Sharp Spencer Reynolds, Jr., was 2 when his mother died, 8 when his family’s way of life ended (in 1865,) and 33 when his baby brother inherited the Reynolds estate and became his landlord. In his 30’s, he was a poor and desperate tenant farmer who came near working and/or beating his children to death, according to his wife, my great-great grandmother Mary Margaret Broom. At 39, he caught typhoid and went to an early grave, and Mary Margaret said it was a good thing for the children.
Things had started better for the second Sharp Spencer Reynolds. Being white in Georgia and a Reynolds in Hall County, he was a son of privilege. In the custom of the 1850’s, Sharp, Jr., as a toddler, likely had his own little slave, designated as his playmate and tasked with taking care of him. Sharp would have been well-dressed in garments made by slaves and would have worn finely crafted shoes, but most of the year his slave playmate would have worn a one-piece item of clothing constructed like a sack with holes for the head and arms. In winter, the slave youngster would likely have had deer hide shoes as hard as a board, and no shoes at all for the rest of the year.
The slaves his own age may have had a nickname for Sharp, Jr., or may have called him Master or Young Master. (In some households, slaves were marched through the big house after the birth of a new child in the Master’s family and required to genuflect before the infant in its crib and say the word “Marster” if it was a boy or “Mistuss” if it was a girl, acknowledging their position in relation to the newborn white.)
It was the Master who named all slaves at birth, and in the Reynolds family, in the 1850’s, there were slave children named Mandi and Thomas, names that Sharp, Sr., had also used for his children. There was also a Mary, the name of Sharp, Sr.’s mother, as well as a much older slave named Will, Sharp’s grandfather’s name. Family tradition does not reveal whether, as was common, the white masters sired any of these children who shared our family names.
Even though there was a Civil War going on elsewhere, Sharp, Jr., would have thought slave life in The Glade was the normal way of things. He would have been aware of slaves rising well before sun-up—the bugle blew at 3 a.m. on some farms, 4 a.m. on others. While it was still dark, slaves would have built a fire in the big house and prepared breakfast for the Reynolds family. The slaves, if they were lucky, got leftovers, but usually subsisted on the rations issued each Sunday: “coffee” made of parched cornmeal, white (all-fat) bacon and ash-bread. Little Sharp Jr. may have had occasion to witness them standing in the field with their hoes or plows lined up along the rows, ready for the day’s work at the first hint of daylight. The slaves would have worked till dark in the fields and pastures and barns of the Reynolds farm, with only a single break for a meager lunch. The female field hands with new babies would have been given two additional breaks to walk back to the slave quarters to nurse their babies—a walk that could be several miles each way, depending upon where on the farm they were working that day.
The house slaves spent each day attending the personal needs of the mistress of the household and her little ones and doing the work that, after the war, some white farm women would have to do for themselves—nonstop cooking, cleaning house, washing clothes, making cloth and candles and soap, sewing clothes, and doing the myriad things required to keep a family fed and clothed.
The slave-children went to work at about the age of eight. Before that age, slaves like Mandi and Mary and Thomas were kept, during the day, in a cabin or a fenced lot, watched over by some slave too old to work. Their lunch, a mixture of whatever gruel or slop the Reynolds mistress approved, was poured into a trough in the yard and the slave children ate with their hands if the mixture was solid enough, or—if it was soupy—put their faces in it and ate like pigs, sometimes competing with dogs and stray pigs that they weren’t allowed to hit. Sometimes their food was put on the ground, or in rainy weather, on the clay floor of the dog run between the kitchen and the rest of the master's house. They ate without benefit of bowl or spoon.
When Sharp, Jr., was two years old, his mother, Sharp, Sr.'s second wife, Elizabeth H. Terrell Reynolds died giving birth to a child, Albert, who also did not survive.
Sharp, Jr., was 7 years old when his 63 year old father took a third wife—Mary Ann Hendrix—in 1864. Mary Ann bore a child for Sharp, Sr., a son they named Minor Grey Reynolds.
