Creator: McCollam, Andrew, fl. 1836-1872.
Collection number: 449
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Abstract: Andrew McCollam was a sugar planter, deputy surveyor, and member of the Louisiana Secession Convention of 1861. He married Ellen Elleonori and lived first in Donaldsonville, La., and later on the family plantation, Ellendale, located outside Houma in Terrebonne Parish, La. McCollam also operated the Bayou Black, Red River Landing, Terrebonne, and Assumption plantations, whose locations are unclear, although Bayou Black was in Terrebonne Parish. The McCollams had six sons and a daughter. Sons Edmund and Alexander became prosperous Terrebonne Parish sugar growers, running the Ellendale and Argyle plantations, respectively. Edmund was also part owner of the South Louisiana Canal and Navigation Company. The collection includes business, family, and political correspondence, financial and legal papers, and miscellaneous items, chiefly 1852-1891, belonging to Andrew McCollam, members of his family, members of the related Slattery family, or his descendants in Donaldsonville and Houma, Terrebonne Parish, La. Much material relates to McCollam family plantations, including Ellendale, Bayou Black, Red River Landing, Terrebonne, Assumption, and Argyle. Financial and legal papers include sugar, merchandise, slave, and sharecropper accounts; plantation journals; deeds; and land plats. Scattered items, including canal toll records, appear for the South Louisiana Canal and Navigation Company. Miscellaneous other papers include farm equipment advertisements, political and commercial broadsides, clippings, pamphlets and magazines, school materials, and a diary (1866-1867) kept by Andrew McCollam on a trip to Brazil. Topics of note in the correspondence are an 1839 survey of lands granted to General Lafayette; secession; Civil War battles and troop movements; slave resistance during the war; antebellum and Reconstruction politics; sugar planting, refining, and marketing; land transactions; foreign travel; and school and college life in Louisiana and Virginia.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Includes correspondence describing accounts that describe resistance by enslaved individuals during the Civil War. Ellen McCollam’s plantation journal (1842-1851) contains extensive slave lists and a draft of a public statement by G. F. Connely and Andrew McCollam concerning Lincoln’s election and the slavery controversy. Of special note is a 26 March 1863 letter in which Ellen McCollam expressed outrage at her slaves abandoning her and the plantation (Folder 14).
Letters Henry McCollam wrote to family members from Louisiana State Seminary discuss the Ku Klux Klan in the area and a near riot in Alexandria upon the election of Ulysses Grant (Subseries 1.2). Other correspondence in this series discusses relations between freedman and white sharecroppers.