Is That Legal?

Thanks a lot, Strom Thurmond's ancestor. Because of you we're today stuck with Al Sharpton.

For my family tree, you have to look to the generation of my great, great grandparents (ie back 4 generations from me). Three generations back, my family members were all born at about the time of the Civil War, so they would have been too young to own slaves.

Assuming that one's ancestors 4 generations back all lived in South Carolina (and were free), what are the chances that at least one of them owned slaves? Most folks have 16 different ancestors at that generation, so you would have sixteen bites at the (poison) apple of slave ownership, for one thing. That might make you think that the chances are pretty good that one of them owned slaves. And of course if all your ancestors 4 generations back lived in SC, then likely so did all your ancestors 5 generations back, giving you another 32 bites at the apple.

For Strom's family tree, one would not need to go back nearly so many generations and so the number of ancestors in question would be much smaller. On the other hand, Strom's famly was, I imagine, well to do and his ancestors no doubt owned lots and lots of slaves.

And there were lots of slaves being owned in South Carolina, too. Slaveryinamerica.org (which is not a source that I can vouch for) says that 58% of SC's population was enslaved in 1860 (about 400,000 slaves).

All of which would suggest that Ms. Senter might well be right. But the "everyone-did-it" defense, as you call it, is also implicitly an affirmative argument in favor of reparations. That is, if everyone really did do it, then isn't it reasonable for everyone to right the wrong? I doubt that was Ms. Senter's point, however.

ELM: This is actually deliciously complex, Mark. Ms. Senter is eliding two different arguments: (1) every native South Carolinian today has a slaveowner somewhere in the family tree; and (2) everybody owned slaves back in the day. (1) may be true, but (2) is most definitely false.

The distinction strikes me as important for just the reason you note: the issue of reparations. I think Ms. Senter is hinting at the idea that since "everybody" owned slaves back in the day, it really wasn't wrong. And that argument would tend to undercut, rather than support, the notion that there's something to repair.

Needless to say, I think that argument is wrong ... but I think you can declare slavery to be an appropriate occasion for some sort of redress without having to wrestle with the relativist notion that since everybody engaged in slavery at the time, it wasn't a redressable "wrong." I think you can simply point out that in fact not everybody owned slaves, and that the supposed monolithic acceptance of the institution of slavery in the American South was not monolithic.

Well, when I looked at the 1800 Census data for Virgina, what was striking is just how high the population of slaves was - in one county, almost 70%, and in many others, including ones I lived in, about half the population was enslaved.
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/population/pop1800numbers.html

The numbers amazed me - I certainly had not thought that the percentage of enslaved human beings basically exceeded one half of Virginia's population (when you exclude the essentially non-slave owning counties which became West Virginia). Obviously, the other free half of the population were not all slave owners, though all of Virginia's founding fathers certainly were. The discovery of these facts puts into a certain perspective the claim that slavery built America - it certainly built more of what I saw in historical Virginia than was ever revealed in Fairfax's school system. And yes, by the way, I did go to the last school desegregated in Fairfax County, in 1969 - it had been the black school, and since things were no longer separate, but now equal, it was renovated before the first white students arrived.

Colonial Virginia was fairly diverse economically, where South Carolina was the epitome of plantation culture - that is, a large number of humans owned as property performing the labor that allowed a small population of owners to prosper in their well mannered circle of fellow owners.

So actually, yes, to the extent that you have connections to that old structure, it is quite possible to have a personal connection to that time when the Constitution really respected property rights as the basis for the rule of law.

For Americans who grew up outside of the southern states, it may seem at times that many claims of their black fellow citizens seem extreme - and as the white population of those southern states have little interest in discussing the entirety of their past, it sometimes makes your comments about Germany a touch uncouth, at least in my Virginian eyes - for example, my German wife was shocked to see race as part of my birth certificate, and couldn't imagine that when I was born, it was illegal for someone whose race was black to marry someone whose race was white - and that doing so was at least potentially a death sentence for a black man.

This is not a criticism about any particular emphasis of which historical evils individuals focus on - but America's history has a lot episodes and facts which could do with some modern German style self-examination - for example, if only we had preserved a few slave markets, for example, and then required every high school student living in a formerly slave state to visit one, to see America's proud tradition of liberty (foreign students in German schools do not have to visit a concentration camp like their classmates, so people in New England would have a reasonable claim for an exemption). The hiding of uncomfortable truths is a skill which can be found in many places. Or, as in the case of some of America's formerly respected politicians (Trent Lott comes instantly to mind, as does George Allen), not really hiding at all - well, until the Internet (blogs and Youtube like services) started shedding a little light into formerly genteel parlors.

