16. The Yankees are Coming! Hide the Silver!

Although The Pile offers no documentation of abducted families sold into slavery, there is abundant evidence of plantation-derived wealth.  Stories about dwellings:  Greek Revival plantation great houses, antebellum colonial mansions in town, a wood frame Revolutionary era house pocked with centuries-old bullet holes. The Pickett residential arrangements alone are described in no fewer than five accounts I found in The Pile.     

For a man who died in his 40s, A.J. Pickett managed to accumulate an impressive number of houses.  The most astonishing detail comes from one of the newspaper stories: “It does not fall to the lot of many men of family to be so favored by fortune that they may change their place of abode every quarter of the year at the approach of each season as was the case with Colonel Pickett.” 

The description of the family’s peripatetic lifestyle is in a reprint of the first issue of the Alabama Quarterly, published in 1930:   

“Although he owned a plantation home in Autauga County, Forest Farm in Montgomery County, and a town house on Commerce Street, Col. Pickett added a fourth estate to his holdings by purchasing a tract of land in the present Elmore County, at Robinson Springs, which at the time comprised a fashionable colony of summer homes of rich planters.  With a family of nine children it was no small undertaking to change one’s place of residence each season of the year but this was the practice of Col. and Mrs. Pickett.”

His poor wife, I think when I read this.  So much work.  Then I remember that the work would have fallen not to her, but to those enslaved in the household.  

Toward the end of his life, The Alabama Quarterly reports, A.J. decided to sell his house on Commerce Street in Montgomery because the area was beginning “to develop as a business section.”   Glancing at a map of Montgomery, it’s not hard to deduce what the business was.  Pickett lived on the primary thoroughfare leading away from the Alabama River docks; every day, the hundreds of enslaved people “were taken off boats, chained together and paraded up Commerce Street” to pens where they were held until they could be sold.  (The house on Commerce Street has been replaced by a parking garage, but its location was across the street from the former slave warehouse that is now the office of the Equal Justice Initiative.)

After leaving Commerce Street, A.J. bought a 20-room mansion in town for his family in another location, away from the slave trading business.  This was the residence that became knows as “Pickett House.”  He didn’t live long enough to move in.   

For a member of the Southern planter aristocracy, that is to say a slave-holder, 1858 was not the worst year to die.  My great great grandfather was still a very rich man.  According to the website Alabama Pioneers, he left an estate of a million dollars, though this is possibly an inflated estimate.

The opulence of “Pickett House” reflected these riches.   According to the Alabama Quarterly account, “the house was built by slave labor and made of brick of unusual durability.” The story describes family oil portraits under the skylight, and a dining room “containing one extremely large mahogany banquet table” as well as “old silver, and one very large sideboard.”   In the garden were “flowers of every kind known and loved by people of the South, magnolias, honeysuckle, jasmine and roses and flowering fruit trees.”  

No vegetable plantings were necessary, as “supplies for the kitchen were brought from the Pickett plantations in Autauga and Montgomery counties.”  Presiding over the Pickett stables was Jerre, the coachman:  “big, tall and powerful, a lover of horses and children.  He kept the horses beautifully groomed and the harness shining.”

I find in The Pile copies of full-page stories about the Pickett house from local newspapers.  They all retail the Pickett version of that staple of Southern Civil War narratives:  The Day the Yankees Came.  Toward the end of the War, Union cavalry swept through Alabama, plundering the plantations, including Pickett’s, “of products, slaves and stock.”   

Sarah Pickett, however, succeeded in saving the family silver by trickery.  Aided by a son-in-law, she first packed a trunk with bricks and sent it to her plantation by slaves, to fuel rumors that the silver was hidden there.  By one account (in The Montgomery Journal in 1908), this stratagem was meant not only to fool the Yankees but  also “to deceive the slaves, lest some turn traitor.”  Meanwhile, the treasured silver was hidden in the cupola of Pickett House. The ruse succeeded and, according to one story, “the Pickett silver is today being handed down from generation to generation.” *

It seems likely that the stash in the Pickett House skylight probably included my serving spoons – which seem to grow heavier and heavier, with each revelation about their provenance.

 My great-great-grandmother lived in the house for 36 more years.  After the Civil War, she turned the property into a boarding house, “with the aid of a few faithful former family slaves,” according to a report in Alabama Pioneers.  Following Mrs. Pickett’s death, the building was used as a school for boys, and a paint store, before becoming home to the Montgomery County Historical Society. 

* An expanded version of this story, one in which the silver was eventually stolen by gypsies, comes from an essay by James Fuller on the Society website:

“In 1865, when word came to Montgomery that Yankee Gen. James Wilson was headed toward Montgomery from Selma, where he had done severe damage, Sarah Harris Pickett filled a trunk with books or bricks, something to give weight, and gave it to one of the slaves to take in the wagon out to the plantation. When Wilson’s Raiders, as they were called, arrived at the Pickett door, they searched the house for silver and other valuables. Not finding any silver, the slaves were questioned as to the whereabouts of the silver. Thinking that what they had taken away in the trunk was the silver, the slaves replied, “They done gone to the plantation.” Actually, it was not in the trunk, but the silver was hidden in the cupola of the house above the attic. So it was saved and used by family descendants until the 1950s, when it was stolen by gypsies in New Jersey, where some descendants were living. Only a nice sized plated tray, engraved with the name PICKETT, was left, and it is now in the possession of the Society.”

See

Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade, issued by the Equal Justice Initiative.