The Southern Claims Commission was created by Congress in 1870 as a result of pleas from citizens who had sustained losses during the Civil War (1861-1865). This commission addressed claims (for personal property only) from residents of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The Southern Claims Commission appointed local commissioners to hear these claims, determine the authenticity of the claim, and decide if indeed the claimant had been LOYAL to the UNION during the war. Yes, you read correctly: The claimant had to answer that he/she had been loyal to the Union and had not provided aid of any kind in support of the Confederacy. Before you say, “Not MY southern ancestor!” you should consider that people did what they had to do to receive compensation for losses suffered during the war. Many southerners did not consider it “lying” to “lie” to a Yankee (especially a bureaucrat)....LOL

A case in point is that of the Reverend Isaac Madison Hicks, claim #11,760, of Bibb County, Alabama. Rev. Hicks was a Baptist preacher, had been a county tax collector, and had an eldest son, Joseph Newton Hicks, who fought as a member of the 8th Alabama Cavalry for the Confederate cause. This is not the type of person one would expect to file a claim, but the National Archives has 44 pages of sworn testimony of Rev. Hicks and two witnesses. This particular claim gives an account of General James H. Wilson’s troop movements in the march to Selma and tells of Union soldiers taking horses, feed, and cooked food from the slave quarters and burning crops but sparing Rev. Hicks’s house because he was a Mason. Supporting testimony was given by a witness who says he is Rev. Hicks’s son-in-law. Another witness, a former slave, gives an account of seeing one of the stolen horses and saddle “under a Union soldier near Selma.” Both whites and blacks filed claims and gave testimony in support of claims made by others.