The fact that you are even surprised by someone in the South saying slaveowning was normal strikes me a bit - of course most of the landowners (if not exactly all) which the Revolutionary War enfranchised in the South were slaveowners too. Simply because the history books tends to slide right over that glaring fact doesn't make it less true.

ELM: You misread me. I'm not surprised that she asserted slaveowning was "normal." I'm instead noting that her -- and, it seems, your -- characterization of the "normalcy" of slave ownership conveniently depicts acceptance of slavery as a monolith in the antebellum South -- something that you've certainly not proven, and that in any case isn't true.

As to your suggestion that I focus too much on the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust and not enough on the question of Southern white responsibility for slavery, I take it that your claim is that because I live in a former slave state, North Carolina history should be of greater concern to me than German history. Do I understand you correctly?

I'm not sure she's really arguing that slavery wasn't really wrong because everybody was doing it. I think she's more arguing that there's no reason to pick on her family tree *now* because everybody *back then* was doing it.

With the slight admixture of presentism, I think her comment is more defensible. It adds the implication that since everybody in the area has that sin in their family background no matter their views on it today, that therefore knowing whether someone's ancestor's owned slaves doesn't tell you anything about that someone today.

knowing whether someone's ancestor's owned slaves doesn't tell you anything about that someone today. --Patrick

Well, sometimes it does, though. Would Strom Thurmond have been such an ardent segregationist had he not come from a slave-owning background? Would he have had the kind of sexual relationship that he did have with a black domestic worker without the legacy of white male entitlement to black female bodies that slavery left? I don't know, but I think Strom's public and private lives are very much outgrowths of America's and his slaveowning past.

Hello,
well, not really for either question. Slavery was basically a 'monolith' in the Old South of 1800, in such states as Virginia and South Carolina - as noted, the Revolutionary War enfranchised land owners, a large number who were slaveowners, and it it is striking that in much of the South, the slave population was fairly equal to the 'free' population - though constitutionally, they were only 3/5ths human numerically. (I may add, a Swiss German I work with wasn't surprised at the numbers at all - his point was that in any economy based on agrarian slavery, the number of slaves will be large compared to non-slaves - my guess would have been 20% or 33% slave, not 50%+.) After all, Thurmond's niece could have also pointed out that Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe were also fine upstanding American slaveowners, along with such other leading lights of freedom as George Mason.

One of the problems is that American history is not monolithic - slavery was not a universal institution, but where practiced, it was deeply woven into the fabric of society. Very deeply woven - though many whites were not slave owners, it wasn't generally due to any higher principle (though in Loudoun County in Virginia, there was religious opposition to slave holding, for example), but merely because they weren't wealthy enough to be able to profit from slaveowning. I am still struck by your surprise that some apparently privileged member of the traditional South would not have been connected to slave owning - after all, UVA's founder certainly was, and it seems not to disturb the student body too much. Generally, history pays attention to the well-off, not the poor - your point that many white southerners were not slave owners is valid, but then, they didn't matter much in the eyes of their contemporaries - though I have no idea what the colonial expression for 'poor white trash' was, I'm pretty sure something like it existed.

As for the Germany point, I grew up in a state which practiced its own version of the Nürnberger Gesetze in my own life time - and yet, apart from its general role in sexual politics, Loving_v._Virginia tends to be pretty much left unspoken - quoting from the opinion of Mr. Chief Justice Warren, 'In upholding the constitutionality of these provisions in the decision below, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia referred to its 1955 decision in Naim v. Naim as stating the reasons supporting the validity of these laws. In Naim, the state court concluded that the State's legitimate purposes were "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride," obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy.' Yes, those quotes cited by Warren are from Virginia courts - striking how well the Nazis were able to copy the tone of such thinking, isn't it? The Nazis weren't actually all that creative - they imported a lot of their racial ideas from America, after all.

I don't need to go back two generations to find horrible injustice on another continent - and I don't honestly believe that America's increasing bellicosity and increasing disdain for world opinion restraining its actions is a very good sign for the future either - I have noticed how torture, which is still being practiced by Americans in secret and not so secret prisons, is no longer really a topic of discussion in the U.S. any longer, much less grounds for impeachment of the commander-in-chief who is ultimately responsible for such sickening and at least formerly illegal practices.

