Anne Lavinia Lewis Nugent: "tired of trotting around..."

In the previous post I introduced John Pratt Nugent, my husband's great-great-great grandfather who came to America from Rathdowney, Ireland, and who eventually settled in Louisiana. After the death of his first wife, he met Anne Lavinia Lewis, daughter of Seth Lewis, "chief justice of Mississippi Territory and later a notable judge" in Louisiana. In going through the family papers (an enterprise not anywhere near completed; I have hundreds of letters yet to read), I have discovered thus far one letter from Anne Lewis Nugent to her son Perry, my husband's great-great grandfather. Of John's and Anne's nine children, Perry became a wealthy businessman in New Orleans and served at one time as the president of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. William Lewis Nugent became a well-respected lawyer in Mississippi; Thomas Lewis Nugent moved to Texas, where he practiced law and eventually ran for governor as a populist candidate of the People's Party in 1894. But the successes (and, for Perry, devastating setbacks, as well) of these three of her sons were still in the future when Anne wrote the following letter to Perry (I have regularized some of the punctuation. Click on each image for a larger version.):

Atchafalaya, March 8, 1857

My Dear Son

Having been disappointed in a letter written to you on last Sunday reaching its destination I have concluded to try it again and perhaps better luck may attend my effort this time.

Why is it that so few letters pass between us now. I seldom get a line from my dear son and sometimes almost conclude that other ties occupy all your spare time from business. Well I suppose that it is all right and while I feel satisfied that you are happy and content I am thankful for I feel sure that your old mother still holds a place in your warm heart that is ever sacred to her alone. I sent you a box last week containing 20 dozen eggs but I suppose they all went to the bottom of the river with the boat so I will try to send you another but it will not contain quite so many eggs as I disposed of a good many before I knew that the others were lost.

Our rivers are all full and the swamp is nearly so in consequence of the great rains we have had. We have the water nearly all around us and I suppose a few inches more will bring it very near us in the back part of our enclosure but still I am quite satisfied with our home and I do not feel disposed to break up again. I conclude from your last letter that your Father had said something about selling out and moving off again. The honest truth is I am tired of trotting round and feel like setting down and staying in one place. Our little house is beginning to look comfortable and we have many comforts around us in our woods home that I would not like to give up but if we leave here I do not think I will ever consent to live on a farm again. However, this is all in the future and we will meet it as it presents itself.

After all the blustering that came from the captain of the A. W. Glaze he was finally compelled to come here and take wood and actually engaged all we had on the bank. I suppose he feared some other boat would call and take it before he returned and he would not get any below us.

I am beginning to feel the want of Amelia's company a good deal as you will readily immagine (sic) when I tell you that I have not had a lady visitor but once in two months, still I am not so selfish as to wish her to return and live as secluded as I have to do. We are all as well as usual. The children learn a little and play a great deal for in truth it is such a task to me to teach that I cannot do much of it. Give my love to Amanda and kiss the dear little babies for grandma. When will they come up to visit us. Give my respects to Mr. Cook and now my dear son may the choice blessing of our heavenly Father ever rest upon you is the prayer of your fond mother
A L Nugent

The voice of a strong-minded woman comes through in this letter, and we get further glimpses of the character of Anne Lavinia Lewis Nugent from sources outside the family. In a search on the web, I found the text of Soldiers of the Cross: Confederate Soldier-Christians and the Impact of War, by Kent T. Dollar, in which William Lewis Nugent gets a hagiographic section. His mother Anne comes in for some high praise, too:

Nugent's mother, Anne, was also a devout Methodist. Anne's public role in the local church, like that of most evangelical women of the antebellum South, probably amounted to holding women's Bible's studies, praying, and exhorting those seeking Christ, particularly during camp meetings. Her role within her own family, however, was another matter altogether. Anne devoted much time to instructing her children in religious matters. According to one of the Nugent brothers, when it came to religion, "she gave it to us all." Anne Nugent continued to instruct her children after they were grown. In 1859, after William had moved east to Greenville, Mississippi, his pious mother entreated him to remember the Lord's promises: "O what a privilege to feel that we are the children of God and can claim his blessing at any time and in any place and yet how often our faith is too weak to reach out and take the cup of blessing that is ever ready for us."

