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John W. Boyd ca. 1850 – March 10, 1932

John W. Boyd was born about 1850 in Tipton County, Tennessee, to Philip and Sophia Fields Boyd, who were slaves to Henry Sanford and his wife Jean Murray Feild [sic] Sanford (1830-1893).  Henry Sanford's father was Col. Robert Walker Sanford (1802-1861), an early elected official of Tipton county, who had moved to Tennessee from Orange County, Virginia.  Jean Feild Sanford's father was Charles Grandison Feild (1805-1845), of Mecklenburg County, Virginia, and Haywood County, Tennessee. 

The death certificate of Armistead Boyd, one of Philip and Sophia’s children, indicates that both his parents were born in Virginia.  Sophia Fields Boyd’s obituary lists her birthplace specifically as Mecklenburg County, Virginia, which had been home to many of Mason's largest slaveholders – including the Feild family.  [Note that the African American members of the family, after Emancipation, changed the spelling of their name from Feild to Fields.] Another of the large slave-holding families in Mecklenburg County were the Boyds, who were intimates and neighbors of the Feilds.  It is likely that the Boyd name among the Feild slaves came from trading or from intermarrying between the slaves of the two families.

John Boyd was married on March 13, 1879, to Martha C. "Mattie" Doggett in Trinity Episcopal Church, Mason, Tennessee.  Mattie was a member of St. Paul Episcopal Church, the local black congregation, but the couple were somehow permitted to be married in the white church, with their wedding ceremony conducted by its priest, Rev. C. F. Collins.  Anecdotal references suggest that Boyd freely attended services in both churches, black and white.

Mattie Doggett was the daughter of Andrew Doggett, a free man of color.  Andrew actually owned property before the Civil War, acquiring some 200 acres more after the war ended.  John Boyd's older brother Armistead was married to Nannie Doggett, Mattie’s twin sister.  Neither couple left any children.  Their sister Judy Boyd married Henderson Stevens, a member of a well respected, land-owning family in Mason. Judy and Henderson Stevens did leave a number of descendants, one of whom provided much of the information we know about the family.

While Nannie and Mattie Doggett were Episcopalians, the Boyd brothers were originally Methodists, members of what survives today as Alexander's Chapel United Methodist Church.  This church, too, was somewhat unusual in that it was not connected with either the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) or African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches, the historically black Methodist denominations.

John Boyd was too young to take part in the Civil War, but toward the end of the war his older brother Armistead left the Sanford place and went to Memphis to join the Federal army.  His war record states that he joined Company C of the 88th U.S. Colored Infantry on Jan. 21, 1865, at 19 years of age. He was mustered out a year later as a corporal.  A story still extant in the community tells that, before his enlistment, after all the adult males had gone off to fight, Armistead, still a young teenager, armed himself with a shotgun to protect his master's family.

Although no information has yet come to light concerning how or where John W. Boyd received his education or legal training, we do know that he was an attorney in the local courts and was highly respected among both the white and black communities.  It is not unlikely that the Boyd family had been allowed to obtain some rudimentary education even before emancipation – there is some evidence that for several generations this family of slaves had been high-achievers and had received special treatment from their masters.  Perhaps this background gave them an advantage during Reconstruction and helped propel John Boyd into the profession of the law.  Despite the Jim Crow laws that disfranchised African Americans during the last decade of the 19th century and removed them from positions of power, Boyd was still representing District 10 as a magistrate on the county court as late as 1900, although by that time he was the only black member remaining on the court.  

John Boyd was elected to two terms in the Tennessee State Legislature.  In the 42nd General Assembly (1881-1882) he served on the committees for Immigration, New Counties and County Lines, and Tippling Houses.  In the 43rd General Assembly (1883-1884) he was named to the committee on Federal Regulations.  During his term of service there, Boyd worked diligently with other African American legislators to overturn Chapter 130 of the Acts of 1875, the first of Tennessee’s Jim Crow laws, which permitted racial discrimination in public facilities.  He also attempted to repeal the restrictive contract labor law, which had the effect of keeping working blacks in bondage.

John and Mattie Boyd’s home was in the town of Mason, just south of the railroad tracks on the east side of Main Street.   John, who outlived Mattie, died on March 10, 1932, at about 80 years of age, and was buried in Magnolia Cemetery, Mason, Tennessee.  The following is his obituary, found in the March 17, 1932, edition of the Covington (TN) Leader.  It appeared on the newspaper’s first page:

"WELL-KNOWN NEGRO BURIED AT MASON--John W. BOYD, a well-known negro of District #10, died suddenly of heart failure Thursday, March 10th.  He was buried the following Sunday. There were no immediate survivors. Well up in the eighties in age, Boyd was politically prominent in the three decades following the Civil War. A resident of a district composed largely of negroes, he was for a number of years, magistrate for the 10th District, and following a split in the Democratic ranks in the years following 1880 was elected to the Legislature from this county. He was also a member of the Covington Bar."

Based on the research of John W. Marshall, Memphis, TN, author of The Early History of Mason (1985) and Mason: A Glimpse into the Past (1991).