Judging Our Slave-Owning Ancestors

EXTRACT FROM BLOGS "Is This Legal" AND "The Real Eve". SOME OF MY OWN ANCESTORS WERE SLAVEOWNERS--Dictynna

HERE IS A LINK TO THE ARTICLE REFERENCED IN THIS POST--Dictynna www.isthatlegal.org/ancestors.pdf


March 08, 2005

Judging Our Own Ancestors

In the new essay I've been shamelessly flogging here the last few days--now available for download on SSRN--I ask how we should judge the wrongdoing of our ancestors.

It turns out this is an especially personal question for my friend Dabney. Her post is a must-read; I quote it here at length and add just a couple of comments.

Dabney writes:

Monday, March 07, 2005

Pocahontas or Robert E. Lee?

My friend Eric Muller has written a great paper about judging our ancestors. In it he defines an appropriate way to hold those in the past responsible for their sins. I think his analysis is a just and sensible one.

But there is another question I have. How does one view one’s ancestors—if they have sinned but have also accomplished good? And what is an appropriate way to incorporate those ancestors into one’s modern life?

For example, in Eric’s paper he talks about Landon Carter, a slaveholder in Colonial Virginia. Landon was the son of King Carter, one of the Colonies’ wealthiest and powerful men. Landon, in 1774, was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses—he had power, wealth and intelligence. At the time of his death, he owned more than 400 slaves. Eric writes that we can and should hold Landon culpable for not speaking out against slavery, for never using his power and influence to change his culture. I agree. I can judge him and find him severely wanting.

But, what about the good that Landon and his father King Carter did? They worked to create government, supported the building of schools, and helped form America. They made some very real, lasting contributions to the past. Do we acknowledge that side of them too?

It is at this point, I must confess, I am a descendant of Landon and King. My eldest is named Carter and I have in my house a small portrait of King Carter. In fact, I am descended from all sorts of slaveholders and Southern aristocrats.

I know this because my family has always been proud of their ancestry. My grandmother, Pocahontas Edmunds (she was the 8th great grand-daughter of the real Pocahontas), was a historian who wrote books about famous Southern people. She signed her grandchildren up for all sorts of ancestry based societies—Descendents of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, the Robert E. Lee Society, etc…. I have been raised to pass on the good traditions of my family. My nephews are named things like Harrison, Carrington, Coles and St. George Tucker. I kept my name when I got married because a) why wouldn’t I and b) I like being a Grinnan.

Should I feel good about being descended (crazy word!) from Pocahontas, but not from Robert E. Lee? But Lee wasn’t all bad—he was, perhaps, a better man to his men than Grant. How do I make sense of this? And what about the things I have—books, furniture, silver—all passed down from generation to generation to me? Are these things wrong for me to love because the money that bought them at some point probably came from wealthy white men who might have owned slaves or who probably never saw blacks as equals?

What does one do? Are the sinners of our past—my past—to be seen only as sinners? Should I renounce that part of my past and push to have my grandchildren named names that carry no Colonial history? Should I sell my silver and give the money to the scholarship fund for African Americans? Should I be ashamed?

I think I’m—more or less—a reasonable person. I would describe my politics as sensible, liberal and well informed. I think I’m making choices in my own life that will hold up to some, if not total, scrutiny from the generations to come. Can I be a good woman in this life while still honoring parts of my past that were flawed, often profoundly? If racism is a family heirloom does that mean all my heirlooms—physical and cultural—should be cast aside in this 21st century? Did I misname my eldest? If I disavow all of my past is that revisionist in some other untruthful way? I just don’t know.

posted by Dabney @ 8:46 PM.

Here's what I say about this in my essay:
"To say that an act from an earlier time should not be entirely excused is not, of course, to say that it should be entirely condemned. Here, too, the criminal law provides a useful model. At a criminal sentencing hearing, the sentencer's mission is to develop as full a picture as possible of the offender and the offense, in order to craft a punishment that takes into account not just the offense but the larger circumstances in which it occurred, some of which may be extenuating. Even where the criminal law does not exculpate an accused on the basis of evidence of his cultural practices, the law often allows such evidence in mitigation at sentencing. Much the same should also be true of our consideration of the wrongdoing of prior generations. Although evidence of "what the world was like back then" will rarely absolve a person of all responsibility for what he chose to do and for the harm he chose to inflict, such evidence should assist us in drawing a more complete and balanced picture of past generations as full, complex human beings who were more than just the sum of certain of their actions.
"We might prefer not to see our ancestors in this light. It is certainly less challenging—to our image of ourselves and to our narrative about our country—to see them as justified actors whose blemishes we can cover up with the cosmetic of context. But this is risky. In justifying the acts of our ancestors, we not only dishonor the memory of those they oppressed. We also create the circumstances for renewed oppression of the powerless of today and tomorrow."
So I say to Dabney: celebrate King Carter--for his complex and richly human legacy. The danger is not in embracing our misbehaving ancestors. It is in embracing our ancestors as if they did not misbehave.

Eric Muller