A Different Civil War Story
James and John Somersall were white brothers who lived in rice-growing, slave-owning Liberty County, Georgia. They were poor. They owned a few acres of land, grew their own food, milked their own cows, and didn’t own people.John was in his late 30’s when the clouds of the Civil War appeared on the horizon, and his view of the matter was that he had nothing to fight for. His mother, Elizabeth, a widow, tried telling her neighbors that they shouldn’t fight to keep their slaves.
She told them that if she did own slaves, even a lot of them, she would gladly give them up to keep the war away. John had to tell her to stop, that they were going to come for her and kill him for defending her. She stopped.
