Brownsville
Tiny Country Town – Huge Family Legacy
Sandy Wills was born in Tipton County, Tennessee around 1840. The year is estimated because no one kept track of the exact birthdays of slaves, they were listed by sex and approximate age. They were kept as human property, but with Sandy’s birth came the winds of change. In 1840, the United States of America was half-slave and half-free and most astute observers knew that this “peculiar institution” could not remain divided for long.
Sandy was “purchased” by Edmund Willis Wills, a property owner and farmer who was one of the largest slaveholders in Haywood County. Sandy was a mere ten years old when Edmund Wills bought him on the auction block. Sandy was forever removed from his parents, siblings, and familiar surroundings and deposited into a new slave community in Brownsville, Haywood County. Like most slaves, he toiled from sun up to sun down, ate spoiled food, and slept on splintered wooden floors in a crowded shack with no windows. No mother’s love, no school, no freedom, just work.
Minds Fixed on Freedom
By 1860, Master Wills owned 48 slaves, but not for long. By 1863, the older male slaves started to run away to join the Union Army. Sandy, Richard, James, Mack, Andy, and Dick were not brothers by blood, but by bondage. They were all of the same mind and their minds were fixed on freedom. As all hell broke loose in the rebel confederate state, the Wills men were trained for battle with the 4th Regiment Heavy Artillery. All of them survived the war, except Richard, who died on December 20, 1863, at the age of 18, in Columbus, Kentucky. He never made it past basic training because he died in the regimental hospital of Rubeola and Diarrhea. In 1866, the Wills soldiers returned to Haywood County’s Brownsville. Records from the National Archives in Washington show all of the Wills men were honorably discharged.
Like many former slaves, Sandy became a sharecropper on the very plantations that once held him as a slave. For every dollar he earned, he would likely be swindled out of fifty cents. Sandy married Emma West-Moore on January 25, 1869. They married in her former Master’s “big house,” which indicates that they all remained friendly after slavery and the war was over. Sandy and Emma had nine children: William, Alex “Alic”, Sandy, Adolfus “Dolphin”, Mattie Belle, John Henry, Walter, Priscilla “Puss,” and James.
Sharing the Legacy
What is most fascinating is that in the 137 years since Sandy Wills enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops, his incredible story was not handed down to future generations. The African tradition of story-telling had been tragically muted – lost in the struggle to survive in the dangerous lawless world of Jim Crow, but Sandy spoke to his great-great-great granddaughter, Cheryl Wills, from the grave and made his legacy known. Now she is proud to share his story with her family and the world.
To contact Cheryl, please visit www.cherylwills.tv
"...the discovery of Cheryl's great-great-great grandfather has been a fortuitous and unexpected find - tracking down slavery ancestry is never easy as slaves were treated as property, bought and sold, and rarely referred to by name."
Craig Rice
Member, Association of Professional Genealogists