So here's that other thing about my great-great grandfather Monroe Micajah Harris: he owned slaves.
At least, I think he did. I swear I remember a census detail showing three slaves in the household, and it must have been the 1860 census, but I can't find it anymore. Still, it wouldn't be at all surprising. The Harris line landed in Virginia and then out to Tennessee; that's the South.
This post was inspired by this:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slavery-lawmakers-overview/
Reuters found 118 senators, representatives, governors, supreme court justices and presidents with ties to slavery.
If you look down the list, documentation is shown where possible, and you will see excerpts from wills and census records, which is all very familiar to anyone who has done any family history.
Here is the really important comment I need to make on this article: it's probably a lot more.
Okay, I think I remember one ancestor having three slaves. Since that is my great-great-grandfather, in his generation I have 16 great-great grandparents. They weren't all in the South, so the ones in Massachusetts and New York at that time probably didn't have slaves. My ancestors in Italy at that time definitely did not have slaves. Others in the South -- who married Harris or gave birth to Harrises -- probably did.:Lower economic status could have prevented ownership, but would not have ruled out leasing, overseeing, or patrolling for runaway slaves.
Then there are the generations before them, and that extends beyond the South. Boston did not abolish slavery until 1783.
Some conservatives are weirdly proud that the one living former president without ancestors who owned slaves is Trump, but that makes sense. It was his grandfather that first came to the United States, and that was after the Civil War. If your ancestors are fairly recent immigrants, they may have never participated in chattel slavery.
Of course, other countries participated in the slave trade, and even after the United Kingdom stopped participating in that specifically, their growing textile trade was interwoven with the cheap cotton exports that slavery made possible.
There were a lot of dirty hands.
You may remember Ben Affleck appearing on Finding Your Roots and trying to get them to leave out his slave-owning ancestor. (I think he also had an abolitionist ancestor.)
https://variety.com/2015/biz/news/ben-affleck-slavery-pbs-censor-ancestors-1201477075/
An interesting thing about that article is that it lists three other celebrities who appeared and found slave owners: Ken Burns, Anderson Cooper, and Derek Jeter.
Jeter's father is Black. It could be on his white side, but given the legacy of rape that came with all of slavery's other abuses, there are probably many Black Americans who have slave owners among their ancestors.
This includes activist Angela Davis, who did find herself descended from at least one slave owner, as well as a Pilgrim, on her episode of Finding Your Roots, something else that conservatives thought gave them points.
Every time you go back a generation, the number of ancestors doubles, and our country has some pretty abominable history. You are probably tied to some of it if you go back far enough.
That's okay. You don't have to be ashamed of it or proud of it. It can be important to sit with the discomfort.
Then, sometimes things can be pretty amazing too.
You may have seen that President Barack Obama is also descended from at least one slave-owner. Again, that is not surprising. What you may not know is that our first Black president is apparently descended from John Punch, possibly the first American to experience chattel slavery.
Punch was among the first Africans brought to the colonies in North America, but at the time some of them were more like indentured servants. He ran away with two other servants, but his punishment was a lifetime of slavery. The white ones got lighter sentences, only an extra four years. This appears to be the beginning of race-based slavery and permanent slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Punch_(slave)
That ancestry is through President Obama's white mother, because that can happen too.
What do we do with this? We are certainly not responsible for the choices of our ancestors, but sometimes the legacies they leave are very real. This can include generational trauma and bad parenting patterns, but it can also include legacies of love and good family traditions, and sometimes generational wealth.
Then there is the collective legacy, with how our society and establishments work.
We do have shared responsibility for those.
We should spend some time on that.
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