An abstract of “‘Every Comfort, Freedom, and Liberty‘: A Case Study of Mississippi’s Confederate Home,” Susannah J. Ural, Journal of the Civil War Era, volume 9, number 1 (March 2019), tells us:
“This case study of Mississippi’s Confederate veteran home, popularly known as Beauvoir, challenges historians to see these southern facilities as more than relics of the Lost Cause. This state-run home had a diverse resident population that included women as early as 1904 and that also included three African-American residents. It provided well-trained physicians in the Beauvoir hospital, and a powerful and popular woman superintendent ran the home as early as 1926. This article analyzes the lives of the veterans, wives, and widows of Mississippi’s Confederate home as well as the state’s policies for them, revealing a facility connected to the Civil War, but grounded in New South efficiency, regulation, and reform.”
One of Beauvoir’s three African-Americans, all former Confederate body servants, was Nathan Best, born enslaved in Greene County, North Carolina, in 1845. Henry Best, then his son Robert, held Nathan Best in slavery and sent him to war to serve Robert’s younger brother Rufus Best. Nathan Best and his family moved to Wilson County before 1880, then migrated south to Georgia’s turpentine belt, then further south to Ocean Springs, Mississippi. In the early 1930s, as he neared 90, Nathan Best applied for admission to Beauvoir.
Nathan Best, at right, with Frank Childress, another former body servant, at Beauvoir. Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College Dixie Press Collection.
Nathan Best was interviewed by a Works Progress Administration fieldworker during his time at Beauvoir. His “slave narrative” does not explicitly mention his time in Wilson County, but does offer a wrenching account of his experience on the Best plantations near Snow Hill — an experience that would have been familiar twenty miles up the road.
1880 census of Black Creek township, Wilson County.
In the 1900 census of Worth County, Georgia, Nathan Best headed a household that included wife Hester and three grandchildren. The elder two were born in North Carolina in 1886 and 1888, and the youngest in Georgia in 1891. The Bests, then, migrated from North Carolina around 1890, when hundreds left the state’s depleted turpentine industry for Georgia’s piney woods. Presumably, Best’s children and grandchildren born in the decade between 1880 and 1890 were born in Wilson County.
Nathan Best was eventually released from the Confederate Home and died at his daughter Lina B. Jones’ home in Biloxi. (Was Angelina Best Jones born in Wilson County? Per her headstone in Biloxi City Cemetery, she was born 25 November 1882.)
Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.), 18 January 1940.
[Side note: Elnathan Tartt was Beauvoir’s superintendent most of the years between 1916 and 1945, which encompasses the time Best was there. Tartt’s unusual first name signals his descent from slaveholding Tartts who lived in the area between modern-day Wilson and Saratoga in eastern Wilson County.]
