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Notes -
Hated Ancestors
I am part of a family heritage organization. This particular family has been in the US for a little over 400 years. The organization's main responsibilities are maintaining a few old grave sites, and serving as a bit of a repository of information for people going on genealogical hunts. I am possibly going to be joining the board of this organization in the future.
Anyways, these ancestors of mine owned slaves, and quite a few of them fought and died on the losing side of the American Civil War. I feel mostly apathy about this. I did not know these people, I didn't even know anyone who knew them. Any "wealth" they had from slavery was never passed down, they all went heavily bankrupt in the 1870s (they were all lending each other money, and someone made a poor investment so they all went down together when debt collectors came in). I don't feel any need to defend their actions, or to attack them to prove to myself I would not have acted similarly in their circumstances. Its just a fact that sits out there and is kind of interesting, but has no bearing on me personally.
I was aware that my view on this might be different than others, but it was confirmed the other day. We received this email to our general inbox (information in brackets is anonymized from original email):
In most cases I'd be happy to toss this email in the trashbin of my mind. This lady disliking me because of my ancestors isn't really a big deal. Someone lost a property sale somewhere, also not me and also not a big deal. But I do share one thing with this lady that constantly frustrates and annoys me: A Government. It would be nice to be a in a world where I could fully dismiss this kind of thing from my life. But if they vote and too many people that share their opinion vote ... well I'm sure they will find inventive ways to make their feelings towards us a more solid thing. I don't know where this leaves us. I'm certainly not going to respond to this lady's email.
It would be wrong to leave you all with the impression that this is a normal interaction. My mother has been doing genealogical research lately, including some compiling of the slaves names. She has made friends with a man in the state who was trying to research his ancestors. The man had hit a wall and couldn't find out more until my mom published the slave research.
I'll answer questions about my ancestors, but I will generally try to avoid doxxing myself, even if I'm not highly concerned with that outcome.
This lady isn’t a majority, as you note. And there’s simply not enough people in the voting public who are legitimately afraid of the ghosts of slaves to worry about it. I would suggest that those of these who do exist contact a priest, not an uninvolved geneological researcher.
The descendants of my ancestors’ slaves are mostly successful and bear us no ill will, although they don’t particularly want to live in the small town in Louisiana where our plantation was located(in fairness, no one else does either). Nor do they bring up that, uh, the connection is because our ancestors owned theirs. Everyone likes to believe they were kind to their slaves, but no one actually knows, and the best evidence that can be obtained is a few scattered mentions that Cajuns were known for treating their slaves somewhat better than average. That some members of my family are quite proud of the victories our confederate shock formation won isn’t much bother either. Everyone broadly understands they’re my ancestors, and I didn’t choose them, and to disown your ancestors would be a horrible thing. Family, the weight of generations, is fundamentally what it is, and demanding performative dissociation from it is the ultimate price of atomic individualism. It’s one I won’t give, and it’s one that hasn’t been asked.
This has been part of my Mom's research actually. One of the things that made it easy to track the slaves that my ancestors owned is that one of the guys would write a paragraph or so about each slave when they passed away. Some aspects of their personality, some positive traits, some things they liked, etc.
I think the whole concept of being "kind" to a slave is a bit oxymoronic. The kindest thing to do is to free them immediately. Most slave owners fail by that standard. There are of course different levels of how terrible you can be to a slave. There isn't evidence that my ancestors were fucking their slaves (and yes, it is definitely possible to know that sort of thing. They knew it about some of their neighbors and gossiped about it in letters.) There are two ways to motivate slaves, the carrot and the stick. We do know they used the carrot, some of the slaves were paid wages. We don't know how heavily they used the stick. Quite a few of the freed slaves took on the family name of my ancestors after they were freed during the Civil war. The men that were older when the civil war broke out thought it was a horrible idea. The younger men were excited by it ... and most of them fought in it and died.
I don't feel like I'm forced into disassociation about it. I feel mostly the same way about my parents. They have done things in their past that I don't condone. Even though I know them and I share half my genes with each of them I feel zero responsibility for their actions. But I know I am probably a bit weird in some areas. I often think the "tribal loyalty" part of my brain is broken and doesn't work. I care about and feel loyalty towards specific individuals, but for anyone I don't know .. there is zero chance I care about them.
It doesn't really matter. My family arrived after the Civil War. My wife's earliest American ancestor arrived on the Mayflower, but none of them ever owned slaves (as they were religiously scrupulous against the institution). This sort of thing gets you exactly zero credit with the progressive race-pushers, you still "benefited from a system of oppression" or whatever. So them trying to shame you for what your ancestors did is double-dipping the shame.
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It's a social dynamic that doesn't exist today, and paternalism was a big part of that dynamic. The paternalistic aspect was very real but isn't to be recognized in this day in age. It certainly isn't an oxymoron.
Luckily someone in my family already compiled all the archival research going back to the 1730s: enlisted in the Revolution, 300 acres, 4 horses, 0 Negroes according to archival documents. It's wild reading wills and such. The first ancestor to arrive to America left his son a Bible, a stove, and a pipe in his will.
The longer fleshed out statement I had originally was something like "it would be kind to not punish them for anything that isn't an actual crime, and pay them wages for the work they do, not forcibly separate their families, and allow them some avenue of exit from the situation if they think its not working out for them." But that was basically the equivalent of freeing them, so I shortened it. But quite a few of those things have no place for someone being "paternalistic". When paternalistic and economic concerns were at odds the economic concerns won out. I say that not as judgement, but as a simple statement of facts. Just like today a company that is unconcerned with economic realities will eventually go broke.
I also believe paternalism does exist today. It is the government as parent to everyone. The government is not as limited by economic concerns, which honestly makes it more frightening. In both cases of paternalism I don't think of them as "kind". The proponents of paternalism probably wouldn't describe it as "kind" either. At best they might say it is a "kindness". Paternalism is a belief that a strong hand is needed for guiding the less able-d and less intelligent to the right paths in life. That the strong hand will dish out measured punishments that are less harsh than what the world itself might dish out (thus the sort of "kindness").
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