More than 100 U.S. political elites have family links to slavery

June 27, 2023 7:03 AM

whats your family secret? America's Family Secret More than 100 U.S. leaders – lawmakers, presidents, governors and justices – have slaveholding ancestors, a Reuters examination found. Few are willing to talk about their ties to America's “original sin”
posted by robbyrobs (52 comments total)

Okay, I need to read this later today, but this might be the least surprising thing in the world.
posted by brundlefly at 7:10 AM on June 27, 2023 [17 favorites]

The reticence was true of members of both parties. For members of the 117th Congress, Reuters identified 77 Republicans, 22 Democrats and one Independent whose ancestors enslaved people. Of those 77 Republicans, 10 commented on the findings. Of the 22 Democrats, 14 commented. Independent Angus King did not respond.

Where the reticence of "both parties" means 87% of Republicans and 36% of Democrats declining to respond (39% if you include King, who caucuses with the Democrats). I would've rather they all responded, but Reuters should've put it in percentage terms to make it clear that this is far from an equal problem in the two major parties.
posted by jedicus at 7:20 AM on June 27, 2023 [30 favorites]

On the one hand, generational wealth and dynastic power relations matters a lot in terms of the priorities of American politics, on the other hand I don’t want this used by other Americans to wash their hands of complicity in the current regime of white supremacy.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:23 AM on June 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

on the other hand I don’t want this used by other Americans to wash their hands of complicity in the current regime of white supremacy.

...The article notes that Biden and all of the other living former presidents - save one - has slaveowning ancestry. And - Barack Obama is not that "save one"; his mother's side has slaveholding ancestors. Rather, the only former US president who does not have a family history of owning slaves is Donald Trump.

I had two reactions upon reading that: first I was angry because I just know that if that fucker gets word of this he is going to use it as a talking point in his campaigns and spin the whole thing to make him look good. Then I realized that just before reading this article I'd been reading a bunch of O. Henry stories - and if that isn't an O. Henry twist, I don't know what is.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:27 AM on June 27, 2023 [27 favorites]

by the way good book: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
posted by robbyrobs at 7:30 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wonder what the percentage is for an American who had ancestors living in the US dating back to the era of slavery. The founding of the (political) country was 10 generations ago, and lineage is a game of exponentials. I know for me, a nobody, coming two families who struggled to be considered lower middle class, we have identified both a well known abolitionist and a Confederate person who shows up in Civil War histories in the family trees. I’d feel better knowing what the general odds are for anyone alive who have one or more ancestors dating back that far.
posted by Silvery Fish at 7:30 AM on June 27, 2023 [24 favorites]

Rather, the only former US president who does not have a family history of owning slaves is Donald Trump.

Importantly, as the article notes, Trump's ancestors came to the US after the abolition of slavery. That probably wouldn't stop him or his supporters from claiming some imaginary moral high ground, though.
posted by jedicus at 7:31 AM on June 27, 2023 [12 favorites]

I thought it was interesting that white people with slaveholding ancestors were more likely to support reparations.

In general, I think that one's views about how to make society more just and equal should not depend on whether or not you know you had a slaveholding ancestor. On an individual level, no one is responsible for what their relatives did many generations ago. It's not an indicator of whether you are good or bad or what your values are. It is potentially an interesting window into personal reflection on the topic.
posted by snofoam at 7:35 AM on June 27, 2023 [15 favorites]

That probably wouldn't stop him or his supporters from claiming some imaginary moral high ground, though.

Oh, yeah, it's absolutely a very conditional data point. But subtlety and context are not things the man or his followers really seem to pay attention to.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:35 AM on June 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

None of the 118 leaders identified by Reuters disputed the findings that at least one of their ancestors had enslaved people. In a letter describing the project to them

Previously, up-article: [Republican Nancy Mace] later provided this statement in response to the family tree Reuters provided: “I don’t recognize these people named and can’t confirm they are relatives...."

