I find several things interesting. I have yet to find an ancestor in my father's line who wasn't born on this continent. My mother's family came to the U.S. in 1921 (from Canada), but the Ivy line, and the associated Moody line (my paternal grandmother's people) all seem to have been here from quite early. Even the guy born in 1777 came from North Carolina; he moved his family to Tennessee between 1805 and 1810. They all seem to have lived, before the Civil War, in the "border states" - Tennessee and Kentucky. Based on census and other records, they all seem to have relocated to Missouri sometime after the Civil war.
Both Tennessee and Kentucky had slaves before the Civil War, despite the fact that the U.S. banned the importation of slaves in March 1807. At that time the South had a self-sustaining population of over 4 million slaves (https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/congress-abolishes-the-african-slave-trade), as children born to slaves were automatically enslaved. It remained legal to trade slaves within the U.S., they only banned importation.
Both Tennessee and Kentucky joined the Confederacy when the war began. For that matter, Missouri (where everyone eventually ended up) was a slave state until the Kansas-Nebras.ka Act in 1854. So it would have been legal for a resident of any of those states to own slaves before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.
So, did my ancestors own slaves? I'm just beginning to do the research, which will involve trying to read filmed census records from a very long time ago, in handwriting which may or may not be legible. My initial guess is, they were poor dirt farmers and couldn't afford slaves. But slaves owned were included in U.S. census records through the 1840 census, and I have no idea what I'll find. I'll post again when I have something definite.
I think the whole "white guilt" thing is getting a little out of hand. Trying to hold oneself "responsible" for things that happened in some other place, in some other time, seems self-defeating to me. Ditto with taking credit. My people on my father's side go back to colonial times, and a distant ancestor (Robert Calef [Calef is my real birth name]) published a pamphlet against the persecution of witches (to rile up Cotton Mather), which I always am proud to reference. But who am I to take credit for that? This was over 300 years ago! My people fought on the Union side in the Civil War, and none of them ever lived in the American South. Mostly West Country folk (UK) and Norwegian farmers, who ended up in the Midwest by the mid-19th century. I don't see how a "person of color" gets to trade on their forebears claims; I certainly don't feel obligated to them to right wrongs of centuries, or many decades past. It doesn't seem to matter that we fought a revolution and a Civil War to establish the rights and privileges which everyone enjoys today. I worked for 27 years in a federal agency and helped thousands of "people of color" but that doesn't seem to matter. I'm just another "white supremacist" making excuses for bigotry and "structural" "systemic" racism. I do not feel personally guilty about America's history, or the progress of its record on human rights.
ReplyDeleteI think the whole "white guilt" thing is getting a little out of hand. Trying to hold oneself "responsible" for things that happened in some other place, in some other time, seems self-defeating to me. Ditto with taking credit. My people on my father's side go back to colonial times, and a distant ancestor (Robert Calef [Calef is my real birth name]) published a pamphlet against the persecution of witches (to rile up Cotton Mather), which I always am proud to reference. But who am I to take credit for that? This was over 300 years ago! My people fought on the Union side in the Civil War, and none of them ever lived in the American South. Mostly West Country folk (UK) and Norwegian farmers, who ended up in the Midwest by the mid-19th century. I don't see how a "person of color" gets to trade on their forebears claims; I certainly don't feel obligated to them to right wrongs of centuries, or many decades past. It doesn't seem to matter that we fought a revolution and a Civil War to establish the rights and privileges which everyone enjoys today. I worked for 27 years in a federal agency and helped thousands of "people of color" but that doesn't seem to matter. I'm just another "white supremacist" making excuses for bigotry and "structural" "systemic" racism. I do not feel personally guilty about America's history, or the progress of its record on human rights.
ReplyDeleteI reread my post and I didn't make any references to "white guilt." I wrote this because I was wondering if my ancestors were slave owners. I don't feel responsible if they were; as you said, it's over a century ago. I just want to know. I may never find out, as I'm having trouble learning exactly where they lived, which means I can't use the census. If I do find out, that will be the time to assess how I feel about it.
DeleteNobody called you a white supremacist; nobody expects you to right the wrongs of centuries.
The problem with your argument about "the rights and privileges which everyone enjoys today" is that everyone doesn't. The discussions after the death of George Floyd have made it clear to me that, after the slavery supporters in the South essentially eliminated the efforts of Reconstruction to extend those rights and privileges to the freed slaves, some parts of white American society simply refused to obey those constitutional amendments, and most of the rest of white American society ignored that. And that is directly related to the fact that Black people are poorer and sicker, in this pandemic, than white people.
I do wonder why you posted the same comment twice.
ReplyDeleteHedera: Oh, that was just an error. Sometimes the app you use gets confused, and doesn't confirm a post (there's a delay, and you think it's been lost).
ReplyDeleteOh yes, Iv'e been called a white supremacist many times online. The term is thrown around quite "liberally" these days, especially by young academics who believe everyone has some sort of "suppressed" (or concealed) prejudice lurking below the surface of consciousness, which they aren't even quite aware of.
The existence of this form of "social injustice" is a new basis for lobbying on behalf of minority rights and privileges. They get to carry the gripe while we get the guilt. We "owe" "people of color" reparations and entitlements because of all the bad things in history that have happened--not to them--but to their ancestors.
It's blatantly racist to think one can make sensible social policy through racial distinctions. There are "intelligent" people in academia right now advocating for individual racial reparations, some as absurd as granting a million dollars for every black person in America who can trace their ancestry back to the Civil War. I don't think anyone should need to take any of that seriously, but it does show how far off the deep end this discussion has gone.
The relationship between the black communities and law enforcement is the result of bad behavior on both sides going back generations. For every Floyd incident there are hundreds of thousands of lawless encounters with ghetto gangs involving firearms. But we're expected to think that if we had fewer police, or even no police at all, everything would be peaceful and orderly.
It might satisfy your curiosity to know whether or not your forbears were ever slave-holders. If that had been the case, there is nothing meaningful you could do about it now, and no reason whatsoever to believe you bear any lingering guilt as a result. We can't go to Germany now and sit down with people who weren't even alive during WWII and expect them to take responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust. That's absurd. You learn about history, and try to be better. But the idea of a continuing debt that continues, decade after decade, generation after generation, is silly.