Obviously, a book with such a religious focus is going to emphasize the good mother's piety and focus on her works in the home. Another book, published much later, provides us with a slightly different complimentary picture of Anne Lewis Nugent. In Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, edited by Martha H. Swain, Elizabeth Anne Payne, and Marjorie Julian Spruill, the focus is on the strength of a woman's intellect. In this book, William Lewis Nugent's daughter Nellie Nugent Somerville is one of those Mississippi Women who "played a major role in Mississippi history as a reformer, suffragist, and politician," and both her maternal grandmother (S. Myra Smith) and paternal grandmother (Anne Lewis Nugent) receive some credit for Nellie's success in public life:

...the Smith/Nugent family was accustomed to strong, capable women as well as men, and the women of the family received more opportunities for education than most women of the era. Both of [Nellie] Nugent's grandmothers studied at academies: Myra Smith attended Nazareth Academy in Bardston, Kentucky, the first boarding school for girls west of the Appalachian Mountains, and Anne Lavinia Lewis graduated from Elizabeth Female Academy in Washington, Mississippi, in 1827. Nellie Nugent's father, William Lewis Nugent, was influenced in favor of women's education by his mother, who was a woman of great intellectual power with a "great feeling for learning" and was often compared to Queen Victoria." (40-41)

These passages and the family letter provide us with as clear a picture--minus a photographic image--as one can hope to have of a great-great-great grandmother who was not famous but whose influence extended far beyond her own children. A great-granddaughter of Anne Lewis Nugent, Lucy Somerville Howorth, was to be admitted to the bar before the U. S. Supreme Court in 1934, and to become a member of the Mississippi state legislature in 1932-1936.

John Pratt Nugent: "Should a boat come..."

One of the oldest letters I've discovered in the hundreds of my husband's family letters is one written by John Pratt Nugent, the Irish immigrant from Ireland who married Anne Lavinia Lewis, daughter of Seth Lewis, prominent judge in Opelousas, Louisiana. John Pratt Nugent is my husband's great-great-great grandfather. The children of John Pratt Nugent and Anne Lavinia Lewis Nugent were:

• Aphra Nugent
• Perry Nugent
• William Nugent
• Richard Nugent
• Thomas Nugent
• Amelia Nugent
• John Nugent
• Anne Nugent
• Clarence Nugent.

The letter reproduced here in these images was written to John Pratt Nugent's son Perry, my husband's great-great grandfather. [Click on the image for a larger version.] Many of the envelopes to these family letters are missing--or the letters were separated from their envelopes by an uncle who had hoped to make money from the stamps. This is one of those free-floating letters, divorced from its envelope and stored with letters unrelated in time.

Some of the handwriting is difficult for me to read, but I have translated the handwriting as best I can below. I have regularized some of the punctuation.

Atchafalaya, October 3rd, 1856

Dear Perry,

Your letter of 20th [undecipherable] came to hand yesterday since, and as I expect to take Tom to Bayou Sara tomorrow I thought it best to drop you a few lines--I am sorry to say that your uncle William has failed to sell his place. Mr. Norwood is sick. I believe he wished to buy the place for himself & a Brother in law by the name, I think, of [Hutchens?], or some such name. The latter lives at or near Clinton, east Feliciana. Tom was sent over there by his Father but Mr. H back (sic) out by saying the place was too [small?] for the hands Mr. Norwood wished to add to his force. It will be proper for you to write to President Miller. Tom wishes to board in the college or with Miller. I have very little money to give him. I had bought some cattle from Harry Juvell last year. I had to pay him & I bought another cow out of a drove and a [undecipherable]. It all put together swept my money. The Captain of the Effort was to bring me a barrel of pork and take pay in wood but he did not return. I have heard he has gone to Red River, the Atchafalaya has risen three feet, and the snag boat is pulling out the snags--and has got up to Bayou Boeuf or higher--inform some of the officers of the Opelousas or get Dick to do it. I am on my last barrel pork. Should a boat come, send me a barrel best [undecipherable] or should no boat come send one [to] Morganza care [of] Mr. Josep Strother (or Strawther) by Bella Donna or Capitol and write by mail to me. You know I only get letters once a week, the state owes me $44--When Caldwell comes along I will get a check and sent it to you. They are going to make a new [undecipherable] Cowhead [Bayou?] on the upper side of the old one. I will not bid. The others were bought 21 cents the cubic yard--it is thought nothing will be made at those works. The earth is to be carried [undecipherable]. I deadened nearly one hundred acres over Cowhead & mean to do more this dark moon. I am gathering my corn now over the River, when that is done I will go at cutting woods--the deadening will only take a few days--Your mother will write to Richard--Say to him he must not think hard of me for not writing--best to him and all and kisses to your Lady love [undecipherable]. I find it hard to get at writing--
as ever your
affectionate
Father
John Nugent