Technically she's not disputing that her ancestors had enslaved people, she's just disputing whether those that enslaved people are really her ancestors. I'm honestly surprised more Republicans didn't have similar responses.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:36 AM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

wash their hands of complicity in the current regime of white supremacy
This. My ancestors didn't arrive until long after the end of slavery in the US, but that doesn't mean I'm not still part of the system that carries it's echoes, or that (as visibly white) I'm not still benefiting from it.
posted by phooky at 7:39 AM on June 27, 2023 [17 favorites]

CW: sexual assault
It’s also important to remember that many Black Americans are descendants of enslavers, also. CR Williams’ “My Body is a Confederate Monument” (NYT) (ungated) is a brief and powerful exploration of this. Under Jim Crow, the legal codification of of sexual assault of Black women by white men persisted well into the 20th century.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:43 AM on June 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

If you're say 40 today, and your ancestors came to America before the end of slavery, whether as slaves or as white people, then there's a good chance at least one of your 128 5th great grand parents or your 256 6th great grand parents was involved in slavery or a slave holder. It's not about holding individuals accountable for the sins of their distant relatives, which is absurd, but holding society accountable for the injustices it allowed, and that it continues to multiply by avoiding reparations.
posted by dis_integration at 7:48 AM on June 27, 2023 [20 favorites]

It's not about holding individuals accountable for the sins of their distant relatives, which is absurd, but holding society accountable for the injustices it allowed, and that it continues to multiply by avoiding reparations.

I hope that the takeaway from this isn't that kind of clickbaity accusatory thing, and it would be great if this can reopen a broader discussion about reparations and how we can reasonably right these wrongs at this late date.

I'm not optimistic that any of my conservative relatives will get into Ta-Nehisi Coates' writing about it, but it would be great to at least dispel the Republican talking points about how reparations would work ("they'll confiscate your assets, just for being white!") and to start to visualize how good life could be in this country if we all had the same opportunities.
posted by knotty knots at 8:00 AM on June 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

My ancestors came to the US too late to enslave people, but we sure did benefit from an economic base built on stolen labor, and they sure did farm stolen land, and we sure were on the right side of redlining.
posted by BrashTech at 8:00 AM on June 27, 2023 [18 favorites]

Yeah, I too have a hard time imagining just about anybody not having slave holding ancestors. Even among people whose ancestors arrived after slavery. What are the odds that none of your more recent ancestors didn't go to bone town with someone whose family came to the US before?
posted by brundlefly at 8:10 AM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you're say 40 today, and your ancestors came to America before the end of slavery, whether as slaves or as white people, then there's a good chance at least one of your 128 5th great grand parents or your 256 6th great grand parents was involved in slavery or a slave holder.

If watching Finding Your Roots has taught me anything, it’s that slaves were everywhere, not just on southern plantations. Cities in the north were full of homes where one or two slaves were working as cooks, maids, bellmen, etc. Homes of people one wouldn’t immediately think of as “slaveholders.” Yet, they were, indeed, slaveholders.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:14 AM on June 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yeah, I too have a hard time imagining just about anybody not having slave holding ancestors. Even among people whose ancestors arrived after slavery. What are the odds that none of your more recent ancestors didn't go to bone town with someone whose family came to the US before?

I get what you are saying, but the US has about 50 million immigrants and another 40 million children of first generation immigrants. A person who has family who have lived here for a relatively long time might easily forget how many Americans have arrived relatively recently.
posted by snofoam at 8:16 AM on June 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

Every American benefited from the labor expended by slaves to clear forests, plant farms, drain swamps, build roads, and run the largest industries in the US during slavery (cotton and sugar). The economy as a whole, North South East and West benefited. No one gets to wash their hands.

For years living in the very racist North, we would blame those Southern people. Don't let this work as a "football" for people to say "my family didn't own slaves, not my problem." The whole of America's growth is predicated on slavery.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:21 AM on June 27, 2023 [25 favorites]

I learned some of my family's history of enslaving people by consulting the Slave Schedules (just like this article did). These are US Census records from 1850 and 1860 of slave ownership, indexed by the slaver's name. They're pretty easy to search via Ancestry but I think you still have to do it explicitly, it's not one of the records they volunteer as a hint.

