William Henry and Nancy Jane Knight Davis

"Aunt Marthie" - Martha Jane Davis
(1918-2003)

My 2nd great-aunt (through my maternal line), Martha Jane Davis, was a high school English teacher at Wren High School in Anderson, South Carolina for many years, as well as a family historian.  "Aunt Marthie," as she was called, was the sister of my great-grandmother, Ruth Beatrice Davis Garrett.  Aunt Marthie's research, along with the research of my maternal grandfather's sister, Margaret Foster Limbaugh, has provided the basis for much of what I know about my mother's side of my family tree.

I have a collection of stories that Aunt Marthie wrote about her parents and grandparents.  I would like to share here one of her stories about her maternal grandparents, William Henry Davis and Nancy Jane Knight Davis, with my notes interjected throughout in italics.  Unless in italics or otherwise notated, the following words are exclusively those of Martha Jane Davis.

Nancy Jane Knight was born on May 7, 1843, the first child of Sophia Burns and Matthew [Mathew] D. Knight of Laurens County, South Carolina.  She had three sisters:  Mary, Mattie, and Susan.

Nancy Jane's father died when she was young [Mathew Knight died in 1856 at age 41, when Nancy was just 13 years old.] and she and her sister had to leave school and help on the farm.  Nancy Jane told of learning to blow into a bottle to call the field hand home.

She loved to read and throughout her long life, she read everything she could.

Nancy Jane married William Henry Davis in the early Eighteen Sixtys.  He volunteered into the Confederate Army and she got a job in the mill at Conestee until he returned home.  After the war was over, he returned home and they raised a family of two sons and five daughters:  Louis Pinckney, [George] Washington [George Washington Davis is my second great-grandfather], Mary Ellen, Malinda Emma, Corrie Lee, Annie Louida, and Minnie Leida.

1900 Census, Austin Township, Greenville County, South Carolina

Nancy Jane lived with her children after the death of William in 1907.  She lived to be ninety-five years old and died of blood poisoning from a wound on her foot where a brick had fallen on it.  She died on June 6, 1937.  She is buried beside William Henry at the cemetery at Conestee, S.C. [Nancy Jane Knight Davis is buried at Conestee Community Cemetery in Greenville, South Carolina.]

Obituary of Nancy J. Knight Davis, The Greenville News, June 8, 1937

 *****

Memories of Grandmother Davis . . . . . . . . Martha Davis
From memories of the many conversations at the feet of this writer's Grandmother, facts about the life of William Henry and Nancy Jane Davis stand out.

At the age of seventeen Nancy Jane Knight, who was born May 7, 1843, in Laurens County, South Carolina, became the bride of William Henry Davis.  Nancy Jane was one of the four daughters of Matthew and Sophia Burns Knight.

Already war was imminent and soon the young groom had to leave his bride and go fight for the Confederacy.  [If Nancy was seventeen when she and Bill married, then they were married in 1860 or early 1861.  The Civil War began in April 1861.]  Both he and his brother, Louis Pinckney Davis, were in the [cavalry].  A love for their country and fighting blood surged through their veins.  Like the Nixons, the Rileys, and the Davises who fought in the Revolutionary War winning land grant after land grant, these two were volunteers.  And like the fun loving Bucky Nixon who cared less for the land grants than he did dancing the "flamingo," these two young gallants felt the war could be won in a few months.  [I have not yet been able to locate the families referenced here.]

"When the initial volley of shots was fired at the First Battle of Manasses, my hair literally stood on end," wrote Bill or Mr. Davis as his wife so fondly called him. [The First Battle of Manasses, or the Battle of Bull Run, was fought on July 21, 1861.]  A few months into the Forty-fifth South Carolina [cavalry] was enough.  [I have thus far been unable to find any evidence to support that a forty-fifth SC Cavalry existed.]  Bill and Pink gave two Virginia soldiers ten dollars and their horses to get out of the [cavalry] and become foot soldiers.  They neither liked the idea of listening to hungry horses chomp their bits all night or to eat horse hair in their food.  For the rest of the war, they fought with Jackson and Lee.  [This means that Bill and Pinckney, upon trading their horses, became members of the Army of Northern Virginia, even though they were both from South Carolina.  This is consistent with the battles in which they fought, as described in Aunt Martha's stories.]  Bill wept the day Stonewall Jackson was killed and to his dying day, he maintained that the south would have won the war had that brave general not been killed.  [General Stonewall Jackson was mistakenly shot by his own men in the left arm on May 2, 1863.  After an unsuccessful arm amputation, Gen. Jackson died of pneumonia on May 10, 1863.]

It was always Pink who found food for the hungry soldiers.  Many were the times he raided farm smoke houses and bee hives to give a much [needed] meal to the hungry soldiers.  Even after taking hives filled with manure, he didn't stop until he found the ones with honey.  Somehow Pink always found a way to appease the officers, especially when he had a slice of golden Virginia ham.

The war dragged on.  Letters were fewer and far apart:  Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and Antietam, which Bill mentioned were like places out of Nancy Jane's old geography book.  [The Battle of Antietam was fought on September 22, 1862; the Battle of Chancellorsville was fought on April 30, 1863; the Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1-3, 1863.]  She read the letters wondering if the war would ever end.  For her times were not easy.  Her clothes were wearing thin.  Shoes were a prized possession to be wrapped carefully and brought out only on Sunday.  She would walk barefoot until she came in sight of the church, then wipe her feet and put on her shoes.  Even though she lived on a farm, food was not abundant.  Seeds were scarce and there was not a horse to be found in any stable.  The white powdery growth on the fodder was used for soda; sweet potatoes were dried and boiled for coffee; and soil from the smoke house was boiled to get salt for food.

