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Chapter Seven Enigmas of Kinship Miss Kitty and Her Family I n part 3 we turn from the mythological elaborations of the story of Bishop Andrew and his relationship to slavery to a rereading of the historical record. We begin with the many puzzles involving the story of Miss Kitty (ca. 1822–51). Who were her parents? How did Bishop Andrew acquire her? What was the precise nature of her relationship with the Bishop? What was her life in Oxford in the Andrew household like? Was the Bishop in fact the father of her children? In this chapter I review and sift through the available evidence, and attempt to reconstruct what we can of Miss Kitty’s life in Augusta and Oxford, and then consider the lives of her children, who were taken away from Oxford after her death. Kitty’s Origins Kitty’s parentage and her childhood before coming into James Andrew’s possession remain puzzling. As noted in chapter 3, Bishop Andrew in his May 1851 obituary of Kitty states, “Some years since a lady in Augusta who had formerly been under my pastoral care, being about to die, bequeathed to me a little mulatto girl, named Kitty, requesting that I should keep her in my family till she was twenty-one years of age, and then if she had conducted herself properly, and was willing, I was to send her to Liberia, and if not, I was to keep her and make her as free as the laws of Georgia would permit.” Augustus Baldwin Longstreet asserted in the 1841 interview, reproduced in G. G. Smith’s 1883 biography of Bishop Andrew, “This day, Kitty, a woman of color, left in charge of the Rev. James O. Andrew by the will of Mrs. Power, came before us.” In the interview, Longstreet tells her, “Kitty, your mistress directed in her will that you should remain with Bishop Andrew until you reached the 184 ch ap t er sev en age of nineteen, when it was to be left to your choice to go to Liberia or remain with the Bishop.”1 The original 1841 document quoted by Rev. Smith does not exist in Smith’s or Andrew’s papers at Emory or in other known repositories. We must thus rely entirely on Smith’s reproduction of the text. The Andrew obituary and Longstreet interview do differ on the question of Kitty’s age. Longstreet in 1841 states that Kitty was to be given the choice to go to Liberia when she turned nineteen; ten years later in 1851 Andrew states this choice was to be presented to her at age nineteen. Since Longstreet was writing closer to the original events, it would seem that his account is more trustworthy and that Kitty was nineteen in 1841, and thus born around 1822. It is not clear precisely when Andrew acquired Kitty. All published accounts assert that this took place after Andrew became a bishop in 1832. Some accounts state Kitty was twelve years old when she came into the Bishop’s household, which would probably have been around 1834. In a letter to his friend Rev. Wightman in 1844, in reference to the New York Conference controversy, Bishop Andrew asserts, “I have been eight years a slaveholder,” which would suggest he acquired Kitty around 1836, just around the time he departed for Newton County, about one hundred miles west of Augusta.2 The first direct mention of Kitty that I know of is in a letter dated December 5, 1840, by Bishop Andrew to his wife, Ann Amelia. All we can say in confidence is that Bishop Andrew acquired Kitty at some point between mid-1836 and late 1840. Bishop Andrew in his obituary asserts that Kitty could read and write, and that she was “rather fond of books.” Since the Bishop evidently acquired Kitty when she was at least twelve, it seems likely that she had learned to read before she came into the Bishop’s household. This would make it likely that she spent her childhood in a Methodist household, as Andrew himself implies by his statement that her former mistress had been one of his congregants. Although teaching slaves to read was illegal in the antebellum Deep South, there are a number of accounts of white Methodists in the region teaching favored slaves to read and write. No less a figure than the great Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury is reported, after a prayer meeting in Charleston, South...

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