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Re: Camp Chase POW
In Response To: Re: Camp Chase POW ()

Hello fellow Southern Compatriots (and Yankees should you be spying on us),

Looking for any information anyone might have on the Southern Freedom Fighter Private John Elbert Elliott, Company I, 46th Alabama. He was captured on December 15, 1864 at the Battle of Nashville and shipped out to Camp Chase on December 16th. He was there for the duration of the war. John Elbert's father, Jim Elliott, had died April 26, 1863 leaving the family's slaves, a "woman of color" Chancy and her two boys Lee and Stamper to the young John Elbert.

He joined the service of his country on May 10, 1862 in Columbia, Henry County, Alabama at age 17. When he was released from Camp Chase, he and another Rebel started the long walk to Alabama, John Elbert headed for the Camp Springs Community of Henry County. Starving, the duo discovered a stray hog, caught it, butchered it and ate it. Word got to the local sheriff and he arrested the two and placed them in the calaboose for about 8 months.

Back home in Alabama, the vigil continued for John Elbert until around Christmas of 1865 and the Elliott Clan thought him to be gone, dying for the cause of a free and sovereign Southland. His older brother, Davis Andrew Jackson "Jack" Elliott had returned soon after the war walking from Brayer's Crossroads, Tennessee. Jack's wife Mary Ann was with child that Christmas and delived the couple's baby boy on New Year's Eve. Thinking John Elbert had expired, the boy was named in memory of his departed uncle as John Elbert Elliott, "Jr.", my great grandfather (my Dad being John Elbert Elliott, III).

In February of 1866, one of the three freed slaves the Elliott's had owned, Chancy Elliott (taking the family name in the summer of '65)was preparing dinner while the Elliott Clan was at monthly preaching day at Camp Springs Missionary Baptist Church about one mile from the Elliott home--the Elliotts were yeoman farmers living in a double pen dog trot log home with a detached log kitchen owning less than five slaves. While in slavery, a side room was built on the front porch for Chancy and her young sons Lee and Stamper.

It was unseasonably warm and Chancy went out on the front porch to cool off. As she looked up the old Abbeville-Columbia Road of Henry County, she saw a lone man heading that way. Many had been the man or men that Chancy had fed, nursed and sent on their way after the War for Southern Independence on their way home to Southwest Georgia or Northwest Florida. As she watched this particular man, there was something familiar about him--his walking gait and his movements. When he was nearly 200 yards away, she recognized the man as the boy she had raised, her "boy" Marse John Elbert!

Chancy was overjoyed and ran toward the young Rebel. As she got near to him, through tears of joy he told her not to come any closer for he was covered with body lice and head lice. The clothes he was wearing simply hung on his decimated body, his feet wrapped in old rags for shoes. Chancy immediately noticed he had no toenails--lost to frost bite.

Once at the homeplace, Chancy built a fire in the smokehouse and began heating up a wash pot of water for him to bath, leaving a big bar of homemade lye soap by the wash pot. After he had stripped, she demanded he throw his old clothes out the door which she gathered up with a pichfork and burned in the trash heap. She hollered to her beloved Marse John that she would be right back and away she flew the mile to Camp Springs Church. When she arrived at the churchyard, she never broke stride, burst through the doors and was halfway down the aisle before she was able to holler, "Marse John done come home!!"

The meeting broke up instantly as the congregation loaded up on wagons and buggies or mounted the very rare mule or horse to go see this miracle--John Elbert was "back from the dead!" It wasn't until 1892 that there were as many mules and horses in the South as there was in 1861--a terrible hinderance to a agriculturally based war ravaged region reliant on these animals for a living.

What happened to Chancy after that was never told in the wonderful oral history that has been carried through the Elliott Clan. Just this year, I was looking through the 1870 US Census of Henry County on the River Ridge Road, a portion of the plantation district that ran through Henry County in the Lower Chattahoocee River Valley. Next door to Squire Baldwin Fluker who had lost 4 million dollars in 2006 currency in estate value during the war, was a mulatto man--Green Henderson. In his household was his wife CHANCY and two boys LEE and STAMPER. Green and Chancy had two "babies", the oldest born in 1867.

We can only suppose, but perhaps she took the Elliott name for a couple of years before she married Green. He was a former slave of the wealthy Brockman W. Henderson before the war who by 1870 was in Cherokee County, Texas with $100 in personal estate. The new home of Green and Chancy was only five miles from the Elliott homeplace. There is no marriage license in the Henry County courhouse in the "colored" section. Many freedman did not have a marraige license because they could not afford it, was not educated in civil law, or married through a ritual practiced by people of color such as "jumpin' the broom."

Chancy, Lee and Stamper had come with the Elliotts from Randolph County, Georgia in 1855 (my Elliott cousins tending the 151st crop on the place this year). Lee and Stamper are both listed as "mulatto". In practices that were uniquely Southern, it is possible that Lee and Stamper were only gaining their birthright when becoming Elliotts after the war.

The story does not end there. Green and Chancy had several more children. The African American Stovall family has worked for the Elliotts for generations. Today they are all simply good friends living in harmony at Haleburg, Alabama two miles east of Camp Springs. Having helped one of the Stovall's with a very small amount of family history in the past, I knew immediately that Green Henderson was the maternal grandfather of an earlier generation.

So when John Elbert Elliott "Sr." returned from Camp Chase he was reuited with his family that included Chancy, Lee and Stamper. He moved to East Texas in 1890 settling in Smith County eleven miles east of Tyler. The 1900 Census of Smith County reveals that living next to John Elbert Elliott and his family was the family of a mulatto man, Lee Henderson. So it goes in Dixie!

Many thanks,
Steve Elliott

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