Nancy Jane found work in the cotton mill at Reedy River.  [I have had some difficulty verifying this fact, as the cotton mills at Reedy River in Greenville County, SC were founded after the Civil War was over.]  Work had always been a part of her life and this was nothing new.  Many were the times she walked from Reedy River to Laurens, a feat unheard of today.  However, this did not [seem] difficult for a woman who had been the boy of the family after the death of her father when she was only ten years old.  [As noted above, my research indicates that Nancy's father died when she was thirteen.]  Her mother, Sophia, had been given only two acres of land at Little Knob when she married Matthew Knight against the wishes of her parents.  [Little Knob is a small peak located in Laurens County, South Carolina.]  Life for the Knight family was not an easy one and freedom of the slaves meant little to them.  Although Grandmother recalled that all the slaves on the Burns Plantation remained loyal even after the war.

In the early summer of 1865, a tiny bit of a girl was working in the dirty oil lit mill at Reedy River.  As she placed a heavy bobbin on the frame, she could hear voices above the clatter of the spinning.  Something unusual was happening.  "They are coming, Nance.  There's a whole band of Lee's men coming around the bend."  Nancy couldn't see immediately; people were milling around and the sun was glinting off the bright rail along the steps.  Anyway, why had she bothered to go outside, her Bill would not be returning.  He had given his life for a lost cause, she thought bitterly as she recalled the notice of Bill's death after the blowup of Petersburg.  His whole regiment had been wiped out.

She was lost in her thoughts.  Life for her would not be easy.  A glint of stubbornness always came into Grandmother's dark eyes as she recalled a moment that lived forever in her memory.  "I just stood there looking at that ragged band -- barefooted and half starved -- without really seeing.  The voices stopped momentarily, and I looked up to see a tall boy with a man's face staring.  No, it couldn't be, but it was Bill.  He was smiling as those astonishingly grey eyes searched my face.  How? I asked, disbelieving.  They said you'd been killed."  He brushed back his long, uneven hair and lifted [her] high in his arms.

"It's over, Nance.  It could have been the Davis luck when my entire regiment except six were killed in that blowup.  Grant's men had all the land mined.  We had gone for water when it happened.  Blood ran out of my ears and eyes, the shock was so great.  What a day -- dry -- dry -- dry.  The dust was intolerable.  The roar was equal to that of Gettysburg.  A cloud of white smoke, rising hundreds of feet into the air covered the entire line.  Guns and men were carried up.  Burnside and his men crowded into the crater surrounding us. 'What are we going to do?' the men asked.  'Do?  Hell, we're going to fight,' I told them and fight we did.  Bayonets clashed, for there was no time to reload rifles.  Luckily for us most of the Northern forces were freed slaves who knew little about fighting.  They kept shouting, 'Remember Fort Pillars and no headquarters.'  [This is likely a reference to the Battle of Fort Pillow/Fort Pillow massacre, which took place on April 12, 1864. The phrase "no quarter" is essentially the equivalent to "take no prisoners."  The Fort Pillow massacre was a slaughter of surrendering African-American Union troops by Confederate Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men.]  We would fight and then retreat with the enemy in hot pursuit."  Grandmother recalled Bill's exact words.  "We made a stand at every favorable point until we were no longer pursued.  Tired and hungry, we lay on wet leaves near a little stream awaiting help to arrive.  Burnside's Negroes might have captured a few guns and many of our already wounded men, but they lost three to four times as many as we did in the battle that followed.  Fighting never stopped.  Grant hung around Richmond literally starving us out.  Even salt pork and hard tack were scarce.  Last winter, we just huddled in our dugout for warmth."  [The preceding paragraph is a very accurate and vivid description of what was known as the Battle of the Crater, which took place on July 30, 1864.]

One of Bill's narrowest escapes came while he and five other water carriers fought for their lives.  While he was stabbing one man, he looked up to see another negro ready to lower the butt of his gun.  A gold watch hung from a chain around the negro's neck.  Bill grabbed the watch, severing the man's neck.  That day, June 15, 1864, was a day Bill never forgot.

Neither did he forget his feeling of pride at being one of the best sharpshooters of the war.  Three battalions of those southern men were reduced to forty by the end of the war. 

Grandfather always recalled that final march to Appomattox on April 12, 1865.  They sang as they marched along but when the order came to stack their arms, tears flowed freely.  Many of the men buried their riles in the mud rather than surrender them to those Yankees.

Perhaps one of the most vivid descriptions of the final march of the Army of Northern Virginia was given by General Joshua Chamberlain, who received the formal surrender on behalf of General Grant.

Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood:  men whom neither toils and sufferings nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond . . . .

Instructions had been given; and when the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugles sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier's salutation, from the "order arms" to the old "carry" -- the marching salute.  General John B. Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual, -- honor answering honor.  On our part not a sound of trumpet, nor roll of drum; not a cheer nor word, nor whisper of vainglorying, nor motion or man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, a breath-holding, as if it were passing of the dead.

Life in the postwar South was difficult.  Grandfather and Grandmother farmed until he became a wagon master making the trip from Fork Shoals to Greenville twice a week.  Old settlers watched for this tall slender wagon master as he urged his horses to their destination.  It was he who invented the two lines for horses.  The trip required two days and in bad weather, they spent the night at Antioch Christian Church.

Bill always said no Confederate Soldier could go to Heaven, but the most wonderful thing Grandmother remembered was that he was saved a short time before his death.  Her prayers as she taught her Sunday School Class for twenty-five years were answered when her husband surrendered his life to Christ.  She loved her [B]ible, and God blessed her with good eyesight and the ability to read it and the Greenville News every day.

Written by Martha Jane Davis, daughter of George Washington Davis and Lucy Belle Friddle Davis.