General Thomas Posey: Son of the American Revolution

8. “I am not … above shewing an example to my fellow citizens ….” (1810-1813)

CHAPTER EIGHT (1810-1813) "1 am not . .. abo'Ve shewing an example to my fellow citizens. ... " Thomas Posey was accounted a resident of Kentucky's Henderson County in the federal census of 1810;1 but the arrival of a new decade found him busily planning a major move to the Territory of Orleans. Posey's nature was intrinsically restive and venturesome, but his decision was based partly upon more practical considerations. The long-planned removal from Virginia to Kentucky had not brought the financial security he envisioned for himself and his family. Farming was, at best, a marginal and precarious existence, and the prospect of further military assignments was highly uncertain. His investments in land had been notably unprofitable-securing and establishing clear legal title to real property in Kentucky was notoriously difficult, and Thomas simply did not have the combination of foresight, patience, canniness and luck that characterized most of the successful land speculators of his day. Public office offered the most promising means of maintaining a comfortable lifestyle, but after the Burr affair his political prospects in Kentucky were not propitious. They had been further diminished by the election of General Charles Scott to the governorship. Two military heroes in one state was one too many, and if he was to improve his public and private fortunes, it was time to move along. Conversely, the heavy burden of educating his family was gradually lightening with the progressive maturation of most of his older 186 1810-1813 children during their first decade on the frontier. Of the older sons, John and Fayette, (the latter a sometime major in the state militia), were now well-established householders in Henderson County, duly recorded as such in the 1810 census, along with their 21-year old brother William, a merchant.2 Army captain Thornton Posey had recently been transferred from Kentucky to the garrison at Vincennes, Indiana Territory, where a violent and career-threatening encounter with a fellow officer awaited him. Twenty-five-yearold Lloyd Posey was nurturing a budding law practice in the Opelousas district of Orleans Territory, while holding local appointive offices in St. Mary's Parish and the settlement of LaFourche.3 Daughter Eliza Maria Posey Street, her studies at Lexington's Academy for Young Ladies cut short by her early marriage, would soon accompany her duel-scarred, debt-ridden husband across the Ohio River to nearby Shawneetown, Illinois Territory. Sixteenyear -old Alexander, the family scholar, had been put under the tutelage of Dr. John Croghan of Louisville. He would later go on to medical and divinity degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, and a brilliant medical practice. It was undoubtedly these past and continuing educational expenses that contributed to the reduction of Thomas' liquid cash assets in 1808 to the deplorable sum of "but one solitary dollar."4 It thus appears that, of Posey's ten children, only 19-year-old Thomas and young Washington, age 11, were still resident members of the family's Henderson County homestead in 1810. (Their youngest sister, Sarah Ann, left in Virginia eight years before, had never joined her Kentucky siblings). The younger Thomas possibly accompanied his father on one or more exploratory trips to Louisiana in 1811 in search of a future family homesite. These journeys, and the contemplated move itself, presented no formidable travel problems. With a convenient water route down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and a much smaller household and retinue, the trip would be much faster and infinitely more comfortable than the arduous overland trek across the Appalachians to Kentucky a decade earlier. But there is no evidence that Mary Posey herself ever visited Louisiana. She appears, during this period, to have continued to preside over the family hearth and home at Longview.5 Long before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought the lower Mississippi delta and the port of New Orleans under American sovereignty , the area had been a tempting target for a wide and varied array of immigrants. Initially opened to settlement by the French, it was forty years under Spanish rule, then briefly restored to 187 General Thomas Posey: Son of the American Re