Finding specific evidence of the 13 old girl my great-great-great-grandparents owned was profoundly depressing for me. Not a surprise, given my family history, but a terrible feeling.

Unfortunately the slave schedules tell us very little about the enslaved people, not even their names. I wrote a bit about what I could infer. Later I learned that someone recently placed a nameless grave marker to "seven Negro slaves" on a family property, so that's more than the one I found in the 1860 slave schedule. I'm certain other ancestors were slavers too, but I have no specific information (yet).

There are way, way more records about enslaved people than are easily searchable online. This Reuters article is remarkable in how much detail they went through; they wrote a companion piece about their data sources.

I'm approaching this as a white member of a Southern family and feel a combination of curiosity and shame. I've talked to a few African American friends about their own genealogy searches and have been amazed at how.. equanimous? composed? they are when talking about it. For the people I've talked to their joy at finding family history seems to outweigh the grief of finding evidence of such suffering. Then again growing up Black in America, I imagine one gets used to bearing a history of violence. Genealogy research can at least combat the erasure of history.

Between genetic testing and records digitization, some African American folks are finding a lot more information than they have before. Including not only family history but also the joy of finding new living relatives. It feels vital to me to make more documents available. There's a lot of unexamined paper sitting in boxes in courthouse basements that could be made available to people.

This topic is about to get a lot more fraught if the US gets anywhere meaningful towards slavery reparations. Particularly for any program that requires documentation of a family history of enslavement.
posted by Nelson at 8:24 AM on June 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

My Dad was always going on about how our ancestors came over on the Mayflower. And my mom's side was Pennsylvania Dutch, from the Palatinate. There is a 100% chance that some, if not many, of my ancestors owned slaves or were at least adjacent to the slave trade. Also in my family history: British loyalists who fled to Canada and a Union civil war soldier who went AWOL because his commander went all Heart of Darkness.

I'm not quite sure what to do with that information, but I'm not opposed to reparations.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:45 AM on June 27, 2023

My brief foray into Ancestry.com revealed a many-greats grandpa who asked Tennessee for benefits for being a Confederate veteran so, it doesn't really matter whether he personally owned slaves. Close enough.
posted by emjaybee at 9:01 AM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's not just USAians. Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance (2021), by Richard "British Establishment" Atkinson is a recent book [reviewed] about digging through obscure archives to uncover a tale about his slave-holding eponymous ancestor. See also Edward Colston's statue tipping in Bristol UK 3 years ago MetaPrev.

And is it true that 4% of white folks have African ancestry?
posted by BobTheScientist at 9:11 AM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

…this might be the least surprising thing in the world.

What surprised me was how low the number was; I wonder how many politicians they looked at didn’t have ancestors who owned slaves. Unless I missed something Trump was the only one mentioned.

It’s also important to remember that many Black Americans are descendants of enslavers

I thought about that too. I wonder what percentage of the descendants of slaves include one or more white ancestors; as Mary Chestnut wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos ones sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” I wonder specifically about Clarence Thomas.

I am pretty sure that there are slaveholders on both sides of my family tree. And as the article says, I am definitely sympathetic toward reparations. It is to this country’s shame that we didn’t more thoroughly root out that institution and its successors when we had the chance.
posted by TedW at 9:15 AM on June 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not just USians — Emma Rothschild’s An Infinite History is an incredibly detailed account of generations of mostly-poor ish people in a small city in France. Over and over they’re desperate to get a fraction of a share in a Caribbean plantation utterly dependent on slavery, because that’s the most probable way to improve their own material conditions.
posted by clew at 9:21 AM on June 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

My paternal ancestors owned a plantation in Natchez; they also owned one outside of Natchez that's now a majority-Black "town" that was mostly mobile homes when I drove through about 20 years ago. I also have ancestors/relatives in that line who were Confederate veterans. I don't know whether my mother's people held slaves but they had enough money to send her grandfather away to college in the late 1800s/early 1900s, so: probably. (The money in my mother's childhood was oil money but who was in a position to exploit oil money? Landholders, who were mostly slaveholders.)

