This article is part of the 52 Ancestor Challenge. Each week in 2023, I will attempt to spotlight one ancestor from my family tree and provide some details about his or her life.
Week Three
Against the Grain: Captain Thomas Masterson and the Fourteenth Amendment
By Clint Alley
I went on a pilgrimage once.
Okay, it wasn't a real pilgrimage.
A real pilgrimage is when you travel to a holy place for a spiritual purpose, like to pray at a holy shrine, to visit a holy relic, or to stay in a holy city. Some go on pilgrimages to achieve a higher knowledge of God or of themselves.
On this particular trip, I wasn't in search of anything divine.
I went to Moulton, Alabama to look for an abandoned log cabin.
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| Me at the Masterson UDC Cabin April 2014 |
The cabin was not holy, but it did have a great deal of significance to me. And the journey was not inspired, but I did learn a little bit about myself along the way.
The cabin in question is nearly a century old, and it was built in memory off my great-great-great-great grandfather, Captain Thomas Masterson. After I learned about its existence, I made plans to find it.
The journey introduced me to a part of my family's story that I didn't expect to find. In a small and unexpected way, at a precise moment in time, my ancestor played a part in moving the United States one step closer to living out its creed, that all men are created equal.
To me, that made the cabin worth searching for.
An Unlikely Radical
Captain Thomas Masterson was born on March 20, 1820, in Lawrence County, Alabama. His father, Thomas Masterson, Sr. (1779-1867) was an early settler of that area. Later accounts would postulate that Captain Tom's older brother, Robert M. Masterson, was the first white child born in Lawrence County, Alabama.
Captain Tom married Amanda Finney on December 16, 1841. He became a lawyer, a politician, a court official, and an active member of county life. He owned a mill and got press in the local newspaper at least once for growing impressively large sweet potatoes. But before that, he was an officer in the local militia company during the Civil War. And before that, he was a farmer who kept a general store. And, like many men of his time, he owned enslaved people.
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| Thomas Masterson 1860 Slave Schedule Source: Ancestry |
In 1860, Captain Tom held four people in bondage. The 1860 slave schedule does not record the names of these men and women, but it does tell us their sex, age, and race. In the order they are listed, they were a 40-year-old black male, a 32-year-old black female, an 8-year-old black male, and a 30-year-old black male.
Most slave schedules listed enslaved people strictly in descending order by age, which makes the inclusion of a 30-year-old male after an eight-year-old boy an unusual anomaly. This unusual grouping leads me to believe that the first male, female, and young boy were possibly a mother, father, and child, although I can't say for sure. One day I hope to track down as many of the names as possible of the people my ancestors held in slavery, so that they can be given their rightful spot in my family story, but that work has not yet begun.
Captain Tom was certainly not the only person participating in the sin of slavery in that time or that place. The men and women he enslaved in 1860 were four of the 6,788 people held in bondage in Lawrence County, Alabama that year. It was a common sin, but a sin nonetheless, and Captain Tom was guilty of it.
Which is what made the path he chose after the guns went silent five years later all the more surprising.
Citizen Soldier
Of all of my ancestors who served in the American Civil War, Captain Tom's military service has been the hardest for me to prove with contemporary evidence (records which were made at the time of his service.) I also have no record written in his own voice. Everything I know about Captain Tom comes from things that were written about him, not by him. If any of my conclusions in this article come across as assumptions, the fault is entirely my own.
Unlike most Civil War soldiers, Captain Tom has no compiled military service record at the National Archives. He never applied for a pension for his service. Inquiries to the Alabama Archives for cursory index searches have failed to find anything. In fact, every source I have found of Captain Tom's service comes mostly from newspaper articles, printed years after the war ended, supplied to editors by Captain Tom's descendants.
Every source, that is, except one.
In his lifetime, Captain Tom was regularly referred to by his rank in local newspaper records. In fact, he is almost consistently called "Captain Tom," "Captain Masterson," or "Captain Thomas Masterson" whenever local newspapers wrote a story about him. In those days, it was common for officers to retain their rank as a title after being discharged from service.
