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The Bush Family's Slaveholding Past - Was Their Dynasty Built on Slavery?
Fahamu (Oxford)
OPINION 13 March 2008 Posted to the web 13 March 2008
By Edward Ball
The image most people have of slavery involves a cotton plantation with a big white house, a black village where 300 people live in cabins and a cruel overseer in the wings. This was not the model followed by the ancestors of President George W. Bush when, 175 years ago, they enslaved about 30 people on the shores of the upper Chesapeake.
A new book by Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, mentions in passing that at one time some of the president's family owned slaves. Weisberg doesn't dwell on the links between the White House and the antebellum past except to say the Bush clan's story is a long-held "family secret." The Bush Tragedy, a revealing book about family dynamics in the Bush political dynasty, treats the slavery matter only briefly, focusing instead on the "spectacular, avoidable flame-out" of the receding administration. But the story that joins the 43rd president to predecessors who held title to dozens of people bears retelling in detail.
The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his research in the IllinoisTimes, a small paper out of Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been slaveholding farmers. The evidence is simple but persuasive: genealogies of the Bush family match up with census data that counted farmers who used enslaved workers. With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen million living white Americans who trace their roots to the long-gone master class.
It's not as though the president is the only politician whose family owned slaves. Of the first eighteen presidents, from George Washington to Ulysses Grant, twelve owned people, eight of them while in office. At one time, Andrew Jackson was even a slave trader. Since Emancipation in 1865, a number of presidents have come from families that once contained slave masters. Even the current presidential hopefuls are likely to have slave owners among their ancestors. The descendants of slaveholders do not wear special tattoos or announce themselves in secret handshakes, but most know who they are.
The tragic story of America's slave days inspires disabling levels of fear among whites and anger among blacks. Probably neither the 43rd president nor his father, the 41st, possesses the introspection needed to grasp the relationship between the Bush family's slaveholding past and its present circumstances without escaping into defensiveness. Still, President Bush has talked about slavery from several microphones, most memorably in a 2003 speech on Gorée Island, one of the "slave castles" in West Africa from which captive youth and children were dispatched to the Americas. Speechwriters likely supplied the words on that occasion when the president said, "slavery was one of the greatest crimes of history." But the words fell short of an accounting by the White House for America's role in the Middle Passage, and they came before the revelation of the Bush family's own link to the slave past.
As for the African Americans in this tale, the Walker family slaves, neither names nor biographical details about them have survived. According to the genealogist who uncovered the records, Robert Hughes, the census accounts show that they lived at four different farms in Cecil County, Maryland, on a string of land called Sassafras Neck, which separates two slender rivers that empty into upper Chesapeake Bay. There, in 1790, William and Sarah Davis, direct ancestors of the president, owned seven people, while another branch of the family owned five. Twenty years later, in 1810, a third couple in the president's ancestral clan were counted as masters to eighteen people. The last appearance of the family as slaveholders of record comes in 1830, when George E. and Harriet Walker, great-great-great grandparents of President George W. Bush, owned 321 acres and two slaves, a female between 10 and 24 and a male between 24 and 36. The namelessness of the slaves is the fault of the so-called slave schedules used in the census, which called for nothing more than approximate ages.
With their small farms, the Walkers and their cousins did not belong to the class of oligarchs, whose vast plantations held scores or hundreds of workers. I've looked, and there were dynasties in Cecil County, places like Cherry Grove, former residence of a Maryland governor, and Mt. Harmon, a vast tobacco estate with a Georgian mansion. The president's forebears probably saw themselves as little people in competition with these fat-cat neighbors.
Still, all slaveholders were also slave traders. The president's family had to avail themselves of a slave auction on at least two occasions: initially, to buy people, and later, when a Walker farm failed, to sell some of the same people, much the way a stockholder liquidates an investment. No story has surfaced about how it happened, but in the mid-1830s, it appears that George E. Walker, the president's third great-grandfather, lost his land. After that, in 1838, he packed his family into a wagon and went west, settling in southern Illinois on a homestead near the town of Bloomington. It is from this branch of migrants that the current Bush clan descends.
