My cousin Peter, the Black Confederate slave who was neither, part 2
Claimed by fake history as a loyal Confederate, the Rev. Peter Vertrees, in real life, was one of the first southern black men who voted to bury the Old South during Reconstruction.
This is the second and final installment of the story of the Rev. Peter Vertrees, of Gallatin, Tennessee, a distant cousin of mine. The complex human agency of his life and autobiography elegantly frames the infantile political trolling that masquerades as Florida’s new “standards” for teaching about African-American history.
I called this “Slavery as VoTech” in Part 1, while noting that my own family history has a relationship with that particular mythology of the “peculiar institution.”
I’m generally skeptical of abstract “standards” in education — even those mostly created in good faith, which Florida’s are not. Like the meaningless, industrial testing they enable, standards mostly help power inefficiently and unjustly sort and restrain human possibility. We have much better ways to structure a student’s relationship with content than bureaucratic checklists. Questions, for example, work much better than standards.
I’m especially disdainful of abstract, bloodless “standards” in history, which literally has the word “story” embedded in its name.
If I were your benevolent historian king, I would decree that every history class put the personal story of each child at its core, organized around this question: How did I come to be in this class in this moment in time with these other people?
That will lead to greater knowledge and deeper relationship with historic “truth” than any outside-in effort to define truth in a static way. Studying my own story through my forebears led me to Peter Vertrees — among many other stories and truths. Standards did nothing like that for me in high school, or even college.
This two-part account of Peter Vertrees is part of the larger story I’m writing about the almost famous invasion of privacy lawsuit that my great aunt Kate Walton and her father, my great grandfather, Judge Vetrees (J.V.) Walton, brought against iconic, Pulitzer-winning Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Thus, the end of this installment attempts to connect Peter Vertrees, who died in 1926, to their experience in the 20th Century and the Rawlings case.
Here is a link to Part 1.
Here is Part 2.
Peter Vertrees: American, not confederate
We left Peter Vertrees near the end of the Civil War, following the death of his unofficial mother, Kitty Vertrees, wife of Jacob Vertrees, my great great great great grandfather who raped (if consent has any meaning) and impregnated Peter’s nameless biological grandmother, who was someone’s (probably Jacob’s) property.
Peter ended the Civil War years narrative of his autobiography with this account of life in the 1864 winter camp at Dalton, Georgia:
One of the most thrilling scenes I witnessed in Army life was a snow balling by the entire 6th Kentucky Regiment. It was a most beautiful sight to look upon. The men were drawn up in opposing lines and it was typical of real warfare to see the men on one side advance and the other retreat. They kept this up for about a half hour and quit neither side claiming victory.
Another thrilling sight was a sham battle [wargame/maneuver practice resembling a modern re-enactment – ed. Note]. I never was a soldier on the firing line but the scenes brought the real activities of war to my view and made me realize what the real combat was. I suffered the same deprivations of warfare that the soldiers felt. Sometimes I was hungry, sometimes cold, sometimes drenched with rain, sometimes tired and footsore from walking; but I stood at my post until the end. We were mustered out at Dalton and given transportation to Nashville.
It eventually involved 5,000 men with charges and broken arms and general manly glee all the way around.
Keeping the Army of Tennessee in the fight with a hint of Redemption
The snowball battle seems a symbolic climax of restoring the morale of the Army of Tennessee after Braxton Bragg’s many defeats and resignation. The Confederate war effort was doomed; but the vibrant religiosity of the winter camp at Dalton, which Peter Vertrees both fervently consumed and preached, kept the men fighting, many of them to their deaths.
And you can hear within the accounts of the “awakening” something crucial and ominous for the American future: sanctification of the soldiers themselves as the Confederate cause itself.
The religious experience of the suffering is preparing the ground for post-war mythology. The real beauty of moment – and the narratives born there – would grow into the horror of Redemption, a decidedly religious name for the political and racial movement that that brutally beat back the second revolution of Reconstruction and replaced it with Jim Crow for 100 years.
Says Army of Tennessee historian Larry J. Daniel:
The message of the revivals was clear—suffering and death in a righteous cause was not to be feared. The spring 1864 revival was an essential glue that kept the army together. The re-enlistments took on the aura of a revival—background music, speeches (sermons), and the men removed their hats and made solemn pledges (professions of faith). The men responded within the context of their culture.
Peter seems to have been mustered out of the Orphan Brigade in Dalton, before the war concluded. When he arrived at federally-occupied Nashville, Peter wrote:
I heard that Judge Vertrees, the brother of Dr. Vertrees, was living at Gallatin, Tennessee. I with two white soldiers set out on foot and walked to Gallatin.