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| The first mention of Captain Tom as "Captain" in a local newspaper. Source: The Christian Herald (Moulton, AL), 29 Sep 1865, p. 3. |
Beyond this, there are two likely reasons why I have yet to find any accounts of his service contemporary to the Civil War: the first is that he served in the Alabama Militia instead of the regular Confederate army, and the second is that I live very far away from Montgomery, Alabama, where the records of his service might be waiting in a roll of microfilm or scrap of paper that has yet to be digitized.
What the Record Shows
Aside from being called "Captain" for the last three decades of his life, the earliest record I have of Captain Tom's Civil War service is his obituary. Published in the Moulton Advertiser in January 1901, it says "he raised a company during the war, and in many fights with the enemy he displayed good generalship and great pluck and bravery."
In 1928, the Advertiser published the following article:
THOMAS MASTERSON APPOINTED LIEUTENANT IN 1863While looking thru some old papers Tuesday Miss Ella Masterson and Mr. Tom Griffin found the following appointment made by Capt. D.C. White in 1863. It is understood that Mr. Masterson was made captain before the close of the war between the states:
Moulton, Ala., July 15, 1863
Thomas Masterson is hereby appointed 3rd Lieutenant in Company C, 4th Brigade 10th Division Alabama Militia. He will be respected and obeyed as such by all persons attached to said command.D.C. WHITE Capt. Co. 6Approved by C.B. Robertson, Lieutenant Col., Company 6 Regular Alabama Militia
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| The enigmatic commission. Source: The Moulton Advertiser 6 Sep 1928 |
For several reasons, this is one of the most baffling and intriguing genealogical documents I have ever found. First, the "Company 6" designations in the last two lines are probably transcription errors. Company designations were always alphabetical. A likely explanation is that D.C. White was the Captain of Company C (misread as "6"), and the last line probably said something to the effect of "Approved by C.B. Robertson, Lieutenant Col., commanding [regimental number unknown] Regiment Alabama Militia.
Also, if the obituary was correct in its assumption that Captain Tom "raised a company," why was he being commissioned 3rd Lieutenant instead of Captain?
D.C. White (short for Dewitt Clinton White) was a longtime newspaper editor in Moulton. He also served for a year as a 2nd Sergeant in the 16th Alabama Infantry before hiring a substitute and securing a discharge from the infantry. His obituary says that White
...served in the Confederate Army as a member of Company F, Sixteenth Alabama Infantry regiment, until 1863 when commissioned by Gov. Watts to raise a battalion in Lowndes County. He raised nine companies, but the war ended before they got into action.
C.B. Robertson, the commanding officer who signed off on the commission, was, indeed a lieutenant colonel in the Alabama militia. Robertson was elected to that post in Lowndes County, Alabama in May 1862, as evidenced by a letter to the governor of Alabama, currently in the state archives, certifying his election.
What's more, the 4th Brigade, 10th Division Alabama Militia was present in the area of Moulton in the summer of 1863. On June 30, 1863, Brigadier General James H. Tompkins wrote a letter from Russellville to the adjutant general of Alabama that the brigade's official rendezvous point was Russellville, about 30 miles from Moulton.
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| The letter which proved the presence of Captain Tom's division in the vicinity in 1863. Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History |
The pieces are all there. And even if it isn't a smoking gun, based on these points of corroboration, I am inclined to believe that the commission which Captain Tom's descendants brought to the office of the Moulton Advertiser that summer day in 1928 was probably a genuine record of his wartime service.
From Rebel to Republican
At war's end, Captain Tom got busy. And he got political.
He started by taking an Oath of Allegiance to the Union.
The Oath was part of the Ten Percent Plan first proposed by Abraham Lincoln and then adopted by Andrew Johnson. It said that if ten percent of voters in each of the former Confederate States swore an oath of allegiance to the Union, that state could write a new state constitution and form a new government.
