19th Century Burrow Family and the History of American Slavery
The 19th Century Burrow Family & the History of American Slavery
Banks Burrow, Sr.'s Plantation Home, Lavinia, Tennessee
Introduction
This is the story of one West Tennessee family during the period of 1800 to the decades following the end of the American Civil War.
What started out as typical research of part of my family history, became an attraction to the history of that family’s relationship to slave-ownership. I very much like combining American history with my genealogical research. In this case, the historical aspect is large and far-reaching, perhaps bigger than any other topic I can think of. It chronicles the historic division of this nation into North and South, the enslavement of one group by another over hundreds of years, the conflict of the American Civil War and the turbulent and largely unsuccessful reconstruction of the nation in the decades after. The Burrow family had to negotiate all of this in ways unknown to the North, sometimes successfully and at other times with much misfortune.
This is also a story about the Black Americans caught up in slavery and later in trying to put together lives in freedom. The study was fortunately made possible by U.S. census records in 1870 which began to identify those previously enslaved who had taken the surname of Burrow upon their emancipation and who continued to live in close proximity of their former owners. The presentation of all of this is organized into two major sections: The White Burrows and the Black Burrows.
The White Burrow Family
This section has 11 chapters:
Chapter One- A brief history of the Burrow family
Chapter Two- Were the Burrows slave-owners?
Chapter Three- The history of slavery in Tennessee
Chapter Four- Slavery as an unjust and abusive economic institution
Chapter Five- Banks Mechium Burrow, Sr., Tennessee plantation owner
Chapter Six- The Carroll County Burrow plantation prior to the Civil War
Chapter Seven- The Gibson County Burrow plantation prior to the Civil War
Chapter Eight- The death of Banks Mechium Burrow and its aftermath
Chapter Nine- The Burrow family during the Civil War.
Chapter Ten- The two brothers: John Jefferson Burrow & Banks M. Burrow, Jr.
Chapter Eleven- The Burrow family after the Civil War.
The Black Burrow Family
This section has 9 Chapters:
Chapter One- Introduction
Chapter Two- The Genealogist’s Journey
Chapter Three- Black Burrows at the time of Emancipation
Chapter Four- Life in the South during the Reconstruction
Chapter Five- The Black Burrows during the Reconstruction
Chapter Six- The History of the “Jim Crow” period, 1877-1963
Chapter Seven- The Black Burrows during the “Jim Crow” Period
Chapter Eight- The Genealogist’s Journey Continued
Chapter Nine- One White Man’s 20th Century Journey in Understanding Social Behavior & Race