Since the Walkers, in effect, declared bankruptcy, and there is no evidence they kept slaves after 1838, it is difficult to follow a money trail from the family's commercial stake in slavery to the White House. However, before he took his family west, it's likely that George Walker sold the people he owned, handing them off to a speculating slave dealer; thereby financing the family's fresh start in Illinois. Things get worse when you contemplate the probable circumstances. In the 1830s, the old tobacco economy of Maryland and Virginia was waning, while the new king, cotton, had caused Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to boom. The tobacco states were selling tens of thousands of slaves to the cotton states, and sending these people south. It is quite possible the Walker slaves were marched 500 miles from Maryland to Alabama to end up on a giant cotton plantation, where the work regime - large crews on vast, unshaded fields - was crueler than the one they'd left behind.
The Walkers eventually quit farming and made a fortune as dry goods wholesalers in Missouri; later, they made another as investment bankers in New York. Nearly all the Bush/Walker family money dates from this more recent period, after the Civil War.
The family, nevertheless, seems to have looked back with nostalgia on their old slave hold. There are two pieces of evidence for this. In The Bush Tragedy, Jacob Weisberg refers to one of the later patriarchs, David Walker, as "a believer in eugenics and the 'unwritten law' of lynching," and cites as proof a letter Walker published in the St. Louis Republic in 1914. Black people, he wrote at the time, were more insidious than prostitution and "all the other evils combined."
The second piece of evidence is within living memory. In 1930, when they could afford it, the family again embraced the antebellum lifestyle. That year President Bush's great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, bought Duncannon plantation, an old cotton estate in South Carolina, to use as a hunting retreat and vacation home. His namesake, George Herbert Walker Bush, the current president's father, spent many youthful vacations on Duncannon, where teams of black cooks, valets, and drivers served him and opened doors when he approached. The Bush heirs no longer own Duncannon plantation; but for a time, the estate provided a version of the baronial life, to which the antebellum Walkers aspired, but never achieved.
The heirs of slaveholders are not responsible for the past; but in a better world, they would be accountable for that past. They would make an effort to deal with the slave story, talk about it, and try to come to terms with it.
At present the Bush political dynasty seems to be dying in misrule, finished off by a president who, as Weisberg writes, is "driven by family demons, overflowing with confidence, and lacking any capacity for self-knowledge." The Bush clan may not be capable of reckoning personally with the tragic inheritance of the slave days. But this week, on a state visit, the president sets foot in three countries that sent hundreds of thousands of captives to America. Today, some of the tens of millions of descendants of those captives want a White House that is accountable. In West Africa President Bush had a superb opportunity, like one presented to a physician attending a wound. A sound physician would have chosen instinctively to apply medicine, not simply turned away in denial and neglect.
*Edward Ball is the author of Slaves in the Family and, most recently, The Genetic Strand.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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W is my president. As an American citizen, I have to respect the Office of the Presidency. As someone who has spent time in the South, I know that i must have encountered Whites whose answered owned slaves. Perhaps, some of their dead relatives owned some of my dead relatives in particular.
I don't hold the children resposible for the sins of the parents. I judge people on what they do in their own lives.
My president who was not elected by a large Black vote gave us Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice as consecutive Secretaries of State.
hey have elevated the image of African Americans internationally and help our country. We are at war - remember.
So, God Bless Pres. Bush, Jr.
Posts: 1115 | From: GOD Bless the USA | Registered: May 2006
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posted
The true descendants of the slavemasters in the American South are the African Americans themselves. These guys kept going back into the slavequarters for nighttime recreation.
Obama told of family's slave-owning history in deep SouthAn amateur genealogist has revealed a surprise in the family tree of the black contender in the race to be the Democrats' presidential candidate Paul Harris in New York The Observer, Sunday March 4 2007 About this articleClose This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday March 04 2007 on p3 of the News section. It was last updated at 12:03 on April 30 2007. The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday March 11 2007
The article below was incorrect to claim that the Rev Al Sharpton's slave ancestors 'were owned by the late politician Strom Thurmond, who once stood for President on a staunchly racist, segregationalist platform'. Al Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather.
It is a question that few thought a man aiming to be America's first black President would ever have to answer: did your family once own slaves?
But that question is now likely to be asked of Senator Barack Obama, who is bidding for the 2008 presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, in part on the appeal of his bi-racial background.
As the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, Obama has seemed to embody a harmonious vision of America's multiracial society. However, recent revelations have thrown up an unexpected twist in the tale.
Obama's ancestors on his white mother's side appear to have been slave owners. William Reitwiesner, an amateur genealogical researcher, has published a history of Obama's mother's family and discovered that her ancestors have a distinctly shadowy past.