This plan fell apart completely in December 1865, when the southern states' delegates to Congress included a large number of unrepentant former Confederate officers and Confederate government officials, including the former vice president of the Confederacy. Radicals in Congress were outraged, and refused to seat the southern delegates--many of whom had borne arms against the U.S. government just months before--beginning the first phase of Congressional Reconstruction, a program of rebuilding the South which was designed by Republicans in Congress to reshape southern culture as well as punish former Confederates.
In 1931, the Moulton Advertiser reproduced an oath of allegiance reportedly taken by Captain Tom. The old document, which was owned by one of Tom's grandsons, was endorsed by Probate Judge Charles Gibson on August 30, 1865.
Also, on September 29, 1865, the Moulton Christian Herald reported that "Captain Thomas Masterson has been appointed General Administrator for Lawrence County."
The office of General Administrator in Alabama is appointed by the Probate Judge, and oversees the estates of deceased people for whom there is no other administrator to be found. No doubt Captain Tom was appointed to this post by the same Judge Gibson who gave him the oath of allegiance the previous month.
Judge Gibson, who was first elected as Probate Judge for Lawrence County in 1858, is said to have spent the war years laboring tirelessly to ensure that the wives and children of Confederate soldiers were provided-for, even going so far as to pay for food out of his own pocket. He was re-elected in 1864, but was disenfranchised by Alabama's Reconstruction government in 1866.
So you can imagine my surprise when I learned that Captain Tom--this respected, seemingly conservative, ex-slave owning, former Confederate soldier who was appointed to county office by a pro-Confederate judge--ran for the state legislature as a radical Republican.
Captain Tom in the Party of Lincoln
A word about Reconstruction political parties. Today, the Republican Party is the nation's conservative party, and the Democratic Party is the nation's liberal party. During Reconstruction and for a century afterward, those roles were generally reversed. The Democratic Party of those days generally captured the nation's conservative impulse while the early Republican Party was one of the most liberal movements our nation has ever seen. For simplicity's sake, when I describe Captain Tom's politics during this period, I am describing what appears to be a moderately conservative man becoming a liberal seemingly overnight.
On December 19, 1867, Captain Tom was nominated for the state legislature by the Republican Party of Lawrence County, Alabama. The resolution which announced his nomination also promised that Lawrence County Republicans would "adhere to and abide by the Republican Union platform, as adopted at the Montgomery convention in June last."
Assuming he was one of these men who pledged to adhere to that platform, what did that mean for Captain Tom?
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| The Republicans of Lawrence County, Alabama nominated Captain Tom for the legislature in 1867. Source: The Daily Sentinel, 27 Dec 1867. |
Among other things, it meant that he endorsed "the action of Congress on the question of reconstruction" (meaning he supported the more punitive measures enacted toward the South by Congress after the Ten Percent Plan failed), that he would "endeavor to secure...the equal rights of all men and the full enjoyment of the rights of citizenship without distinction on account of color," that he supported "the removal of the tax on cotton and the state poll tax."
Support for Congressional Reconstruction, equal citizenship for African-Americans, and the removal of the poll tax were extraordinarily liberal notions, indeed, at that place and time. It certainly stirred the ire of the man who may have been Captain Tom's commanding officer in 1863.
D.C. White's conservative Moulton Advertiser hurled invective at the Republican platform in the summer of 1867, claiming that the entire Republican convention held at Montgomery was "begotten in fear and born in corruption," and that its parents were "Congressional oppression and lust for power."
I don't know what motivated Captain Tom's decision to join the Republican Party. It was a move with potentially seismic implications, to be sure. It earned him a brief mention in the book The Scalawag in Alabama Politics: 1865-1881, a work of scholarship concerning southerners who joined the Republican Party after the Civil War by Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins.
However, this phase of Captain Tom's life, as unexpected as it might be, brought him what I consider to be one of the most enduring parts of his legacy.
