Betsy Love Allen (after 1782 – July 1837) was a Chickasaw merchant and planter who ran a trading post on the Natchez Trace and maintained a large cattle plantation.
[3][11] Colbert became a wealthy plantation owner who enslaved around one hundred and fifty people and founded a prominent Chickasaw family of mixed-race children.
[12] The Colbert-Love marriage created a union of two families, which became influential in Chickasaw politics and the tribe's relationship with the United States government throughout the early nineteenth century.
The families were part of the planter class and enslaved numerous people, as well as virtually controlling the commerce of the Chickasaw Nation with traders from the Southern Colonies.
[13][14] Betsy's father, Thomas Love, a Loyalist, fled to the Chickasaw Nation around 1782 after the British defeat in the Gulf Coast campaign during the American Revolutionary War.
[4][Notes 3] With his first wife, who was of the clan In-cun-no-mar, Thomas had seven sons – Henry, Isaac, Sloan, Benjamin, Samuel, Robert, and William – and three daughters, Delilah, Elizabeth, and Nancy.
In 1829, Love deeded several of the people she enslaved to her children, which, at that time, also included Tennessee, Mary (aka Polly), Elizabeth, and Samuel.
[18] At one point, they operated and ran a trading post on the Natchez Trace,[29] and also maintained a large cattle ranch near Toccopola, Mississippi.
[37] Richard Green, a historian who focuses on Chickasaw history,[38] noted that by the time the appeal was being heard in 1837, the judges were aware of the removal treaties and that Native women were to receive allotments.
[40] Her analysis, as well as that of scholar Joseph Custer, included that the justices deciding the case would also have been influenced by the perceived threat of civil unrest by enslaved people or free blacks and a desire to control their populations by allowing them to be transported out of the state.
[40][41] In 1784, Alexander Malcom (or Malcolm) paid James Allen five thousand pounds in North Carolina currency to purchase a tract of land in Tennessee.
[19] Susan was a minor, and the bond ($650) for her protest against the sale of Toney was posted by her brother George (who also represented her) and her great-uncle James Colbert.
When it became applicable, the 1830 Citizenship Act validated all marriages and matrimonial unions that had previously occurred under Chickasaw custom and grandfathered Native marital property laws.
[19][45][46] Fisher did not deny that Toney had been gifted by Love but argued that because the instrument had not been recorded within ninety days of the 1830 legislation that the deed was not binding and invalid.
[48] The final ruling of the Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals, written in two separate opinions issued by Justices Sharkey and Smith in January 1837, concluded that Chickasaw women were in effect feme soles and not subject to the restrictions of coverture under common law.
[54][Notes 8] She states that Fisher v. Allen specifically was decided to facilitate removal and that the Women's Property Act was passed to shield men's assets from credit seizures.
[50] He also noted that attempts to modify the bill to prevent husbands from hiding or shielding their assets in their wives' names, as proposed by Senator Spence Grayson, were voted down.
[4][61] At the time of her death, she owned over three hundred acres of land in Mississippi and Tennessee (some of it in allotments); cattle, horses, and other livestock; farm equipment; home furnishings; and twelve enslaved people totaling some US$10,000 (equivalent to $240,000 in 2021).
[19][63] Kerri M. Armstrong, a Chickasaw historian,[66] stated that it is probable because they are not named, that the other children were deceased by the time the estate was distributed,[19] which occurred around 1849.
[25][83][84] The Toccopola Homemaker Volunteers established a Betty Allen Festival in 2003, and an artist in Booneville created a statue in Love's honor to mark the event.
[30] In 2018, the Chickasaw Historical Society erected a monument in Toccopola to celebrate Love's memory for Women's History Month.