Inspired by Sarah Zureick-Brown's substack article "A Juneteenth reflection on surnames," I took a look into the surnames of formerly enslaved people in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. A valuable source of information is the 1869 militia enrollment lists.
After Civil War, South Carolina was placed under military rule for several years. Civil government was restored in 1868, and one of the first actions of the new state government was to re-establish the state militia. As part of this effort, the governor had state census takers create a list of all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. In the present content, enrollment records are really valuable as they are one of the first records of the names of formerly enslaved people. (Enslaved people had been recorded in the federal census, but only by age and gender.)
As data, the enrollment records have their flaws. The census takers efforts were patchy, so and they missed a number of people. There also are a few clerical efforts. Several lists have two people with the except same age and name, so it looks like a careless clerk copied the same name twice. Errors of this nature really skew the data because a given surname is fairly uncommon. Most surnames only occur once or twice, so accidentally repeating an entry makes the surname appear much more likely than it actually was. Another issue is spellings. Some surnames appear with different spellings, like "Bollinger" versus "Ballinger." Most people in Spartanburg were illiterate and unable to spell their own name, and some surnames might not even have had a standardized spelling. Despite this, we'll see some interesting patterns.
Slavery in Spartanburg County
To orient things, let's recall some demographic features of Spartanburg. The Spartanburg County of 1869 was actually larger than modern Spartanburg County. It comprised both that county and the modern county of Cherokee. This region is part of the "Upstate." The area had been populated since before the Revolutionary Way, but it had long been a primitive and isolated region, populated by poor white farmers. The county center was the town of Spartanburg, then a simple courthouse village.
Like much of the Upstate, the development of the cotton industry both drove an economic boom and promoted an increase in the use of enslaved labor. Economically, the county was largely split between the northern half and the southern half, with Spartanburg village in the center. The southern half supported a larger cotton industry and was wealthier. Even after the cotton-boom, Spartanburg County remained one of the poorer parts of the state, but the southern part of the county included men who had established themselves as wealthier planters. John C. Zimmerman and John Winsmith each enslaved approximately one-hundred people, placing them among the wealthiest people in the United States.
The northern half of the county was poorer with many residents running small farms, struggling to grow enough food to freed themselves. The region also had somewhat of a reputation for lawlessness, home to illegal alcohol distilleries and bandits.
In a development that was unusual for the south, the regional economy began to diversity in the antebellum. Businessmen established several iron foundries and cotton mills, all of which were largely run with enslaved labor.
What does this mean in terms of freed people in 1869? Approximately nine-thousand people or one-third of the twenty-six thousand of the county population had been enslaved before the war. A typical person lived on a family farm consisting of, perhaps, their enslaver's family and one or two enslaved families. Everyone on the farm lived and worked closely together, and largely performed the same work. In particular, enslaved people regularly interacted with white people and had a personal relationship with their enslavers. After Emancipation, many of the newly freed people living family farms had considerable freedom. If they found themselves in conflict with a former enslaver or a new employer or if they simply wanted to seek new opportunities, they could simply leave and seeking farm work elsewhere.
A small but significant minority, close to one-thousand or one-eighth of the Black population, had lived on large cotton plantations. They lives were similar to people enslaved on family farms, but their labor tended to be regimented and specialized, and they had less interaction with their enslavers, and with white people in general.
Another group of formerly enslaved people were people who labored in industry, in the cotton mills or iron foundries. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any information about them, although their experience freedom likely had been quite different from people enslaved on farm.
A final important group was enslaved people living in towns or villages. This was a small group of people. In 1860, only twenty-nine Black people were recorded as living in Spartanburg village, the region's largest population center. However, these people played a large role during the years after the war. Most had worked as skilled laborers or domestic servants. They also had considerable experience interacting with the white residents of Spartanburg village The personal relationships they developed were valuable as the white residents of Spartanburg village included region's economic and political leaders.
The names
So what do we see from statistical data? Freedpeople do not appear to have chosen surnames to signal their new status or their African-descended identity. Although the surname "Freeman" certainly would be an appropriate surname for someone recently freed from bondage, the only people with this surname were white.
This appears to contradict claims made by an NBC news article I found, "Many African American last names hold weight of Black history." That article reports that common surnames were Freeman or Freedman as well as Washington, Williams, Brown or Johnson. This was not the case for Spartanburg. The surnames "Freedman" and "Washington" do not appear. The other surnames do appear, and both "Brown" and "Williams" were common, but these were also common surnames for white people.
There are surnames associated with Black identity. The most common surname was "Anderson." This was the surname of twenty-one Black men (approximately 2.8% of the population) but only six white people. Most of these people were living in Reidville township. My guess is that these people are members of a prominent white family and people who had been enslaved by them. A likely candidate is the family of David Anderson, a Reidville planter who had enslaved almost forty people in the antebellum.
