Manumission in One South Carolina Family
Three brothers: John, Benjamin, and Lacon Ryan appeared in the backcountry of South Carolina about 1757 and with their father, Benjamin, received grants of land on Horns Creek of the Savannah River. ¹ Coming from Virginia, they were no doubt fleeing the excesses of the French and Indian War. By 1761 the eldest son, John Ryan, was already active in the Cherokee War, the treaty for which, it was established that no Indian could travel below Ninety-Six. That was also the time when South Carolina was beginning to encourage Protestant settlement in the backcountry. The first Ryan Grant in this region was dated October 25, 1764. The Regulators, frontier vigilantes, were also active and they were responsible for the establishment of courts in the backcountry essential to the creation of order. ²
Four years later, the Separate Baptist, Daniel Marshall, organized the Horns Creek Baptist Church near Ryan land. ³ The roots of the Separate Baptist originate with Rev. George Whitfield and the Great Awakening in America. Marshall had been part of the Regular Baptists at Sandy Creek Church Association in North Carolina and he moved over to Abbotts Creek on Deep River where he came under the influence of Rev. Shubal Sterns. ⁴ There was little difference to be had between the Regular and the Separate Baptist. On such issues as the Christian Ordinances, the latter recognized nine ordinances while the Regular Baptists practiced only two: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
People who had left their traditional birthplace in Europe and the British Isles and risked the perils of a new land, had grown an intolerant personality. They had been persecuted so long with such vengeance that they had little tolerance for government and law administered from far away. In their religious faith, however, they were equally guarded about the details that made them different. They seem to have agreed on but one thing, that they wanted no part of the orthodoxy of the Catholic Faith.
When the Revolutionary War broke out, the Ryan brothers had established their repute as Indian fighters and it was John who was designated as Militia Captain under General Arthur Williamson. Ryan led his Militia unit from Edgefield to Savannah. ⁵ In 1777, he was taken prisoner by Tories on the Edgefield Road near Horns Creek Church. Without a rope to hang him, the Tories asked a man plowing nearby for his plow line and he agreed saying, “I would lose a year’s plowing to see John Ryan tied.” Ryan escaped when they reached Sarah Jane Springs. Determined to find the plowman, named Booth, he kept an eye out when he returned to service. He found Booth as he ate dinner at his sister’s house and shot him dead. ⁶ Not directly threatened by British forces in the Edgefield District in this early part of the war, Ryan, under Williamson was active in two campaigns against the Cherokee before but his Militia was also engaged at the Battle of Stono.
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¹ The Story of Edgefield, (Edgefield County Historical Society, 2005), 83.
² Rainsford, Bettis C., The Early History of Horn’s Creek Baptist Church (Edgefield: Edgefield County Historical Society, 2014) 14.
³ Ibid, 32.
⁴ Ibid, 25.
⁵ John Ryan Obituary, Columbia Telescope, September 2, 1827; Transcripted note of Rev Herbert B. Satcher from Chapman’s History of Edgefield.”
⁶ Ibid, 43
Ryan was among the militia troops captured in the Fall of Charleston in 1780. This was broadly considered as the nadir of the American cause in the South. ⁷ The British command, in an effort to neutralize Whig strength in South Carolina, offered to allow Williamson and his men to take parole and the General put it to a vote which became very contentious. Some professed such action as dishonorable. The majority voted to take parole, among them was a reluctant group who accepted parole as the only opportunity they would have to escape, among them John Ryan. When the British spoke of them as British subjects and asked them to bear arms, a number, including Ryan refused and they were sent to the provost prison in Charleston. There they rioted and they were confined to wretched conditions on a prison ship from which most escaped. Ryan had returned to Edgefield by the time Cornwallis, stymied at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, swung back to restabilize South Carolina. General Williamson returned to a plantation the British had provided and took no part in the rest of the fighting. His actions, though even now not fully understood, earned him the sobriquet, “the Benedict Arnold of the South.” ⁸
Edgefield was in deplorable condition as Tory bands, like those under “Bloody Bill” Cunningham, brought wanton destruction. Plantations were burned, slave killed, and nearly half the males of the region were killed or died of disease. ⁹ The spiraling fight to devour each other was inspired by a spirit of pure personal hatred. Finally, in the fall of 1781 in a skirmish, Ryan was wounded in the shoulder, had to withdraw and was sent home, his war finished. Years of brutal fighting with Indians on the frontier, then the organized and disciplined British including imprisonment, and finally the sheer eye-gouging bitterness of neighbors facing defeat, must have had an enervating effect on the surviving Ryan sons. They came home to claim their rewards.