The Fourteenth Amendment
Captain Tom was elected to represent Lawrence County in the Alabama legislature on February 4, 1868 and was sworn in as a member of the State House of Representatives of Alabama on July 13, 1868. In fact, Captain Tom was a member of the first group of Republicans to be elected to state office in Alabama history, and was part of one of the most racially diverse classes of legislatures the state has ever known. Later that day, he was one of 67 members of the State House who voted in favor of ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, fulfilling his local party's pledge to support equal citizenship and helping Alabama cross a major checkpoint on its way toward being readmitted to the Union.
The Fourteenth Amendment defines the criteria for citizenship and, most importantly, guarantees equal protection under the law for every citizen. It extended citizenship to every person who was "born or naturalized" in the United States, regardless of color.
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| The record of the Alabama House of Representatives showing the results of the vote to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment. Captain Tom's name is highlighted. Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History |
The Fourteenth Amendment was the subject of Amend: The Fight for America, a popular six-part Netflix series hosted by Will Smith in 2021.
Simply put, the Fourteenth Amendment remains one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. It defended the formerly enslaved as full-fledged citizens with every right due to citizens, and ensured that everyone enjoyed equal protection of the laws. It is one of the most-often cited amendments in litigation today, and has been crucial to many of our most important Supreme Court opinions.
As you might remember from history class, amendments to the Constitution must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures in order to take effect. Captain Tom was there at just the right time to take part in the historic moment for Alabama.
Alabama's ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment came just days after South Carolina gave the amendment the numerical green light it needed to become part of the Constitution. And, under a law passed by Congress earlier that year, Alabama was required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before it could be readmitted to the Union. No ratification meant no representation in Congress. Alabama's hands were effectively tied.
But still, I think it's pretty cool that my ancestor Captain Tom voted in favor of it on his first day in office. Four representatives voted against ratification. Captain Tom could have been the fifth, but instead he voted yes. And, although we may never know what he was thinking when he cast that vote, the fact that a man who once owned slaves could vote in favor of legislation that made those former slaves politically equal to him seems to me to be a moment of personal growth, even if it may have been done out of political necessity.
The End of an Era
Captain Tom's career as a liberal politician didn't last long.
He was an active member of the legislature, present throughout most of the sessions during that first two-year term of office.
On July 30, Captain Tom introduced a bill which would have "fully restored" the right to vote to several groups of people disenfranchised by the Alabama Constitution of 1867, including former Confederate soldiers, the insane, and certain criminals. The act was tabled.
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| Captain Tom's radicalism had moderated sufficiently by December 1868 for the conservative Moulton Advertiser to refer to the Republican as "our amiable and indefatigable Representative." Source: Moulton Advertiser, 25 Dec 1868, p. 2. |
The zenith (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) of his radical summer came when he began making stump speeches in favor of former Union general Ulysses Grant for president. Journalists from as far afield as the New York Herald pointed to Captain Tom as one of the "great men of the carpet-bag regime" in Alabama and a "leading light" of the Alabama radicals.
By late summer, however, the tide began to turn. For reasons not reported in any newspaper, Captain Tom moderated his politics, abandoned Grant, and, according to the New York Herald, began to throw his support behind the Democratic candidate for president. Although he continued to be a Republican, Captain Tom's moderation became a hallmark of his political style. Years later, the Moulton Advertiser printed a letter in which a man was said to have voted the straight Republican ticket his whole life, except for Captain Tom, whom he "scratched on account of...not being extreme enough."
Captain Tom continued to be active in local politics, even attending the 1876 Republican National Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio as a delegate for Alabama.
The Cabin
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| The remains of the Masterson Mill in 2015 |
His daughter Ella Masterson became extremely involved in the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the early years of the twentieth century. Everywhere a document connected to Captain Tom's wartime activities was reproduced in a local paper, she was there.
In 1934, she donated a cabin on a plot of land once owned by Captain Tom to the Wheeler Chapter UDC in Moulton.
