Milly Turner and Family - Book Excerpt

From "Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South"
Book by Victoria E. Bynum; University of North Carolina Press, 1992

"Even more malicious were the charges of fornication against six legally and long-married couples in Montgomery County, whose marriages probably had not been considered interracial by most citizens of their community before the war. Six sons and daughters of John and Eleanor Hussey--Milly, Nelly, Sarah, Mary, Samuel, and Lindsay-although indistinguishable in appearance from whites, were descended through their father from Milly Turner, a free woman of one-eighth African ancestry. Turner had been accepted as white in her native South Carolina, where she married a white man, Samuel Hussey, and raised her son John as a white. John Hussey married Eleanor, a white woman, and they migrated to North Carolina, where they and their children were accepted as white until the Civil War. First initiated in the fall of 1861, the fornication charges were not dropped until late 1864. Further harassment of the family is indicated by the arrest of John Hussey in 1863 for illegal possession of firearms, a charge traditionally reserved in the antebellum South for free black males."