A Deliberately Forgotten Woman

I am researching Maj. Squire Turner (1793-1871) for the 1849 campaign my great, great grandfather's half-brother ran, as he sought to represent Madison County in a Kentucky State Constitutional Convention. Any nugget of information seems particularly valuable, for Turner is not well represented in today's historical record. It is not as if my 3x, great-grandfather's son didn't leave a paper trail: having organized the direct election of all state officials, and reigned in the legislature's authority to go into debt; Turner became the guiding light behind a massive effort to subsequently codify all of Kentucky's laws into a single document. Through his legislation and law practice, Squire Turner created mountains of paperwork. Eastern Kentucky University has lost track of a collection of Turner's papers. Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, has no record of his acceptance speech, nor any institutional knowledge as to why they venerated Turner with an honorary law degree. Barely an obituary survives into the digital age.

Squire Turner was adamantly pro-slavery. Hewing to the nation's founding compact, Turner was a property-rights man. Though the actual wording should be attributed to someone else, Turner would no doubt agree with a report made after the 1850 Constitution massaged Kentucky's legal relationship with slavery: Turner is often credited with 'enshrining the rights to property (slaves) as higher than divine law.'

I recently found this link to a Kentucky Gazette report of a Turner voting in the Kentucky House in 1819. It was not 'my' Squire Turner, but his uncle (and mine) Cornelius Turner (1770-1835), from Warren County, Kentucky, who served from 1816-1820 before being elected to the Kentucky Senate. The Gazette reported that - after the state senate deadlocked - Cornelius Turner voted in the Kentucky House to send Col. Richard Mentor Johnson (c1780-1850) to the U.S. Senate.

Ever heard of Richard Mentor Johnson?

He was already nationally renowned in 1819, having been credited with killing Shawnee Chief Tecumseh (1768-1813) at the Battle of the Thames, during the War of 1812. His 1819 appointment to the U.S. Senate was a stepping stone: in 1837 the Senate elected Johnson to be the ninth Vice-President of the United States. Johnson played a nominal part in Martin Van Buren's first administration.

It seems Johnson, like Squire Turner, has not fared well in remaining current in historical chronicles. Both were popular men later judged ignominious. Both held views on race that were considered disturbing. Both were slaveholders ... yet Johnson held his slaves perhaps more closely.

By the time of his appointment to the U.S. Senate, Johnson had fathered two daughters by Julia Chinn (1780-1833). Sometime after his father died (1815) Johnson had inherited Chinn from his father's estate.

From Wikipedia:

"As his prominence grew, [Johnson's] interracial relationship with Julia Chinn, an octoroon slave, was more widely criticized. It worked against his political ambitions. Unlike other upper class leaders who had African American mistresses but never mentioned them, Johnson openly treated Chinn as his common law wife. He acknowledged their two daughters as his children, giving them his surname, much to the consternation of some of his constituents."

Johnson gave his daughters more than just his surname. He gave them land. His 1834 biography (propaganda including lyrics to a drinking song designed to popularize the 'gallant patriot's' bid for the Vice-Presidency) makes no mention of Julia, or daughters Imogene Malvina and Adaline Chinn Johnson. A wedding announcement in the Lexington Observer and Kentucky Reporter (based in Fayette County) addressed the sensitive issue after Adaline married Thomas W. Scott in 1832:

"This is the second time that the moral feelings ... of the people of Scott County have been shocked and outraged by the marriage of a mulatto daughter of Col. Johnson to a white man, if a man, who will so far degrade himself; who will make himself an object of scorn and detestation to every person that has the least regard for decency, for a little property; can be considered a white man."

"How long will the people of Scott County - of Kentucky - permit such palpable violations of the laws of their state to be committed with impunity? How long will the moral and religious part of the community suffer such an indecent and shocking example to be set for their sons and the rising generation, before they put their veto upon them? Before they consign to private life at least, if not to infamy, those who encourage such violations of the laws both of God and of man? The laws of Kentucky forbid, under heavy penalties, a white man's marrying a negro or mulatto, or living with one in the character of man and wife."