In Judge’s house
Last we saw Judge James Vertrees, the U.S. Army was leading him away in custody as a Confederate traitor from Liberty, Missouri in December of 1861. I do not know what happened to him. I don’t know how he or his family spent the war. But he seems to have landed on his feet as owner of a farm in federally-occupied Gallatin.
The James Vertrees family household, which would have included J.V. Walton’s mother Kate, took Peter in without hesitation and gave him work on the Vertrees farm.
When I arrived at Judge Vertrees’ home they received me joyfully. I took a bath and they gave me a change of clothing, and I sat around and rested up. The good food and comfortable sleeping and daily rest soon made me feel myself again. I went to work for Judge Vertrees and gradually came to feel as much at home at home with him as I felt at home in Old Kentucky with Judge’s father. [Emphasis mine]
Judge’s son, John [Jacob] Jr. and I were great pals. We had plowed together many and many a day. At night Mr. John Jr. would give me lessons. I learned so much this way.
“Judge’s father.”
Peter wrote that paragraph, and his entire autobiography, in his “declining years,” likely near his death in 1926.
Did Peter Vertrees ever know that Jacob Vertrees was his grandfather, not just “Judge’s father?” Did he ever understand that John Jacob Jr. wasn’t his pal and teacher, but his first cousin, with whom he shared a grandfather? Did he die thinking himself a Vertrees ward, rather than Vertrees blood? Did he perceive only kindness from his “family?”
Did the family itself know?
Peter’s intensely ecstatic religion, born during his Civil War experience, seems to have startled the more reserved Vertrees family during his post war stay:
In the evening, when we got through feeding and putting the stock up for the night while the family was eating supper I would go to the buggy house and pray to God. Sometimes my heart would overflow with the love of God and I would cry out in praise to Him whose hand I knew was leading me. The family would rush out to see what was the trouble with me. When they would find out that I was shouting, they would return to the house, all but John Jr. He would say to me, “Peter, if you don’t stop this you will be crazy.”
Independence in the name of Kitty
Peter used this religion – and Kitty’s role in sparking it – to successfully face down the entire Vertrees household in a crucial moment of self-understanding.
Peter’s household duties included shining shoes for the Vertrees boys to wear to church on Sunday. This had to happen on Saturday because Peter insisted on keeping the Sabbath holy, in the most traditional sense of not laboring on it. One Saturday, the Vertrees boys didn’t get him their shoes to him on time; and he refused to shine them on Sunday.
The boys ratted him out to their mother, Susan Lee Vertrees.
“I told her why I refused. She became angry with me and reported the matter to Judge, who was still in bed,” Peter wrote. Here’s how the ensuing conversation went:
He said to me kindly, “Well Peter if you can’t do what is needed to be done about the house, you will need to find another you another home.” “All right, Judge,” I said and went away to my appointment. I preached that day and night also. I spent the night in the community. On Monday morning I went back and ask Judge to settle with me.
He greeted me in this manner, “Good morning, Peter, come in and sit down, I want to talk with you.” I obeyed. He talked with me and brought to me the scripture about the Pharisees. I listened to him and then I said, “Judge, do you know who raised me? Your mother did and a better woman never lived than she and she taught me to keep the Sabbath Day holy. She never allowed me to do on Sunday what I could do on Saturday preparatory for Sunday.” The expression of Judge’s face made me know that I had won the argument.
He complimented me for adhering to the principles of Christianity implanted in my heart by his sainted mother. He told me to go on to work as usual and on Saturdays stop at twelve o’clock and do the work necessary in preparation for the Sabbath, then he said to me there is a horse and saddle at the barn, any time you care to ride away do so, and stay as long as you desire, just so you return in time for work Monday morning. From there on the entire family had the highest respect for me as a Christian. I never had any more dissension in any way during the remainder of my stay with them. When Judge decided to quit the farm, I hired to Mr. Mat Lucas, who lived about four miles out on the Scottsville Pike.
A vote to bury the Confederacy, without bitterness
It’s here that Peter Vertrees’ story diverts from the lineage and story of J.V. and Kate Walton, neither of whom yet existed.
It’s also here, as I read it, that a self-awareness and pride in his own complex racial identity, empowered by religion, leads him to a life that is self-consciously of color – at perhaps the moment in American history in which “colored” Americans most sensed rising power within their country.
I preached that day and night also. I spent the night in the community. On Monday morning I went back and ask Judge to settle with me.
There’s not a hint of racial or status deference in that statement. It happens again with his new employer; and then Peter Vertrees, supposed “Black Confederate,” made his post-Civil War politics and agency clear, through his own words and actions.
