Henry Ledbetter

Henry Ledbetter was born in 1765 in Maryland. He is the farthest known ancestor in the Ledbetter family tree, and the starting point for the seven generations traced in the family genealogy.¹

Family

Henry married Charity Edwards and had seventeen children: Henry, William Hardiman, Vann H., William B., George Washington, Sarah, Burlin Lee, Lorana, Mary, Doctor Jackson, John Marshall, Rebecca Mariah, Susan, Margaret, Asa, Lewis, and Polly.¹

Although other names are connected to Henry in the family tree, these connections are “only possibilities.” Henry’s son William Hardiman was either stabbed or shot and killed by another of his sons, William B.¹

Murder in the Family

According to the Local Record Newspaper of Shawneetown, Illinois, dated March 2, 1906:

In April 1834, William B. Ledbetter was indicted for murder. On Christmas Day 1833, at his father’s home, William B. had quarreled with his father and was ordered from the premises. As he was leaving, his brother William Hardiman took up the father’s side of the quarrel. William B. stabbed him with a knife, with fatal effect.¹

The trial was moved from Gallatin County to White County, Illinois. After adjournment, the condemned man was guarded in the courthouse by armed men, the county having no jail. Colonel Hosea Pearce, Sheriff of the county, erected a scaffold about four hundred yards northeast of the present fair grounds and sixty yards from the present State roads, near the city of Carmi.¹

On April 30, 1834, an immense crowd assembled to witness the execution. The armed militia formed at the courthouse and the condemned man was brought out in a wagon. The cortege moved in solemn step to the music of a muffled drum and the shrill note of a fife playing the death march. The Rev. Charles Slocum delivered a prayer and preached “a powerful sermon to the vast concourse present.” During the sermon, a gun in the hands of one of the guards was accidentally discharged, the ball striking one of the posts of the scaffold.¹

The sheriff failed to sever the cord on the first two blows, succeeding only on the third. William B. “died without much struggling, and in about twenty-four minutes the body was lowered and placed in a coffin.” His wife and little son were there with a wagon drawn by small oxen, waiting. After the coffin was placed in the wagon, she and her son started for their home in Gallatin County, some six miles from Elizabethtown. That night they camped by the roadside near New Haven, “as no person would let them stay in their house all night.”¹

Death

Henry Ledbetter died in September 1835, at the age of seventy, in Gallatin County, Illinois.¹

The Ledbetter Line

Henry is the first generation of the Ledbetter family traced in America. The line continues through his son Doctor Jackson Ledbetter, to John Thomas Ledbetter, John Jackson Ledbetter Sr., and Col. John Jackson Ledbetter Jr..²