Burning Bridges

 

Speed-reading the genealogy of an extended family line can help spot patterns. In the case of my second great-grandmother's possible link to the line of William Laws of North Carolina, that pattern seemed to be skipping across the county line before the family's name was called in yet another court of law. Whether that was true or not, I can't yet say. I haven't followed up on the entries I found in Yancey County court records from North Carolina.

"Oh, but that would be the fun part," my daughter remarked when I told her what I had found—but she'll just have to wait until I can focus on solely tracing legal documents which, unfortunately, is not my forte. There is, however, another possibility driving the family's seeming disappearance during the time period I've been studying. For that, I needed to widen the lens to examine a broader view of history—not just the Laws family's own history, but that of the time period in which they lived. To put it in a nutshell, theirs was a time and a place for burning bridges.

So far, I had found William Laws' household in Yancey County, North Carolina, in the 1850s. Then it was  across the state line, first to Washington County, Tennessee, where daughter Sarah Catherine Laws married Thomas Davis in 1856, then onward again to Carter County. Finally, the family—along with my second great-grandmother's Davis household—appeared in Greene County, Tennessee.

All told, the time span stretched from 1850 to 1870, encapsulating a critical period in American history: the Civil War. While I don't know much about North Carolina history, I did know one thing about the counties where my maternal grandfather's line lived for generations: northeastern Tennessee, unlike the rest of the state, was pro-Union leading up to the vote regarding secession.

When the vote did not go the way the local populace wanted, there were enough of those independently-minded locals to take the path of the renegade. Perhaps the Laws family was of that same mind.

After reading several newspaper articles from that time period and region, it was clear to me that northeastern Tennessee might reveal some clues about the point of view of my own family if I dug deeper into the local history of those counties. Prime focus led to Greene County, where I found the family in the 1870 census—and where many of their descendants stayed, long after the close of that time period.

Newspapers would publish comments about "the whisky war at Greeneville," the county seat of Greene County, and other reports that gave an impression far removed from the bucolic ambience I might otherwise have ascribed to Tennessee. Greeneville, home of soon-to-be president Andrew Johnson, apparently had a long history of independent action, and was a hotbed of activity for a number of movements, such as the abolitionist movement of the early 1800s and, during the start of the Civil War, an effort to secede from the Confederate state of Tennessee to form a separate pro-Union state.

It was from that fertile ground that a Civil War era plot was hatched to—literally—burn bridges. The idea was shared by residents across several counties of northeastern Tennessee, and the nine bridges targeted were located along the eastern border of Tennessee, stretching from Bluff City near the Virginia border down to Chattanooga and even into Alabama. Among those targeted was one bridge in Greene County, as well as another in Carter and Washington Counties, home to Laws' relatives.

While I have no idea whether any of William Laws' sons were involved in the bridge-burning plot, just reviewing the history of the area points out the mindset that undoubtedly made the Laws family feel quite at home in the region during that era of American history.

Granted, I still want to pore over the original North Carolina court records to see just what incident inspired the Laws boys to step across the county line—and as a genealogist, I certainly am not appreciative of their history's shenanigans which have led me on such a paper chase. But this discovery about history's lesser-known local episodes aptly reminds me that we all are a product not only of our genes, but of our environment and culture, and it can sometimes help to take a step back and explore the headlines of our ancestors' own newspapers.