The early part of Jilson Hawkins’ life is unknown and there are few documents pertaining to him among the thousands of Dinsmore documents.  But it is known that James Dinsmore first met him at the Concordia Plantation in Mississippi that was owned by the Stephen Minor family.  Jilson was enslaved on the plantation and worked in the cotton fields.  In the 1820s, James was employed as a tutor for the sons of Stephen Minor, who was by that time deceased.  The wealthy family’s several plantations were under the overall management of the boys’ uncle, John Minor, who was acting as guardian for the assets of his brother’s children until they reached twenty-one.  In addition to tutoring the boys, James took on legal responsibilities for John and also assumed the management of the plantations when the family took their annual trip north to escape the sickly season of the lower South, when yellow fever was most prominent.  As the manager of the plantations, Dinsmore, a northerner, became involved in the lives of the enslaved African Americans who worked on the Minor lands, dispensing rations, ensuring that the necessary work was completed, and occasionally riding into the swamps in search of runaways.

James’ cousin, John Bell, was a physician from New York City who moved south in the 1820s and began a practice in Natchez.  From there his records show that he visited the many plantations in the area, prescribing treatment for enslaved African Americans and white slaveholders alike.  In 1827, he visited Concordia Plantation where he cared for Jilson Hawkins and Nancy Mcgruder.  By this time James had purchased several African Americans on his own, among them Jilson and Nancy Mcgruder.  Two years later, James bought a plantation in partnership with John Minor in southern Louisiana.  To work this sugarcane and cotton plantation, he bought some slaves from Minor, bought others from the markets in Natchez and New Orleans, and hired even more out from his neighbors.  Jilson was among those who began working at Bayou Black – the name James gave to his new home – and was listed as being twenty-two years old in 1832 when James mortgaged his slaves to the New Orleans Canal & Banking Company. ¹  On Bayou Black, as on other sugar cane plantations, James compensated the enslaved African Americans with small amounts of money for working in the sugar mill – a task on which his annual success or failure depended heavily.  He also allowed the slaves to raise hogs and chickens and he set aside small plots of land for them to raise vegetables and spices for themselves or to sell.  These were not, however, one-sided decisions for James, but illustrate the ability of African Americans to enforce some concessions on their owners in return for their labor.  On the other hand, the arrangement was not entirely satisfactory for the African Americans because those enslaved by James continued to assert themselves by assisting runaways and many, most likely, resisted their enslavement by breaking tools and laboring in a half-hearted manner.  The compensation James gave was never enough for most of the enslaved people to buy their freedom, but it may have helped to motivate them to complete a job they loathed.

In 1831, James purchased a young girl, Eliza, from a trader from Richmond, Virginia.  Eliza was listed as twelve years old at the time. Within the next ten years Jilson married Eliza in an informal ceremony and they were listed as a family unit in James’ plantation records, with a female named Ellen, who may have been their daughter.  When James made the decision to move to Kentucky, he chose to leave Jilson and his family in Louisiana to continue working for the Winder & Minor partnership.  This arrangement allowed Dinsmore to earn a portion of the profits of future sugar crops on the plantation without having to feed, clothe, or medicate those who remained in Louisiana.  Years later, in 1854, James and a Boone County neighbor, F.W. Grant, went together to buy a farm in Salinas County, where they produced hemp.   According to the agreement they drew up, James was to provide the slave labor for the Gaines Farm enterprise and Grant or a relative of his, was to oversee the its operation.  Jilson and his family were sent to Missouri from Louisiana.

Early in the Civil War, with hostilities already brewing in Missouri, Jilson and Eliza Hawkins were brought east to settle and work on the Boone County farm.  Not everyone from the Gaines Farm came back to Kentucky—Adam Taylor, and perhaps his brother Daniel, either ran away or chose to remain in Missouri with Dinsmore’s approval.  With the ending of the Civil War, the Hawkins family stayed on James’ property as tenants.  The 1870 Census lists Jilson as having $100 in personal assets and showed that he was living with his wife, Eliza, and a number of other females.  Ellen was described as being black, thirty-five years old, and illiterate – as were all members of the family even though it is known that Eliza was literate.  Three teenagers, Phoebe, Amanda, and Eliza, lived in the house in addition to a four-year-old named Mary.  These children were probably Ellen Simpson’s daughters and Jilson’s and Eliza’s granddaughters.

Records show that the older grandchildren, Phoebe and Amanda, joined their mother and grandparents in working for the Dinsmore family for small sums of money, peeling osier willows for the basket factory.  Tragedy struck the family in the 1870s. In September 1870, James Dinsmore bought a coffin for the fifteen-year-old Eliza, the granddaughter of Jilson and Eliza.  The walls for the Dinsmore graveyard were put up in 1867, so it is likely that Eliza was buried close to what is now the wall, toward the Ohio River, with only a fieldstone marking her burial spot.  Three years later, little seven-year- old Mary followed in 1873.  This last death occurred less than one year after James Dinsmore had died.

In the instructions he left for his daughter, Julia Dinsmore, before his death, James requested her to buy a house for Jilson and his family.  They chose to move to Rising Sun, Indiana where there was a fairly large African American community and where Ellen had moved after marrying a man named John Ebbington.  Many from Boone County opted to escape the racial violence in Kentucky that followed the Civil War by moving north, across the river.  Phoebe Simpson married in 1870 and moved there and four years later, Jilson moved with his wife to a half-lot in town with a small house on it.  Although he stayed at home most of the time (he was at this time about sixty-four years old), Eliza occasionally traveled back to Boone County to do the cooking for Julia.  James had written several credit notes payable to Jilson before he died for the work he had done on the farm, allowing the freedman to live somewhat comfortably for the few years that remained to him.  He died in late July 1879 and was brought back to Boone County to be buried near his granddaughters in the Dinsmore graveyard.  On the 31st of July, Julia bought clothes for him to be buried in, a coffin, and a hearse to bring him up from the river.  At the same time she also bought ice – perhaps to help preserve the body during the long, hot summer day.

Through the rest of Eliza’s life, she worked on and off for Julia and accepted aging relatives and friends into her small household.  Sally Taylor, who with her seven children was brought from Louisiana by James Dinsmore in 1842, lived near Eliza and the extended families remained close.  While Eliza and Nancy Mcgruder did not always get along according to Julia Dinsmore’s letters, they enjoyed visiting back and forth across the river, and after Nancy’s cabin burned down in the 1890s it is believed she lived with Eliza for a short time prior to moving into the kitchen cabin on the farm.  At the approximate age of eighty-five, Eliza Hawkins died in 1904.  In contrast to her husband and two granddaughters, she was buried in the graveyard in Rising Sun.

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¹ Houma Courthouse Records, F352, June 1832.