I worked for Mr. Lucas until the [1865] election of Brownlow for Governor of Tennessee. On the day of the Election, I made one trip with wood and put my horses up and fed them and went to the house and ask for a settlement. Mr. Lucas did not want me to leave. He told me I was best hand he had on his place. I told him I was going where I thought I could make more. I went on to Gallatin and voted for Brownlow and began to make arrangements to go to Kentucky to work on the railroad. Several colored men had already gone and were sending good reports about wages and how much you make or save working.
Why would Peter have timed his departure from Tennessee so that he could cast his first vote as a full citizen for William Gannaway “Parson” Brownlow?
The 17th governor of Tennessee had been installed in 1863 by the U.S. Army, which controlled Tennessee. Brownlow opposed secession as a Whig before the war and later joined the Radical Republicans as a political ally in Reconstruction. He made Tennessee the first state readmitted to the Union by enfranchising blacks like Peter Vertrees immediately after the war.
By doing so, Tennessee avoided the militarized Congressional reconstruction imposed elsewhere later. And he was ferocious lifelong opponent of Andrew Johnson, who undermined every Congressional aim of Reconstruction to the point of impeachment. Underlying all of this was the religious fervor of the Methodist circuit rider Brownlow had been in 1820s.
The vote that Peter Vertrees cast for Brownlow on Election Day 1865 was one of the first ever cast by a black man in a former slave state. And it wasn’t for the Confederate vision of America. It was for enforcement of the expressed ideals of American equality, later slandered as “Carpetbag Rule.”
An appreciation that isn’t
The Confederate nostalgists eager to claim and memorialize Peter Vertrees completely ignore these facts. Indeed, the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine published an article in May 2016 titled, “I Stayed at My Post Until the End: Black Confederate and Celebrated Church and Community Leader.”
Of all the beauties in Peter’s autobiography, the phrase they chose for the title, in 2016, was: “I stayed at my post until the end.” (The link I used to read some time ago is now broken.)
The article highlights Peter’s warm feelings toward the Vertrees family – and completely ignores his carefully planned and proud vote for Brownlow. Free to finally make a choice in 1865, “Black Confederate” Peter Vertrees went out of his way, ordered his life around, a vote to bury the Confederacy politically and economically. He just did so without expressing any bitterness towards actual confederates.
His decency was not returned.
When the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan threatened his church, there is no record that any white confederates – Vertreeses included – arose to defend it alongside their war time companion.
White confederates did not honor Peter Vertrees’ service in the Army of Tennessee with freedom during Jim Crow. They did not protect him from their mobs. But they did try to buy him off with a pension when he was old and use him in death to soften their vicious ideology. Their appreciations are bullshit.
Indeed, any effort to impose a modern “identity” on Peter Vertrees crumbles under the force of his own narration and circumstances. Having read his story now, in his own longhand script, I’m really only comfortable saying this:
Peter Vertrees was an American, not a Confederate. He was the beloved and devoted son of Kitty Vertrees, who was not his mother. He loved Jesus Christ, and the religion of Jesus Christ, with an intensity that burned through much of the pain and humiliation his country and its post-Civil War unification with its Confederates imposed on him.
With that propulsive fervency, and that hint of immunity from bitterness and despair, he spent a lifetime building that which so many people who were not “crazy” never could.
Monuments and inheritances
Like Peter, the Vertrees family seems to have mostly remained in and around Gallatin for 20 years after Judge James Vertrees “quit the farm.” But there’s no record in Peter’s autobiography that they remained in contact.
In 1883, Judge James Vertrees’ daughter Kate married John Norfleet Walton, the son of the John William Walton, in Gallatin. They named their first child, born in Gallatin in 1884, Judge Vertrees (J.V.) Walton to honor James Vertrees, who was a judge.
J.V. Walton attended college and law school at Washington and Lee College. He would become a prominent Florida lawyer, but never an actual judge.
Shortly after J.V.’s birth, a caravan of Vertreeses and Waltons relocated from Tennessee to Florida. Most of them settled in around the St. Johns River city of Palatka, which sits between St. Augustine and Gainesville in the northeast part of the state.
J.V. Walton eventually married Sophie Howard, the daughter of an Ocklawaha River steamboat captain, descended from Blackbeard’s pirates. J.V. and Sophie had four daughters. They named the second Kate, after Kate Vertrees.
I am indebted to an author named Sana Butler, whose 2009 book Sugar of the Crop interviewed some of the last living children of slaves. Her chapter about Peter Vertrees, who was not a slave, alerted me to the existence of his autobiography.
Near the end of the chapter, Butler wrote:
And who knows how Peter’s uncles later interacted with blacks down the line but I do think having him as a member of the family had to have changed their perspective on race at the time.
