War and Occupation

In 1861, Williamson County’s white and black residents braced for war as men near Thompson’s Station joined Jacob “Jake” T. Martin’s 140-strong Confederate cavalry force and women took on farm work and other duties. After the Union army occupied the region in early 1862, families around Thompson’s Station lived with constant military movement along Columbia Pike and the Tennessee & Alabama Railroad, while soldiers camped widely and demanded labor, supplies, and food. Precilla Gray, enslaved at Samuel A. Pointer’s plantation, recalled knitting socks and helping make soldiers’ coats as the war began. Union troops often foraged from known secessionists, though any farm might be plundered, and their presence also encouraged enslaved people to seek freedom. Maggie Washington, enslaved at Ben Caldwell’s plantation, remembered her mother being ordered to wash lice-filled Union uniforms, while her brother was among the newly free black men who joined the U.S. Colored Troops and returned in a blue uniform. Wealthy planters such as thirty-three-year-old Samuel A. Pointer, who owned more than 20 slaves, were exempt from Confederate service; in 1863, Pointer sent his slaves to Rome, Georgia, and central Alabama to keep them from emancipation and hired them out in cotton fields and ironworks. Federal authorities arrested him that August and briefly imprisoned him in Franklin, likely because he refused to swear allegiance to the United States. In January 1864, despite those troubles, Pointer praised the occupying forces for protecting their friends in that part of the state while condemning local “homemade yankees” at Franklin. Samuel A. Pointer remained a civilian during the war, while his younger brother Edward H. Pointer joined Martin’s Confederate Cavalry at Thompson’s Station and was killed in action in Hickman County, Tennessee, in 1864.

Thompson's Station, Tennessee · United States