Mary Williams Pugh

Mary Louise Williams (daughter of Mississippi cotton planter and then Louisiana sugar planter John Williams) married Richard Pugh, son of Thomas Pugh, in 1861. During the war she exchanged letters with her husband, who was in the army, that are microfilmed as part of the Pugh-Williams-Mayes Family Papers at LSU.

Mary apparently moved in 1862 to Rusk County or Rusk, Cherokee County, in Texas, writing a letter from “Rusk” on December 15, 1862, explaining that she would be staying there to watch over “your negroes” while Mr. Williams and “Pa” went back to Louisiana to tend to some business. She reports that one of the slaves, Frederick, was to be left in charge after the men in the family were unable to find a suitable white man in Texas to keep on the place.¹ In a letter three days later, Pugh notes:

Frederick keeps everything very straight & is inclined to be very strict with the negroes. They are now finishing their log cabins & making a shed for the mules. By the time they are finished we will have some ploughs when twill be time to break up the land. The women are having a fine time, as there is nothing for them to do. I gave Mr. Williams some [illegible] money to buy me some cotton cards & Pa too promised to get some, so s soon as these come I shall put the women all at making cloth, as there is not more land than the men can cultivate.²

In the same letter, Pugh muses that her husband would not recognize her, “particularly as I sit down to dinner with Phillis as cook & Maria as waiting maid. … They still cling to the idea of being home by Christmas, & I catch myself every day joining in the hope.” She complains about the character of women in the neighborhood, all of whom either smoke or dip and invite her to do the same, “much to the amusement of Phillips & Maria. I wish you could have seen their faces when the old lady said, ‘You don’t dip nor chew nor nothing?!’”³

Pugh’s experience has been used by other historians as evidence of how difficult it was to remove slaves from Louisiana without their running away first. One of her letters from November 1862 is reprinted by litwack1979, p. 34, from another secondary source and reports on the loss of slaves by her father John Williams:

The first night we camped Sylvester left—the next night at Bayou B. about 25 of Pa’s best hands left & the next day at Berwick Bay nearly all of the women & children started—but this Pa found out in time to catch them all except one man & one woman. Altogether he lost about sixty of his best men.