First foreman at Lower Bremo. Born date unknown. Died about 1827.
His name is everywhere in the letters from the overseers to The General. “Champion is also planting his field laying near the shop and has got his new ground nearly logged and above half cultured,” says a letter from Upper Bremo overseer Dudley Ragland to The General on April 27, 1807. He comes up again and again in Ragland’s letters, and also in those of Moss, another overseer, perhaps at Recess. His work was clearly important enough to report on.
He also seems to have held some standing in the overall hierarchy of plantation management. In 1844, long after he has disappeared from the inventories—a sign that he has probably died—they still call a structure “Champion’s House.” Throughout the overseers’ letters, fields are referred to with the possessive—"Champion’s.” He’s the only person, besides Primus, I’ve seen given prestige enough to be considered as possessing—however informally—some piece of property.
I’m presuming this means he was the foreman, but nothing I’ve found so far actually designates him as such. It could be that I’m just wishful here. Maybe I want badly to know something more of him.
I do know that in 1808 Champion got sick with “pains in his limbs and body which induces one to suppose that it is the rheumatic pains,” said Sam Pettit, another overseer. At that time, many things were called rheumatism, just as most lung conditions were called pleurisy. So there’s no way to know whether Champion actually had rheumatic arthritis, but if he did, I can’t imagine how he managed to work the fields with that much pain and stiffness. His fatigue must have been overwhelming.
In fact, he says as much via Moss when the overseer writes to The General. “Champion informs you his wheat is very likely [sic] and that he will begin to plant corn.” He is still sick, however, and says he is “not capable of doing more than attending to his people and see how they go on.” Champion worked in a system that valued a person by his ability to work and also to produce a certain amount of product, whether corn, wheat, or tobacco. For Champion to not work for a few days but also feel compelled to tell his master of his illness, he must have been very ill. In reporting his illness, he marked himself as less than.
At some point, around 1808, Champion becomes “Old Champion” in the records. This new nomenclature may have been a result of his illness—perhaps his sickness aged him or simply called attention to his age. More likely, he became “Old Champion” when a “new” Champion entered the farm. I expect this new Champion was Champion Morse, a baby born to Harry Morse and Ann “Sucky” Faulcon. This young Champion was probably named after Old Champion, another sign of the respect folks at Bremo showed to the older man.
I know much more about young Champion. He grew up at Bremo, but then in 1840, he was among the group of 50 slaves who moved to Hopewell. There, he eventually became foreman for several years after Shadrach died in 1855. Eventually, due to poor health—possibly another inheritance from his namesake—he shared those duties with his nephew Cain until 1865. In 1866, he stayed on at Hopewell as hired labor, under Mr. Powell, the man running the plantation, but then, late that year, led a group of former slaves to begin their own cultivation of land in Alabama. Young Champion was married three times and had two children by his second wife. According to the census, he was farming near Cedarville in Hale County, Alabama, in 1870.
Yet, of Old Champion’s personal life, I know so little. I don’t know if he was married or had any children. I don’t know who his parents were or where he was born. I don’t even know on which plantation—Upper, Lower, Recess—he lived at Bremo. Like most of the people who were enslaved on these plantations, Champion is a name that is only associated with his work, with the products he brought to harvest, with the land he cleared.
Yet, for me, he is also an ancestor of sorts. He is the man who first did the work to make my home, the man who chopped down the trees for the Chapel Field that I love to watch from my dad’s living room in the early morning. He is the man who helped clear the roadways down which I drive or hike. He is the man who preceded my father by effort and time. In so many ways, Champion built my home.
For this, I owe him more than I can say.