P. S. You had better burn my scrawls of letters--J. N.

The letter is rather disjointed, as the infrequent letter-writer--by his own admission--hits the high spots of news for his son, who will understand the references to place names and steamboats. I was stumped for a while by the references to "Bella Donna and Capitol" until I thought to do a Google search on boats on the Mississippi and found in Google Books a text titled "Fifty Years on the Mississippi: or, Gould's History of River Navigation, by Emerson W. Gould. The book includes the names of steamboats and their captains. In the section titled "Steamboats on the Bayou Sara Trade," the steamer Bella Donna is listed for 1853, along with her captain, Captain I. H. Morrison. The steamer Capital is listed for 1856, and her captain, Captain Baranco. Also, I puzzled over the word "deadened" for a while until I guessed that it had something to do with killing trees in preparation for clearing land for cultivation. Another search in Google Books provided support for my guess in "Southern Cultivator, vol. 5 (p. 319), in which the editors answer a query about the best time for "deadening" timber for bringing land into cultivation. John Nugent's letter does give the reader a pretty good idea of what was most on the man's mind as he wrote his son, and I am glad that son did not follow his father's advice to burn the letters.

The Nugents: Origins

For now we will leave Mary Ophelia Nugent and Baker White Armstrong in September, 1887, at which time Baker professed his love for Mary. Yes, they eventually married, and Mary followed Baker from Virginia to Texas, where one consequence of their union is the existence of my husband, Thomas Alexander Greene, born 1958. I will return to the details of the Nugent-Armstrong alliance, but I am now going to pick up threads of Mary Ophelia Nugent's family background. Mary's father was Perry Nugent, still living in 1887; Mary's mother, Amanda Maria Keep Cook Nugent had died months earlier, on January 3, 1887. I will provide details that we have of the other threads of family history (Cook, Lewis, Hardeman), but first I will concentrate on what we know about the Nugents.

Perform a Google web search on the phrase "Nugent origins," and you will find web sites devoted to the Nugent family. The "Old World" Nugents, according to those websites as well as from information copied by my husband's relatives, describe the Nugents' traveling from France to England with William the Conqueror. They assisted William of Normandy in the Battle of Hastings of 1066. According to one website, the Nugent

surname is of Norman origin, and was introduced into Britain and Ireland after the Conquest of 1066. It is a locational name from any of the several places in Northern France, such as Nogent-sur-Oise, named with the Latin "Novientum", apparently an altered form of a Gaulish name meaning "new settlement". The Anglo-Norman family of this name are descended from Fulke de Bellesme, lord of Nogent in Normandy, who was granted large estates around Winchester after the Conquest. His great-grandson was Hugh de Nugent (died 1213), who went to Ireland with Hugh de Lacy, and was granted lands in Bracklyn in Westmeath. The family formed themselves into a clan in the Irish model, of which the chief bore the hereditary title of Uinsheadun, from their original seat at Winchester. They have been Earls of Westmeath since 1621, and the name is now widespread in Ireland. The surname dates back to the early 13th Century.

This information coincides with information from other sources, so it seems to be fairly accurate. My husband's family, through Mary Ophelia Nugent, is descended from those Nugents who went to Ireland with Hugh de Lacy. Mary's grandfather, John Pratt Nugent (born 1792; died 1873), emigrated from Ireland to the United States, where he eventually married (1827) Anne Lewis (born 1807; died Aug. 23, 1873). In the papers of Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong ("Mimi"), daughter of Mary Ophelia Nugent and Baker White Armstrong, are papers about the Nugent family. Included among those papers are hand-written notes titled "Nugent Family: From notes--Mrs. Anne Nugent Edmonds." Anne was one of the children of John Pratt Nugent and Anne Lewis--and sister to Perry Nugent. Here are the words from that document:

John Pratt Nugent came of Anglo-Norman ancestry, the descendent of one of the knights who were associated with Hugo de Lacy in a grant of land made by Henry II in what is now known as Queens Co., Ireland. James Nugent, his father, was in the British Army at the time he ran away and married Aphra Pratt, who was attending boarding school in Dublin. After his marriage with Aphra Pratt, whose father seems to have been a wealthy man, he left the soldiers (sic) life and went to live on an estate in Queens County near the town of Rothdowny (sic)  where all his children were born. They were members of the Church of England in which communion, John, was confirmed before coming to America. Aphra Pratt's (Nugent) brothers held office under the British government but nature of positions is not known. James Nugent's family suffered severely in the Catholic riots, during one of which the home was burned to the ground, the baby in the family having made a narrow escape with his life.

Notes from John Pratt Nugent
"I arrived from Philadelphia, Nov. 16, 1816. Sailed from Dublin. I was in the employ of Thos. P. & Sons while there. They were tobacco commission merchants. Thos. Kirkman of the house of Kirkman and Jackman, sent me to Natchez in the fall of 1818. They had a branch at Nashville and one at Natchez."

