Master and Slave

Why Tangled Honor for a book title? One reason is the friction between the main character and his ‘man-servant’, which is a polite term for his personal Negro slave. Why am I exploring the rapport between a forty-year old white Confederate officer and his twenty-year old half-white slave? It’s not something I just dreamed up one morning to write about.

  

For one thing, it’s an historically sound relationship to construct in a novel because thousands of Confederate officers took their personal man-servants with them to war. It was not at all uncommon.

But mainly, it’s because I have learned that my family tree includes a real pair of men who found themselves in exactly that situation. The historical Confederate Captain John J McBride and family slave Levi Miller were the real men who inspired me to write Tangled Honor as more than a war story. Their lives were indeed tangled together. 

In real life, for health reasons, young John J McBride emigrated from Lexington, Virginia to Leon County, Texas in the 1840’s. When the Civil War started, McBride enlisted and was elected 1st. Lieutenant in the Leon County Hunters, a group of men from his county in Texas, which became Company C of the Fifth Texas Infantry.

With two brothers and his mother still living in Lexington, Virginia, McBride, an actual man, secured the use of a family-owned slave to serve as his man-servant for the duration of the war. McBride was soon promoted to captain and was twice wounded in famous battles, at Second Manassas in 1862 and the Wilderness in 1864.  Both times, the real man and slave Levi Miller got the job of serving as McBride’s nurse.

The color image of the bearded guy is a post-Civil War oil painting, still in the family, of Captain John J McBride. 

The black and white image is a post-Civil War photo of Levi Miller, gathered from an old postcard that lauded him as the last Negro Confederate soldier.

We know so much about Levi Miller because he did something unexpected, and it was noticed and recorded.  In 1864, he crossed a ‘killing field’ to deliver rations to McBride’s company while they were deployed in the defensive trenches near Richmond.  Captain McBride was not present, having been seriously wounded two weeks earlier.

The enemy fire was too heavy for Miller to run back to the wagons, so he stayed in the trench, and was there when Union soldiers charged. Levi Miller picked up a rifle and fought with the Texas Confederates around him, even to the point of using the bayonet in hand-to-hand combat.

Long after the war, Miller applied for and was granted a Confederate soldier’s pension by the state of Texas for that specific incident. It helped that his story was corroborated by the Confederate officer who witnessed Miller take up arms with the soldiers in his master’s company.

After the war, Captain McBride returned to Texas, and Levi Miller settled in Winchester, Virginia, about a hundred miles north of Lexington, and worked as a water dipper at a health resort for the rest of his life. At his death in 1921, the story of his Confederate pension was written about in the local newspaper, and has since become an example often referenced by those who insist that hundreds, or even thousands, of black men fought as Confederate soldiers.

Almost all historians dismiss that opinion as baloney, as do I. The only groups of black men who carried rifles and fought in the Civil War were the US Colored Troops in the Union army, and there were some 200,000 of them, most of them freed slaves. Maybe those who espouse the ‘Black Confederate’ theory are merely color-blind and confused.

Back to Levi, he is listed in the 1860 US census as a “mulatto.” In that census there were three choices for ethnicity: White, Negro, and Mulatto-half white. That means Levi Miller had a white father. Since Levi was owned by a family with a father and three grown sons, there is a reasonable chance that one of them fathered Levi, if Levi’s mother was also a slave owned by the same family.

Sitting here at my laptop, even 150 years later, it is uncomfortable to reflect on the particulars of my McBride ancestors in Virginia and Texas owning slaves until the bitter end of the Confederacy. It may have been four generations back, but it still feels close to home. Family history with warts.

As to the story of John and Levi in Tangled Honor, what kind of relationship would a master and his man-servant develop while camping together in the army for nearly three years?  Would the relationship be influenced by the two men knowing, or even suspecting, that they were related as half-brothers or cousins or even, perhaps, father-son? Would such a kinship even be acknowledged in the culture of the South, where “one drop” of Negro blood put one in the caste of slaves? 

I find those questions troubling and terribly fascinating. They are compelling me to build a three-novel story around Captain John McBride and Levi Miller. Three years of war together, three books to tell the tale.

Since it’s nearly Thanksgiving, how about a food metaphor? There are just enough known facts about John J McBride and Levi Miller to make a fine pie crust, just waiting for me to spoon in layers of tasty story fillings that run together as I bake the whole pie. I mean, three pies, and the first one, Tangled Honor, will be available next week as a Thanksgiving dessert.