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- 1860 Federal Census - Nathan Henry Bass is listed in both Bibb County and Floyd County
1870 Federal Census of Rome, Floyd County, Georgia (July 1, 1870)
Nathan Bass - 61 - Male - Georgia - Farmer 141,500 24,200
Caroline - 50 - Female - Georgia - Keeping House
Eugenia B. - 30 - Female - Georgia - At Home
John H. - 28 - Male - Georgia - Teacher
Julia B. - 14 - Female - Georgia - At School
Martha Hurt - 38 - Female - Georgia - At Home
and six others
Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress
By Ezra J. Warner
Nathan Bass (Georgia) was born October 1, 1808, certainly in Georgia, and probably in Putnam County, whence his parents had moved from Virginia. He is said to have been educated at Mount Pleasant Academy, the location of which is unknown to the Georgia Historical Society, but which may have been in the hamlet of Mount Pleasant in Wayne County. Shortly after 1840 Bass took his family, including two stepdaughters, to the newly opened Floyd County in northwest Georgia, where they were listed as early settlers of Rome. After acquiring land and slaves in Floyd County, Bass moved with his family in 1851 to Macon in Bibb County, where he came to be regarded as one of the wealthiest men in Georgia - his personal property in Bibb County alone was worth $351,000 in 1860 and his real estate was worth $251,000. Besides this, he retained ownership of his land and Negroes in Floyd County, and an undetermined interest in plantation lands in Barbour County, Alabama.
As a Union Democrat, Bass was for years active in politics as well as in civic affairs. He served as vice-president of the Cotton Planters’ Convention of the Southern States in 1851; and five years later he was appointed chairman of the Kansas Aid Meeting, formed to combat the abolitionist movement and to lend assistance to proslavery settlers in the new territory. As president of the Cotton Planters’ Association, Bass presided at the inaugural of the Belgian Fair in Macon. When Georgia seceded the next year, he went with his state despite his Union principles. When Eugenius A. Nisbet (q.v.) resigned from the Provisional Congress, Bass, without his knowledge, was chosen to succeed him. Bass took his seat January 14, 1862, and thus served only until adjournment on February 17. During his brief tenure he took little part in lawmaking but apparently had confidence in Jefferson Davis; he granted the War Department whatever use of manpower it requested. His few votes on other matters, however, indicate that he opposed any control by the Confederate government over the economy. He made no effort to seek election to the Regular Congress.
In the remaining course of the war Bass was prominent in supporting various civic enterprises while two of his sons served in the Confederate army. At its termination he was, of course, ruined by inflation, the expropriation of his slave property, and the subsequent decline of the southern economy. By 1872 he had moved back to Rome, Georgia, where he lived, bereft of his former land holdings, in a sort of genteel poverty until his death there on September 22, 1890, at the age of eighty-two. He was buried in Myrtle Hill Cemetery in Rome, with his wife and several of his sons and daughters.
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