Written by Pamela Lynn - Catherine’s 2nd great grand daughter
Catherine Ann James went by C.A., and was one of five children of John James from Virginia and Sarah Ann Cowan from North Carolina. John and Sarah Ann were part of the flood of people coming to Texas in the 1830s. They married in 1835 in Brazoria County, which was then part of Coahuila y Tejas, Mexico. They settled down and by 1860 they were established on Arenosa Creek in Victoria County.
C.A. James was born in 1844. In this picture she looks quite young, maybe late teens or early 20s. She is quite stylish and well-dressed for a young girl living in Victoria County. I think that is because her father was not a poor farmer but a relatively wealthy man who had a small plantation and owned 13 slaves. I’m not proud of that but there you have it.
Looking through the family papers that my paternal grandmother saved, I found a tissue-thin piece of pale blue paper with now faded ink, titled “Nettie Moore” at the top and inscribed at the bottom: “Written by W.M. H. May 19, 1860, For Miss C. A. James. Residence Arenosa Texas.” On the back is written A Song Ballad for Miss C.A. James in florid handwriting. C.A. was only 16 in 1860 and had her whole life ahead of her.
C.A.’s life got a complicated just one year later. The Civil War began in April 1861, and her older brother William Bradley James went to fight for the Confederacy. Her mother had already died in 1856 and in 1863 her father John James died, leaving C.A. alone on the plantation with her two younger siblings and thirteen slaves. Was there a manager or did C.A. have to manage the plantation? I don’t know. Did she have any help? I don’t know, but she stayed.
In April 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered, and by May 1865 the Civil War was formally over. On June 19, 1865, Texas slaves finally found out that they were free. William came home to the family plantation from the war and in September 1865 C.A. and her brother William married siblings James W. Patterson and Elvira Jane Patterson, in separate weddings two weeks apart in Victoria, Texas. James W. Patterson was another Confederate soldier who made it home, and he was the son Eugenia Primeau and James S. Patterson, who fought at San Jacinto.
In August 1866 William probated his father’s will, in which John James had named all his slaves, and bequeathed them to family members, but now were no longer property that could be given away. By the late 1870s, the intermarried James and Patterson families were living in Austin, Texas. C.A. died in 1911, her husband in 1914. Like her Patterson in-laws, she and her husband are both buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Austin, section 4, lot 925.