Looking for Samuel, I Found George and Bobby…I Think

Since the 1600s the people of the Northern Neck (NNK)[i] of Virginia and of St. Mary’s County, Maryland have been connected—not separated—by the Potomac.  They have married each other; they have battled common enemies together: the British in 1776 and 1812 and the Yankees in 1861.  Though they were on the same side in The War, in later years, St. Mary’s baseball teams enjoyed a friendly rivalry with the Northern Neck boys.  And as tidewater neighbors, they have engaged in mutually beneficial commerce, St. Mary’s buy boats purchasing the day’s catch of oysters and crabs from the Virginians, and NNK buy boats in turn conducting business with the St. Mary’s watermen.  During Prohibition, St. Mary’s County bootleggers kept the entire Northern Neck supplied with spirits.  Given all of this, when I moved from my now ruined St. Mary’s to the still relatively intact NNK, it was not as one of those “come-heres,” a derogatory term for the newly arrived.  From my few acres of Northern Neck dirt, I will hold the line against the carpetbagger’s vaunted “change” and against what the “rich men” in Richmond are doing to Oliver Anthony’s “sweet Virginia.”  I will also continue to look for my NNK kinfolk, living and dead, hopefully among the latter, a Confederate soldier named Samuel D. Mothershead.

Samuel is someone I came across about a year ago when I noticed his name on a list of POWs in a book entitled Point Lookout Prison Camp for Confederates by Edwin W. Beitzell,[ii] which I highly recommend.  Captured at Falling Waters, Maryland on July 14 of 1863, Samuel eventually found himself at Point Lookout in Union occupied Maryland. The reason the name Mothershead caught my eye is the fact that I am descended from Alice Malinda Mothershead of the Northern Neck.  She was married to William Henry Nash, my great-great-grandfather, who served in the 47 Virginia Infantry, Company C.   Samuel was also from the Northern Neck, according to the Beitzell book, so I thought, at that time, that he might have been kin to my great-great-grandmother, a cousin perhaps.

It didn’t take long before I found Samuel’s death notice in the August 1, 1901 edition of The Baltimore Sun.  He died at the age of seventy-five at the Maryland Line Confederate Soldiers Home in Pikesville near Baltimore.  The facility was established in 1888 by the Maryland branch of the Society of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States with the aid of generous funding from the Maryland legislature.  William Pope, the superintendent of the home, was quoted in The Confederate Veteran of November 1893.

“Now a little insight into the way we do things in Maryland: We have no ex-Confederate Societies, but several strong active Confederate Societies. We never mix in any manner with the other side – have no joint reunions, no joint banquets, no decoration, or memorial days in common. In fact, we do not mix at all, we go our own way, they go theirs. We do not belong to that class of Confederates that believe they were right. We knew we were right in 1861. We knew we were right when the war closed, and we know we are right today.”

This safe haven for old Confederates has always interested me because it is one more piece of evidence confounding those who would deny Marylanders their Southern history. When I discovered that Samuel had lived there during his final days, I was even more elated at the prospect that he might have been a kinsmen.  After my decamping, as the crow flies, thirteen miles across the river to the NNK last Fall, I took advantage of the resources of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Montross.  Though I have spent a lot of time there and at other research centers, I have so far been unsuccessful regarding my connections to Samuel.  While focused on him, however, I found out that I am very likely George Washington’s third cousin many times removed, he and I both direct descendants of a common ancestor.

I knew that my people might have been connected to the Washingtons in some way because of family names that had been handed down—the way people used to do. My paternal great-grandfather was Bushrod Nash. George Washington’s nephew was Bushrod Washington whose mother was Hannah Nash—I have found several Hannahs in the Nash and Mothershead families, not positive proof of anything but certainly clues.

Not too long after that day I learned about Cousin George, I discovered that General Robert E. Lee and I are, it seems, both direct descendants of a certain English knight. Again, I “had heard” that I might be kin to Lee—and there were those family names again—but I just assumed that I had a case of wishful thinking.

For fear that I be accused of affectation, I will state that I would rather be kin to Private Samuel Mothershead than to Cousin George, much as I admire George for his rye whiskey making.  General Lee is another matter.  It would be an unimagined honour to be his cousin.  My priority will remain, however, solving the mystery of Samuel because he survived the hellish place that was Point Lookout, and because, even though my Mothershead ancestors, at first glance, seem to have been poor and illiterate, I am still proud of them, proud of my great-great grandmother, Alice Malinda.  There are those who may suggest, considering all the dangers of the crazy and coercive regime just up the Potomac from my rural retreat, that matters of lineage seem quaint and of little consequence, that my genealogical research is frivolous escapism. And they may be right.  But being the keepers of the family history is what Virginia ladies of a certain age do, the current state of affairs notwithstanding.

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[i] This acronym includes the K in Neck.

[ii] Edwin Warfield Beitzell was born in St. Mary’s County in 1905.  One of the few historians who have told the truth about Maryland’s ordeal during the Union occupation and about the conditions at Point Lookout Prison, he is accused, predictably, of having a “Southern bias.”

J.L. Bennett

J.L. Bennett is an independent historian living in Virginia and the author of Maryland, My Maryland: The Cultural Cleansing of a Small Southern State.

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