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Story Archives: The Greshams come to Natchez; Lynch is free at 15
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The Greshams come to Natchez; Lynch is free at 15
 (Fourth in a series)
In July 1863, when the victory at Vicksburg during the Civil War gave the Union full control of the Mississippi River, the U.S. made Natchez a staging point for other campaigns and provided 15-year-old slave John Roy Lynch his taste of freedom.
John Roy's master, Alfred Vidal Davis, had banished the young slave -- who served as his valet -- from the Dunleith mansion in Natchez across the Mississippi River to Concordia Parish in February 1862. The banishment was to appeased Davis' wife, who thought John Roy smart-mouthed and disrespectful. For 15 months at Tacony Plantation, some of it spent in bed due to illness, possibly malaria, John Roy had experienced hard plantation labor.
Now this teenage ex-slave, who would one day serve in Congress and become the first African-American Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, made his way to Natchez to visit his mother and brother, who like him, had been house servants at Dunleith. With a new life ahead, John Roy had decisions to make. What would he do?
In the meantime, Matilda Gresham, the wife of 31-year-old Union officer Walter Quinton Gresham, arrived in Vicksburg to visit her husband following the Union victory over the Confederates. There, she learned that Gresham had departed for Natchez.
In Vicksburg, Matilda was given a tour of the devastated town, which had fallen to the Yankees after a 40-day siege: "It was early September, sixty days after the surrender, and some of the streets were still barricaded. In those that were open there were hats, rubbish, old clothes, and parts of wagons and caissons. The caves in the chalk-like clay hills, in which the Vicksburg people lived during the siege were pointed out."
Gresham, from Indiana, had commanded a regiment southeast of the city. Matilda wrote about her husband and about their lives in a book, "Life Of Walter Quintin Gresham 1832-1895," published in 1919.
Matilda had first met Walter Gresham at a party. She wore a red dress and was chaperoned by her two sisters. Matilda would recall that Gresham was 21, a law student, tall, handsome and well dressed.
Gresham and John Roy Lynch had two things in common -- both lost their fathers when they were less than two years old and both admired their mothers. When John Roy was only 15 or 16 months old in 1847, his father, a white man, died of either tetanus or cholera. Gresham, born in 1832, was 22 months old when his father, a law officer in Indiana, was stabbed and killed instantly when trying to arrest an outlaw named Levi Sipes.
Consequently, Gresham and his siblings were reared by their mother, Sarah, who often expressed her anti-slavery views as the nation debated the issue. She was haunted by the memory of a scene involving a young enslaved mother, Madge. When Madge learned that she was being sold to a new master, her child was forcefully removed from her arms and the two separated.
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