Restrictions to Access

This collection contains materials which are closed. The Library closed the original manuscript volumes (SV-1095/1-5) because of their fragility. Transcriptions, microfilm, and digital facsimiles of these volumes are available.

Restrictions to Use

No usage restrictions.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Francis Terry Leak Papers #1095, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Alternate Form of Material

Microfilm copy available.

• Reel 1: V-1095/1 (1841-1861)
• Reel 2: V-1095/2 (1846-1852)

Acquisitions Information

Manuscripts volumes received from Mrs. Gerard Badow of Holly Springs, Miss., in May 1946; typed transcriptions added in 1947 and subsequent years (transcribing history documented in control file); maps received from Andrew Brown of Arlington, Va., in July 1962.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Processed by: Roslyn Holdzkom, April 1990

Encoded by: Eben Lehman, May 2006

Updated by: Kathryn Michaelis, February 2010

Updated by: Laura Hart, June 2021

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Agriculture--Mississippi--History--19th century.
• Benton County (Miss.)--History--19th century.
• Confederate States of America--Social conditions.
• Cotton growing--Mississippi--History--19th century.
• Cotton trade--Mississippi--History--19th century.
• Families--Mississippi--Social life and customs.
• Leak, Francis Terry, 1803-1863.
• Mississippi--Economic conditions.
• Mississippi--History--Civil War, 1861-1865.
• Mississippi--Social life and customs.
• Plantation life--Mississippi.
• Plantations--Mississippi.
• Slavery--Mississippi.
• Southern States--Description and travel.
• Tippah County (Miss.)--History--19th century.

Francis Terry Leak, son of Walter and Hannah Pickett Leak, was born in 1803 in Rockingham, N.C. He was admitted to the North Carolina bar 27 December 1824. By 1839, however, he had purchased land in northern Mississippi near the town of Salem, which was an important trading center until the American Civil War. In the decades before the war, he enslaved people on his plantation in Tippah County (now Benton County), Miss.

Leak apparently purchased the southern part of his holdings in 1836 and added significantly to his lands around 1851. In 1837, he was assessed for claiming 32 people as his property, enslaved people whom he probably forced to migrate with him from North Carolina. In 1850, there appear to have been ten or eleven white peoples living on the plantation (chiefly family members) and 110 black people, most of whom were enslaved. In that same year, he declared for tax purposes the following: 1,360 acres of land; factory stock in North Carolina; 1/3 share of a warehouse in Salem, Mississippi; houses, wagons, and farming tools; 100 yards of carpeting; 500 bushels of oats; 500 bushels of peas; 1,000 bushels of potatoes; 400 pounds of butter; 250 bales of cotton; 19 horses; 18 mules; 13 cows; 8 oxen; 23 cattle; 26 sheep; 150 hogs (manuscript volume 2, p. 195). In 1860, he claimed 90 people as his property, the largest number enslaved people claimed by any one man in Tippah County.

Leak appears also to have been active in financial dealings outside of farming operations. Besides the North Carolina factory stock and the interest in the warehouse in Salem, records in Tippah County for 1860 indicate that Leak had a sizeable amount of "money loaned at interest."

Leak died in Alabama in 1863 and was buried in Selma.

The collection includes manuscript volumes containing entries of various types, most of which are presumed to have been written by Francis Terry Leak, a cotton planter and businessman of Tippah County, Miss. (now Benton County, Miss.). With the exception of one volume consisting chiefly of work records of people he enslaved on his plantation, the greater portion of each volume contains Francis Terry Leak's diary and plantation journal. Some entries contain brief references to the number of acres plowed and the weather on a given day, while others are substantive narrative passages about plantation, family, and community life, ranging from trips through the South that were undertaken by family or friends to the progress of the Civil War. Other sections of these volumes are devoted to records of miscellaneous accounts, including those relating to cotton shipped and sold, goods and services purchased from various sources, transactions involving the loaning or collecting of money, and other activities having to do with finances.

• Extra oversize paper folder (XOPF-1095/1)
• Microfilm reels (M-1095/1-2)
• Oversize volumes (SV-1095/1-5)