Note 37 — Chapter XXVIII · The “Jeff. Davis Cotton Plantation.”

“There was a colored woman at Davis’ Bend, when our forces took possession of that place—afterward sent to Cincinnati—who can be proved, by the testimony of hundreds, to have been the kept mistress of Jeff. Davis; and she is universally reputed to be the daughter of Joe Davis, the Rebel insurgent leader’s brother. We know, also, of at least six persons, the offspring of white Southern women by colored men. One of these children of white women, after narrowly escaping death by drowning at the hands of his maternal uncles, is now a Presiding Elder in the Methodist Church. Another was once sold into slavery by his mother, for a ‘flitch of bacon.’

“Moreover, in the course of their official action during the past year, my assistants have become cognizant of four marriages of Southern white men to colored women. One of them was formerly a negro-trader. His quadroon slave and mistress would not live with him without marriage, because, as she said, she had now become free, and it was no longer right to submit to that to which she had been helplessly subjected in slavery. A chaplain, altogether unwilling to assist at mixed marriages, was induced to perform the ceremony in this instance, by the man’s saying that he had ‘married her in the sight of God five years ago!’”—Official Report of Colonel John Eaton, General Superintendent Freedmen, Department of the Tennessee and State of Arkansas, for 1864, to the Adjutant General U. S. A.