William Barksdale was my wife’s great great uncle.
His sister Virginia Barksdale Wade was her great great gandma and the wife of State Senator Levi Wade who owned a large cotton plantation southeast of Nashville between Smyrna and Murfreesboro called Bellevue...not to be confused with another Bellevue home in West Nashville which still stands.
My wife’s family home was razed by the Federals during the Stones River and Tullahoma etc campaigns that ran up and down the Old Nashville Highway where it was located.
Levi had voted for Secession at the last moment as a state senator and was a colonel in the CSA away in Virginia and the Yankees pillaged the home and foraged the crops and appropriated all the male field slaves for labor. The family (women and children) with the house slaves and women and girls and younger boy slaves fled to kinfolks in the hills to the east in Smith county near what is now Center Hill lake. Virginia Barksdale wrote quite a bit on this in her journal which my wife’s aunt has to this day.
Ironically...all of the descendents I know today are Republicans...it would be hard to explain to them if you could today how the parties have sorta switched as to who is now the progressive.
But we still have the same pickle whereby a transformational progressive time and again gets elected President of the USA without a majority of the vote,
Though Obama got 10 points more than Lincoln.
* all that stands of the old homeplace is the graveyard which some of us try to keep up...their family never recovered economically...they did keep the land and sharecropped out to the older slaves who stayed and they even built a small farm house in 1868...which burned down in the 1970s under new owners...the foundation of the original plantation still exists
“William Barksdale was my wife’s great great uncle.
His sister Virginia Barksdale Wade was her great great gandma and the wife of State Senator Levi Wade”
Well, that explains one male offspring’s name. ;o)
“Ironically...all of the descendents I know today are Republicans...it would be hard to explain to them if you could today how the parties have sorta switched as to who is now the progressive.”
Profound! Thanks for writing what I’ve been perplexed as to how to communicate.