In 2007, David Mills, writing in the Huffington Post, made some contemporary observations about Richard Mentor Johnson's position in family trees. It seems that many who descend from the nation's ninth Vice- President are unaware of their relationship to him: intervening generations of storytellers - wanting not to claim their descendancy from a woman of color - simply relinquished their claims upon a war hero and semi-successful political aspirant. (Time once voted Johnson the nation's forth-worst Vice-President in history.)

It's admittedly complicated, but their are reasons to admire Julia Chinn. An assumed descendant declared Johnson's captive chattel "an excellent Châtelaine for his home," as she is known to have wined and dined the aristocratic French revolutionary, the Marquis de Lafayette, when he visited the plantation in 1825. Chinn managed Johnson's business affairs during his absences in the nation's capital. Dedicated genealogists might be put off by the fact that, as miscegenation was then illegal, documentary proof of the marriage becomes problematic. Others may be put off by the fact that Chinn exercised a master's rights over slaves in her role as Johnson's plantation manager. Indeed, Johnson gave slaves as part of his daughters' dowries.

Admiration for Richard Mentor Johnson comes in a mixed bag as well. He educated his daughters, provided them with superior social graces and economic advantages. Mills declares them "bona-fide, fully vested white people." However, according to Johnson's official Senate biography:

"When Lewis Tappan asked the vice-president to present an abolition petition to the Senate, Johnson, who owned several slaves, averred that "considerations of a moral and political, as well as of a constitutional nature" prevented him from presenting "petitions of a character evidently hostile to the union, and destructive of the principles on which it is founded.""

More extraordinary, following his wife's death in 1833, Wikipedia reports Johnson began a relationship with another family slave. When she left him for another man, Johnson had her captured and sold at auction. He then began a relationship with her sister.

Johnson paid a political price for bearing an interracial family. New York papers ridiculed Johnson's domestic situation, and the Democrats' constituency as well.

A racist attack on Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Richard M. Johnson.



Johnson's lifestyle choices also bring into relief a side of Abraham Lincoln you may not be aware of. According to Clifton Porter II, blogging as Undercover Black Man, 'Honest Abe' exploited Johnson’s relationship with Chinn, to score points against Stephen Douglas during the legendary Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.

"Lincoln asserted, to the applause of his audience, that “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races… nor qualifying [Negroes] to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people…”"

Porter reports Lincoln saying:

"I do not understand that, because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife …

I will add to this that I have never seen to my knowledge a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality - social and political - between negroes and white men. I recollect but one distinguished instance that I ever heard of so frequently as to be entirely satisfied of its correctness – and that is the case of Judge Douglas’ old friend Col. Richard M. Johnson." [Laughter.]

Johnson had died eight years earlier, months after Kentucky's new state constitution went into effect. One provision in the 1850 constitution provided that "no slave shall be emancipated but upon condition that such emancipated slave be sent out of the state." [See page 137.]

Johnson's daughter Adaline had died in 1836. Among first-degree family, only daughter Imogene survived Kentucky's gallant patriot. Although Johnson willed vast property to his daughter, Imogene was prevented from inheriting her father's estate: the Fayette County Court considered her illegitimate and without rights. Upon Johnson's death, the court ruled that "he left no widow, children, father, or mother living."

Julia Chinn is depicted as an octoroon, or 1/8 black (i.e., she had one black great-grandparent). If so, Johnson's grandchildren - also deemed ineligible for their inheritance - would have been 1/32 black. To connect those grandchildren to a black ancestor is to travel as far back in a family tree as I must go, to claim relationship to my 2nd great-grandfather, James Berry Turner (1820-1867), half-brother to the above Squire. While that relationship seems a long road into a distant past, and while white supremacists were willing to reach that far back to besmirch Julia Chinn and Richard Mentor Johnson, it is the same distance I must travel from the 21st century, to claim relationship to James Berry Turner, who - contrary to his half brother's agenda - sought to nominate emancipationists to Kentucky's 1849 constitutional convention.

