Death of Innocence

Professionally edited and corrected 3-2-2017. People of the south in 1860, would soon find themselves in the midst of a terrible civil war, whose architect, President Abraham Lincoln, would become known as the ‘Widow Maker’. Never again would life in the south be as it was before the great civil war.Joseph Greene (my great grandfather on my father’s side) came to Florence, Alabama as a young boy in search of a better life than the one he had known while working his father’s farm in southern Tennessee. His dreams of being a pilot of riverboats took him to the Tennessee River where he met, and fell in love with my great grandmother, Mary W. McAlexander.The McAlexander family consisted of brothers Edward, Alexander, and their sister Mary (my great grandmother on my father’s side). The McAlexander family was of some importance, living their innocent dream in northern Alabama, in a place called Florence, in the county of Lauderdale, located on the Tennessee River. Unknowingly, their lives were about to be caught up in a great struggle.William Chrisman (my great, great, grandfather on my father’s side) lived in Kentucky where he met and married Elizabeth Louisa Blackstone, a young Indian girl against his family’s wishes in 1837. Rather than accept William’s wife, his family gave him money and two young Negro slaves suggesting he take his bride and leave the county for the west. William and his young bride eventually settled on a farm near New Site, in Tallapoosa County, Alabama. There, they cut a life out of the wilderness and raised a family never knowing that a great war would all but destroy their family.Andrew Jackson Patterson (my great, great, grandfather on my mother’s side) was 43 years old, and a widower living on a farm in Anderson County, South Carolina at the start of the civil war. He was busy raising four children as best he could while secretly in love with a neighbor’s daughter, who was twenty-five years younger. Even he would not be able to resist the fever of the southern cause that tugged at him to defend his way of life. His decision to leave his farm and young children to join the southern cause would take him to places of such violence he never dreamed possible.While most of the families were not acquainted with one another, each was linked to the other by an invisible chain of events that would one day travel the roads of fate coming together in another time and another place a thousand miles away creating my family line.Where does one start when telling the story of his own family? Out of so many people, how does one choose the correct place in time, or with the correct person to begin such a story? After much struggling with this I finally realized that all true stories end in death, and quite often, the end is the best place to start. I hope you enjoy reading this fictional story based on fact of my family, places and events.