Reitwiesner traced Obama's great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Washington Overall, and found that he owned two slaves in Kentucky: a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man. He also found out that Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Duvall, also owned a pair of slaves listed in an 1850 census record. They were a 60-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman. In fact, the Duvalls were a wealthy family whose members were descended from a major landowner, Maureen Duvall, whose estate owned at least 18 slaves in the 17th century.
The news comes at a time when Obama is engaged in a fierce battle with Senator Hillary Clinton to woo black voters in their bids to get the Democratic presidential nomination. It also comes ahead of appearances by both Clinton and Obama today in Selma, Alabama, to mark the anniversary of a famous 1965 civil rights march. This is hardly the best time to be exposed as the descendant of slave owners.
Reitwiesner has posted his research, which he warns is a 'first draft', on his website, wargs.com. However, the news is unlikely to be a serious political problem for Obama, despite the fact that some black commentators have accused him of not being a real black American. Nor is he likely to be alone in finding out that his white ancestors once owned the ancestors of his fellow black Americans. America, like Britain, is caught in the grip of a frenzy of genealogical research. Dozens of websites have sprung up, allowing fast and easy access to all sorts of historical records and prompting many Americans to research their family trees.
That can throw up some very surprising results. In fact, last week Obama was not even the only black politician to find out some unusual personal history. The civil rights campaigner, the Reverend Al Sharpton was stunned to discover his slave ancestors were owned by the late politician Strom Thurmond, who once ran for President on a staunchly racist segregationist platform. The pair might even be related. The news prompted Sharpton to issue a statement about his private agony at the revelation. 'Words cannot fully describe the feelings I had when I learned the awful truth. Not only I am the descendant of slaves, but my family had to endure the particular agony of being slaves to the Thurmonds.'
Obama's campaign team have handled the news of his family's slaving past a bit more casually and a lot less emotionally, issuing a statement saying such a family background was 'representative of America'. That is certainly true. Slavery was the economic bedrock of the American economy in the South before the Civil War. It would come as no surprise that anyone tracing their family roots back to the pre-war South would find that his descendants had owned slaves.
But more edifying discoveries can come from looking at the past too. Another of Obama's ancestors, his great-great-great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Clark, fought for the Union army in the Civil War. As a result Obama can also lay claim to relatives who risked their lives to end slavery. 'While a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union,' said Obama spokesman Bill Burton in a statement. Perhaps it is just another case of Obama's complex past showing that he can have it both ways.
Posts: 1115 | From: GOD Bless the USA | Registered: May 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Red,White, and Blue + Christian: Evergreen,
W is my president. As an American citizen, I have to respect the Office of the Presidency. As someone who has spent time in the South, I know that i must have encountered Whites whose answered owned slaves. Perhaps, some of their dead relatives owned some of my dead relatives in particular.
I don't hold the children resposible for the sins of the parents. I judge people on what they do in their own lives.
My president who was not elected by a large Black vote gave us Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice as consecutive Secretaries of State.
hey have elevated the image of African Americans internationally and help our country. We are at war - remember.
So, God Bless Pres. Bush, Jr.
Man, excuse my francois, but you are like the biggest "coon" I have ever encountered smh.
An African American proud to be Christian and American?!?!? Loves George Bush because he thinks he has to?!?! Do you have a "soul" or no Posts: 343 | Registered: Feb 2008
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posted
Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are African-Americans who have a right to be as American or African, as they prefer.
Posts: 387 | From: England, UK | Registered: Feb 2008
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posted
^I agree, but am not sure because of some propaganda I've recently heard called "Bush has done more for Africa than any previous U.S. President" though the US has never done much in comparison to Israel.
quote:Originally posted by Wolofi : Loves George Bush because he thinks he has to?!?!
^I don't get that part. How does RW&B+C think he has to do anything.
Oh, and about the so-called "Asiatic religions" that are really African in origin (Buy tha Book):
Malcolm X was a Muslim
and Nat Turner was a f u c k i n g ***Christian***.
I rest my case.
Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006
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This is your White Queen again with Queen Sofia of Spain at Goree Island where my ancestors left for the USA. What about the role of the thiedo warriors in the slave trade?
Posts: 1115 | From: GOD Bless the USA | Registered: May 2006
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posted
Yeah, that's how Nkrumah messed up. Went off and married an Egyptian Coptic woman (of Levantine origin). Hmm.
Posts: 387 | From: England, UK | Registered: Feb 2008
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UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
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I rest my case.
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