My family is all from Texas and has been here for generations. Both of my parents grew to adulthood under Jim Crow, so even though they weren't slaveholders themselves, they benefited directly in their lifetime from explicit white advancement at the expense of Black citizens, built into the legal system.

My great-grandfather on my father's side was involved in politics in his little county in Texas. He was the county judge (chief executive) at one point. My maternal line great-grandmother's second husband, my maternal grandmother's stepfather who was the only grandfather my mother knew, was the name brand local type with oil money when she was a kid during WWII.

People who had money held slaves. People who had money went into politics. People who had significant generational wealth and influence kept making money and putting people up for office. Given all that it's unsurprising that so many politicians in the present day have slaveholding in their family history (even Obama). It would be more surprising if they didn't.

I don't like the language of "original sin" but I really do feel like slavery is the original sin of America and that we'll never be able to root it out because too many of our institutions are implicated in it. Not just our political institutions and the Founding Fathers and so on, but our elite universities, our museums and historical societies, and so on. And the later institutions developed by industrialists were built on that model: extracting everything from wage workers by coercion/force and violence (see: how we got our labor laws in the US) and then laundering it through museums and libraries and so on. It's what we have, but it's profoundly fucked up.

(I am 100% behind reparations, fwiw.)
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:22 AM on June 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

My mother, when and if this came up, claimed innocence in the slavery question because her family came from Germany in 1929.

Then my father's family... we have Jamestown (I have an ancestor who got a "you should go to Jamestown instead of prison" note), and years in Virginia and Maryland, and considering how the only great-grandfather I knew I remember as a terrible human and a racist, I would not be surprised for slave-owners in my family line.

I'm also in favor of reparations.
posted by mephron at 9:52 AM on June 27, 2023

On an individual level, no one is responsible for what their relatives did many generations ago.

To me this depends on whether you received a generational wealth inheritance that can be tied back to slavery. I assume some of the US elite political leadership has.
posted by srboisvert at 10:29 AM on June 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

This article is powerful. But I'd rather see it as more evidence that we can't as a nation look away from how widespread the practice was - and less about making it a prevailing case for reparations. It's just too narrow a reason - for reasons including the side discussion that's popping up here, of whether or not each of us personally does have that ancestral guilt). I'd even argue that reparations shouldn't only apply to descendants of former slaves, though I understand why that line in the sand makes sense. When you look at all the ways that American power structures have made it close to impossible for Black Americans to rise post-slavery - from assaults like the Tulsa riots, to modern actions like redlining and targeted eminent domain - slavery is only one facet of the way America was built on white supremacy. Especially now, when generational wealth seems to be crucial to reach almost any of the success markers people used to assume they could reach if they worked hard enough. When property values rose in restricted communities, while they fell in those that weren't because of the existence of restricted communities in the area - that imbalance alone enriched white people at the expense of Black people, and those repercussions directly affect who's able to buy homes today, even though those restrictions are (legally) gone. And that's just in the last 75 years.

Sorry to derail from the main discussion - I think that talking about who and how many people had slaves is both one of the most important conversations we need to keep having, and also one of those third-rail conversations that white people use to absolve ourselves (it wasn't my family / it was over a century ago / see, everyone was doing it, even Obama's ancestors) from doing anything about it now.
posted by Mchelly at 10:43 AM on June 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

Of course, this is only one aspect of a very broad approach in terms of who has benefited from colonization and settler-colonialism which continues today. So even if ones family were not enslavers, where did your family get your land? Look back to the land grants from the U.S. government. Land that was not originally the U.S. government's to give was handed to or sold for a decent price to settlers.
Families built their wealth and legacy on that originally stolen land.

it's not to hold individuals solely accountable but to recognize the truth; to honor the first people's who were here for millenia before colonization.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 10:46 AM on June 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Absolutely, Mchelly. You said it better than I could.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 10:47 AM on June 27, 2023

To me this depends on whether you received a generational wealth inheritance that can be tied back to slavery. I assume some of the US elite political leadership has.

