Fort Worth Characters

Chapter 7: Black Sheep Jeff Daggett

131 ChapTeR 7 Black Sheep Jeff Daggett Jeff Daggett was bad news his whole life, from his unwelcome birth in 1863 to his unfortunate end fifty-four years later in a hail of bullets in the Tarrant County Courthouse. He was born in 1863 on the plantation of Captain Ephraim M. Daggett, remembered as the Father of Fort Worth. His mother was Matilda Smith, a slave on the plantation . It was a small plantation by the standards of the Old South, no more than ten or fifteen acres with the slave quarters right behind the big house. Slaves and their master’s family lived and worked close together. Jeff’s father was Ephraim “Bud” Daggett, the only son of Ephraim Merrell Daggett. Bud Daggett had been born in Kentucky in 1838 to E. M. and Pheniba Strauss Daggett. The mother died while Bud was still a child. The father fought in the Mexican War where he acquired the rank of captain while serving with the Texas Rangers. He came to Fort Worth in 1854 with his family, livestock, and slaves, settling on a survey about three-quarters of a mile south of the bluff. Daggett had remarried in the meantime, but Bud Daggett was mostly raised by a black mammy who was like a second mother. Growing up in a slave-owning family, race was a fact of life and living in such close proximity the lines between the races were sometimes blurred. With his father often away on business and being the oldest male in the household, Bud was the man of the place.1 Fort Worth Characters / 132 A rare image of Captain E. M. Daggett (1810–1883), unacknowledged grandfather of Jeff Daggett. Seen here in a studio photograph, subsequently colorized , the youthful-appearing Daggett is probably in his fifties, which would date the picture sometime in the 1860s. No indication where it was taken or by whom. (Courtesy Fort Worth Public Library, Genealogy, Local History, and Archives Unit.) He may have been the only son and even the man of the house in his father’s absence, but E. B. Daggett was hardly the “good son.” Just the opposite, he was the black sheep of the family, estranged from his father for most of his adult life. The son was such an embarrassment that in 1876 Daggett senior wrote out a will leaving all of his property to a nephew upon the old man’s death. When E. B. subsequently married a white woman and started a respectable family, Daggett senior tore up the old will and wrote out a second one leaving everything to his daughter-in-law and whatever children she had by E. B. As for her husband, he remained the family outcast the rest of his life, and when Daggett senior died in 1883, his only son received nothing.2 What could E. B. have done to bring his father’s undying opprobrium down on him? He was not a badman in a criminal sense. On the contrary, he held his head up high in the community, even serving a term on the City Council. His sin was not breaking one of the usual laws but violating racial taboos by committing miscegenation, which was also against the law but was never enforced against the slaveowning class. The crime that could not be named was having intimate Black Sheep Jeff Daggett / 133 relations with a family slave that produced an offspring, Jeff Daggett. The boy who came into this world on July 3, 1864, was just one day shy of being “a real live nephew of his Uncle Sam.”3 More importantly , if he had been born a year later, he would have been born a free man. As it was, there was no birth certificate since Matilda was a slave, and for the rest of Jeff’s life, public documents such as census records and death certificate listed his father as “unknown.” His father was not unknown, just unnamed. The only clues that Jeff’s parentage was unconventional were that he was routinely described as “mulatto” for the rest of his life and when he struck out on his own he proudly retained the last name of his former master. The facts that Bud Daggett was the only other adult male in the Daggett household besides the old man, and that Captain Daggett, who was widely known as a kindly and...