One writer opens up about her ancestor's crimes—and vows to do better.
When the white supremacists chanted “blood and soil”
in honor of a Confederate general in Charlottesville this weekend, they
were invoking me and people like me. On my father’s side, I’m descended
from plantation families that enslaved Africans and African Americans
in Mississippi and South Carolina. My second great-grandfather, Samuel
Mitchell McAlister Jr., was a slaveholding Confederate private in the Mississippi State Cavalry.White supremacists have called, so I must respond. As a descendant of
slaveholders and Confederate soldiers, I want to tell the truth about
the evil that my ancestors and the Confederacy perpetrated, the
repercussions their crimes have today, and how I and other white people
still benefit from discrimination against people of color.
While conducting genealogical research in 2012, I
traced my family’s line back to Enoch Grubbs, my fourth
great-grandfather. As I looked through census records and other
documents, I found a transcript of his will. Written in 1831 when he was
about 76, it reads: “I give to my Son William my negro [woman] Lucy and
her six children now in his possession.” To his grandsons, Enoch
bequeathed four enslaved people, including “my negro girl Hannah 6 years
of age and my negro boy George 4 years of age,” and stipulated that if
his grandsons died before turning 21 and marrying, “the negro or negroes
so given to him or them shall go to and belong to the survivours or
survivour of them my said three grandchild, to them and their heirs
forever."
I’m descended from Enoch’s daughter
from his second marriage, Minerva, who was 12 when her father died. For
her, her mother, and other young siblings, Enoch ordered the sale of any
enslaved people he had not specifically bequeathed. He said the
proceeds should pay for their maintenance and education.
I was disgusted as I read Enoch’s will. He is a DAR-recognized
Revolutionary War veteran who used the land he received for his service
to grow rich off the backs of black men, women and children. Lucy and
her children stand out in his will as the only family that appears
mostly intact, suggesting they may have received different treatment.
It’s possible Enoch raped Lucy and fathered her children, whom he then
enslaved. Young Hannah and George were taken from their parents to live
and die in labor to a stranger.
In his own
words, Enoch planned for his grandchildren and their descendants,
including me, to continue these crimes “forever.” In some ways, he got
his wish.
Over the past five years, I’ve tried to find out
what happened to some of the people Enoch enslaved. William Grubbs, who
inherited Lucy and her children, moved to a plantation in Alabama, where
he listed
23 enslaved people in his will. Lucy isn’t named among them. Enoch's
grandson, Enoch Lot, mostly disappears from government records, taking
the fates of Hannah and George with him.
If they
lived to see the Emancipation Proclamation, Hannah would have been 38
and George would have been 36. Even free, their lives would have been
hard. They had already lost their families and would have had no money
or education. I haven’t been able to find any photos of them, another
depressing illustration of how white history erases people of color and
tries to bury the lives of the people it exploits.
I
do have a family photo of my second great-grandmother, Minerva's
daughter and Enoch's granddaughter. This photo (she is the youngest,
seated between two children I believe are her sisters) was
taken in the late 1850s. In the 1860 census, her father, P.R. Thomas, is
listed in the slave schedules as owning eight enslaved people, ranging
from a one-year-old baby girl to a 35-year-old woman.
The Union and the people it freed technically “won”
the Civil War, but my ancestors had already helped build a society that
would always favor them and their descendants based on the color of
their skin. They had powerful connections throughout the South. They had
sold fellow human beings to fund their own educations, ensuring they
qualified for important jobs.
I still benefit
from the generational wealth and education that my ancestors stole from
black people. After fighting for the Confederacy, Samuel McAlister
received a position as postmaster—a prestigious role singling him out as
one of the few literate men in his town. When he died, his obituary praised him
as a lifelong Christian and “a man of a strong and well-cultivated
mind." Ninety-eight years after his death, many of his
descendants—including my immediate family—are college-educated. I went
to a well-respected undergraduate program as a legacy student and was an
attorney at the age of 25.
I’m not alone in the advantages I’ve reaped from
the exploitation of people of color. Although we all want to believe we
come from honest, hard-working people, even the poorest of our early
European American ancestors had an upper hand over their contemporaries
who had dark skin, particularly for employment opportunities. After the
Civil War, Robert E. Lee personally advised
his son to only hire other whites, writing: “You will never prosper
with blacks. … Our material, social, and political interests are
naturally with the whites.”
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