Another common surname was "Shippy." This surname was only recorded for Black men. A close look shows a pattern to that with "Anderson." Everyone with the "Shippy" surname was living in the township of White Plains. Although they were not recorded on the militia rolls, White Plains was home to several white families who had enslaved people in the antebellum. For example, the woman Jeanetta Shippy had enslaved sixteen people on her farm. As a woman, she would not have been recorded on the rolls.
I found a similar pattern with all the "Black" surnames I found: most of the people with the surname were living in the same township, and the surname was shared with someone who enslaved a large workforce in the antebellum. No such pattern is seen with surnames that are just generically popular. The most common surnames were "Smith" and "Foster," and these surnames are found throughout the county.
Some surnames are notable absent. The largest enslaved workforce, over one-hundred people, was on the plantation of John C. Zimmerman. Nobody with the "Zimmerman" surname appears on the rolls. (John C. was too old to have been registered.) Also absent are anyone with the surname "Winsmith" even though John Winsmith enslaved approximately one-hundred people.
Other missing surnames of interest are names that were common among white men. Examples are "Lanford" (held by fifteen people), "Cash" (thirteen people), and "Bishop" (twelve people). None of these names are found among Black men. These surnames appear to be the names of people in one or more families (all the Landfords were living in Woodruff township). Looking at census records, people in these families appear to have enslaved few people. In some cases, the families were too poor, but in other cases, the families were involved in other professions. For example, Fieldon Hayden Cash was quite prominent: he served as a postmaster and founded a cotton mill.
Any occupation other than farming was very unusual. Farmers made up over 90% of the men listed on the militia rolls. Only forty-three people had a different occupation, with milling, shoemaking and blacksmithing being especially common. There does not seem to be any special feature with the surnames of people in these professions.
Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to use the militia rolls to take a closer look at the villages and towns. The clerks recorded the township but more precise location information. I took a quick look at Spartanburg township and was unable to identify more than one or two people living in Spartanburg village.
Some statistical information is displayed below. The "Black Name Index" of surname is the percentage of Black people with the name divided by the percentage of people with that name. The index will be 100 if the surname is only found among Black people, 0 if it is only found among white people. The vertical axis is the percentage of people with a surname with an index in the corresponding x-axis. For example, approximately one-quarter of all Black people had a surname with index 90 or greater. I dropped all names that only appeared once or twice.
What do we see from this? Approximately one-third of the white population had a distinctively white surname, i.e. a surname with an index of at most 10. The remaining two-thirds appear to be normally distributed around 50. The
The chart for Black surnames is similar. Approximately one-quarter of the Black population had a distinctively Black surname. The remaining three-quarters is normally distributed around 60. The standard deviation is smaller. No Black person had a surname with index below 20.
I speculate that these statistical features we are seeing reflects class differences among white people. The surnames of poor whites are distinctively white; the surnames or wealthy planters are distinctively Black; the surnames for mid-range slave-owning farmers are in between.
Summary
What are we to make of this analysis of surnames? At least in Spartanburg County, nobody who had been enslaved took a surname like "Freeman" to assert their new free status. At the same time, nobody took surnames to mark a connection to the region's wealthiest planters. Instead, the surnames chosen are those of enslavers who ran smaller farms. The militia rolls don't speak to why people made these choices, but we can speculate and look at what other sources say.
In her substack essay, Sarah Zureick-Brown quoted a white woman in Georgia who observed that many formerly enslaved people abandoned their enslaver's surname as a way of casting off a "badge of servitude." Instead, they tended to select the surname of the first person to have enslaved them. This was a way to assert their free status without losing too much of their identify or wholly inventing a new tradition.
I only found one personal account where a freedmen in Spartanburg explained his surname. The freedman Daniel Lipscomb was interviewed by a congressional subcommittee as part of Congress's investigation to Ku Klux Klan activities. In sharing his basic biography, he explained that he had gone by several different surnames: in addition to Lipscomb, he also went by "Linder" and "Bobo." "Linder" was the surname of his former enslaver, the planter Lee Linder, and "Lipscomb" was the maiden name of Lee Linder's wife, Mary. Daniel had original been enslaved by the Lipscomb family, but they "gave" him to Lee Linder as a wedding gift. These two choices of surnames are consistent with what the Georgia woman observed. However, the surname "Bobo" is different. This surnames was occasionally used because Daniel had worked as a foreman at an ironworks owned by a man named Simpson Bobo.
There's certainly more that one could do to look into this topic. The 1870 federal census includes the surnames of men and women of all ages as well as more personal information. This larger pool of names would be useful. I didn't use it because getting the data into a spreadsheet would be a very onerous task.
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