James E. Edmonds (Maj. Gen. N. G. U S.-Retired), Anne Nugent Edmond's grandson, most probably, corresponded with Mary ("Mimi") Ophelia Nugent Armstrong and provided her with a lot of information on the Nugents. In a letter dated March 25, 1957, and addressed from 29 Colonial Place, Asheville, N. C., cousin James wrote the following:

Dear Mary Nugent Armstrong
Cousin Mary
Years ago I picked up in a Washington second hand book store, a biography of one ROBERT LORD NUGENT; a brilliant, fortune-hunting, politician and place-hunter of the 18th Century. I did so, more or less to tease my straight-laced mother. I only glanced at the book, by a man named Claude Nugent.

But the other day, re-ordering my older books, I found in the volume--unread by me hitherto--an account of the Nugent tribe from the first comer from England in the long ago, down to the mid-18th century; and, a singularly interesting lot of chronic rebels, adventurers, and turbulent country gentlemen.

The names Richard, Robert, William recur and recur...

Of course, over more than 700 years there were many split-offs and there are Nugents of all sorts and kinds in Ireland and here in the United States, of other lines than ours.

But, I feel sure that the 18th Century gap between our known ancestor, James Nugent of the 19th Regiment of Foot, who married Aphra Pratt and settled down at Rathdowney in the 1770s or '80s--and the Nugents of the senior line of Westmeath, could be filled in by any competent genealogist in Dublin.

If you like, I'll send you a copy of the material in the old book

By the way: Have you any trace of any Nugent descendents (sic) of Judge Thomas H. Nugent, your-great-uncle who flourished in Texas about 60 years ago and lived (I believe) in Palestine?

Cordially, James

Cousin James Edmonds evidently followed through with his promise to send some of that material from the book by Claude Nugent, for in Mimi's papers are several typed pages of information on the Nugents. I will not reproduce all the information James Edmonds includes about the Nugents (beginning with Hugh de Lacy and his Nugent companions in Ireland). Instead, I will pick up here:

All these Nugents plainly shifted from the Royalist Catholic Nugents of Westmeath when William and Mary won the Irish wars in the 1690s and Queen Anne succeeded, and the Stuarts went into final eclipse. So;;;;: we come to:

Lieutenant JAMES NUGENT, who served in His Majesty's 19th Regiment of Foot, during the Seven Years War and was captured by the French at the fighting over some channel (Belle Isle) islands. By family legend, he persuaded schoolgirl Aphra Pratt, daughter of a well-to-do Protestant landowner of near Rathdowney, to elope with him from her boarding school in Dublin. He quit the army in 1771 after serving since 1775, and went to the family estate, in what is Queen's County. The Pratts were office-holders under the English government and Rathdowney was the site of a considerable Protestant community. By family legend, the Nugent-Pratt family suffered severely during the Catholic riots in the late 1700s; one of the homes was burned, and a baby in that family was saved by his nurse who climbed out of a window with him.

James Nugent, the ex-soldier, sired:

• James Nugent, the eldest, date of birth not noted, married 1804, and "lived and died in Ireland." His emigrant younger brother long later wrote, "my last letter from him in 1852." Probably born circa 1773 or 5. (When Cynthia and I visited Rathdowney in 1936, no Nugent trace remained nor could we, on our brief visit, locate the site of the Pratt-Nugent homestead in the country)...
• Robert Nugent, born 1777, "came to America when old"...
• George Nugent, about whom no statistic or word...
• Perry Nugent, who came to the United States, married, left a son who never married... and then...
• John Pratt Nugent, youngest and son of his father's later years, born 1792, and the ancestor of the Nugents who were my maternal uncles, aunts, and cousins in my boyhood and young manhood... and some of the cousins my dearest kin into my maturity and middle and old age... He sailed from Dublin in 1816, spent seven weeks at sea, arrived in Philadelphia, November 16, 1816. Two years later he was sent, as he relates, by "Thomas Kirkman of the house of Kirkman and Jackson" to their branch at Natchez, Mississippi. There, the young Irishman seems to have prospered. He removed to the then territorial capital of Washington, married a Miss Forman, fathered a daughter, Katherine. This wife died young and soon. Eight years after his arrival... the lovely Anne Lavinia Lewis, daughter of Judge Seth Lewis of Opelousas, Louisiana, was attending the Elizabeth Academy for Young Ladies--the first chartered institution of higher learning for women in the United States!---She saw the handsome young widower riding by on his handsome horse, and he saw the lovely girl, fifteen years his junior. They met...and in 1827 they married...Later, probably with the encouragement of Judge Seth Lewis...the couple re[settled in] St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, became planters instead of merchants and reared the family there until the tragedy of the Civil War."

And so we have the history of the Nugents from whom Mary Ophelia Nugent was descended, and from her, my husband and his sister. We have in the family papers letters written by John Pratt Nugent to his sons and a few letters written by Anne Lavinia Lewis Nugent. With those, I will pick up the story of the Nugents in Louisiana.