Mixed Race Studies

Oysters made Hampton man wealthy

Daily Press
Newport News, Virginia
2013-02-17

Mark St. John Erickson, Columnist

Even before the Civil War, Hampton’s busy waterfront boasted many free blacks who made their living as pilots, fishermen and boatmen.

Living side by side with whites who worked in the same maritime trades, they included such figures as Revolutionary War hero Cesar Tarrant, whose stand-out navigational skills and coolness under fire led the General Assembly to buy his freedom as a reward for “meritorious service.”

Tarrant was long dead when a light-skinned African-American boy named John Mallory Phillips came to Hampton in the 1860s. But the enterprise and independence he represented lived on in the tide of free blacks and ex-slaves who saw the opportunity to determine their own fates by taking to the water…

…Uncommon roots

Little was known about Phillips’ origins until his great-granddaughter Josephine C. Williams, a retired educator, began looking into her family’s past more than 15 years ago.

Scouring federal Census records, she found him listed first in 1860 as a 4-year-old child living in the York County household of a free black woman named Rachel Banks.

A decade later, Phillips shows up in the Hampton household of his uncle — a black oysterman named Cary Hopson — who owned his own home and reported several other oystermen from the Banks family living in his dwelling.

With his light skin and straight hair, Phillip’s appearance reflected the heritage of his father, a white York County farmer named John Phillips, and his light-skinned mother, whose mixed-race family reached far back into the colonial period, Williams says.

Whether Phillips was also related to white Hampton attorney, planter and Confederate officer Charles King Mallory — whose runaway slaves prompted Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler to give blacks refuge as “contraband of war” at nearby Fort Monroe — is debatable, she adds.

She also disputes the rumored link between the young freeman and Elizabeth City County planter Jefferson Curle Phillips, who commanded the local militiamen who burned Hampton in August 1861 to keep its buildings from being used by Union troops and the fast-growing population of fugitive slaves.

“I think it’s a coincidence,” Williams says, citing her Census documents as well as family lore.

“I don’t think there’s any relationship at all.”…

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