Charles "Don Carlos" Percy

Charles "Don Carlos" Percy (1704–1794) was the founder of the Percy family of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Life

An Irish-Catholic adventurer, Percy arrived in British West Florida in 1775. For services to the Crown (rumored to be as a privateer), he initially received a 600-acre (2.4 km2) land grant in Louisiana, near present-day St. Francisville. With that and other land parcels, he established three successful indigo plantations, which enabled him to amass great wealth. He named the main plantation in present-day Wilkinson County near Natchez, Mississippi, Northumberland Place in honor of supposed ties with the fabled British Percy lineage of Hotspur. For a while, Percy was an alcalde, or magistrate, under the Spanish government, hence his nickname, "Don Carlos." At the age of 90, Percy reportedly gave in to melancholia (depression) and drowned himself in a local creek, since named Percy's Creek.

Family

His son, Robert Percy became a highly esteemed military official and owner of the 2,200 Beechwood Plantation. He had received a tenth of Charles Percy's Estate as part of a settlement dispute [1] Robert Percy's daughter Jane married into the prominent Williams family. She married James Cadwallader Williams in 1815.[2] James and Jane Williams son named David Percy Williams of Natchez inherited the Percy/Williams estate and was established as one of the wealthiest men in the Natchez area.[3] David Percy Williams mixed-race son, Archie P. Williams, inherited part of the Percy/Williams Estate from his father, helped pioneer the oil and natural gas industry in Adams County, Mississippi and became a prominent Supervisor of the Third District in the Natchez area.[4]

His son, Thomas George Percy, Sr. (Princeton 1806), wed Maria Pope, (a relative of the British poet Alexander Pope) in 1814. Maria's sister Matilda wed John Williams Walker, a Princeton University graduate and one of Alabama's first two senators. Walker and Percy settled on two adjacent estates in Huntsville, Alabama, and named their sons after one another.

The sons of Thomas George Percy helped develop the Mississippi Delta into the leading cotton-producing area in the world. William Alexander Percy, the youngest son, became rich before the Civil War and married Nana Armstrong, a cousin of George Armstrong Custer and granddaughter of General James (Trooper) Armstrong, a hero of the War of 1812.

Nana's son, William Alexander Percy, became a famed Confederate colonel and was a railroad lawyer after the war.

LeRoy Percy (1860–1929), the son of William Alexander Percy, served as a US senator and confronted the Ku Klux Klan in Washington County in 1922, thwarting their recruiting effort.

LeRoy Percy was the father of William Alexander Percy, a World War I hero, lawyer, poet and memoirist, best known for Lanterns on the Levee: Memoirs of a Planter's Son. The senior Percy was the great-uncle of the writer Walker Percy (1916–1990), who wrote novels and essays; and William Armstrong Percy, III, an historian who became a gay activist beginning in the 1980s.

Senator Charles H. Percy of Illinois was also a direct descendant of Charles "Don Carlos" Percy.

References
  1. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (21 November 1996). House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family. ISBN 9780198022305.
  2. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (21 November 1996). House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family. p. 438. ISBN 9780198022305.
  3. Wayne, Michael (2001). Death of an Overseer:Reopening a Murder Investigation in the Plantation South. ISBN 9780195140033.
  4. Mississippi (1888). Biennial Reports of the Department and Benevolent Institions of the State of Mississippi. p. 34.
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