The Primms of Fayette County: A Biracial Family in Nineteenth-Century Texas

Abstract

The Primms of Fayette County: A Biracial Family in Nineteenth-Century Texas Randolph B. Campbell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Randolph B. Campbell is pictured here with his friend and colleague Richard Lowe, c. 1977, in the North Texas Daily, the student newspaper of North Texas State University (now University of North Texas). Photo courtesy of the Campbell family. [End Page 294] William Primm migrated to Texas at the age of fifty-seven in 1835 and within a year established a cotton plantation near the Colorado River to the northwest of La Grange in Fayette County. At a glance, Primm’s story does not appear to have been notably different from those of many other Texas immigrant planters at the time, but it contrasted dramatically in one way: Primm’s wife Celia was an African American woman whom he owned as a slave prior to emancipating and marrying in Ohio in 1817. They lived as a married couple in Louisiana before migrating to Texas and continued to live in the Lone Star state as man and wife until his death in May 1865. Celia died three years later in January 1868. The Primms had five mixed-race children who lived to maturity, four born before the family came to Texas and one after they reached Fayette County. Adding to their special situation as a biracial family, William Primm owned enslaved persons—twenty-one in 1850 and thirty-three in 1860, ranking his family in the Old South’s planter class.1 [End Page 295] From the time of their arrival in Texas until 1865, the Primm family lived first in a slaveholding republic and then in a slave state that both had extensive legal codes dedicated to upholding the Peculiar Institution. Laws dictated the conduct not only of slaves, but of free Blacks as well. For example, the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1837 outlawed the marriage of any person of “European blood” with “Africans, or the descendants of Africans.” Any couple who broke that law would have their marriage nullified and be “deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor and punished as such.”2 When the Civil War ended slavery in the state in 1865, it certainly did not usher in an era of racial equality in any aspect of life. Thus, the central question raised by the story of the Primm family is how a White father, a Black mother, and their biracial children endured the complications of living as a biracial family in Texas during the years from the 1830s until the twentieth century. The answers show a notable range of individual variation. No person considered “Black” escaped the briar patch of race relations unscathed, but as the story of the Primm family shows, some found their way through with fewer injuries than others. Fayette County local histories that deal with the Primms usually describe the family as coming from colonial Virginia aristocracy. Unlike most of the Old Dominion’s leaders, however, the family’s founder in America, John De La Pryme (1725–80), was of French rather than English ancestry. A descendant of French Huguenots who moved to England in the late seventeenth century to escape religious persecution, he migrated from England’s Isle of Man to Stafford County, Virginia, in 1735. Eventually, probably to escape anti-French animus during the French and Indian War, the Prymes changed their family name to Primm.3 John Primm’s third son, also named John and usually called John Primm II, was born in 1750. John II served in a Virginia unit during the American Revolution and participated in the siege of Yorktown. Belying the claim that the Primms belonged to the Virginia “aristocracy,” John Primm II owned no slaves. In fact, soon after the Revolution, he began to migrate in a direction that took him away from the Old Dominion and any possibility of slave ownership. He moved west to Hampshire County, Virginia (now West Virginia), by 1797 and then in 1803 continued on to St. Clair County, Illinois, where he remained until his death in 1837.4 The eldest of John Primm II’s eighteen children, William Primm, was born...