John Beckwith

John Beckwith was 83 and living in Cary, North Carolina, when he was interviewed. He was about nine at the surrender. His parents, Green and Molly, were among some twenty-four people enslaved by a woman who married, in turn, Joe Edwards, Marion Gully and Hilliard Beckwith. He said people were beaten every once in a while, but that they had plank houses, good food, shoes and weekends off. The mistress raised the enslaved babies so their mothers could work, and he remembered her rocking him to sleep in her own bed.

His sharpest memory was the Tuesday Union troops arrived. They burned the cotton house, killed most of the chickens and pigs, found the brandy in the cellar, cursed the mistress on her own porch, and slit open mattresses and pillows looking for valuables. The officers took over the house for two days, and John was kept there to carry brandy up from the cellar and mix mint juleps. On the second night a violent storm shook the house, and when lightning struck the catalpa tree beside it, a captain said the witches were abroad and the soldiers moved off to the barns and cabins. They left the next morning.

The family stayed on at the place until his parents died.