If ever a farm had secrets, Prospect Hill is the keeper of ghosts. The former Mississippi cotton plantation conceals one of the most astonishing, surreal and forgotten stories in American history.
Within an antebellum mansion flanked by 5,000 acres of white fiber, a patriarch risked prosperity and position by freeing his operation’s 150-plus slaves and sending the entire workforce to Africa.
The result? A Southern Gothic mix of family intrigue, murder, lynching and valor—all chased with a glass of tears.
And liberty? Escaping bondage, the group of Prospect Hill freedmen sailed 5,500 miles and promptly made slaves of Liberian natives. The wash, rinse and repeat of human nature.
Prospect Hill is an Old Testament tale of triumph and tragedy colored in white, black and seven shades of gray. Welcome to a graveyard of good intentions.
Captain Isaac
At 6 a.m., on a Saturday morning in London, Oct. 25, 1760, the sovereign of the British empire awoke at Kensington Palace and chugged his habitual daybreak cup of hot chocolate. Royal bowels rumbling, George ll, 77, the oldest ruler of the realm to that date, shuffled toward a privy, essentially a walk-in cabinet with a chamber pot, and sat down on a lesser throne.
Hearing a loud crash in the portable closet, a valet opened the privy door to find a crumpled George ll. The monarch was stone-dead from an aortic tear, possibly triggered by overexertion on the velvet-seated commode.
Long live the new king, grandson George lll, 22, who inherited a rabble of farmers across the Atlantic. (Despite his high-brow pedigree, George lll was consumed by an interest in agriculture, overseeing extensive crop trials at Windsor.)
Riding shotgun in time with George lll’s coronation in 1760, one of the most remarkable Americans of the colonial age was born 4,000 miles west in Charlotte, North Carolina. Enter Isaac Ross.
Twenty-one years later, in 1781, as George lll rolled snake-eyes in the Revolutionary War and failed to quell passions of liberty in the colonies, Isaac joined the Continental Army and repeatedly hoisted a 10-lb. Brown Bess musket with a .75 caliber smoothbore barrel. He tasted intense combat, including fighting at King’s Mountain and Cowpens—stellar action that cost him an eye and merited the rank of captain.
At war’s end, Isaac declined a pirate’s patch, popped a glass ball into his eye socket, and began building a farm life. Roughly 25 years onward, feeling the pull of cheap acres and fresh soil, Isaac and his wife, Jane, alongside five children, 60-plus slaves, and several freedmen (soldiers who fought with Isaac in the Revolutionary War), pulled stakes and moved 650 miles west into the wilds of Mississippi territory, a short hop from the big river.
It was 1808, the same year slave importation was officially banned in the U.S., half a century before the Civil War. However, the storm over human bondage was already raging in Isaac’s heart.
Rock the Bloodline
Tucked in the pocket of plantation country, 40 miles south of the Mississippi River’s bend at Vicksburg, and 40 miles northeast of Natchez’s abundant millionaires and notorious Forks of the Road Slave Market, Isaac built a home in the heart of a farmland empire.
Amid a haunting realm of dripping Spanish moss, towering bald cypress, dense cane brakes, yellow fever outbreaks, pistol duels, the creep of every insect denied residence in the Amazon, and humidity that clung to men like a second skin, Isaac acquired more land and slaves, turning his agriculture business into a 5,000-acre success: Prospect Hill Plantation.
The main residence was magnificent, according to descendant Thomas M. Wade Jr. (Journal of Mississippi History, 1947): This house was a commodious two story building, built entirely with lumber made on the plantation, sawed, as described, by the slaves. It was ceiled with poplar lumber, after being dressed by hand, and the hall, dining room and parlor were wainscoted in cherry. A book case reaching to the ceiling in the parlor was home made and built of choice cherry. The staircase ran up from the front of the hall and the hand rails were also made of cherry.
Annie Mims Wright, likewise a descendant of Isaac, provided additional detail: The view from the Prospect Hill house is one of grandeur. The house is built on a high hill surrounded by sloping meadows and hills of great size. It was over this expanse that Captain Ross could survey his abundant harvests, for as far as the eye could reach his possessions lay.
In the Prospect Hill house there now hang portraits of Captain Ross and his wife, Jane Allison Ross. The portrait of Captain Ross has suffered the loss of one eye; the expression of the face, however, is not much changed thereby, and shows a man of middle age, with blue eyes, dark hair and florid complexion, a man one would judge possessed a strong will and steadfastness of purpose. He was of a deeply religious nature. This and other causes led to the liberation of his slaves.