And yes, those racial laws were overturned by the United States Supreme Court - but you seem to have some knowledge of several recent appointees to the Supreme Court - do they fill you with confidence in their legal judgment if confronted with such a case?

Especially when you see how certain connections exist (maybe some people still hope they can be reversed?) -
'There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The statutes proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races. Over the years, this Court has consistently repudiated "distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry" as being "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." At the very least, the Equal Protection Clause demands that racial classifications, especially suspect in criminal statutes, be subjected to the "most rigid scrutiny," Korematsu v. United States (1944), and, if they are ever to be upheld, they must be shown to be necessary to the accomplishment of some permissible state objective, independent of the racial discrimination which it was the object of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate. Indeed, two members of this Court have already stated that they "cannot conceive of a valid legislative purpose . . . which makes the color of a person's skin the test of whether his conduct is a criminal offense."'

Though these days, a lot of Americans know a terrorist or 'illegal immigrant' when they see him - seems to have something to do with the color of his skin.

There is never really any way to compare evil - but the reality of where I come from still seems to be somehow more relevant than the reality of where I live now - as it is pretty hard to find the German government handing out contracts for large scale concentration camps in Germany at this point. ('WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 2006 — The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root.... KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, company executives said. KBR, which announced the contract last month, had a similar contract with immigration agencies from 2000 to last year.

The contract with the Corps of Engineers runs one year, with four optional one-year extensions. Officials of the corps said that they had solicited bids and that KBR was the lone responder. A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jamie Zuieback, said KBR would build the centers only in an emergency like the one when thousands of Cubans floated on rafts to the United States.' - note the 'new programs')

I worry much, much more about the evil the country I grew up in could commit, in addition to what it has commited in my lifetime, than the evil that was committed two generations ago. Not that I see anything to do about it, except for not participating in it. Much of what we think of as 'America' is really just a few easily reversed Supreme Court decisions over a couple of generations.

We all have our own perspectives and experiences, and Germans have certainly earned all the scrutiny they now receive for their actions, and unflinching scrutiny is part of making certain that such horrors do not return. I only wish that more Americans were willing to do the same with their past - a museum of dead Indians, slaves, and lynched ex-slaves would be so much more appropriate on the Treasury site currently occupied by the Holocaust Museum in DC - the American government benefitted from the blood of those people, after all.

Again, there is no way to measure evil - but some day, maybe America could note the location of at least a few slave markets (Williamsburg likely had one, for example), where wreaths could be laid annually in a sort of ritually hollow ceremony, next to a list of the people who passed through, people who were merely property without any value beyond their labor in the eyes of the law. The sort of thing regularly practiced throughout Germany, not that it is reasonable to ever expect it to happen in the non-monolithic land of the free and the home of the brave I grew up in.

ELM: Couldn't agree with you more, cya, on just about every point. Perhaps you take the frequency of my blogging about Nazi Germany as a proxy for the full range of things that matter to me; but if you do, that's a mistake. Most of my professional research and writing focuses on American injustice and its legacy for today. Principally this has been the Japanese American internment, but I'm also now organizing a symposium about the law of slavery and how we choose to remember those most responsible for the institution's defense and survival.

A couple of links may be interesting -
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15735 for an American historian with some insights - a good introduction is available at http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2000/winter/hydra-slave-trade-documentation-1.html

I believe it was George Washington Williams that also noted that the cotton gin gave a second life to slavery - the institution as practiced by Washington and other Virginian luminaries was fading in the decades following the Revolutionary War, but with the growth of the Industrial Revolution in England and the growth of the cotton industry in the Deep South (Virginia and Maryland were essentially tobacco exporters), an entirely new economic basis was established - and speaking broadly, the people who benefitted from that system are considered the cream of the antebellum past - especially their skin.

Personally, I do think that one problem with dealing with such history in the U.S. is that it is simply not relevant to many - a German immigrant to Minnesota in 1880 had nothing to do with slavery, nor did an Irish immigrant in Boston in 1852, nor did anyone in states Alaska. Add in the extreme mobility of Americans, and quite honestly, it becomes very easy to sweep a lot of truth under the tapestry, so to speak.

And that truth is so uncomfortable to the self-image we are taught about America, it is much easier to simply ignore it. That to an extent is the point about Germany - the U.S. has a long way to go before it approaches the fairly brutal level of introspection and horror which most, though not all, Germans feel about their past.

