Dick and Anna McKissack

One of the beautiful parts of my job is discovering the symphony of each family and connecting that family to our collective American narrative. Following the details as they come together note by note, each detail, every experience falling exactly where it needed to be to create a unique family story. I tell people every single day that each family tree I research is a flawless symphony. When we look at our complicated American narrative, it’s hard to see perfection in the symphony. Human beings are fixers. We look back and see the things that shouldn’t have happened or the things that could have been done better. The very simple truth is that our job is to study the symphony, learn from it, take all that knowledge and change the future. It’s the only power we have.

Weaving family history and historical events into one narrative is not done in one day, one week or even a year. Resources take time to find and connect together. I get the distinct honor of poking around through databases, archives and (my favorite) original files and ledger books sitting on court house shelves. The details come alive when you fit them into the timeline of our country. I’m not a composer, I didn’t write the symphony. But after time and generations silence the melodies, I get to help bring them to a full vibrant crescendo.  

The problem with history education is that we tend to learn history by memorization. We memorize places, dates and numbers and the human experience is removed. Understanding human history and having empathy for it, requires human stories. This is especially the case in a family narrative. Human stories woven into the American narrative show us how one generation led to another, how each person’s human experience was dependent on the previous one. And it is so vividly evident that there were no mistakes. There was strength. Dick and Anna McKissack are the beginning of a generational family narrative seamlessly woven into the racial narrative of our country.

Dick  and Anna were born enslaved in North Carolina. Both born during the years our nation was in its infancy. The words “all men are created equal” fresh in the collective hearts of Americans. Dick born abt 1790 during the presidency of George Washington and Anna abt nine years later, when John Adams was president. They grew as our country did. They were children when the importation of Africans became illegal. Young adults when Native Americans were moved across the Mississippi and cotton exploded. They grew as the country grew.

Much of Dick’s early narrative has yet to be discovered. However, Anna can be found on many court records. Anna was owned by a Revolutionary War veteran named Charles Sallard in Person County, NC. Sallard owned twenty-eight slaves in 1820 and that number grew to seventy-six by 1840. On December 20, 1814 Sallard’s daughter, Rebecca, married William McKissack. The next day, Sallard gifted to Rebecca, without deed, a slave girl named Anna. Anna was a teenager at the time, about fifteen. She likely at this time became a personal slave for Rebecca. Rebecca did not have a long life. She died shortly after giving birth to her only child, Eleanor. At her death, Anna became the property of Wm. McKissack. After his first wife’s death, William remarried and abt 1833 he removed his family and his slaves to Maury County, TN. He was joining his father and some of his siblings, who had already migrated to Tennessee. The expansion of the United States quickly moved westward, as did slavery. 

Wm. McKissack farmed, but he was not specifically a farmer. He was a businessman and his focus was industry. His slaves were skilled artisans: carpenters, brick masons, mechanics, tinners, etc. Young slaves trained under the older ones. The youngest, doing simple jobs like carrying bricks until they were old enough to learn more skilled labor. He owned vast numbers of slaves under various corporation names. He owned gins, mills, factories and farms. William McKissack’s entire success was dependent upon his slaves, and likewise the details of their lives are dependent upon William. 

It can be logically assumed that Dick was already a slave of William McKissack when Anna arrived, because Dick and Anna’s oldest known child, Mary, was born about 1815. Wm. McKissack was noted by other former slaves as having been the one to perform marriage ceremonies for his slaves, reading from a book. Once he was done reading you were married.  The process became more complicated if the couple being married were owned by different owners. In Anna and Dick’s case, they were both owned by William. Dick and Anna had a brood of at least eleven children, most of them born in North Carolina: Mary, Malinda, Almira, Madison, Roam, Richard, Caroline, Harriet, Margaret, Clemson and Calvin. 

William’s daughter, Eleanor, had married her cousin Orville McKissack in 1833, against her father’s wishes. Because of this, he did not “provide” for her in the marriage. Eleanor demanded her father to give her Anna, Patsy and Murphy, who had been given to her mother, Rebecca. She said because her mother died, the three slaves should be hers, not her fathers. Her father refused and when he moved to Tennessee, he removed Anna, Patsy and Murphy with him. In 1836 Orville and Eleanor McKissack sued William for not only Anna, Patsy and Murphy, but all of Anna and Patsy’s combined children as well. This court case lasted for almost ten years. In the end, the courts ruled that all slaves would stay with William McKissack.

Dick, like many of William’s slaves, was a skilled craftsman, a carpenter. Dick would have worked on building projects for William personally, but also would have been rented or contracted out to complete building projects. All of the work that Dick did would not have been in Spring Hill, where Anna and the children were. Logic dictates that as a carpenter, Dick would have had to travel to where each building project was. William McKissack had contracts for the labor of his slaves from Davidson to Giles Counties. William also moved his slaves from factory to gin to mill, depending on time of year and labor needed. We also know, Dick was a spiritual leader for other slaves. It was specifically noted by Nancy Cheairs that she and her husband were married in Spring Hill by Richard McKissack “an old colored man” abt 1840. 

When William McKissack died in 1855, he died intestate so his children “drew” his slaves in a lottery like process, making sure each child inherited an equal value of slaves. Dick and Anna were drawn by William’s daughter, Susan McKissack Cheairs. Their daughter Margaret was their only child who ended up at the Cheairs home as well. Their youngest son, Calvin, sixteen years old, was one of two of their children drawn by Eleanor McKissack. After over ten years of fighting for ownership of Anna and her children, only two of those children ended up being drawn by Eleanor. In addition to Margaret, Caroline, Dick and Anna’s daughter-in-law and their two young grandsons were drawn by Susan Cheairs. 

Rippa Villa, the home of Susan and Nat Cheairs, was a sprawling 1,000 acre plantation growing large quantities of livestock and crops, cotton being the most prominent. Nat Cheairs joined the Confederate Army during the Civil War and in his letters home he mentioned Dick and Anna. On April 22, 1862 he wrote “Hello to…Uncle Dick and his wife” and just a few weeks later, “Tell Uncle Dick and Nath to take good care of Miss Susan.” We do not know exactly the jobs that Dick and Anna were doing at this time, but it is apparent they were working closely within the home.

The silent notes of their lives are more plentiful than the loud notes. However we know, they wrote the first movement, and established a strong rhythm and the final composition was enriched by all the movements that followed. Dick and Anna were born at the founding of our country. They grew as the foundations of democracy were being established. They raised their children as the country expanded and lived their later years in a country divided in a bitter war. They survived the tumultuous years leading up to war, and saw Lincoln win the election. They lived through sixteen presidents! The Dred Scott case told them that they had no rights because they were not citizens. However, they didn’t need to know the Dred Scott decision to know that. Anna and her children had been fought over in court for years as property. Anna had no voice in her own life or the lives of her children. Their family could have been split up with the drop of a gavel. They had no rights. We do not know if Dick and Anna survived the war. If they were able to know freedom. But we know they lived long enough to see hope. Hope that their children and grandchildren would know freedom. And they did. 

(next week Anna and Dick’s children:)