I don’t think receiving an inheritance makes you responsible for what someone else did long before you were born. But once you have the inheritance, it is your responsibility to decide what you do with it. To me, those are two different things. We are responsible for what we do, but there’s no utility in holding someone responsible for what an ancestor did. We can’t time travel and fix it.
posted by snofoam at 10:53 AM on June 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I too have a hard time imagining just about anybody not having slave holding ancestors. Even among people whose ancestors arrived after slavery. What are the odds that none of your more recent ancestors didn't go to bone town with someone whose family came to the US before?

I mean, in my case that's making fairly scurrilous accusations about very specific people? Including me, there are five people in my direct family line who were born in the US: me, my parents, and one set of grandparents. I can't say for 100% certain, but I feel reasonably confident of all of our parentage. I don't think I'm descended from slaveholders.

Having said that, it's telling that support for reparations is lower among white people who don't think they have slaveholding ancestors than those who think they do. I think it's really vital for white people to explore their families' relationship to slavery, but it's equally important for those of us without that personal history to examine the many indirect ways that we have benefited from the continuing legacies of slavery and white supremacy. And I have, in many fairly concrete ways, benefited from those legacies, even though nobody in my family was in the US until almost 50 years after abolition.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:54 AM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I too have a hard time imagining just about anybody not having slave holding ancestors.

Depends on geographical origin and ethnicity. Many Eastern European immigrants only came in the 20th century. I've researched my family tree back to the late 18th century and my first ancestor arrived to the US in 1875. They married another Polish-American whose ancestors were all born in Poland and their descendants either married 1st or 2nd generation European immigrants.

All that said, we still benefited from having white skin and being allowed into the ruling class of the US.
posted by asteria at 11:23 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Finding specific evidence of the 13 old girl my great-great-great-grandparents owned was profoundly depressing for me. Not a surprise, given my family history, but a terrible feeling.

Yeah, knowing it was likely was a completely different feeling from seeing it in black and white and knowing the names of the people involved.

They didn't even teach us in school that slavery existed in this part of the country. I hope they're doing a better job of that now.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:31 PM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

as Mary Chestnut wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos ones sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”

When I was a kid I read a memoir of a woman who had grown up on an antebellum plantation. She waxed nostalgic about the enslaved children she had played with, describing many of them as "mulatto," "yellow," and "nearly white," and how they were all born right there on the plantation instead of being purchased elsewhere, with seemingly no awareness even in retrospect of what that meant.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:36 PM on June 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

The relevance of politicians’ ancestors owning spaces is that the generational wealth crated from that stolen labor has directly led to those politicians’ present positions, in most cases. Yes, this is about the broader question of reparations. But it’s also about how political power never truly devolved from the slave-owning class in the US.
posted by eviemath at 1:08 PM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I grew up in a trailer park and in 7th grade we did family history and took a field trip to our counties genealogical center and most of us had slave holding ancestors (my family had 26) and we were all dirt poor, I don't really think this is the gotcha people are making it out to be.
posted by julie_of_the_jungle at 1:36 PM on June 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

The NPR program 1A had a really interesting episode last week on How Genealogy Is Used To Track Black Family Histories
posted by hydropsyche at 3:21 PM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

> I had two reactions upon reading that: first I was angry because I just know that if that fucker gets word of this he is going to use it as a talking point in his campaigns and spin the whole thing to make him look good.

The Fucker did indeed do exactly that, very quickly, and in the nauseating, self-serving way we've all come to expect.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 9:54 PM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm sort of surprised it's so few, though thinking about demographics it kind of makes sense I guess.

With a few exceptions I think focusing on individuals misses the point. Every American who has prospered here has benefited off wealth built up by slave labor whether we had ancestors who were here before 1865 or not.

Yeah, I too have a hard time imagining just about anybody not having slave holding ancestors. Even among people whose ancestors arrived after slavery. What are the odds that none of your more recent ancestors didn't go to bone town with someone whose family came to the US before?

My reaction to this is the same as ArbitraryAndCapricious. I think it underestimates how many people arrived in the US because of post-slavery immigration, and perhaps how few generations there are between us and the 19th century. And maybe how well integrated the first generation was in any wave.

