In 2017, when I realized that my 4th great-grandfather’s will had the names of 11 people held in slavery by him, I learned that of the 11 people, eight were a family. Sibby was their mother, and her seven children were Andrew, Toby, Toney, Frank, Elitha (Lizia, Litha), Sandy, and Clayton. After Emancipation, the ones who survived each took a different surname: Andrew Law, Toby Ashmore, Toney West, Frank Williams, and Sandy Maybank. Elitha died before 1870, and Clayton was “sold away,” which I believe means that he was sold far enough away that his siblings did not know where he was after Emancipation.
I know quite a bit about what happened to Toby Ashmore, whose father was one of my ancestors, probably John Ashmore. Andrew Law was the one I knew least about. He appeared in Savannah after Emancipation but I was never sure if the records I was finding were all about the same person or if there were two men named Andrew Law.
A contact from a descendant of his caused me to take a closer look recently, and I found the answers. As his descendant put it when giving permission to put this research on the website, “Everyone has the right to the truth no matter how much it hurts.”
After John Ashmore died in 1847, his will left Andrew to his daughter Sarah Rebecca Ashmore, who married Benjamin Lane. They sold Andrew to Jacob Manses, a German-born grocer in Savannah, in January 1851, but Manses sued them later that year because Andrew had problems with his leg and couldn’t be used for what Manses wanted. Manses won his case and then it appears Andrew was sold to Zachariah Zipperer, a farmer in Effingham County.
By the time the Civil War started, Andrew was hiring himself out in Savannah and remitting part of his earnings to Zipperer. He experienced the Civil War in Effingham County, where Sherman’s troops took his possessions while they were foraging for the Army. He filed a claim against the U.S. Government as part of the U.S. Southern Claims Commission process to try to get restitution for the property that was stolen, but the Commission denied his claim on the basis that he should have gotten either his former slaveowner or a white member of that family to testify that he was allowed to own property, and that there should have been more details in his claim about how he acquired the property.
One of his witnesses for his claim testified about him, “I knew him all through the war. He & I belonged to the same man. I talked with him while the war was going on. Of course the most of our talk was hoping we might be free men. I did not know anything else but to be a union man…every colored man was a union man or a very foolish man one or the other.”
After Emancipation, Andrew Law lived in Savannah the rest of his life, working as a wood seller and raising his children with his wife Ann. He died, probably of complications of heart failure, in 1890.
Andrew Law and his surviving siblings appear to have still be in touch after Emancipation, because Sandy Maybank and Andrew Law both named their siblings with current surnames in their Freedman’s Bank registers.
Why did Andrew use the surname Law? Based on analysis of the Freedman’s Bank registers, I believe it was probably because his father, Shadrach, was owned by Nathaniel Law.
For all the details about Andrew Law’s life, see https://theyhadnames.net/2024/05/07/research-andrew-law-sibbys-son/.
For more about Sibby and her family, see https://theyhadnames.net/research-sibbys-family/.