Got empathy?

It’s an informal, intimate moment. I've given a ride home to a young mother of two. ‘LC’ has spent (as in donated) her evening to help organize a grass-roots attempt to eliminate racial profiling by Portland Police. It’s been six years since police killed unarmed, mother-of-two Kendra James at a traffic stop. In a few months an unarmed father, Aaron Campbell, will be executed during a welfare check by police. Campbell’s mother will lose two sons that day; one to heart disease and another – despondent over his brother’s death – to a police sniper acting outside his chain of command.

Campbell’s will be the fourth police homicide of an unarmed black man or woman in the preceding several years of Portland’s long history of disparate treatment of people of color. Like the victims, LC too is a person of color. It is deep concern that has brought her away from her family to plan a campaign to get Portland City Council to change police policy.

My companion turned to me to say, “As a mother, it is so important to get this right.” LC began reflecting on the challenges of physically disciplining her boys.

It would be years before I was exposed to Dr. Joy DeGruy’s work: Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome— America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. I was then only superficially aware of the abject brutality that slavery invoked. Writing this today, my own family history research has revealed to me a staggering capacity for inhumane treatment of slaves. Genial stories about ‘Uncle’ Dave and ‘Aunt’ Mary have receded in importance. I've read warnings from my Christian, slave-owning antecessors. They cite the the ill effects of slaveholding to be the corruption on morals that such absolute, life-and-death domination has on character. Slave-holding kin explain that such power corrupts their neighbor's character.

“You know, they used whips on us,” says LC meekly. She is torn. She doesn't want her parenting style to be a continuation of the physical coercion that has shaped African American culture.

“But, if I don’t get this right,” she says, meaning if undisciplined children run afoul of the law, “the police will kill my boys.”

And I am stunned. I have glimpsed across the divide of my White Privilege. I am a parent, flying by the seat of my pants: at no point have I felt it necessary to contemplate that my failures in fathering bear the remotest possibility of such lethal consequences. As a parent, I care about this issue in a new way.

I informed myself. I now know that Portland over-polices LC’s neighborhood. The odds are far greater that her children will encounter law enforcement than mine. In fact, the police target LC’s children. The City of Portland’s own stop data has consistently shown racial disparities since they began collecting it in 2004: people of color are twice as likely to be stopped than whites; once stopped, they are twice as likely to be searched (an amplified effect). Yet people of color searched by Portland Police in 2010 (latest available figures) are a third less likely to have contraband.

Based on false assumptions, and society’s massive expenditures in a War on Drugs, my country now systemically hunts her children. [While white youth experience drug-related emergency room visits thee times more frequently than black youth, and whites (ages 12-17) are a third more likely to have sold drugs; and while the use of drugs has long been about par for white youth and those of darker pigmentation, black children (about 16% of that population) make up 58% of the youth cohort committed to state prison as adults.]

Even if she gets it right, and LC’s children grow up well-disciplined and productive members of society … beyond the sphere of criminal activity … they run a much higher risk of death at the hands of police than my fair-skinned children ever will.

But who cares?

Looking for images of Kendra James, as Portland memorializes the ten-year milestone of her homicide (where, as with Aaron Campbell, no one has been punished): I was directed to The Empathy Blog. In an analysis of missed empathetic opportunities during a public forum following James’ death, the author decried “re-activating histories of violence, victimhood and hatred.”

“a re-telling of the Kendra James incident that raised memories of old familiar stories of white on black violence, and evoked resonances of rape and slavery … began the collapse of the opportunity for empathy.”

I don’t know what to do with my empathy. My vicarious experience of KC’s fears led me to an intellectual identification with the debilitating effects of racism. I was spurred to take public risks and work for the passage of a Police Plan to Address Racial Profiling in 2009.