Along with Arthur Simpkins and John Gray, John Ryan was a commissioner taking title to three acres near his home as Horns Creek Baptist Church. ¹⁰ Lacon Ryan, who had served as his Lieutenant, took up 140 acres of grant land to establish his homeplace and 10 months later died, leaving a widow and two small children for whom John Ryan took personal responsibility. ¹¹ When one of the children, Sarah, came of age, she married Col. George Moore, and when he died, Benjamin Gallman. Of her children by Moore, Mary Elder Moore, married Benjamin Tillman. Her younger siblings became wards of Gallman and were adopted by him with John Ryan as surety.
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⁷ John Ryan Obituary, Columbia Telescope, November 2, 1827.
⁸ Runyan, Conner, “Tha Monument that Never Was,” from Journal of the American Revolution, September 2, 2015.
⁹ Chapman, John A., History of Edgefield County From Earliest Times, abstracts in Genealogy Trails History Group.
¹⁰ Ibid, 69-70
¹¹ Biography of Benjamin Ryan, 12,
Complaints had been heard against Hezekiah Walker, the minister, by Bethel Baptist Association when the membership of Horns Creek notified them that action had already concluded to settle the problem. All was well. At this point it appears that Horns Creek entered into its association with the Separate Baptists and a second Horns Creek, under the Bethel Association, was built on land of John Ryan. These biographical incidents do not define or measure the internal congregational stress plaguing Horns Creek. The country was, however, progressing in its organization by way of such incidents as the visit at Piney Woods of George Washington, their new President, on his Southern Tour. The invention of the cotton gin anticipated the industrial revolution. Ominous was the murder of Joseph Cotton by his wife, Becky, wielding an axe, and prescient of the profusion of murder that was to characterize the Edgefield area.
John Ryan acquired two 1000-acre plantations. His wife, Margaret, was childless and in 1799 a son was born to his slave, Sophie. He was named Gilderoy [Golden Boy,] and all subsequent records indicate that John Ryan was the father. The overtones of the birth were reminiscent of the Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah and her handmaid, Hagar, who bore Ishmael. In John Ryan, they are also faithful to the actions of Abraham as Patriarch. ¹² Brother Benjamin Ryan died November 11, 1813 having written a will that in imprecise phraseology left his considerable estate (valued at $13,500) ¹³ to his widow, Milly Odom, and the two children, Sarah and Benjamin, of his late brother, Lacon. ¹⁴ At the same time, John Ryan executed a Deed of Manumission for Gilderoy who was 14. In Benjamin’s will they had been set free as long as they did not become unfaithful or sassy to his beloved wife. ¹⁵ He also attempted to comply with the South Carolina law on manumission then in force. In 1815, 1820 and 1824, John Ryan petitioned the South Carolina Legislature to free his late brother, Benjamin’s slaves. John Ryan’s actions in regard to the Horns Creek’s promotion of manumission, seem to have been in close harmony. ¹⁶
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¹² Manuscript document, Charles Rodenbough Collection, “Gilderoy, Latin: Golden King,”1-5.
¹³ “Looking for Odom and Williams of Edgefield and Aiken SC,” Abraham Odum/Odom and Samuel Marsh Blog, blogspot.com
¹⁴ Biography of Benjamin Ryan, Will of Benjamin Ryan, September 20, 1808, 19-20.
¹⁵ Edgefield County, Estate Box 25, package 905; Rainsford, Early Horns Creek, 58-59..
