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Story Archives: Despite deathbed promise, Lynch & family return to slavery
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Despite deathbed promise, Lynch & family return to slavery
(Second in a series)
John Roy Lynch was born into slavery to a white father and black mother on Tacony Plantation in Vidalia in 1847. As an adult, he would become a congressman and speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era.
In 1849, John Roy's father, Patrick, while on his deathbed in Vidalia, went into debt to gain ownership of his wife and children -- all slaves -- in an attempt to assure that they would be free and protected after he died. He turned those titles over to a man he trusted. This transfer was accomplished shortly before Patrick Lynch died. John Roy was not yet two-years-old.
During that time flood waters inundated much of Concordia and Catahoula parishes. A second menace also threatened every man, woman and child, black and white, rich and poor -- an outbreak of cholera. Either that, or tetanus, may have claimed Patrick Lynch's life.
Everyone was at wit's end. According to Black River planter Dr. A.R. Kilpatrick: "A gloom was over the whole country, produced both by the apprehension of this terrible scourge and the threatening overflow."
That gloom intensified for John Roy Lynch's mother, Caroline, who not only had to deal with the death of the man she loved, but also had to deal with the future of her children as well as her own. The man his father trusted, William Deale, quickly sold Lynch's mother and her three children to wealthy planter Alfred Vidal Davis of Natchez to settle the debts of John Roy's father.
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