But, in this online community of well-meaning folks committed to understanding and evoking empathy, I find no appreciation for historical trauma ... a condition I'm reasonably certain resonates in the lives of people not too far removed from the author. The depiction of ‘victimhood’ is an affront to compassionate people who understand the unremitting continuum of racial injustice.

Data from the Multnomah County Health Department gives longitudinal evidence of racial disparities in health outcomes. “How can this be?” I wondered, at first disbelieving. “Doctors are among the most caring people in my community.” But it is true; for a variety of reasons, care providers demonstrate racial bias. Our brothers and sisters suffer needlessly.

I am in a dilemma. I know empathy would be a highly effective tool, to motivate those in the dominant culture to end such injustice. I am pretty sure contributors to The Empathy Blog see themselves as do most Portlanders: as just and compassionate ... progressing toward an ever more equitable future. Time and time again, however, I get the sense that well-meaning members of the dominant culture want to leap past truth and embrace reconciliation. It is difficult for them to countenance that the most fortunate among us pay to perpetuate police, courts, county health providers (not to mention schools, the housing authority, employment opportunities and training initiatives) that perpetuate racially unequal outcomes.

White people’s advantages are often invisible to them. It requires some study, and a society bent on documenting them, before disparities can be made obvious in a structured way. 

For me, a sense of moral indignation was a prerequisite to becoming sufficiently motivated to make apparent what had been invisible to me. White people who have not achieved intimacy with the victims of racism are, I fear, less likely to so engage. When those in the dominant culture dismiss as 'old' and 'familiar' fears and pain that resonate in the here and now, I suspect they are unlikely to achieve empathy that will lead to dismantling racism. This reinforcing behavior leaves most of my fellows distant and uniformed of serious, ongoing social ills. 

Seeing how pervasive it is, I struggle now with the idea that structured racism is not inadvertent. Racial disadvantages do not remain simply due to entropy. I had thought empathy would be a vital component in spurring well-meaning folks to move from denial and into remedial action ... to press against all that reinforces racism. When I find myself in a center of advocacy for empathy, however, and infer that victims or their survivors should ‘get over it,’ I find myself discouraged. Contemporary attitudes and policies both have straight line connections from America’s one-time embrace of slavery. I don’t think everyone has to untangle those lines with historical accuracy, but I join in the demands of the Coalition of Communities of Color in their well-researched Unsettling Profile:

We seek for those in the White community to end a prideful perception that Multnomah County is an enclave of progressivity. Communities of color face tremendous inequities and a significant narrowing of opportunity and advantage. This must become unacceptable for everyone.

We in the dominant culture must learn to stop waving away the hurt. We must learn to care.

2003 Memorial for Kendra James, I-5 Overpass, NE Skidmore St., Portland, OR

Fiddling with Cato

"What about the women?" asked my [then] wife, after being subjected to a long, drawn out depiction of ancestral exploits. Subsequently sensitive to the fact that the dominant culture - keepers of the record - leaves many persons' histories unrecorded, I find it particularly rewarding when I encounter documentation left by people of color.

Reading 'The Negro In Kentucky,' written by G. W. Jackson and published in 1940 by the Negro Educational Association Journal, I assumed I'd discovered a non-white voice declaiming the merits of my subject, Monk Estill.

"In accounts of Indian raids, slaves are reported as loyal and daring. In the battle of Little Mountain, when pioneers fought with the Wyandotte Indians in 1782, the bravery of Colonel William [Captain James - RDH] Estill's slave Monk, inspired the pioneer warriors as nothing else in the battle did. He was an expert in making gunpowder and such an interesting preacher that the whites and blacks from Shelby and surrounding counties flocked to his meetings."

I leave aside reference to loyalty, and the author's statistics demonstrating that, "The Kentucky Negro has done his bit in the wars of the nation," while America prepared to enter World War II. It's true, but historical timing seems to drive this emphasis on fighting and preaching for the Lord.