I'm a middle aged guy. My maternal grandparents were born in the early 20th century in Austria-Hungary, and were in the US by the 1920s, when Eastern Europeans were the scary immigrants. So if there's a slaveholder on that side of the family it's basically asking whether my mother is the bastard child of an affair, or I am.

I'm a little hazier on my father's side but if I'm counting correctly it still comes down to two options for a child-producing affair with a WASP-y type that produced a child there, too.
posted by mark k at 11:10 PM on June 27, 2023

My general impression is that pretty much all my ancestors came to the U.S. from either Great Britain or Scandanavia in the mid 1800s. Meaning that they didn't really have a chance to participate in the American slavery system before it was abolished.

But . . . I went back and looked more closely, and what do you know: 12 of 16 of my great-great grandparents are exactly that. But what about the remaining 4?

It turns out, in short, that the two major branches spent many generations in #1. New Netherlands/New York and #2. the Massachusetts Bay colony. A few strayed into Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, etc.

So all perfectly safe, right? New England, no deep south - or even Virginia or Maryland.

Then - without even looking hard! - we come across this:

25 May 1671. Jacob Jansz Flodder appearing before the court is not satisfied with the oath of Eldert Gerberts and his wife regarding the purchase of the negress' child, alleging that they swear falsely; furthermore that he cannot sell the child, as the same is his own bastard child. (p. 254)

OK, then . . . apparently owning slaves and raping them as well.

The only plus side - he seems reluctant to sell his own offspring. So that's . . . something?

(I never have quite understood how happy the southern slave owners seemed to be to enslave their very own children. They almost seemed to take special joy in that end of it. It's . . . hard to understand.)

So does this change anything?

In one sense, no more so than learning basic historical facts about slavery - for example, that it did exist in New England for some hundreds of years.

On the flip side, yeah this does make it a little more personal, and hard to avoid.

It's my 9th great grandfather - so not exactly that close in time or relation. A person has 2048 9th great grandparents. In a sample that size, you're going to have one of just about every kind of person there is.

But still.
posted by flug at 12:04 AM on June 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Something like a 12th generation American on both sides, with ancestry in North America that goes back to 1618 in Virginia; in the course of my genealogical research, I've discovered that my ancestors, collectively, probably enslaved over a thousand people over the 175 or so years between the late 1600's and emancipation. Two of my 3rd great-grandfathers appeared on the slave schedule of the 1860 census (one was a Baptist minister in Georgia, the other was a Catholic farmer in western Kentucky). Some of my ancestors who were enslavers are also ancestors of some of the people on this list (Clinton and Obama, to name two I can identify).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:46 AM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Fucker did indeed do exactly that, very quickly, and in the nauseating, self-serving way we've all come to expect.

Omg. It’s actually not the self-serving way I expected. That looks polished. Most of his tweets are explicitly bragging about how great he is, how much better he is. This doesn’t say that - he’s just throwing mud at Biden and Obama. And not linking - just saying Reuters. There’s literally a pull quote that he’s the only living President who did a good thing, and he didn’t use it. He does not want his base to know that his family didn’t own slaves, only that theirs did. It’s the “everyone does it; look at the Democrat hypocrites” accusatory playbook Republicans use to defend themselves when they’ve done something worse, only this time, he didn’t even do the thing. It’s like he still wants the credit for it. He’s posting about it and silently still playing to the less educated white supremacist crowd.
posted by Mchelly at 3:06 AM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Trump's ancestors came to the US after the abolition of slavery. That probably wouldn't stop him or his supporters from claiming some imaginary moral high ground, though.

This idea misunderstands Trump's appeal on such an issue.

For his vocal followers getting 'the liberals' mad is a goal. By making a claim of 'the high ground' and then pointing at those who complain about the slave ownership claim Trump and his followers have people to poke at to get a rise out of. By getting a rise out of someone means it will get repeated and A/B tested in the repetition of others until 'the best' versions rise to the top.

Social media has allowed this 'trolling culture' of politics to flourish.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:37 AM on June 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

I grew up in a trailer park and in 7th grade we did family history and took a field trip to our counties genealogical center and most of us had slave holding ancestors (my family had 26) and we were all dirt poor, I don't really think this is the gotcha people are making it out to be.

