Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2023

Southerners who were settler-colonists in in Sha K’ Pay, Minnesota Territory in 1857 brought generations of slavery’s history with them. One family who moved to Sha K’ Pay and later Shakapee City was the Garig family.

In fact, the Garig family participated in the transatlantic slave trade. According to a book, Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State by Dr. Christopher P. Lehman, “At the dawn of the nineteenth century, an eight-year-old African boy disembarked from the slave ship Success to a new world in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana.”

At least fifty-five “slave ships” and “ships with slaves” entered the port of New Orleans between 1804 and 1808, including ten in 1806, including Success, the ship that included enslaved people bound to Louisiana, according to Jean-Pierre Leglaunec’s article, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates” in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association.

“After months of writhing in the vomit and waste of his fellow captives in the vessel, he stood in iron restraints on dry land. He heard the auctioneers speaking quickly, and then a man took him away from the auction and brought him to a plantation,” said Lehman, on page 61-63 of the book, Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State. The boy became enslaved on July 6, 1806, and the captor who called himself the boy’s master was George Garig, according to “Louisiana, U.S., Records of Enslaved People, 1719-1820.”

George’s son, Phillip, was just two months old when the enslaved boy arrived on the plantation, but as Phillip grew into adulthood, he acquired his own human chattel in East Baton Rouge. According to Lehman, Phillip had 16 enslaved people of his own by 1850.

In the mid-1850s, Phillip and his family abandoned the parish and moved to Scott County in Sha K’ Pay, Minnesota Territory. George M. Garig, his son, arrived a few years earlier, and bought land here.

Before he left and moved to Minnesota Territory, Phillip sold his plantation and the enslaved people who lived there. An advertisement in the Baton Rouge Weekly Gazette and Comet on January 26, 1857 noted:

“The attention of persons desiring negroes and lands is directed to the advertisement elsewhere of Phil. Garig, Esq. His place is handsomely situated, and his fruit trees are of the best species.” In the notice by Garig himself, according to Lehman, announced “I will sell at public auction, in the town of Baton Rouge at the Court House door, on the 14th day of February next at 11 o’clock a.m., a like lot of CREOLE SLAVES, as follows – Five women, two men, and five children…(and) an undivided tract of land…containing 640 acres,” said Christopher P. Lehman in Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State (p. 62).

Phillip also established the terms of the sale: “The slaves and land, one-third cash, the balance in one and two years from day of sale, with good endorsed notes, and mortgage retained until final payment. Persons desirous to purchase the back, the stages, or land, can see me at my Amite plantation, previously to the day of sale.”

The 1857 Census of Shakopee included Phillip Garig, age 53, from Louisiana, his wife, Jane E. Garig, age 45, from Kentucky, William W. Garig, 18, Ann, age 15, Margaret, age 11, H.H. age 5, and M.M. age 3, all born in Louisiana.

Three generations of Garig members moved to what later became Shakopee, with Spier Spencer selling $7,300 land between 1855 and 1860 to the Garig family. The Garigs owned a greater portion of the town and the family remained here for generations, according to Lehman (p. 62).

One of their grandsons was William Wallace Garig, who was born in 1839 in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. He moved to Minnesota Territory with his parents, Phillipo Phillip Garig (1806-1880) and Jane Emerlione Spencer Pierson Garig (1812-1880). Jane’s parents were John Spencer (1774-1820) and Margaret Bruce Spencer (1774-1851). The Spencers, like the Garig family, had enslaved people working in Kentucky.

Before the Civil War, William lived in Minnesota. He was known by the Confederate soldiers as “Minnesota Bill” because when the Civil War started, he wanted to get to Louisiana to fight for the Confederate Army. There was no steamboat heading south, and so William got in a skiff to the headwaters of the Mississippi River and came down the river all alone in his boat to join the Confederate Army, according to the Times-Picayune article, “William Wallace Garig Dead: Traveled from Minnesota to Louisiana in a Skiff to Fight.”

He enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1862 at Camp Moore in Louisiana, entering Company A of the 11th Louisiana Infantry Regiment.

William later married Susan Beatrice Freeman (1840-1915), who was from East Feliciana Parish. They married on February 21, 1866, in East Feliciana Parish. Their children were William Wickliffe (died in August 1931), Idalia Inda (died in March 1906), Mercedes Melville (born on July 18, 1877, and died on July 17, 1957), George Gardiner (died in November 1961), Lillian Louise (died on July 8, 1935), Rukins R. (died on October 5, 1948), and Edwin E. (died in June 1951). There were other children who did not survive childbirth or childhood.

William had a livestock and animal husbandry business that he operated in Livingston Parish at Cedar Ota. He bred and sold dogs, poultry, pigs, hares, and other animals.

William wrote a lot including Civil War diaries and writings, and his views on the outcome of the Civil War, often criticizing African Americans and expressing white supremacist beliefs, according to William Wallace Garig and Family Collection at the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge.

William Wallace Garig died on October 23, 1908, and was buried at the Magnolia Cemetery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Bibliography

Baton Rouge Weekly Gazette and Comet, 26 Jan. 1857.

Leglaunec, Jean-Pierre. “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 46, no. 2, 2005, pp. 185–209. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4234106.

Lehman, Christopher P. Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2019.

“Louisiana, U.S., Records of Enslaved People, 1719-1820.” Ancestry.com. www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7383.

Minnesota. Census of 1857: Population Schedules, Scott County, Shakopee. Microcopy T1175. Minnesota Historical Society, 1857.

William Wallace Garig and Family Collection. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge.

“William Wallace Garig Dead: Traveled from Minnesota to Louisiana in a Skiff to Fight.” The Times-Picayune, 25 Oct. 1908.