With the information I had, I identified at least two grandfathers, and eight enslaved persons. (Another man I found listed in the 1830 census with 1 enslaved person in his household, a girl younger than 10, might also be a grandfather but the evidence was less conclusive.)
At the time the 1860 census was taken in Franklin County, Virginia, Robert Radford, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, was the enslaver of three people: a 42-year-old woman, a 5-year-old girl, and a 6-month-old baby boy. Each marked by a slash.
In 1850 in Patrick County, Virginia, Edward Cockran, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, was the enslaver of five people: a 23-year-old woman, a 7-year-old boy, a 5-year-old girl, a 3-year-old girl, and a 1-year-old boy. Each marked by a slash.
(Edward’s brother-in-law was next on the page, enslaving 9 people, ages 7 months to 80 years.)
The fact that these grandfathers’ entries both had one enslaved adult — a female — plus children certainly caught my attention given how common rape of enslaved women was in the period.
The lifetimes of those two adult women could have overlapped in southwest Virginia with my first grandparents, the man and woman who raised my father and I knew, born in 1917 and 1920. The lives of some of those six children designated by a slash almost certainly did. They could’ve crossed paths with my grandparents, Joseph and Bernice, on a country road, in a town square, on a farm, in a feed store. Maybe they met. Perhaps my grandparents once heard their names.
The slave schedules for 1860 and 1850 are searchable for free.
ONE GOOD THING: Snow Day
SOURCES & CREDITS:
“Manly McCauley 1880-1898: Background on His Life in Orange County, North Carolina, and His Death by Lynch Mob just West of Chapel Hill” by Mike Ogle: OCCRC
A Backward Glance: Facts of Life in Chapel Hill, compiled by the Chapel Hill Bicentennial Committee (1793-1993), published in 1994
“Black Freedom and the University of North Carolina, 1793-1960”, doctoral dissertation by John K. (Yonni) Chapman
“Page From Account Book, 1830, Listing Student Fees Including Two-Dollar Charge Paid For Slaves Hired As College Servants”: The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History
U.S. Federal Census and Slave Schedules (and screenshots): Ancestry.com
Image of Paul C. Cameron in The University Magazine, December 1886: Archive.org
All other photos: Mike Ogle