When Minor Reynolds was 24 (in 1890,) Sharp, Sr., died, leaving Minor the entire Reynolds estate, almost 400 acres of which is still occupied today by Minor's granddaughter Jane Reynolds Hemmer and her family. That land has now been in the family since 1801 or thereabouts when a 3,000 acre (?) land grant in Cherokee territory was allegedly given to Bartemous Reynolds, a Virginian living in Pickens Conty, South Carolina. Bartemous got the land free. From the government. Which got it from the Cherokee.
I assume Bartemous Reynolds' qualifications for obtaining that land were that:
A . He was White.
B. He was Male.
C. He knew somebody who had some influence—perhaps his Pickens County, South Carolina neighbor, Revolutionary War Hero and Cherokee fighter General Andrew Pickens. General Pickens was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He became a Congressman. One of his sons became governor of South Carolina. Two of his sons served as Lieutenant-governor. He was the uncle (by marriage) of Vice-president John C. Calhoun. More significantly, he led a campaign against the Cherokee which resulted in the tribe ceding large portions of their land between Georgia's Chattahoochee and Savannah Rivers. The 3,000 acres of what would become Reynolds land and is still occupied by a Reynolds descendant today is located in that area. Bartemous Reynolds named one of his sons Pickens Taylor Reynolds. (The Taylor was, according to family lore, Captain Zachary Taylor, first cousin of Bartemous Reynolds' wife and future President of the United States. )
I assume Bartemous Reynolds' qualifications for obtaining that land were that:
A . He was White.
B. He was Male.
C. He knew somebody who had some influence—perhaps his Pickens County, South Carolina neighbor, Revolutionary War Hero and Cherokee fighter General Andrew Pickens. General Pickens was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He became a Congressman. One of his sons became governor of South Carolina. Two of his sons served as Lieutenant-governor. He was the uncle (by marriage) of Vice-president John C. Calhoun. More significantly, he led a campaign against the Cherokee which resulted in the tribe ceding large portions of their land between Georgia's Chattahoochee and Savannah Rivers. The 3,000 acres of what would become Reynolds land and is still occupied by a Reynolds descendant today is located in that area. Bartemous Reynolds named one of his sons Pickens Taylor Reynolds. (The Taylor was, according to family lore, Captain Zachary Taylor, first cousin of Bartemous Reynolds' wife and future President of the United States. )
Some slaves, knowing little except the farm, remained with the Sharp, Sr., family after they became “freedmen,” and after Minor inherited the land and they lived out their lives in conditions not much better than slavery. The Black Codes, after Reconstruction, had given whites control over former slaves. These laws allowed whites to own the labor of their former slaves, rather than own the actual people. Thus, former slave-owners like the elderly Sharp, Sr., and his offspring like Minor Reynolds, had a way to keep their former slaves under their boot.
Sharp, Jr., by contrast, lived most of his adult life in a house not much better than a slave cabin on land taken from the Cherokee and distributed by the government to Bartemous and inherited from him by Sharp, Sr., who passed it on to Minor who passed it on to his son Minor Garland (Butch) Reynolds, whose daughter owns it today (in 2019) more than 200 years later.
Sharp, Jr., worked 80 acres of his baby brother's land as a tenant farmer. Sharp, Jr.'s three oldest sons, Sharp III, Allen, and Robert, were all forced, as slaves had been, to work the farm from dawn to twilight, starting at the age of 8 or 9.
Sharp, Jr., worked 80 acres of his baby brother's land as a tenant farmer. Sharp, Jr.'s three oldest sons, Sharp III, Allen, and Robert, were all forced, as slaves had been, to work the farm from dawn to twilight, starting at the age of 8 or 9.
A few years later, in the early 20th Century, Sharp Jr.’s son Allen once whipped his young son mercilessly for working a mule too hard—the actions of a hard and desperate man who had been raised that way himself by Sharp Jr. (That young boy would become my grandfather, Bonnell Reynolds.)
Sharp, Jr.’s wife, Mary Margaret Broom told her daughter-in-law (my great-grandmother) Chesty Collins Reynolds that it was a good thing Sharp, Jr., died when he did, at age 39, because she had feared that his sons could not survive the work and the lashes he laid upon them.
"Everybody in the South wants to whip somebody else."
~Frederick Douglass
