Tag Archives: Reuben Alexander

“Raging, Roaring, Tearing, Whirling”

Nancy Brooks's 1855 letter

Nancy Brooks’s 1855 letter

Among many letters received from the far-flung members of his family by Cumberland County’s Reuben Alexander (1785-1864) was one from his niece, Nancy Brooks, who lived with her husband and son on a plantation near Pontotoc, Mississippi.  Writing on March 22, 1855, she described her harrowing experience of a tornado:

Last Friday night, the 16th of March, an awful, raging, roaring, tearing whirling Tornado passed over, among and round about us, with terrifying fury!

My family were all at home. . . .  [We] secured everything as well as we could.  I had scarcely got my little son, and several of us, in a little shed room which I thought the safest place, and lifted up my heart & voice in prayer, before the deafening roar of the storm commenced. . . .

The next morning we went out of our house and looked around — destruction reigned around our premises!  An immense quantity of large timber fallen, and torn to atoms. . . .  Our meat house, kitchen, cabbins, corn houses, stables, unroofed and wrecked. . . .

In Pontotoc, a neighbor reported, the destruction was “awful”:

One man got his leg broken, when a very large new brick Livery stable was blown to atoms. . . .  Only two horses were killed, but a great smashing of buggies & carriages.

Also lost was a new school, set to open the following week:

The pride of our town, the Male Academy, a substantial beautiful brick building, was blown down! . . . They were teaching in one of the churches, waiting for a little finish, on the Academy, but alas!  how their hopes are blasted!

Twenty miles away, a woman had been killed and her clergyman husband seriously injured in their collapsed house, but Nancy wrote that her son and husband, who was “very busy at work, helping to repair our shattered place,” had survived “what I fervently implore my Heavenly Father that I may never experience again.”

Nancy Brooks’s letter is part of the Alexander Family Papers in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections about Kentucky families, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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A Scriptural Divide

Reuben Alexander

Reuben Alexander

From their roots in Henry County, Virginia, the Alexander family migrated to plantations in Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas and elsewhere.  Members kept in touch, but there were two that patriarch Reuben Alexander (1785-1864) might not have wanted to seat next to each other at Thanksgiving.  One was his nephew, Edward Fontaine, of Hinds County, Mississippi.  The other was Reuben’s own son Miller, who caused his family to drop its collective jaw when he freed his slaves and struck out for Iowa to go into business.

In a letter to his father from Keokuk in 1859, Miller acknowledged the damage he had done to his net worth, but the deeply religious man felt compelled to explain himself to his skeptical parent.  “I knew I had not your approbation in moving North–And am sorry for it, but it was my duty to obey the voice of conscience and of God,” he wrote.  Moreover, “if you were possesser of ten thousand slaves and would give them to me to return to Ky. I could not do it.”  While not an activist for abolition, Miller declared that “every feeling of my nature revolts at the idea of owning a fellow creature, when I am but a worm myself.”

Only a month earlier, Reuben had received a letter from nephew Edward, who weighed in on his cousin’s struggles.  “I regret to find from Cousin Miller’s Letter that his fanatical freak, freeing his slaves, and settling among the pious Yankees had led him into difficulties.”  Nevertheless, Edward–a pastor–hoped that Miller’s youth and energy would “enable him to extricate himself from the embarrassments into which his unscriptural views of the question of Slavery have drawn him.”  Edward prayed that Miller, whose former slaves had doubtless been rendered equally unhappy by this unholy state of affairs, might recover from his “fanatical freak” and regain his former prosperity.

Reuben Alexander’s family correspondence is part of the Alexander Family Papers in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more collections about Kentucky families, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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