Ironically, to a certain extent, it was the Nazis that finally allowed America's political system to end the 'vestiges' (read that Loving decision to see what 'vestige' meant in Virginia in 1955) of its slavery based past - the Nazis used much American created rhetoric to justify their racial evil, and after decades of using the Nazis as a symbol of absolute evil, it became difficult for 'white supremacy' (yes, that means Thurmond too) to appear in any other light but what it was.

So, just as one example, I picked Horry County, SC (because it was the only SC county that I knew the name of) where I believe Myrtle Beach now is. That was a rice plantation area, I believe. It definitely was a part of the heart of the plantation system of agriculture/slavery.

Because it is too much trouble to analyze the whole county, I only looked at the first parish (alphabetically) which is All Saints Parish. Here is what I found from the 1860 US Census:

In All Saints Parish in 1860, there were 841 slaves, who were owned by just 77 free people. At the time, there were 1009 free people (including children) in All Saints Parish. Granted married women would not usually separately own slaves (or anything else) and likewise children would not have owned slaves, but even so: Most folks did not own slaves in the heart of the plantation world.

The average slaveowner in my little study owned 11 slaves. Twelve people owned just one slave each. Eleven people owned twenty or more. The top slave-owner owned 91 slaves. His name was J J Wortham. He lived with his wife Martha and their 10 year old son James. One way of viewing things would be that the 3 members of the Wortham family owned these 91 slaves amongst the 3 of them. That type of analysis would expand the count of slaveowners considerably, but I think it is obvious that it would not expand the number of slaveowners from 77 to anything approaching 1009 (or even half of that).

This subject could definitely be (and surely has been) studied more rigorously, but the conclusion is obvious: Most free people in coastal South Carolina did not own slaves (and this was probably even more true in other areas of the South). And I suppose that most free people did not own slaves because they could not afford to.

All of which makes me think that Ms. Senter is probably wrong. Only the wealthiest South Carolinians had slaves and though those wealthy people have many, many descendants today, their descendants probably do not constitute the majority of "native South Carolinians."

Sean- you conflate two different things: Thurmond's personal ancestry, and America's collective past. While there's no doubt that the collective culture of the United States influences individuals who grow up within it, I think there's more reason to be concerned about drawing direct connections down specific family trees. As has been pointed out previously, go back a few generations and you have a LOT of ancestors. It would be tough on a lot of us if we had to answer for them all. Plus, that sort of inquiry often tends to lead to the absurd- look at your comment about Thurmond's sexual relationship with one of his house staff. You don't need a legacy of sin in your bloodline to have an affair. Any connection drawn between Thurmond's ancestor's slaveholding and his affair with an african american woman is forced to rely on a massive degree of supposition and handwaving. Its not a path down which we should travel.

Not to mention that its questionable whether one should refer to Thurmond's ancestor's slaveowning as "his slaveowning past." Thurmond was old when he died, but not THAT old.

This isn't South Carolina, and the time period covered is 1719-1820, but there are some very interesting genealogical data available on ibiblio covering Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy. The data for this exhibit were prepared by Prof. Gwendolyn Hall (professor emerita of History at Rutgers). Databases exist for LA from 1699-1860

See http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/index.html for the exhibit and databases.

Patrick,

Point taken about Thurmond's slaveowning past. However, Thurmond's sexual behavior toward the female domestic in his household is too similar to what went on under slavery to be ignored. Yes, when we go back far enough we have a lot of ancestors, but Thurmond lived a privileged life substantially similar to that of his slaveowning progenitors. This is South Carolina, after all, where the Civil War, or "War Between the States" as so many Palmettoans still refer to it, never really ended.

Many families in the South have done their dead level best to maintain the their "ancient" ways, continuing to grow the crops grown since the early nineteenth century, going into the same professions (law, medicine) generation after generation. And Strom was only a generation or two later than slavery. He no doubt grew up around people who had in fact been slaveowners (though probably these folks were quite old). Basically, Strom came from a background that strenuously resisted the results of the Civil War, and this is not uncommon in the South. His stance on Jim Crow is directly descended from his slaveowning ancestors and his redeemer predecessors in SC's Democratic party.

As for the conflation between Thurmond's personal ancestry and America's collective past, I conflate them because they interweave so easily. As Thurmond left the Democratic for the Republican party, so did many other Americans. As Thurmond's ancestors benefited from the forced labor of Africans, so did many Americans, and not just in the South. In many ways Thurmond's history is American history.