I'll also leave aside the frustrations of Ted Franklin Belue, who contributed the entry concerning Monk in the 1992 Kentucky Encyclopedia, and who wrote me that editors reported Monk being a Baptist preacher ... despite his objection as a subject matter expert, and absent any proof on the editors' part.

Jackson's article referenced one of Monk's contemporaries, and my interest was piqued:

"The first Christmas party in Kentucky would have ended in dismal failure but for the fiddling of Cato Watts, a Negro servant who had come to Louisville with one of the families in the George Rogers Clark expedition."

Interesting, the term 'servant:' Cato was a slave. It also seemed odd that - when describing African American 'contributions' to Kentucky history - Jackson would leap past the sacrifice of Twetty's slave, killed by Native warriors before Boone's party ever cut their way to the future site of Boonesborough.

Nevertheless, since false (or at least unsupported) accounts abound ... of Monk in possession of musical talent ... I was keen to research Cato Watts.

From Reuben Thomas Durrett, attributed to his 1894 work, The Romance of the Origin of Louisville, I draw the version I call 'Uncle Cato,' where we are encouraged to see slaves as indolent, and gentle in their acceptance of forced subservience.

"A source of pleasure to the islanders was a fiddle in the hands of Cato Watts, a slave who belonged to Captain John Donne. Cato would play for hours in the shade of the trees while young and old joined in the Virginia Reel, the Irish Jig, and the Highland Fling. When Sunday came, however, the fiddle was silent and all joined in the singing of hymns."

Again with the emphasis on Christianity: this historian wants us to know the value the group placed on religion. It is true, that slaves worshiped with whites. Thirty-one years later, in 1809, Giles preceded by four years my 3x-gr-grandfather, Capt. Whitfield Early (1777-1865) into a Baptist congregation in Boone County, Kentucky. Giles, slave to Early, transferred his membership from a Virginia church.

Mildred J. Hill, in her History of Music in Louisville, gives an 1896 depiction of the Christmas party (on Corn Island, a crude settlement at the Falls of the Ohio, as Louisville was not yet in existence):

"This is the first mention of music of any kind in Louisville; and, as it is a story of happiness, contentment and good-fellowship, it makes a pleasant starting point for a pleasant subject."

The most recent account I discovered, of 'Cato Watts - the first Slave in Louisville,' shocked me. In observation of Black History Month, 2013, examiner.com posted this account of Cato's life:

... he was hanged.

The article - calling us to mind our history - runs but two paragraphs. Basically, "Little was known about Watts ... he was hanged." No fiddle playing. No birth or death dates, but their reporting does hyperlink Cato Watts to the illustrious slave-owner George Rogers Clark.

At family history sites, presumably-white descendants of Capt. John Donne have preserved an historical record of their ancestor's demise (no mention of fiddle playing discovered). They report that "Cato claimed the death was an accident." It might seem reasonable for descendants to then declare, "Cato was charged in the murder of John Donne and hung for the offence," except that Virginia law (then in effect in what is now known as Kentucky) prevented people of color - free or not - from testifying against whites. Or testifying at all in such cases.

J. Blaine Hudson, in a 1999 paper for the august, Louisville-based Filson Club Historical Quarterly, looked further into the historical record than examiner.com or Donne descendants. In his pre-trial hearing, "The above named Cato Watts was led to the Bar, and upon Examination says that he knocked the said Donne down but that it was not with the intention to kill him."

Uniquely, Hudson combined histories of Cato's status as first black resident, his fiddle playing, and the subsequent homicide. Though 'first slave in Louisville' accounts are often linked to his execution, my assessment is that Cato Watts is best remembered for saving Christmas ... with a particularly sentimental, fictionalized 2003 account here.

