Finding Kittie Sneed: A former Tennessee slave's words are finally heard, 118 years later

Jeannette Horne always thought she was the last in her family, but after doing an Ancestry.com test, she not only found extended family members but also learned about the turn-of-the-20th-century pension application of a formerly enslaved ancestor in Brentwood.

“My dad was born and raised in Nashville," Horne said. "He set out in the Army, and they always say he left and he never came back. He never talked about his family. And so, the only folks that I knew were his mom, his sister (and) his dad, who was a prominent attorney in Nashville (and) had already passed away in 1950.”

When her father died in 2000, Horne started trying to research her family's past.

Growing up in California, she didn’t know much about Tennessee. So when she took that Ancestry.com test in 2016, she was amazed when people she was related to, but had never heard of, started popping up all over the Volunteer State.

“I would dive in, get as far as I could, emotionally, and then I would back out. But, during one of those times... I found Kittie,” she said, referencing Kittie Waller Sneed.

Learning about 'Black Mammy'

“I had been in contact with the (Brentwood) historical society but, Jenny Calvin, who’s a Sneed descendant, reached out to me directly,” Horne said. “She found Kittie in my tree, and we had started communicating.”

Until recently, Kittie Waller Sneed’s story was a complete mystery. As the only Black person buried in the Sneed family cemetery, in Williamson County, descendants of the Sneed family also wondered who she was. The family's descendants oversee regular care and maintenance on the family cemetery grounds, which currently contain the graves of 112 people. Kittie Waller Sneed's headstone reads, “Black Mammy. A true servant of God.”

Last year, the group invited a Brentwood historical board member to their cemetery association board meeting in the hopes of learning more about Kittie Sneed.

"We started looking for information,” said Kathie Greaves, a member of the Brentwood Historic Commission. “One of the things I found out in our initial looking is that Kittie Sneed is the picture we have on the historic timeline on the Brentwood website. She had not been identified. She had been a nameless individual representing the Hardscuffle Community on the timeline, so it’s time we learned about Kittie.”

The Hardscuffle Community was Brentwood’s only Black community, created in 1867 by newly freed slaves. Today, all that exists of it is a plaque in the Church Street East median. Although Kittie Sneed's picture was used to represent the community, Horne found no evidence that she actually lived there.

“I thought, perhaps, she was a landowner because she was the photo on that section," Horne said. "So, it hit me even more to learn that although her likeness was used on that section... come to find out, not only was she not a landowner, but she died in need.”

According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, in 1860, enslaved people accounted for almost 25% of Tennessee's population. Middle Tennessee also held the largest amount of slaves during the antebellum period.

According to Brentwood City Commissioner Anne Dunn, the population in Williamson County was double that, at around 54%. The explanation: The area's large agricultural industry. Many of Williamson County’s first and prominent families, including Thomas Wilson, relied on slave labor to maintain their wealth.

The Sneed family owned a variety of slaves, including Kittie. Before emancipation, slaves took the last names of their owners, so once she was sold to the Sneed family, Kittie became a Sneed.

Tracing the past

Originally from Virginia, James Sneed and his wife relocated to Tennessee in 1798 after receiving a 640-acre Revolutionary War land grant. The grants were given by the federal government to veterans and their heirs. Four of the couple's sons were also given land to build their own homes.

Kittie was originally from North Carolina but slave traders bought and sold her to James Sneed's son, Major Constantine Sneed, when she was 15, records show.

Constantine Sneed served with President Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812 and also participated in the Battle of New Orleans. After returning to Tennessee in 1825, he began to build the 9.6-acre property known as Windy Hill and started his own family.

He married his cousin, Susannah Perkins Sneed, and together, the couple would have nine children, which Kittie cared for.

“I have lived within one mile of Brentwood, Tennessee, ever since I have lived in Tennessee,” Kittie Sneed once said.

For enslaved people, writing and reading was prohibited, so in order to receive services post slavery, many had others transcribe their stories.

“When I first read her words, I felt a lot of anger, and I had just the feeling that somebody really owed her something,” Horne said. “I cried, and I was angry because this woman who had spent her entire life working for other people was in a situation where she was unable to take care of herself and had nobody to take care of her.”

When Kittie Sneed was 19, she married Zachary Sneed and had 14 children. Some died, and others were sold to different plantations. Kittie Sneed said one of her sons, “Seth” was taken to Texas during the Civil War and she had not seen him since.

Like most descendants of the formerly enslaved, tracing family lineage has been difficult for Horne.

According to a PBS documentary on African American genealogy, “Because African American slaves were considered property, often a bill of sale – bearing just the age and gender of the person sold – is the only record for an individual living in a pre-Civil War slave holding state.”

Often, there are mistakes or inconsistencies in some of the documents and that only adds to the confusion, Horne said.

“I would love to be able to trace my ancestors all the way back to the motherland but having complete anonymity and being stripped of anything that can tie or relate, including names spelled wrong, makes it impossible," she said. "It could be inadvertently, but most of the time, it's just a lack of care."

Putting the pieces together

In 1892, Kittie Sneed filed an 82-page claim to try to collect on her late son Thomas's military pension. Thomas Sneed died of tuberculosis shortly after the war.

Kittie Sneed didn't have any savings or inheritance, so she needed the money to pay for living expenses, so she could survive. She was 87 at the time.

“I am always sick, I have one eye, and have such pains in my right thigh that the side of my lower limb is almost useless, unfitting to do washing or such labor as I might do,” she told the lawyer at the time of the claim's filing.

Through the Slaves to Soldiers project, created in the hopes of educating and preserving the history of formally enslaved men who served in the military, researchers learned that another of Kittie’s sons, Ephraim Edmondson, served in the 12th US Colored Infantry.

It wasn't clear if she knew this.

Kittie Sneed's claim on her son's pension was denied, and her story went unknown until the Brentwood Historic Commission got involved in the efforts to learn more about her last year.

Kittie Sneed lived to be 96. She died in 1905, and while she didn’t get to reconnect with many of her children during her lifetime, generations later, her words have served to reunite her descendants, Horne said.

“As I talk and reach out to those cousins or other relatives in Nashville, they grew up knowing more of that side of things,” she said. “It was wild just to go from that feeling of being the very last Horne to all of a sudden having multiples of cousins. Just so many people and so much love.”

The Brentwood Historic Commission hopes that by researching Kittie’s story they will find more stories like hers. Despite such a large population of African Americans living in Brentwood during the 1800s, only a few narratives exist, historians say.

“I wanted to give voice to Mrs. Kittie Sneed, not because I’m Black but because she was a human being, just to give voice to those who were voiceless at the time,” Historic Commission member Inetta Gaines said during an Oct. 9 reading, dedicated to Kittie's story. “She could not read or write, so someone else was taking her deposition. This is a treasure for us to have.”

The Sneed family couldn't agree more.

They are planning to have a cemetery celebration next year, where, for the first time, all descendants, including those of Kittie Sneed, will be welcome.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: A 118-year-old mystery: The story behind Tennessee's 'Black Mammy'