By 1820, Isaac owned 128 slaves. Considering the era, there were few wealthy planters of ideological compare: Breaking Mississippi law, he allowed many of his slaves to learn to read and write, never sold his slaves, and refused to break up families. Further, Isaac had ties to the American Colonization Society, an organization birthed in 1816 to repatriate slaves to Liberia, on the west coast of Africa. In 1831, Isaac helped create a state chapter, the Mississippi Colonization Society, which transported small groups of freedmen to Liberia and established a small, fledgling colony, Mississippi-In-Africa. (For more, see Alan Huffman’s masterful book, Mississippi In Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill and Their Legacy in Liberia Today)
Isaac’s wealth increased, as did family woe. From 1818 to 1834, death took Isaac’s daughter, Martha; wife, Jane; son, Arthur; and several sons-in-law. Time was short: The average lifespan for an American male born in 1760 was 38; Isaac was 74.
In 1834, he wrote a will—and the details rocked his kin to the core. Isaac Ross, almost 30 years prior to the first shots of the Civil War in 1861, could no longer fight the pangs of conscience.
Et Tu
Isaac’s instructions were astounding: “… it is my will and desire that all of those thus called together and all my other slaves … shall be sent to Africa, under the directions and superintend of the American Colonization Society.”
In a nutshell, the plantation was to be sold and proceeds used to transport Prospect Hill slaves as freedmen to Liberia, supplemented with funds to build a school, as well as buy essentials, seed, and farming tools. Anyone wishing to remain in America would be sold, with families kept intact. Ross’ grandson and namesake, Isaac Ross Wade, was named among the executors of the will.
There was a caveat: Triggering of the will would not occur at Ross’ death. Rather, the terms commenced at the death of his daughter, Margaret.
Two years later, in 1836, at 76, Ross died, with approximately 220 slaves under his control. In 1838, at 51, Margaret died.
The slaves knew. Everyone knew. Time to go. Liberia.
However, executor Ross Wade, a man raised under the wing of his grandfather since age 6, was unwilling to watch an inheritance and legacy disappear. Ross Wade pulled the legal handbrake. He thwarted Isaac’s intentions and sued in court, contesting the legitimacy of the will.
Et tu, Brute?
Murder Most Foul
Days became months became years. Cotton was planted; cotton was picked.
By 1845, almost a decade past Isaac’s death, an inner cadre of Prospect Hill slaves were restless as hellfire. Tension. Rage.
Solution? Murder most foul.
Roughly 15 slaves, rumored to be spurred by white members of the American Colonization Society, began plotting the death of Ross Wade. Poison the family; burn down the mansion; go to Liberia. A preposterous calculus, but in the eyes of the conspirators, the die was cast.
Factual confirmation is lacking, but family history paints a conflicting and approximate narrative. On the evening of April 14, 1845, as the Prospect Hill mansion was packed with family, including six young children, a post-supper serving of coffee was spiked. Into the witching hour, as the knockout drug took effect, the pitch-pine mansion was set afire.
Decades later, writing in the Port Gibson Reveille, Aug. 31, 1902, Thomas Magruder Wade Sr. (son of Ross Wade) described the scenario: My father, mother, and three small children, Isaac, Dunbar and Catherine, now Mrs. Newell, of this place, my mother’s niece, Miss Mary Girault, of Grenada, my father’s sister, Mrs. Adelaide Wade Richardson, and three small children, Martha, about 6 years old, Cabell and Addie, now of our town, his brother, Dr. Walter Wade , and his business partner, Mr. Bailey (his given name I do not remember) were asleep in the house at the time. The coffee for supper on the night of the fire had been drugged by the cook, and the older members of the family drank of it except Dr. Wade and Miss Girault. The house was a large, two-story house, and Dr. Wade, Mr. Bailey, Mrs. Richardson and children and Miss Girault occupied the rooms in the second story. Dr. Wade was the first occupant to discover the fire and immediately set to work to arouse the family. This he found a difficult task, and probably would not have succeeded, owing to the size of the house, had it not been for the assistance of one of my father’s own slaves and bodyservant Major, who was faithful, and rendered every assistance in his power.
In the inferno’s chaos, whether due to smoke and flames, or drug-induced disorientation, 6-year-old Martha Washington, great-granddaughter of Isaac, was forgotten during the mass exit.
