A Divided Legacy: The Story of H. Frank Fleming, the Freewoman Jennia, and the Confederate Lineage of the DeBerry, Fleming, and Burch Families.

History often speaks in fragments. But in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, those fragments can form a powerful story when placed in the hands of descendants determined to uncover truth, reckon with legacy, and honor the lives that history tried to silence. One such story belongs to H. Frank Fleming, a man born in 1810 to a free woman named Jennia Fleming and a white slaveholder named Robert McTyre DeBerry¹. His life, and the lives of those connected to him, offer a window into a layered and complex history of race, privilege, and lineage in the post-Revolutionary and Civil War South.

Jennia: Freewoman and Granddaughter of a Revolutionary

Jennia Fleming, the mother of H. Frank Fleming, was not enslaved. Her name bears no trace of the DeBerry surname, and her lineage places her among a rare group of free people of color in South Carolina before the Civil War². She descended from Gideon Gibson, Jr., a free man of color and prominent figure in the South Carolina Regulator Movement during the 1760s. Gibson, Jr. was the son of Gideon Gibson, Sr., who migrated from Virginia and North Carolina with land, livestock, and legal rights uncommon for men of African descent³.

The Regulators were a group of mostly white settlers, including some free Black men like Gibson, who opposed lawlessness and corrupt colonial authorities. Their activism influenced colonial legislation and laid groundwork for Revolutionary ideas of representation and local control⁴.

Jennia’s free status is further evidenced by the absence of any sale, deed, or probate record identifying her as enslaved, and the fact that her son Frank carried the Fleming name, not DeBerry, suggests no formal claim of ownership⁵.

The DeBerry Lineage: Privilege, Politics, and Confederacy

Robert McTyre DeBerry, Jennia’s partner and the father of H. Frank Fleming, belonged to one of South Carolina’s prominent white families. His brother, Edmond DeBerry, served as a state senator in the mid-1800s and was deeply embedded in the political and planter class of the time⁶. The DeBerrys were Confederate sympathizers and active participants in maintaining the system of slavery.

Despite his mother’s African ancestry, H. Frank Fleming was socially aligned with the DeBerry world. He was born into a complicated position of partial privilege and later fully embraced the identity of a white Southern planter and Confederate soldier⁷.

Though legally biracial by today’s definitions, Frank’s alignment with white Southern values, particularly his Confederate affiliation, speaks to the fluidity and contradiction of racial identity in antebellum and Reconstruction-era South Carolina.

Two Families, One Man: The Legacy of Frank Fleming

H. Frank Fleming maintained two households in the Pee Dee after the Civil War, one in what is now Fleming Town and another in the Mill Branch community. In Fleming Town, he lived with Phoebe Grant, a Black woman with whom he had children⁸. In Mill Branch, he was in a long-term relationship with Maggie Gordon Burch, a widow with five children from a previous marriage. Maggie and Frank went on to have five more children together, including Lonnie Burch, who would become the father of Allean Burch Robinson, my great-grandmother⁹.

Family oral history, preserved by Allean herself, recounts how Frank managed his dual obligations. Whenever he bought staples such as sugar or flour, he would split them between his two households. One half went to Phoebe in Fleming Town, the other to Maggie in Mill Branch¹⁰.

These familial arrangements were not just local lore. They reflect the tangled roots of Black Southern families where lineage, love, and legitimacy were constantly negotiated across the lines of race, gender, and class.

A Descendant's Reckoning

I am a descendant of H. Frank Fleming, Maggie Gordon Burch, and Gideon Gibson, Jr. My great-grandmother Allean Burch Robinson, who lived into my lifetime, was raised on these stories. She passed them down not just as whispers of the past, but as instructions for remembering.

Her legacy is my inheritance. And as a genealogist, I have confirmed what oral tradition taught us. Frank’s son, Lonnie Burch, though he never carried the Fleming surname, was indeed the child of H. Frank Fleming. This is supported by family tradition, census enumeration, and DNA analysis¹¹.

This story is not just about Frank. It is about truth-telling, the reclamation of narrative by those long written out of the record. It is about a man born of both power and marginality. And it is about what it means for descendants to reckon with that truth, heal from it, and pass it forward, unashamed and unafraid.

Footnotes

1. 1850 U.S. census, Williamsburg County, South Carolina, population schedule, Kingstree, dwelling 109, family 109, H. Frank Fleming household; National Archives microfilm publication M432, roll 860; digital image, Ancestry.com(https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 1 August 2025). ↩

2. "Gibson Family History," Free People of Color Register, Pee Dee Region Archives, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina. ↩

3. Paul Heinegg, Free African Americans of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, 5th ed. (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2005), 2:344–347. ↩

4. Edward L. Paquette, “The South Carolina Regulators,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 87 (July 1986): 181–199. ↩

5. South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC, Estate File for Robert McTyre DeBerry, ca. 1855, Williamsburg County, no enslaved woman named Jennia listed. ↩

6. South Carolina General Assembly, Biographical Directory of the South Carolina Legislature, Vol. II (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), entry for Edmond DeBerry. ↩

7. 1860 U.S. census, Williamsburg County, South Carolina, slave schedule, p. 46, entry for H. F. Fleming; National Archives microfilm publication M653, roll 1225. ↩

8. Interview with Allean Burch Robinson (Florence County, South Carolina), by Tamiquia T. Simon, 12 March 2002; privately held by Simon, Florence, South Carolina. ↩

9. South Carolina, Death Certificate no. 014235 (1936), Lonnie Burch; South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, Columbia. ↩

10. Oral history of Allean Burch Robinson, as told to Tamiquia T. Simon, 1998–2005. ↩

11. Autosomal DNA results for descendants of Allean Burch Robinson and known descendants of H. Frank Fleming (via children with Phoebe Grant), available privately with consent; analysis by Tamiquia T. Simon, 2024. ↩