The Bowen family web e-history files.

 

[ Re: Virgina , Tennessee, Pennsylvania, William Bowen, Mary Henley Russell Bowen,Catherine Bowen Campbell,Bowen-Campbell House ]

Archaeologists uncover details of slave life
Last modified at 12:54 p.m.on Monday, September 7, 1998

Copyright 1998 The Associated Press

GOODLETTSVILLE, Tenn. -- Archaeologists digging into the past of enslaved blacks at the old William Bowen plantation have discovered what is believed to be the kitchen of a slave cabin.

The site, which dates back to the Indian wars of the late 1700s, has yielded pieces of broken dishes, old eating utensils, small raccoon and possum bones, and an 18th century coin.

"Slaves and women did all the work, and there's not much about them in the way of records," said Doug Slater, head of the Bowen-Campbell House Association, a local restoration group.

He said authentic evidence about the actual lives of slaves can be found at sites like the William Bowen plantation and The Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson.

The problem is the money to pay for such digs, Slater said.

Slater, a 76-year-old thinly framed white man who has been studying Tennessee history since 1929, said the Tennessee Historical Commission has awarded the Bowen-Campbell House Association three grants totaling about $37,500.

Until slave burial sites are found and bones analyzed, diggers at The Hermitage and Bowen will not know for sure how blacks were treated. But they believe slave cemeteries will be found in time, given the proper resources.

Bowen, the son of Welsh and Irish parents who settled in Pennsylvania among the Quakers, brought blacks here from Virginia in 1784, according to "The Journey and Sojourn of the William Bowen Family," written by Anne Cato Sowell.

A Revolutionary War soldier who earned the rank of captain, Bowen received thousands of acres in Sumner County, near Mansker's Station, through land warrants for his military service.

An 1820 census records that Bowen and his wife, Mary Henley Russell Bowen, owned as many as 16 slaves.

Some of the Bowen property and slaves were willed to their daughter, Catherine, who lived there with her husband, David Campbell. David and Catherine Bowen Campbell were the parents of Tennessee governor William Bowen Campbell (1851-53).

Russell C. Campbell, the great-grandson of Gov. Campbell, serves as family adviser for the Bowen-Campbell House Association. He doesn't worry about what research might show regarding how his family treated African Americans during slavery.

"I think the Quaker heritage of my family came down, and I think they treated everyone fairly. They were as good as masters as could be found in Middle Tennessee at that time. ... Slavery did exist, and there were many farmer workers of slave status. How they lived and what they did should be recognized. It's part of our heritage. We shouldn't turn our backs," he said.

Historians say slave labor was instrumental in building the economy of Tennessee.

According to the Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans, Tennessee's slave labor force totaled more than 150,000 by 1850.

But besides anecdotal incidents, not much is known about the men, women and children held in slavery in Tennessee. State records are sketchy, state and federal money scarce and the traditional academic community has been slow to do this kind of research.

"American history has been about great white men written by great white men," said archaeologist Dan Allen, hired by the Bowen-Campbell House Association in Goodlettsville to excavate on the Bowen Plantation.

"The way my mind works, I ask the question who leaves the most impression on the landscape: the white people or the slaves. To me, it's the African-Americans. So when I do a plantation, I look at it as an African-American landscape and not a Euro-American landscape."

 

[ Accounts of the battle of Kings Mountain ]

[ A History of the Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory By David E. Johnson (1906) ]

 

 

The Bowen family web 1999-2003