On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865

6. “We all lived neighbors”: Sociability in Small-Slave-holding Neighborhoods

6 / “We all lived neighbors”: Sociability in Small-Slaveholding Neighborhoods Archibald Little Hager was an astute observer of the many happenings in his Perry County neighborhood; for twenty-six years he faithfully chronicled weddings, births, sicknesses, deaths, sales of land and slaves, and even beatings and shootings involving his kin and neighbors. Hager was not a slaveholder, yet he maintained close relationships with many who were. He described a community where people knew their neighbors well and often cultivated their associations through mutual aid and sociability. His detailed journal reveals that the residents of Perry County, both slave and free, were inextricably connected to one another through the course of their everyday work and social interactions.1 Archibald Hager described his Perry County neighborhood as expansive , encompassing local residents who shared similar backgrounds and experiences. Sites of sociability allowed people to connect with one another , but they also excluded those who were considered outsiders. White and black residents of Perry County did not share all social spaces, and for that matter, all white people did not socialize with one another. Instead , neighborhoods often were created within neighborhoods. Hager clearly excluded from his definition of neighbor a large group of German Saxon immigrants—people with a different language, customs, and faith—who had recently settled on the eastern margins of the county. Hager also suggests that there were many instances in which his neighbors were segregated by age, gender, and race. Men and women engaged in some social activities together, although just as often they socialized 232 / “we all lived neighbors” apart. Enslaved Missourians were especially effective at developing their own social networks—often hidden—within the framework of the large whole.2 Approximately 150 miles to the north of Perry County, a slave man named Alfred Smith forged vital connections with other bondpeople living throughout his Pike County neighborhood. Soon after the Civil War, both Esther Smith and Clarinda Morton filed claims with the federal government for the military pension of Alfred Smith. Esther Smith disputed Clarinda Morton’s assertion that she was Alfred’s wife and argued that as the soldier’s mother she was entitled to her deceased son’s pension. Morton defended her claim by asking her relatives and friends to testify that she had married and cohabitated with Alfred Smith in the years before his enlistment. Although her main objective was to prove the validity of her abroad marriage, a fortunate and unintended consequence of the resulting paper trail is a detailed description of the complex relationships that existed between slaves living on the farms of Pike County. The picture that emerges from the pages of Alfred Smith’s pension file, and those of hundreds of other Missouri soldiers, is one of strong bonds of family and friendship forged within rural neighborhoods where bondpeople knew one another well and were interconnected through their families, owners, work, and play.3 Archibald Hager and Alfred Smith’s friends and family described close-knit communities in which neighbors interacted with one another as they conducted business, provided mutual aid, and gathered socially. Most white Missourians owned small to medium-sized farms—there were more farms under one hundred acres than over; therefore, neighbors ’ homes frequently were located a short distance from one another. The immediate neighborhood was the site of the most intense and frequent socializing as neighbors regularly exchanged social calls and lent aid to one another. Neighbors both black and white knew the business of those who lived within “hallooing distance.” They associated as they sat at one another’s firesides, passed by neighbors’ farms on the way home, labored in close proximity in the fields abutting property lines, and ran into one another while rambling, hunting, or working in nearby woods. Neighbors figured prominently in Missourians’ accountings of their lives, no matter their social standing.4 Rural Missourians’ social circles also radiated outward from their home farms and neighborhoods; however, the extent of this social interaction was dependent on an individual’s place within his or her household and society. White youngsters often walked to the local one-room “we all lived neighbors” / 233 schoolhouses where they met neighborhood children, thus connecting their families to those of their fellow students. White men rode to the nearest town to purchase goods at mercantile establishments and haul crops to mill and market, and they periodically attended court sessions and conducted legal business at the county seat...