My great great grandmother Kate Vertrees, the daughter of one of those uncles, who would have known and lived with Peter as a girl, went on to help found the Putnam County, Florida chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
In 1924, she and her daughter Susie Lee Walton (J.V.’s sister) played leadership roles in erecting the Confederate monument on the grounds of the Putnam County Courthouse in Palatka. This monument to a cause that had been lost for 60 years completely overshadowed a smaller integrated monument to black and white Putnam County soldiers who had recently died in World War I.
Peter Vertrees died shortly afterward in January 1926 in Gallatin.
That’s far into the worst of Jim Crow and at roughly the peak of the “Revival” Ku Klux Klan’s popular power in Florida, although it was waning nationally by then.
At the moment of Peter’s death, Judge James Vertrees’ grandson, literally named Judge Vertrees Walton, was an important leader in Palatka and Florida’s resistance to the 1926 “Revival” Ku Klux Klan.
At a moment of climax, in September of 1926, J.V., his wife Sophie, and daughter Kate, confronted a mob they thought had come to “Ku Klux” their home – just like the Reconstruction Klan threatened Peter’s church.
J.V. and Sophie Walton pointed rifles at the men; and 13-year-old Kate Walton nocked a bow and arrow she had made at summer camp in Vermont. As it turns out, this “mob,” which contained Klansmen and law enforcement personnel who regularly took part in mobs, was actually a “legitimate” posse. On this night, it was acting in a reasonably legitimate way. Everyone managed to lower their weapons and back away from what might have become a very bloody and historic mistake.
Eventually, in the 1928 and 1930 elections, J.V. Walton and his allies narrowly defeated the Klan through democracy and law, backed by force.
Nearly 100 years later, in 2020, under pressure from young black activists, the Putnam County Commission voted to approve removal of the monument to the Confederacy if private money paid for it. (It’s still there.) The young activists cited some of the research and storytelling from my book, Age of Barbarity, in their arguments. And my uncle, who has long lived in J.V. Walton’s house, where that standoff took place, gave an impassioned speech in favor of removing the statue his great aunt helped erect.
To address Sana Butler’s speculation more directly: what, if any, role did the memory of Peter Vertrees have in the actions of his distant family in Klan-era Florida?
If he was not a son of the masters, with all the forms of capital that entails, could J.V. Walton have emerged unscathed as a leader of the victorious faction? Did J.V. and Kate Walton take some vestige of Peter into the Cross Creek trial and its arguments about “negroes” and their castles?
The obligations of mythology
I never heard of Peter Vertrees, or any story resembling him, until 2019. And that didn’t come from family. So I doubt he occupied any real space in the consciousness of J.V. and Kate Walton.
On the other hand, Kate Lee Walton, named for her Vertrees grandmother and great grandmother, heard this from somewhere about J.V.’s other grandfather, John William Walton, whose family owned roughly 400 slaves, and who died 20 years before her birth. Somebody in the family told her this:
JWW was not a believer in slavery although he owned slaves. When he could teach them a trade that would enable them to earn a living, he would free them. This was done for the slave carpenter who built the little desk.
If you fuse the story of Peter Vertrees to the mythology of John William Walton, I see how you might come away with: “When he could teach them a trade that would enable them to earn a living, he would free them.”
That statement is just as false as Marjorie Rawlings’ “the Negro is…” riff at the beginning of the “Black Shadows” chapter of Cross Creek, which opens like this:
I am not of the race of southerners who claim to understand the Negro. There are a few platitudes dear to the hearts of these that seem reasonably accurate. The Negro is just a child. The Negro is carefree and gay. The Negro is religious in an amusing way. The Negro is a congenital liar. There is no dependence to be put in the best of them.
In reality, Marjorie considered herself — and was considered by her friends and neighbors — a relative racial liberal in 1940s Florida. She often lamented her own timidity in acting.
And her myths soften her moral cowardice in the present. Listen to how broad racial narrative relieves her of responsibility, based on fake world-weary self-criticism, a “grave mistake,” dependent upon the slander of others:
I have made one grave mistake in dealing with Negroes at the grove. I have expected that, given justice and kindness, a reasonable attitude toward their problems, and wages higher than the customary ones, they could carry considerable responsibility and learn to discipline them themselves. I should have known better. I should have understood that only in rare instances can a Negro work long on his own initiative. For long years since actual slavery he has been told what to do and what not to do.
For J.V. and Kate, as sons and daughters of the masters, as the inheritors, in some way, of Kitty Vertrees’ real humanity and a slave-liberating mythology, idealizing their ancestors imposed a responsibility they perceived across generations.
The merits and accuracy of the idealizing, relative to historical truth, are irrelevant to its effect on how they behaved in the first half of the 20th Century. I think it girded their courage, sense of obligation, and willingness to confront what Marjorie wouldn’t.