The witness who wasn’t

Why the witness wasn’t Charlsie

There was that one nagging issue in The Legal Genealogist‘s thinking.

The thinking that led to last Saturday’s family blog suggesting that the second youngest daughter of William and Ann (Jacobs) Battles posed as her sister Charlsie, the youngest daughter, to support her then-widowed mother’s claim for reimbursement before a special examiner of the Southern Claims Commission on 1 June 1874.

In that blog, you may recall, I came up with the theory that Julia (Battles) Hale pretended to be her younger sister Charlsie when she testified that General Sherman’s Army had taken animals, fodder and other items from the Battles farm in northeastern Alabama in the fall of 1864. Union loyalists were entitled to reimbursement of their losses from such takings from the Southern Claims Commission after the war.¹

Only one problem.

This family was going to have more than a little trouble proving they’d been Union loyalists.

William and Ann, after all, had sent six sons into the Confederate Army: George, Guilford, Azariah, William, James Franklin, and Lewis (also called Richard).² Two of those sons never came home. Azariah died in Confederate Service in November 1862.³ Guilford was reported as having deserted in 1864;⁴ more likely, he was killed — he certainly never made it home.⁵

Julia herself would have had credibility issues on that loyalty score: she was the widow of Elias L. Hale — who died while on active duty in the 19th Alabama Infantry, in the service of the Confederacy.⁶ Which may explain why all the characteristics of the witness “Charlsie Battles” actually fit Julia, and not Charlsie at all.

But that leaves an open issue, doesn’t it?

Why wouldn’t Charlsie herself have testified?

The most likely explanation, it turns out, is that Charlsie wouldn’t have been any more credible a witness than her sister.

Because Charlsie wasn’t Charlsie Battles on the first of June 1874. She was Mrs. F.M. Davis.

The initials translate on various records as Franklin M. or Francis M. — he’s Franklin on the 1880 census⁷ and Francis in 1900.⁸ He and Charlsie married around 1866-1867.⁹

And he’s clearly Francis M. Davis in the records of the Civil War — a private in Company G, 29th Tennessee Infantry, captured by the Union forces near Marietta, Georgia, on 27 June 1864, held first at the Military Prison in Louisville, then sent to Camp Morton, Indiana, in July 1864, and ultimately discharged on taking the oath of allegiance on 20 May 1865, after the surrender.¹⁰

That it’s the same guy is shown by the statement he submitted in Alabama in 1921 as part of a statewide enumeration of Confederate soldiers.¹¹ He reported that he was a widower living with a grandson in Collinsville, on the Cherokee-Dekalb County border. He named his four living children: Julia, Francis, Maud and Mittie — and each can be found with their parents, including Charlsie, on at least one census record.¹²

In other words, Charlsie’s husband was another Confederate — and a living breathing Confederate whose records could well have been readily accessible to the federal government folks who’d be checking on the issue of loyalty. And a Confederate who’d surely had just about as much to do with the Yankees as anyone would want in one lifetime.

So — why not Charlsie? Because Frank Davis had every reason not to have his wife testify. And the wife of a Confederate veteran who’d been held in a Union prison camp wouldn’t have been a credible witness anyway. No more than her sister, the widow of a Confederate.

The only possible witness whose testimony might have helped, then, was the unmarried “Charlsie Battles.”

The non-existent unmarried “Charlsie Battles.”

The witness who wasn’t.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “The witness who wasn’t,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 3 Apr 2021).

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