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Dr. Frederick Schuman
Dr. Schuman came to Wachovia (present day Forsyth County in the early 1800s with a wife who was so ill that she literally had to be carried from the coach. Around 1815, the doctor came to Salem to practice medicine but instead of lving in town, he settled on a farm across the creek from Salem. That farm later became Happy Hill, the first African American community in the city of modern Winston-Salem.. The community was settled in 1872 by Freedmen who purchased lots from the Moravians but Dr. Schuman was the first to have enslaved people on "the Hill".
In 1836, working through the American Colonization Society, Dr. Schuman emancipated all seventeen of his enslaved people and sent them to Liberia, West Africa. Not only did the doctor pay for passage from Salem to Wilmington and on to Liberia, but he also gave them enough funds to substain them for the first six months in Africa..
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Mendenhall Plantation
The Mendenhall Plantation house is located in Guilford County, NC in Jamestown. It was built by Quaker Richard Mendenhall for him and his wife, Mary Pegg Mendenhall. The building also served as a tavern. The town itself was named for Richard's grandfather, James Mendenhall.
One of only two known original false bottom wagons in the country used during the Underground Railroad is located here.
Across the street from Mendenhall Plantation, now operated as a museum by the Historic Jamestown Society, is an original 18th century Quaker meeting house.
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Quaker Free
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Knights of Labor
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The Moravians, Quakers, and Syphax and Lettie
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While there is little documented evidence of the influence of the Quakers in Piedmont North Carolina on area Moravians and vice versa, there is ample circumstantial evidence of such. It can be seen in how both religious groups dealt with slavery. The Quakers were anti-slavery and the pacifist Moravians, while not offically opposed to it, often exhibited more Quaker-like attitudes in their dealing with enslaved persons. These two groups lived in close proximity to each other in the upper Yadkin Valley region, especially in the area of western Guilford County and eastern Forsyth County. Both groups were quite careful about staying within the bounds of ever-changing laws concerning slavery. Sometimes, through slavery documents, we are given a rather open window into the affinity between the two groups' attitudes towards that "perculiar institution". Such was the case with Syphax and his family.
There is much that is still unknown about Syphax and his family and descendants, which continuing research, hopefully, will reveal. What is known is this family is a curiosity in that they appeared to have had ample opportunity to leave the area but chose to remain, although it meant continued bondage.
Syphax appears to have been born circa 1819 in parts yet unknown. The name itself is quiet unusual for this area. ( A Syphox shows up at the turn of the 19th century in the household of Matthew Moore in Stokes County) The name can be seen in northern Virginia as a surname during the period of enslavement in America, associated with some of those enslaved at George Washington's Mt. Vernon plantation. The name also has an ancient association with Africa through the Kingdom of Numidia. It is further reported that another person enslaved at Mt. Vernon was said to have been sold in Richmond to a family in Caswell County in Piedmont North Carolina. He died in 1873 at the ripe old age of one-hundred ten.
Syphax of the upper Yadkin Valley was enslaved to European American Thomas Adams who, in 1843, emancipated him "after the death of his wife" and "as long as the law provided". It was during this period that North Carolina's constantly changing slave laws forbade emancipation by will. Judging by the manner in which this family was moved about in Stokes/Forsyth County over the next generation, Syphax and his family were not officially emancipated until 1865.
Thomas Adams' church affiliation is not yet known by the author but what is known is that he made Darius Starbuck executor of his will in 1843 after his wife. Starbuck and his parents and other ancestors were Quakers who were connected with Quaker Meetings in Piedmont North Carolina, namely New Garden, Deep River, Dover, and Union. Darius was a member of the Dover Meeting until 1843 and he later joined the Moravian church in Salem. Thomas Adams was in the Deep River Township (Kernersville) of Stokes County, a neighbor to Doughty Stockton in 1810. Stockton was, in turn, a neighbor of Darius Starbuck in 1860 in the same area and married Elizabeth Mendenhall (See sidebar on Mendenhall Plantation). Both belonged to the Deep River Quaker Meeting in Guilford County.
Incrediably, Syphax and his wife Lettie and six children were actually sold to Starbuck, then residing in Guilford County, in 1844 for a total of eighty-five dollars and twenty cents. The stipulation was that the enslaved family would remain at the disposal of Adams and his wife for the remainder of their lives. Syphax alone would have been valued at four to six times that much in the early 1840s.
