`Ex-slave left the South, lived long and prospered`

By Hal Johnson
Herald Staff Writer

Black
History
Month

Shortly before the Georgian slaveholder died in 1848, Morris Steverson listed his properties to be divided among his nine heirs.

The hand-written list included a 9-year-old Wilson Steverson, whose worth was listed as $300. His name and names of other slaves were on the same list as the slaveholder's mules.

Emily Steverson inherited Wilson Steverson and his brother, Dennis. She married George Fanbrough, whom Wilson Steverson and his brother followed into the Civil War. With the Confederate Army's 16th Georgian Battalion of the Partisan Regiment, the slaves protected their masters from Union Army gunfire by firing at the enemy, said Wilson's great-grandson, Roland Barksdale-Hall.

But in war and on the frontier, the master also protected his slaves, the Sharon man said. At a frontier funeral in the 1830s, Morris Steverson shot a panther as it was about to attack Wilson Steverson's father, Archie Willie Brewster, Barksdale-Hall said. The master had his gun in hand. If he had not, both slave and master would be dead.

``The slave- holders were indebted to the slaves. It was a relationship that followed them into the frontier,'' said Barksdale-Hall.

The 37-year-old Sharon man traced his roots when he learned that his great-grandfather, Wilson Steverson, also known as ``Dad'' Steverson, was buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Hermitage. Although born into slavery, Steverson spent the last years of his 109-year-life in Sharon.

Wilson Steverson and his family just never considered running away as an option. Because of their strong family ties, a runaway slave feared retribution from his family as well as mistreatment from his master, Barksdale-Hall said.

``Slaves wanted to be freed, but with their whole family,'' he said.

That wish might have come true with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, but it didn't. ``Slavery never ended when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. It was still in the minds of the people. No stroke of the pen could remove that,'' Barksdale-Hall said.

If Wilson Steverson was to make a living after slavery, he would keep the interdependent relationship with whites, he said. Without the relationship with whites, the Ku Klux Klan would force the ex-slave off his land, he said.

The fact that Wilson Steverson was a mulatto also helped him survive as a newly freed slave, Barksdale-Hall said. A mulatto has biracial ancestors and had fairer skin tone than most other African Americans of the post-Civil War era.

As an ex-slave, Wilson Steverson became a sharecropper. After saving 50 cents of every dollar he made, Steverson bought 80 acres in 1885.

In the 1920s, poor returns from cotton crops forced Steverson's family members to head North. Then in his 80s, Steverson followed his family and got a job in an Erie paper mill and what was then the American Sheet and Tin Plate Co. in Farrell, Barksdale-Hall said.

Steverson also became the caretaker for the Church of God campgrounds, near West Middlesex, he said. He died in Sharon in 1948.

A bad cotton crop wasn't the only reason Steverson left the South. ``He wanted to experience freedom. He knew how to play the game, but he was tired of it,'' Barksdale-Hall said.

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Updated Feb. 3, 1998
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