The cabin was dedicated in a ceremony on May 10, 1934. At that time, the cabin was three miles from Moulton at "the Masterson homestead on the Courtland highway." The cabin was near the old Masterson Millpond. More than a hundred people came to the dedication ceremony, including at least one Confederate veteran. Dixie was sung, speeches were made, and one tribute was given specifically about Captain Tom which unfortunately I have not been able to find in print.
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| The bridge over Masterson Mill Pond in 2015 |
The cabin was neglected during World War II, but repaired in 1949 and placed back into regular use. The UDC continued to meet there, but so did the local Cub Scouts and eventually the local Sons of Confederate Veterans camp.
In 1977, the land on which the cabin was built was condemned in order to straighten a curve in the nearby highway. With what must have been a great deal of hard work and effort, the cabin was removed from its original site and placed in its current location inside the city limits of Moulton in 1983.
Finding the Cabin
I went in search of the cabin in 2014. I began by asking my friends from college who were from Moulton if they had ever heard of it. Some of them vaguely remembered a grandma or a great-aunt talking about a cabin once, but no one knew where it was.
After some digging in UDC history books and old newspaper articles, I consulted the ladies of the Lawrence County Archives in Moulton. They were able to give me a vicinity where it was, but they warned me that it was probably overgrown and might be full of snakes.
A true Indiana Jones adventure, snakes and all!
After a few wrong turns and a consultation with Google Maps satellite view, I saw the woods where it had to be: a rugged patch of land behind the county high school, near the edge of town.
At long last I found it.
The cabin was still there, tucked beneath a copse of trees and suffering from neglect. And, as luck would have it, it was not locked. In fact, I believe the door may have been ajar. The dedication engraved in the stone mantle told me I was in the right place. It said, "In memory of my father Capt. Thomas Masterson. Ella Masterson."
The cabin was a mess. Logs were damaged, furniture was scattered everywhere, and no doubt a few snakes had called it home over the years. But the building was still there. And I couldn't help but feel a connection with my long-dead ancestor as I stood in the quiet of that place, reading his name on the mantle with the cool spring breeze blowing through the holes in the wall.
Captain Tom was a complex man. He was a patriot who answered when his state called during the Civil War. He was a public servant who quietly lent his voice to the chorus of Americans who demanded that we live up to our national creed in the years after that war. And he was a beloved man whose children and grandchildren continued to recall his deeds many years after he died and of whom even his opponents spoke well.
I thought of all of this while I stood in that cabin, and I took a moment to remember Captain Tom.
It was worth the journey.
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| A photo collage I made the day I visited the Masterson cabin in 2014. The bottom photo is of LaGrange Mountain, which is in a different county. |
Works Cited
'Congressional Legislature.' The Times and Messenger (Selma, AL). 30 Jul 1868, p. 4.
'Demoralization of Southern Radicals.' The New York Herald (New York, NY). 23 Aug 1868, p. 4.
'Interesting Old Document.' The Moulton Advertiser (Moulton, AL). 3 Sep 1931, p. 1.
Irwin, Elizabeth Griffin. The Masterson Family, House, and Cemetery. The Moulton Advertiser. Moulton, Alabama. 11 June 1959, p. 7.
Journal of the House of Representatives, During the Session Commencing in July, September, and November, 1868, Held in the City of Montgomery. Jno. G. Stokes & Co., State Printers. (Montgomery, AL), pp. 9-10.
'Night Dispatches.' The Times and Messenger (Selma, AL). 22 Aug 1868, p. 3.
'UDC Meets at Cabin.' The Decatur Daily (Decatur, AL). 17 Oct 1949, p. 6.
'Republicans of Lawrence County.' The Daily State Sentinel (Montgomery, AL). 22 Dec 1867, p. 2.
Simms, Sadie. 'Moulton--Wheeler Chapter No. 2040.' History of the Alabama Division United Daughters of the Confederacy, Vol. III, Virginia James Cook, ed. The Strode Publishers (Huntsville, AL), p. 318.
US Census Bureau. “1860 Census: Population of the United States.” Census.gov, December 16, 2021. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.html.
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