¹⁶ Burton, Orville Burton, In My Fathers House Are Many Mansions (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 26; Rainsford, Early Horns ,59-60.
At Horns Creek Baptist Church at this moment were Rev Samuel Marsh and Mason Locke Weems, better known in history as Parson Weems, who had already published into a fifth edition, his “Life of George Washington.” In ordinance, the Horn Creek Baptist Church was considered to be professing Separate Baptists who were using their influence to manumit slaves.
Milly Odom took Reverend Samuel Marsh as her second husband. She was considered to be “a woman of high spirit.” ¹⁷ Probably, through the cautious oversight of her brother-in-law, John Ryan, Milly insisted on a precise prenuptial agreement which, in effect, shielded all her late husband’s assets from Marsh. ¹⁸ Their marriage took place February 4, 1815. Sixteen days later, John Ryan paid for a copy of Benjamin Ryan’s will, a portentous act of caution. By August, he had hired Edmund Bacon to defend the property of the children of Benjamin Ryan. By May of the next year, he had filed a Bill for Relief, Discovery, Injunction, and Participation against Samuel Marsh and Milly.
On the 29th of May, Milly Odom Ryan Marsh was murdered in her own house, shot through a window by a shot gun, one source says while peeling potatoes, another that she was eating supper. ¹⁹ As she lay on the floor, later testimony said that Marsh insisted that 2 keys be given to him from her pocket so he could get some medicine from her desk. He then removed papers including the prenuptial agreement, and $500 in cash, and destroyed the agreement. ²⁰ There were claims that the murderer had been dissatisfied slaves on testimony that Milly intended to send some of her slaves to Kentucky. The transcription of the ensuing trial, hint further at Marsh as the murdered but no charges were ever filed. Squabbles followed and various suits for interests in the estate. There was a charge that Marsh had cut down timber including a cherry tree on the edge of the Ryan cemetery on Benjamin’s land (shades of Parson Weem’s Cherry tree story applied to Washington). ²¹ The court awarded John Ryan all of his brother’s personal estate and the proceeds of the sale of the rest was divided between March and the two children of Lacon Ryan. ²²
Ominous was the murder, a few years later, of Joseph Cotton by his wife, Becky, wielding an axe. Prescient was the profusion of murder, that was to characterize the Edgefield area. This was a few years after the murder of Milly Odum which the Edgefield community seemed to ignore. ²³
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¹⁷ “Looking for Odom and Williams “; Rainsford, Early Horns Creek, 57.
¹⁸ Ibid; Rodenbough, Charles D., “John Ryan’s Book,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly, June 1983, Vol 51, Nr. 2, 114.
¹⁹ Descendants of Benjamin Ryan, 1718-1793, manuscript document, Family History Library, Family Search. International, 1, 4; .”The Fiery and Confusing Odum Family, Looking for Odum, blindspot.com.,0
²⁰ Rainsford, Early Horns Creek, 58.
²¹ John Ryan vs Samuel Marsh, May 18, 1816, Edgefield County; Where the Cherry Tree Grew: An Interview with Phillip Levy, Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 2016.
²² Manuscript, Charles Rodenbough Collection, “Ryan-Marsh Trial.”
²³ Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane, Sex and Race in the Early South,Wallowing in a swamp of Sin, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) footnote 35, p. 35.
Parson Mason Locke Weems preached a sermon at Horns Creek titled, “The Devil in Petticoats,” using the Becky Cotton incident of the murder of her husband as a precipitous act for which her husband was acquitted. In his sermon he raged, “will the Lord have mercy upon Old Edgefield! For sure it must be pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils.” ²⁴ Parson Weems is a ubiquitous character in this story and in the characterization of Edgefield. Ultimately, it is said that “once beset by scandal and corruption, [Edgefield] transformed itself into a fortress against destructive elements, a region redeemed rather than condemned.” ²⁵ Parson’s Weems, was the preacher, book seller, and fiddler, whose pamphlet, “stirred the passion of commonfolk.” “His tracts were whips with which he lashed the brutal or self-indulgent classes of the South.” ²⁶ Why did he pass over the murder of Milly Odom and preach his searing sin and redemption through the murder of Becky Cotton? Did he shy away from a scandal directly implicating his friend Rev. Samuel Marsh? Was it, in the cutting down of the cherry tree at the cemetery, that Weems found the seed for George Washington’s confession of the similar act? Parson Weems has almost a Shakespearian presence in this story of the Ryan family.
