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Archiver > BOZEMAN > 1999-06 > 0928600355


From: John Coats <>
Subject: Re: [BOZEMAN-L] Southampton Co. VA
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 1999 09:32:35 -0700


Diana, Thanks for posting this. You may remember I asked about any Indian
Bozeman's previously on this list. My ggrandmother was Rebecca Griffin, who was
the daughter of Granville Griffin, who was married to Larah or Sarah Bozeman,
who was the daughter of Meady Jr, who was the son of Meady Sr. She said on
several different occasions that she was part Indian and proud of it. We have
never determined if the Indian was on the Bozeman or Griffin side. Both of those
families came from around Milledgeville, Ga. in the early 1800's. If anyone has
any further info, I'd love to share what I have.

John W. Coats

DIANA M WILLIAMS wrote:

> Hi Gang,
>
> Last year sometime, Steve mentioned a VA Bozeman with Indian connections.
> I said I had seen him and we agreed the tribe was the Nottoways. I said I
> had an item about him and of all things it has emerged from my wonderful
> non-filing system. Now that I see that he was in Southampton Co., it looks
> more important than I had originally thought. The name is intriguing also,
> William G. Bozeman. This makes more of a mystery than an answer, but here
> is the whole thing. I see 3 possibilities for his father: a handsome
> stranger who compromised the Chief's daughter; she just took the name from
> having heard it; or someone we do not know who spent time there and was
> really married to the Indian maid.
> Please come forth with your thoughts. Diana
>
> This is from: Southampton Co. VA by Thomas C. Parramore -- pgs. 12 to 15,
> from a chapter entitled 'The Passing of the Nottaways'.
>
> In the decades following the end of the Rev. War, the Nottoways continued
> to buy time by selling reservation land though ever more pinched by the
> change from food gathering to food growing. They were too few in number to
> take any organized part in the American Rev, though the Nottoway chief
> fought and died in the patriot ranks. (His name may have been on a
> preceding page, but I did not get it.) By the beginning of the 19th Century
> the tribal inheritance had diminished to less than four thousand acres, the
> arable portion of which was barely enough even for farming.
> But self-respect and self-identity remained. When they were queried in
> 1808 as to whether they might be willing to sell more land, the Nottoways
> announced that "the white people were already as near them as they wished
> them to be," and declined selling anything. They also refused to have their
> children bound out as apprentices, giving as their reason that "an
> Indian.....was never known as an apprentice."
> Little besides their dignity remained. Trustees reported that the
> tribe, whose cluster of small farms was now known as Simmons Town, was
> without educational facilities and that the Indians practiced neither
> sobriety, industry, nor frugality. Almost entirely illiterate, they seemed
> dependent on the good will of the trustees as their only guarantee against
> fraud and unfairness in their dealings with the white community.
> In 1818 the Nottoways appealed to the General Assembly for the right to
> sell the last of their lands except the few acres on which they actually
> lived. Queen Edith Turner, Ellick Rogers, Jack Woodson, Solomon Bartlett,
> and Nancy Turner, all of them illiterate, petitioned that the two dozen or
> so members of the tribe were mostly either very old or else infants too
> young to work. They held common title to 3,912 acres but could make use of
> very little of it and were in distress for money and provisions. The
> legislature in 1820 authorized sale of about a quarter of the reservation,
> but a substantial part of the proceeds had to be applied to the settlement
> of claims for goods advanced on credit. With Edith Turner now seventy years
> of age, Littleton Schollar--the tribes principal man--older still, another
> totally blind, and Alexander Rogers lately convicted of murder, the
> situation was still darker than before.
> It was at this crisis in affairs that the state legislature in Dec.
> 1823, was startled to receive from the hand of a member of the tribe a
> lengthy and incisive written analysis of the tribe's fundamental problems
> and a recommendation for how to solve them. The document was the work of a
> young man named WILLIAM G. BOZEMAN who had left VA some years earlier,
> acquired by some means a formal education, and returned to try to improve
> his own lot and that of the tribe.
> Bozeman's was the direct and forceful statement of a man who sought no
> charity and acknowledged no inferiority:
> "My forefathers helped to achieve the independence of America, they
> enlisted under the banner of freedom, and went forth to battle against the
> hostile armies of King George 3. They fought, they toil'd, they bled, for
> that LIBERTY, which the citizens of the US now enjoy. My grandfather at
> that time was King of the aforesaid tribe of Nottoway, he fell in battle,
> contending for liberty, under the immortal Washington.....Will you now
> behold me an offspring of the then noble spirits, of the memorable
> Revolution, who by their confederated plan stood the test of British warfare
> and tyranny; they burst the fetters, and hurled them at their oppressors,
> and shouted they were free, the sound broke across the Atlantic and shook
> the fog wrapt island of Britain; and raised America to the first rank,
> among the nations of the Earth."
> Bozeman proceeded to analyze what he conceived to be the chief obstacle
> to the advancement of the Nottoways. It was, he asserted, communal
> ownership of their land, a circumstance that had the effect of stifling
> individual initiative and denying to the Indians political suffrage.
> "What is more disheartening to a man," asked Bozeman, "than to know that
> the labour of his hands is not to go to the children of his body? And when
> we know it will, with what energy of industry it animates man for the
> happiness of his children."
> On Feb. 23, 1824, the General Assembly passed an act allowing the
> trustees of the Nottoways either to provide Bozeman tribal funds or set
> aside for him a reservation tract which he would then own in fee simple.
> They further enacted that any other member of the tribe was entitled to
> similar privileges. Bozeman, joined by the old queen, was allowed to
> select a tract on the road from Jerusalem to Belfield. The land they chose,
> probably with due deliberation, was considered to be "the most inferior" on
> the reservation.
>
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