In a 1976 article by Robert A. Burnett, in another issue of the Filson Club Historical Quarterly, something poignant comes to light about that festive occasion in primitive conditions on Corn Island:

"Jean Nickle, a Frenchman ... entertained the party with his fiddle, playing dances then the rage in Paris, but these were too sophisticated [described as too 'scientific' in an 1893 account] for pioneers unaccustomed to the music of a Paris salon. The evening was saved when Nickle gave the slave, Cato Watts, some strings to replace the worn ones on his fiddle and Watts enlivened the party with popular tunes of the frontier."

Folklore depicting the first celebration of the birth of Christ in Kentucky could be used to indicate that pioneers lacked sophistication. In this story line, the rough justice subsequently handed out to Cato Watts would be reinforced for its barbarism.

In a sentence following how the Frenchman Nickle yielded fiddle playing to Cato "who soon had himself and the dancers in a paroxysm of joy," Durrett's 1893 account declares Monk's contemporary was, in addition to being the first slave in what is now Louisville ... in addition to being the man who saved the first Christmas in those environs ... Cato Watts, property of John Donne, was also the first man ever hung in Louisville.

"He killed his owner as he claimed by accident, but was tried and hung for the crime. He was hanged to the limb of a large oak tree which stood on ... the public square on which the court house now stands. The hanging was in 1787, and much to the sorrow of the young people who enjoyed his music at their dances."

Monsieur Nickle graced Louisville with a dancing school in 1786. In 2012, an Electronica/Worldbeat/Jamba band was performing in Louisville under the name of Cato Watts.

Cato Watts, from Stories of Old Kentucky, 
by Martha C. Grassham Purcell, pg 114; c1915

Two Cases for High-Tech, Racial Identity

Hypodescent is the societal practice of assigning children of mixed union to the ethnic group which is perceived by the dominant group as being 'subordinate.'

Appearances can be pretty deceiving, I figure. I was raised on Nazi stories, describing how white supremacists hunted down anyone with A SINGLE DROP of Jewish blood. As a kid I heard that a Negro was any person who had a single drop of black blood. One drop and, no matter what you looked like, you were in that other race. Well, not just ‘another’ race: you were in a race that wasn’t as good as people who were all white.

And what is 'all white,' anyway? I got to thinking how best to categorize people, based on race.

An African-American cousin and I were discussing 'octaroons' and 'mulatto,' and the whole idea of race sorta collapsed on me. I was trying to figure out how pigmentation will be handled after racism has faded from our consciousness: I had this vision where we’d each be rated by a specific, pertinent number; no longer categorized 'Non-Hispanic White' or 'Caucasoid' or whatever. I figured science would give us a number (or a code, for those embracing complexity). I thought that number or code might come from DNA research, but maybe it will be a number generated by a densitometer.

The Reflective Qualities of Melanin

But then I realized I change pigmentation throughout the year (I discovered Blacks darkened after a couple weeks in Hawaii.), so we’d each have to be a range numbers. Then, I realize I have moles and sometimes scabs like what I got from scratching chigger bites while down in Kentucky … heck I’m a vast array of skin tones!

Lighting Directors and Color Corrections Specialists, when producing close-ups for television, know that each face – from the blackest African to the tawniest Asian and pinkest Anglo – reflect essentially the same range of colors. The pigmentation we reflect is more similar than we realize.

Amelia (Turner) Leer c1872

My whole concept of white superiority took a hit when I helped produce a radio program about skin tone. Not only does my coloration change, the rules for being the 'best' color have also been in play. Heard the term ‘blue blood?’ It meant the subject came from a fine family (wealthy, and in some way related to someone in power). Blue blood referred to the veins visible in a White person’s arms. The French introduced powders, even hideous looking, lead-based ointment, to make themselves whiter than humanly possible. My great-grandmother (left) employed a parasol to ward off the sun, presumably because she did not want melanin granules to expand among her skin cells.

Then, swept in by the Industrial Revolution, most workers left the fields and took jobs indoors … laboring in factories. They got pale. Whites with means responded by sporting sun tans. The rate of skin cancer shot up in their class, but at least one could tell by looking at their bronze skin, that they were better resourced than most of the rest of us.

