Talk:Stephen Heard

Category:American slave owners

No mention of slave-owning. I feel that this category should be restricted to people whose slave-owning history was notable in itself. Valetude (talk) 14:11, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

More work needed

I performed a triage edit on this article, but in Virginia lack the resources to clean it up. The Mammy Kate story which I linked in the text a couple of days ago is mentioned in the New Georgia Encyclopedia article listed not in the footnotes but in a "sources" section. That was a lot more professional than the article was a week ago, but really doesn't otherwise address his slaveholding. FYI, supposedly, Heard was of slight stature, and after his capture (on the Kettle Creek battlefield or elsewhere according to various sources) was taken to a Savannah prison by local Tories, and marked to death. Mammy Kate arrived with a large basket of clothing and linens and was allowed to see him. Heard supposedly escaped in the basket on her head, and later freed her. Yesterday, I performed a quick ancestry.com census check and had difficulty locating his census entries (which might include slaveholdings but generally are sketchy before 1820) before the library computer reset (as this personal laptop will do shortly). I was able to confirm that two of his sons owned significant numbers of slaves, especially near Abbeville on the other side of the Savannah River. However, my expertise such as it is is mostly for Virginia people, and I couldn't even confirm whether he was born in Westmoreland or Hanover County, per two contrasting stories of his background. Further cleanup of this article requires access to wills, etc., probably via Family Search which is not available at most libraries nor at the Library of Virginia. I write here because I don't know when or if I'll be able to do such. Frankly, this article originally seemed another case of intentional "forgetting" of people who manumitted slaves, quite the opposite agenda of the person who originally wrote the Clifford Dowdey article that I also edited today while waiting for a pokey windows update to install. That article included a false characterization of him as the "Last Confederate", which I could not find in any of the obituaries when I was able to get to Richmond two months ago, much less the accolades Dowdey received in his lifetime from Virginia governors of both political parties. Dowdey's real problem (and the reason local libraries have culled many of his books) is not an ahistorical agency, but that even his nonfiction books lack footnotes.Jweaver28 (talk) 23:40, 4 October 2022 (UTC)