After considerable time, I’ve started coming to terms with some facts about my family that I’ve inferred from research into our genealogy. I started digging into the subject a couple of years ago after my nephew complained to me that he knew nothing at all about our family, because his father, my estranged brother, shared nothing with him about it. I treated my own, adopted, daughters differently, freely sharing such oral history as I had learned from older relatives when growing up, telling and repeating various stories over the years to them from time to time. When I learned that my adult nephew felt left out of this sort of thing, I didn’t want to just start blurting out the same old tales without doing the due diligence that modern tech and computer services have recently made possible. So, I started online research and had genetic testing run. I gained extremely detailed context, in some instances, of stories I knew or thought I knew. But I believed I’ve learned even more about stories I never knew before, including what I can only consider a skeleton in the family closet.
My father’s family lived in the North Carolina Tidewater region dating back to the emigration, from Spain, of our first American ancestor in my father’s direct line, in the late 1790s, my Great Great Grandfather Andrew. I heard family stories that spoke of our progenitor’s Spanish origin, but no one even knew his name. 19th Century Census records state GGGF Andrew’s country of origin and supply a lot of the remainder of what I’ve learned. Plus I have access to his service record from the War of 1812 and an application for a pension for that service filed by his widow many years later, after the Civil War.
Andrew had a large family, including my Great Grandfather, named after U.S. President, Martin Van Buren. GGF Martin and his brothers served in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. After avoiding, through sheer dumb luck, the massacre of Pickett’s Charge, at the Battle of Gettysburg, GGF Martin was later taken prisoner during the Siege of Petersburg during the last year of the war at the Battle of Boydton Plank Road. Absolutely none of this was ever shared with me in any family stories, and my knowledge comes entirely from my own research.
GGF Martin received a Parole, just before the very end of the Civil War, and made his way back to North Carolina from a Union Army POW camp in Maryland. He found and married a wife, later having my Grandfather, idiosyncratically named Daniel Webster, after one of Martin Van Buren’s opponents (field of five) in the U.S. Presidential election of 1836. Grandfather Daniel was born into a post-Civil War white family that did not and had never owned land. Census records show as much rather conclusively. They did not not appear to have ever owned slaves, a matter of specific detail in Antebellum Census records. The Census also kept tabs on the occupation of the people it counted. GGGF Andrew and all of his sons, once grown, were always listed as Farm Laborers.
I have to wonder what the hell the term Farm Laborer meant for white men in North Carolina’s Tidewater in Antebellum America. Yeoman Farmers who owned their own small holdings sometimes employed white labor, but such holdings weren’t common in the Coastal region. In that place and time, rural landless white men employed in agriculture were probably overseeing slaves. When I reached that circumstantial inference, I thought, no wonder my family stories blotted out these men. On the other hand, could I be certain?
Then I found the Census of 1820, listing GGGF Andrew, our patriarch, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. At that moment he lived with his wife and three children, and shared the property with seven slaves, one woman and six males under 14. I’ve racked my mind over those numbers. What was Andrew doing with those slaves? Why so many so young. If he owned them, how did he get them and where did they go, since later Antebellum Census’s show no sign of them? Was Andrew. dabbling in slave trading? Was he looking after slaves for someone absent? The only conclusive answer I can discern is that my family somehow had its hands directly in the slavery business, at least in 1820. Later, as noted, GGGF Andrew, and his sons as they attained working age, were listed as Farm Laborers in subsequent Census’s in 1830, 1840, 1850 and 1860 what that meant.
Although, possibly excepting the Census of GGGF Andrew and the mystery slaves in 1820, there’s no evidence of slave owning in my father’s direct line, though GGF Martin’s wife, Martha, was born a Laughinghouse, likely slaveholders given that family’s land holdings in the area. So, in the absence of contradictory evidence, considerable circumstantial evidence suggests that my Great grandfather, Martin, was experienced with slaves working on Coastal North Carolina plantations. Of course, a white man’s story about his white, Antebellum, Southern ancestors and their lives in slaveholding America isn’t necessarily the stuff of Black History Month. But there is one last twist that might make it so.
After GGF Martin was captured by Union Troops at the Civil War Battle of Boydton Plank Road, near Petersburg, Virginia, the Army transported him to the large Union POW camp at Lookout Point, Maryland, at the mouth of the Potomac River. Some might see that as a karmic twist of topsy-turvy, given the nature of the Port Lookout prison. Here’s a description from one of the internet’s several Civil War sites —
There was much animosity between the prisoners and the guards, who were mostly black troops. One Confederate who had managed to purchase his freedom from the prison reported that "murder was not only not scrupled at, but opportunities sought for its commission by the guards, who are known to have been offered by the officer of the day as much as $10 and $15 apiece for every prisoner they could shoot in the discharge of their duty."
Even if GGF Martin was the kindest, most compassionate slave overseer of his time, the outcome of his Civil War career seems fitting and fair. At the very least, he worked in the interests and fought to preserve that most odious, invidious institution. I can muster no sympathy for whatever privations or cruelties GGF Martin may have suffered at the hands of the black Union troops guarding the Point Lookout prisoners, tough I’m personally gratified they didn’t slay him. Sadly, my family history offers no evidence that he learned anything decent from his experience. My father and his 10 siblings grew up as mostly irredeemable racists, raised by one of GGF Martin’s post war sons. Although I lost my father at age 2, I knew many of his brothers and sisters and their spouses, all unabashed and open racists.
So, though I’m not quite sure exactly why, I felt that this story says something about the persistence of racism and White Supremacy in the face of even deadly opposition. I believe the scourge of racism has only, finally skipped a generation in my family because of my Yankee mother who fought to keep our minds open for my brother and me.
Therefore, for what ever use it might be, I offer this short family history of some white folks for whatever benefit it might afford to Black History Month.