Thomas Magruder Wade Sr. continues: Miss Girault, who occupied the room with Mrs. Richardson, did not drink the drugged coffee, so was active and alert, and discovered that Mrs. Richardson was dazed and stupefied. She took charge of the two youngest children, Cabell and Addie, and requested Mrs. Richardson to bring down Martha, the oldest. She did not discover that Mrs. Richardson, in her dazed condition, had left the child in bed until they all met in the yard. When this was discovered, Mrs. Richardson, terror stricken, frantically appealed for assistance and volunteers to go with her to the second floor to save her child. To this appeal a brave and faithful slave, Thomas, responded, and started with her up the steps to the second story, but before ascending very far the steps sank under them into the fire. They were both rescued from the flames, but badly burnt. Mrs. Richardson was pulled out by her hair. The next morning the child’s heart was found and buried in the family graveyard, only a few paces from the spot where she met her tragic death.
When the family were aroused, my father went to the outer doors to open them that all might escape. The front door was hard to open, but after some efforts he succeeded in throwing it open, but did not go out. Mrs. Ross immediately ran through the door, and to her horror there stood Esau, one of the estate’s slaves, with a drawn ax, evidently with the purpose of killing my father, whom he expected to pass out that door, as it was nearest his room. Miss Girault bounded out unexpectedly, and seeing Esau with a drawn ax, quickly remarked, “Uncle Esau, are you here to help us by cutting away the door?” He replied, “Yes sum, Mistus,” and walked off. My father afterwards learned that Esau had been standing at the front door some time, and did not make any effort to arouse them or knock the door in, and that he had gone there for the purpose of killing my father should he escape from the flames. Esau, with six or seven other leaders, were burnt or hung.
A posse was formed. With no apparent judicial process, 10 suspect slaves were rounded up and hanged on Prospect Hill’s white oaks, dangling bodies surreally flanked by the smoldering mansion—all within a stone’s throw of the entombed Isaac, the man who signed their ticket to freedom 11 years prior.
And Liberia? It remained 5,500 miles distant.
Under the Sun
In 1847, mere months after Martha Washington burned to death, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled against Ross Wade, in the name of property, rather than liberty. At its core, the decision was simple in the eyes of the court: Isaac’s slaves were his property and he could transport his possessions as he saw fit. Case closed.
After nearly a decade’s wait, Isaac’s slaves were allowed to depart. In 1849, approximately 120 Prospect Hill slaves boarded a boat (more would follow) in Natchez bound for New Orleans and steamed across the globe for the West Coast of Africa—specifically to a Mississippi-In-Africa, a colony birthed from land purchased in Liberia by the Mississippi Colonization Society, at the mouth of the Sinoe River.
Their incredible tale of survival and establishment, an epic by itself, is layered with heavy irony: Once in Africa, some of the ex-Prospect Hill freedmen built mansion-modeled homes, adopted formal wear, grew cotton, and acquired servants—slaves by any other name.
Nothing new under the sun.
Shades of Gray
As for Prospect Hill, Ross Wade reacquired the mansion site, cemetery, and a modicum of acreage. He rebuilt in 1854. The second home was in use for almost another century, reduced to a husk by the 1960s. (In 2011, the Archeological Conservancy purchased the house and immediate acreage.)
The time-shrouded Prospect Hill tale is bookended by a one-eyed maverick of the age and man of conscience, Isaac, and a group of slaves willing to risk all for a shot at new shores in the back of beyond, hardly a promised land. In between, the narrative is filled with nuance and blurred snapshots that elicit more questions than answers. (See Prospect Hill’s Facebook group for more on the plantation site.)
On Jan. 10, 1891, Ross Wade died at 76 years old. He was buried within the wrought-iron ringed Prospect Hill cemetery, alongside his blood, including the graves of patriarch Isaac and 6-year-old Martha Richardson. However, Ross Wade’s headstone was placed facing the opposite direction of all other family markers.
Why? Maybe an oversight. Maybe the unspoken.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
How a Nazi-Fighting Oklahoman Rejected NFL Draft and Went Home to Farm
Sisters of Farm Fraud: How 4 Siblings Fleeced USDA for $10M
Tractor Terrorist: How a Forgotten Farmer Attacked Washington with Fertilizer Bombs
Farmer Unearths Lost Treasure, Solves WW2 Mystery
How The Deep State Tried, And Failed, To Crush An American Farmer
Organic Implosion: How Two Grifters Cooked $50M In Fake Fertilizer and Rocked Agriculture
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
