Sanker

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Sanker was the enslaved manservant of Samuel R. Watkins, who fought in the American Civil War with the 1st Tennessee Infantry Regiment.

Life[edit]

Sanker was one of some fifty slaves to accompany their masters as body servants while the latter fought with the “First Tennessee; only nine are known by name.<ref>See Body Servants of the 1st Tennessee.Watkins, who survived the war and would later write about his experiences as a Confederate foot soldier, mentioned Sanker in a brief narrative entitled “Snowball battle in Dalton – Little Jimmie White,” which was published in the first volume of the Confederate Veteran Magazine in 1893. Here is the passage in question:

This snow ball battle lasted all day. A good many of the boys were quite badly hurt. My little bedfellow, Jimmie White, a mere boy of fourteen years, was run over by a caison [sic] and both his legs broken, and he was otherwise injured. Poor boy, tears rush to my eyes when I go back in memory to the death of the clever lad. I cry now when I think of him. Poor little fellow, how he suffered, and how he hated to die! Sanker, my negro servant, brought him and laid him on our bunk. (261–262)

This is Sanker’s only appearance in the piece; indeed, it may well be the sole record of his existence as he is entirely absent from Watkins’ popular and oft reprinted postwar memoir Co. Aytch.<ref>Watkins does mention in passing “the negro boys, who were with their young masters as servants” (p. 34), “the negros who were with us as servants” (p 39) and “the negros who were acting as servants” (p 108), and he twice referred (on pp. 119 and 183), to “the negro boy” of two different officers. Nothing more is said of them and none are named. As Edward John Harcourt noted, “None of the previous editors of Co. Aytch [first serialized in 1881–82, again in 1901–02, and published in seven editions since] has acknowledged ‘Sanker’ or the Watkins family’s slaveholding interests, though the 1893 piece and the 1860s federal census and county tax records are clear on this point.”<ref>From footnote 17 of “‘Would to God I could tear the page from these memoirs and from my own memory’: Co. Aytch and the Confederate Sensibility of Loss.”

On the Watkins family’s slaveholding interests, the National Park Service notes the following: “Census and tax records of antebellum Maury County show that Sam's father, Frederick, owned more than 100 enslaved African Americans on two plantations in the county. The Watkins family was the third wealthiest in one of the most prosperous counties in the state. Incredibly, Watkins was not an outlier in his company. Nearly half of the company with which he left Maury County in 1861 came from slave-owning households.” Even Ken Burns, who quotes extensively from Co. Aytch in his The Civil War (miniseries), states that Watkins “owned no slaves.”<ref>Perhaps Burns inferred this from the following passage, in which Watkins implies he was poor: A law was made by the Confederate States Congress about this time allowing every person who owned twenty negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of "rich man's war, poor man's fight." The glory of the war, the glory of the South, the glory and the pride of our volunteers had no charms for the conscript. (p. 37)

Death[edit]

While the post-war lives of some body servants have been documented,<ref>See for example “Osborne Cunningham, Body Servant to William Cunningham, 1st Tenn. Infantry Co. D. Williamson Grays, CSA” on the blog From Slaves to Soldiers and Beyond - Williamson County, Tennessee's African American History it is unknown whether Sanker survived the war and, if so, where he might have gone and what he might have done afterwards; the time, place and cause of his death are likewise unknown. His fleeting presence in Sam Watkins’ writings bears testimony to the many body servants, and enslaved African Americans more generally, whose identities and stories have been lost to history.

References[edit]

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