It is in a Trumpian sort of way, if you had slaves why ain't you rich?
posted by kingdead at 4:24 AM on June 28, 2023

I'll mention that another thing you can find as you dig through ancestry.com or similar portals--a common thing for people to consult in the surviving documentation are military records. In the U.S., that does include records of people serving in militias that fought Native Americans. I've run into this multiple times. Not every soldier ancestor is a revolutionary war hero.
posted by gimonca at 4:40 AM on June 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

I never have quite understood how happy the southern slave owners seemed to be to enslave their very own children.

It's worth trying to understand this because it speaks so directly the mindset that enables one human being to own another human being. Slaves were considered as much like livestock as people and slave breeding was an explicit practice. Many families looked the other way if the master of the house raped and impregnated the women he enslaved. Some welcomed the increase in wealth.

Also there's the particularly odd thing in American chattel slavery where the child of a female slave and male free person was enslaved. That was an explicit break with English law made in the 17th century, most likely as a way to make it easier for colonists to build wealth by enslaving more children.

There must be good scholarship on the topic of how masters saw their relationships with the women they raped and the slave children they produced. Anyone have a recommendation?
posted by Nelson at 8:23 AM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not every soldier ancestor is a revolutionary war hero.

Or a Civil War hero, for that matter. I found that a 1st cousin, 5x removed was colonel of a Minnesota infantry regiment; he had been the owner and editor/ of an abolitionist newspaper, and was the first Republican elected Secretary of State in Ohio before moving to Minnesota (where he was also elected Secretary of State). His military service as colonel of the 10th Minnesota consisted of suppressing a Sioux uprising and presiding over the largest mass execution in American history.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:52 AM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

There must be good scholarship on the topic of how masters saw their relationships with the women they raped and the slave children they produced. Anyone have a recommendation?

Start with Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello and if you're interested in the 19th-century fictional take on it, try William Wells Brown's Clotel.
posted by TwoStride at 11:04 AM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

> how masters saw their relationships with the women they raped and the slave children they produced.

The one story I happen to know about - though I feel it is very, very much the exception to the rule - is of Catherine and Simpson Younger.

They were children of Charles Younger and Elizabeth Simpson, an enslaved women who belonged to Charles. She was pregnant with Catherine by the time she was 15 - and Charles was 68. So it doesn't take much thinking to figure out what kind of relationship it was.

The interesting and unusual thing is that when Charles moved 2-3 days travel south, near Osceola (then and now a huge Confederate stronghold), he left his "legitimate" family behind and took Elizabeth and her children.

Then he arranged for the three to be freed at his death, for Elizabeth to inherit the land where they lived, and the two children to be educated at some of the best schools in the North, and generally provided for pretty generously.

All three ended up living really interesting and noteworthy lives (outline - far more detail). Clearly far outside the norm, but sheds a lot of light on the entire situation, partly because it is so unusual.

Charles was also grandfather of infamous Younger brothers, who rode with Jesse James both as Confederate guerrillas before and during the Civil War (Quantrill's Raiders/bushwhackers), and then as part of the James-Younger Gang).

So Charles's grandchildren included both freed slaves who played a major role in the fight for equal rights in the late 1800s, and some of the bloodiest and most ruthless Confederate partisans.
posted by flug at 12:29 PM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's fascinating on one level, just how collectively and individually we make sense of our ancestry and connection to history (in my case no known enslavers, but missionary ancestors pushing religious ideology in colonial India), but I think that the important takeaway in looking at these histories both individually and in aggregate is to own up to how wealth and power have descended from the monstrous system of slavery. I don't need people to feel guilt for their anscestors' actions, but I would love to see a greater acknowledgment of privilege that descendants continue to exploit. The Guardian's recent reporting on its own slavery past and the reparations movement in its Cotton Capital series has been very good in exploring and reckoning with these connections and possible responses. It's a conversation we should be having at a personal, community, and national level.
posted by amusebuche at 4:55 PM on June 28, 2023 [4 favorites]