Sometime between 1844 and 1862 and Henry Nutt, this African family wound up in the possession of Dr. Frederick Schuman for his 1862 will, referring to the family as "the Adams Negroes", bequeathed Jerry to Starbuck "that he will emancipate him at the time he gives the other Negroes aforesaid their freedom". The state legislature banned emancipation by will in its 1860-61 session. (Schuman was a lifelong Moravian who had initally moved to Bethania from New Jersey in the early 1800s and then to Salem. He has his own intriguing story regarding other enslaved persons. See sidebar.) It is not yet clear just who Jerry is but his gravemarker in the Second African Moravian cemetery in Salem bears the names of his children: Lewis, Sallie, Lucy, and Lettie. Jerry, living in Winston with his son Nathan, in 1870, carried the Stockton name at the time of his death in 1887. Nathan was born about 1851 and baptized in the African Moravian church in Salem in 1864. At that time, he was still a part of the estate of Dr. Schuman.
The author had been unable to find any record of Syphax's death but he was living with his family in the Abbotts Creek Township, south of Kernersville, in 1870.
From this point on the story gets rather complicated.
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In 1860 Syphax and Lettie and seven children appear together in the Broadbay Township, Waughtown post office. However, 1866 co-habitation records reveal that Syphax married Mary Mitchell, likely a Free Person of Color, in 1844. One could make an argument that the couple simply forgot the year they were actually married as co-hab dates were provided orally by the Freedmen. So in 1870 we see Syphax, still in southeastern Forsyth County, this time with Mary and eleven children including one set of twins. The older of these children was born circa 1845.
As previously mentioned, Jerry was included in the emancipation instructions by will from Dr. Schuman to Darius Starbuck in 1862 which also referred to the "Adams Negroes", meaning Syphax and Lettie and their children. When Jerry died in 1887 he was publically referred to as an "influential and well-to-do citizen among the Colored people". (As early as 1870 Jerry owned 400 acres of land, some in the Moravian Freedman's settlement of Happy Hill in Salem) The large funeral included one-hundred fifty Knights of Labor (see sidebar). Of the four names of the children inscribed on Jerry's gravemarker, Lewis, Sallie, Lucy, and Lettie, the three of them born between 1845 and 1854 are in the household with Lettie and Syphax in 1860.
When Nancy, a daughter of Syphax and Lettie born circa 1840, was baptized in the African Moravian church in Salem in 1857, she was said by the pastor to have been enslaved to Darius Starbuck " as far as known to me". Other Moravian records referred to some members of this particular family as "quasi-free". Those ostensibly enslaved to Quakers in the region were often referred to as Quaker-free. (See sidebar)
In less than two years after Jerry Stockton's death, his children sued their half-siblings Nathan (called Nathan Blum in the documents) and Syphax, Jr. for Jerry's property. They ultimately won the suit as Nathan nor Syphax could be located. Part of the property, while still in Jerry's estate, was sold to Lloyd Presbyterian Church, which was the first church built for African Americans in Winston .
The story of Syphax and Lettie is far from complete and thus far has provided as many questions as answers. The author is hopeful that public records and oral traditions will ultimately provide the remaining pieces to the puzzle. Special thanks to Cindy Casey for all her research assistance some years ago with this story.
____Mel White
Sources:
Various Church records relating to the African Population in and around Salem, 1800s, Moravian Archives Southern Province, Winston-Salem, NC.
Various Public Records in Forsyth County and Stokes County, NC, 1700 - 1930,
Hilty, Hiram H. By land and Sea: Quakers Confront Slavery and its Aftermath In North Carolina. Greensboro (NC): North Carolina Friends Historical Society, 1993.
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Lettie and Syphax Descendant Surnames (four generations)
ADAMS, BITTING, BOGER, BRANNICK, CONRAD, CREWS, ECCLES, FULP, FULK, HAIZLIP, HEGE, JARRETT, DIGGS, LEMLY, LOWE, MILLER, MITCHELL, MOORE, REYNOLDS, RIGHTS, SOWERS, STARBUCK, STOCKTON, SMITH, WHEELER, WOMACK.
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Revolving Stories
