War and Occupation

War and Occupation. . In 1861, Williamson County, white and black, braced for war. Men near Thompson's Station joined Jacob "Jake" T. Martin's 140-strong Confederate cavalry force. The war challenged women's traditional roles, but many joined the effort by taking charge of the farm and other tasks., Once the Union army occupied the region in early 1862, Thompson's Station families encountered the heavy hand of war on a daily basis as troops regularly traveled on Columbia Pike or the Tennessee and Alabama Railroad. Precilla Gray, enslaved at Samuel A. Pointer's plantation, remembered "when the Civil War was starting, there was soldiers in tents everywhere. I had to knit socks and help make soldiers coats.", The armies also took supplies and food. Union troops preferred to forage from known secessionists rather than Unionists, but any farm could be plundered. The presence of Union troops encouraged slaves to seek freedom. Maggie Washington, enslaved at Ben Caldwell's Plantation, recalled her mother was ordered to wash Union uniforms "teeming with lice. Maggie's brother, one of many newly free black men who joined the U.S. Colored Troops, "went away with Yankees and came back resplendent in a blue uniform with black buttons.", Wealthy planters, like thirty-three-year-old Samuel A. Pointer, who owned more than 20 slaves, were exempt from Confederate service. In 1863, to keep his slaves, Pointer sent them to Rome, Georgia and central Alabama where he hired them out to work in cotton fields and ironworks. That August, federal authorities arrested Pointer and briefly imprisoned him in Franklin, most likely because he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Despite his troubles, Pointer praised the occupiers in January 1864 for their "great kindness for the protection they have given to their friends in this part of the state" and admonished the "homemade yankees ... at Franklin ... the most damnable of mankind.", (caption) , Samuel A. Pointer, pictured here around 1870, remained a civilian during the Civil War. His younger brother, Edward H. Pointer, joined Martin's Confederate Cavalry at Thompson's Station (11th Regiment, Tennessee Cavalry). The younger Pointer was killed in action in Hickman County, Tennessee in 1864. Courtesy Rick Warwick