My ancestors owned slaves. What I’m doing about it
It felt like a kick in the stomach. Exploring an ancestry website, I discovered an 1860 Slave Schedule showing that my great-great-grandfather, William Henry Robertson of Mason County, Kentucky, owned 13 human beings. I had often wondered if any of my ancestors were slave owners. Now I knew.
Feeling this new knowledge like a burn, I embarked on a search for William Henry Robertson. My grandparents’ dairy and tobacco farm that I roamed as a boy was likely part of the same land my great-great-grandfather had owned. It was a few miles from the Ohio River which divided the slave state of Kentucky from the free state of Ohio. In 1860, 15,000 free people lived in the county. About 5% of them owned slaves.
William Henry Robertson attended medical college, married and had five children. He owned a farm and practiced medicine. In 1860, his 13 slaves, seven of them children, lived in three houses. He signed a petition opposing Southern secession from the Union. Being both pro-slavery and pro-union was the position of the Constitutional Union Party, which carried the state in the election of 1860. He died at the age of 54, three years after the end of the Civil War. This is all I know.
Ancestry websites, with their trove of records, pull us close, but not close enough. It was not the census-taker’s facts I sought, but the human stories. I wanted to know how my great-greatgrandfather lived his life, what he thought, how he felt. I wanted to know whether he wrestled with the issue of slavery, why he was not an abolitionist. I found no answers.
Though slave-owning was widely accepted in Kentucky, abolitionists abounded. In 1849, 535 citizens of Mason County signed a petition calling for the emancipation of slaves. My greatgreat-grandfather was not among the signers. The well-known abolitionist
John Rankin lived eight miles downriver in Ripley, Ohio, one of the most important towns on the Underground Railroad. John Parker, a former slave who also lived in Ripley, helped more than 400 escaped slaves in their flight to freedom.
In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eliza (like the real woman on whom the character was based) ran with her infant from her home in Mason County and crossed the partially frozen Ohio River into Ripley. The spot couldn’t have been more than a few miles from my great-great-grandfather’s farm. The temper of the times might explain William Henry Robertson’s position, but it does not forgive it.
There is something about ancestors, even those who died before we were born, that speaks to us from the past. I can’t help feeling that I’m carrying baggage left by William Henry Robertson— whether I want to or not. In this, my perplexed feelings are a microcosm of contemporary American society.
Metaphorically and sometimes literally,
white Americans descend from slave holders, as Black Americans descend from slaves. We debate paying reparations, renouncing institutions connected to slavery and renaming streets and buildings. We wonder how to make good on the bad of our past.
The late Daniel Bell described two moral strains in the American character, “the piety and torment of Jonathan Edwards, obsessed with human depravity, and the practicality and expedience of Benjamin Franklin, oriented toward a world of possibility and gain.”
Both strains are with us still. Puritan righteousness is obsessed with the scourge of evil. Sin stamps us like a brand, and a nation, like an individual, must wear the scarlet letter forever. The cultural Protestantism of Franklin is roll-up-your-sleeves practical, committed to shaping a better future. It favors improvement over punishment. It embodies the American belief that when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Paraphrasing a 20th century abolitionist, Martin Luther King who famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It bends not on its own, but by people acting to bend it. Though King denounced the sins of the past, he called people toward the future. He acknowledged the nightmare, but he spoke of the dream. His social gospel had more in common with Ben Franklin than with Jonathan Edwards. Work, not woke, paves the road to the prize.
For the past decade I have taught at San Quentin Prison. I see men making themselves better. They take classes, commit themselves to self-help groups, organize peace days on the yard and walk to raise money for breast cancer. Those with the necessary clearance fight wildfires.
There is something deeply wrong about defining individuals — or a nation — by their past sins, by assuming they cannot change, by denying we are all works-in-progress. Ben Franklin did not become an abolitionist until his last years. Should we cancel him for his earlier position?
When the aggressive part of our nature finds its outlet in self-righteous moralism, injecting the venom of Salem into contemporary life, the moral arc is bent toward hatred, not justice. Instead of making the world better, we bask in self-righteousness or—and this is the other side of the Puritan coin—we marinate in guilt. Such rage wounds the human soul.
The most likely verdict on William Henry Robertson is that he was a man of his day, acting in accord with the prevailing winds, failing to rise above his time. I had hoped for moral heroic, but failed to find it.
That kick in the stomach must become a kick in the butt. What we need is not a cancel list, but a to-do list.
We have a debt to pay—to our ancestors (both the wrong-doers and the wronged), to the arc of justice, and to ourselves.
Bill Smoot grew up in Maysville, Kentucky. He is a writer of fiction and essays. He lives in Berkeley, CA, and teaches college courses at San Quentin Prison. His writer’s website is billsmoot.net