U.S. Sen. John McCain, who died at his Arizona home on Sunday at age 81, had longstanding ties with Carroll County.
McCain’s cousin, Bill McCain, was 7 years old and John was 14 when the future senator came out for a visit and was learning to drive.
“His daddy asked me to go with him out on these country roads to practice driving,” Bill McCain said.
“John started getting a little anxious and was trying to turn around. I opened my passenger door to look at the rear and see if we were clear, and my door ran into the dirt and sprung.
“He cussed and cussed and called me a few names,” Bill remembered with a laugh. “I kept thinking, ‘He’s 14, and I’m just 7, and he’s gonna get it when we get home.’
“Well, he did, and I did, too. We both got it when we got home.”
Bill McCain, who still owns the family land that once was Waverly Plantation – 2,000 acres at Teoc — said John McCain visited family in Mississippi many times in his earlier years.
At Waverly, prior to the Civil War, Bill and John McCain’s great-great-grandfather, William Alexander McCain, owned 52 slaves. He and a brother bought the land in 1851.
Senator McCain reportedly did not learn of his family’s slave-owning legacy until 2000, when journalists Jake Tapper and Suzi Parker dug into the family history and showed McCain documents proving it. At the time, he said he was surprised and sobered by the revelation.
“The last of Senator McCain’s direct family line to live here permanently was his great-grandfather, John S. McCain,” said Pamela Lee, mayor of Carrollton.
That John S. McCain served as sheriff and county supervisor in Carrollton and, according to Lee, was a member of the Presbyterian Church. His son John S. “Slew” McCain I, Senator McCain’s grandfather, attended the U.S. Naval Academy and became a four-star U.S. Navy admiral, as did McCain’s father, John “Jack” S. McCain Jr., paving the way for the Sen. John S. McCain III’s military career.
McCain crash-landed in a lake outside Hanoi in 1967 while serving as a naval officer in Vietnam and was held and tortured as a prisoner of war until 1973. He sustained serious injuries from the crash and during his captivity that affected him for the rest of his life.
He died of an invasive brain tumor.
He served in the U.S. Senate for 31 years, beginning in 1987. He was the Republican nominee for U.S. president in 2008 but lost the election to Barack Obama. He is being remembered this week as one of the great “lions” of the Senate.
The Teoc area still is home to a number of black McCains, descendants of slaves owned by the McCains prior to the war.
In 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported on the black McCains who “resisted the Ku Klux Klan, led the civil rights movement and voter registration efforts in the 1960s and helped integrate public schools in Mississippi.”
Among the family members was George McCain, Greenwood’s first black fire chief, who died in a motorcycle accident in 2003.
During his presidential campaign, McCain commented on the families’ connected histories, saying:
“How the Teoc descendants have served their community, and by extension their country, is a testament to the power of family, love, compassion and the human spirit, an example for all citizens.”
The Merrill Store and Museum in Carrollton houses an exhibition of McCain-family memorabilia including a diagram of all the family connections over the last century.
One of Senator McCain’s cousins is famed Mississippi novelist Elizabeth Spencer, who grew up in Carrollton.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