By 1820, the rise of Nullification and the Denmark Vesey Revolt in Charleston had put a pause on manumission just as John Ryan was attempting to free Sophia, mother of Gilderoy. A young graduate of the University of North Carolina, Basil Manley, came to Horns Creek Baptist. He had composed a theme while at the university in which he said:
“Slavery seems to be repugnant to the spirit of our republican institutions. While the framers of our constitution recognized most distinctly the principle that all men are naturally free and equal; with the very hand that subscribed it, and fought to maintain it, they held the chain that bound a portion of their fellow men to perpetual servitude.” ²⁷
There is no proof that John Ryan ever saw these words of thesis written by Manly. He probably had occasion to hear Manly preach at Horns Creek. He certainly lived in the midst of the concern for manumission represented by the Separate Baptists. More important, his concerted efforts to free the slaves of his brother, Benjamin; his deep concern for Gilderoy; his detailed exertions to preserve the family units within his slave community; and his determination, within the scope of the shifting South Carolina laws concerning manumission, to comply with law yet accomplish the release of slaves, demonstrate a man who is not comfortable with the practice of slavery. Still, at his death he left 103 enslaved people to be sold, singly and in family units, to his neighbors. ²⁸ Today our task should be to continue to examine this conundrum of his life, without making judgements using the humanity we have come to cherish in our age. The dichotomy speaks to us, but it is not an objective basis of debate or action.
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²⁴ Burton, In My Father’s House,136-137; The Story of Edgefield,15, 85
²⁵ Clinton Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane, 33,
²⁶ Ibid, 27.
²⁷ Burton, In My Father’s House, 26.
²⁸ Biography of Benjamin Ryan, Will of John Ryan, March 13, 1827, 20-21; Transcription of Will of John Ryan sale by Rev. Herbert Boyce Satcher; Abstract of John Ryan Will, Edgefield County Will Book C, October 17, 1827..
The records of Horns Creek were taken by persons unknown and congregants attempted to re-create that history and start a new role of membership. None of the Ryan’s are found on those rolls except 22 plantation slaves. In 1824, Ryan deeded two hundred acres to Gilderoy completely surrounded by his own land, as a protection against South Carolina’s Manumission laws. ²⁹ John Ryan deeded the property of the second Horns Creek Church to the Methodist denomination. Basil Manley left Horns Creek Baptist and later was President of the University of Alabama. ³⁰ On October 1, 1827, Captain John Ryan died on his Edgefield plantation.
In a single family biography of the Ryans of Edgefield County, South Carolina, we can exhibit the deep complexities they confronted in regard to slavery. With all these details, we still cannot be certain where their commitment to humanity lay, judged in their time or in our own. If John Ryan had access to Basil Manly’s remarks, how would the arrow of truth struck him? The society around him continued to move toward a truly unforgiving character. The grandson of Mary Elder Moore, John Ryan’s niece, whose interests he protected, was Benjamin Ryan Tillman, “Pitchford Ben” Tillman, Governor of South Carolina and leader of the Red Shirts. In 1876, when Reconstruction. as Abraham Lincoln had envisioned it, ended, and segregation became entrenched in the South. ³¹ History, if it serves us, is in understanding the details and reporting reality truthfully and as completely and sensitively as possible, not in placing the imprimatur of our own judgement on the past.
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²⁹ Ibid, 61-62.
³⁰ “A Biographical Sketch of Basil Manly, Sr.,” Founders Ministries.
³¹ Benjamin Ryan Tillman Papers, 1769-1950, Clemson University
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