While analyzing racial profiling data, a new concept of pigmentation dawned on me. Portland, Oregon police had been ordered to ascribe racial categories to drivers stopped. Consult Hardesty analyzed those statistics by racial categories. African Americans were stopped more frequently than Hispanics and both were stopped about twice as often as Anglos. I realized that, if cops supplied densitometer readings, the frequency by which these people were subsequently searched would fall out on a line: the blacker the driver they have accosted, the more likely it is that Portland police officers will search them. (Plot spoiler: African Americans were half as likely to be carrying contraband or have outstanding warrants, even though they were stopped twice as often, and then searched twice as often as those that police identified as White.)

Coal black folks get worse interactions than ‘high yaller’ ones, I suspect.

What a weird world. Like pigmentation has anything to do with anything else: criminality, intelligence, ability to love.*

Hapalogroups Unite!

It came to me that geneticists can give us a number ... or some sort of solid, identifying code that will evoke racial heritage. I'll admit that I'm not sure how informed we are when we speak of the Hispanic or Jewish race. And I'm not sure what advantage that knowledge supplies, but where our genes came from seems important to classifiers.

And then I heard that DNA research has confirmed that all human genetic material originated in Africa. No matter how White you are, your people were at one time Black.

And what of the term 'Caucasian Male?' Instead of a point of origin, categorizing in this way makes it important that our genes parked for a time in a certain geographical location (like the Caucus Mountains).

Like the vector scope analysis (top), my haplogroup data set becomes meaningless when we understand that most people's genetic material, over the expanse of human history, has largely traversed a mesh of similar circuits. Imagine the vast web that would connect all the places your ancestors inhabited as they led up to your parents. Would a code describing this web actually distinguish you any more accurately than the label 'Scots-Irish?' Besides, if your DNA tests don't take you back to the Yoruba or a neighboring tribe in Africa, then I would hold those results as suspect. They may be shielding you from your true humanity.

I am not the only American to be intrigued by the categorization of people by skin color. Certainly more so than, say, eye color. I know my countrymen have put a lot of energy into discriminating epidermal hues , cranial constructions, nose flanges, etc., and mostly so one pigmented group can declare itself superior to another. So that one group can dominate (take advantage) of another. I can't see what racial analysis based on, though.

I can see that, while the original, race-based cause for such degradation is probably meaningless, the history of racial oppression is all too real.

Our history of slavery … I think that DOES have an impact on things, even today. I know from my work among Native Americans that deep, psychic pain courses through communities who identify in this way. I cannot imagine the ache that still reverberates, knowing one’s ancestors felt either the repression of repeated attempts at genocide, or endured four centuries of enslavement. To me, the horrors at Abu Ghraib are immense … and they only lasted a few years. I cannot imagine, generation after generation, suffering this kind of torment. I cannot imagine thinking that there is no way out ... even for your children's children.

Some ambitious peoples wanted to be in a group that dominated others. I guess it was easier than doing all the work yourself or compensating for legal title to land. Those with an enduring history of success chose not to define themselves by height, or eye color, or muscle tone ... but by skin color. And they assigned subordinate roles to children who were not precisely in their dominant parents' color range.

Some folks say that Thomas Jefferson's red-haired, African American son was quite intelligent. Yet Jefferson held hypodescent practices. Slave Tom was prevented from living his life to the fullest. Why would a man do that to his son? Martha Washington never freed her half-sister. Ann Dandridge Costin and all of Martha's nieces and nephews were treated as property, to be divided up according to Martha's 19th century will.

Yes, this race thing is tricky. The true racial identity of my olive-skinned grandmother was likely shielded from me. Maybe I'm a quintroon, but pass as high yellow. My second wife was as Black as a Queen of Spades ... but guess what? With the vagaries of genetics, her heavy pigmentation might deceive you into thinking she's closer to her African roots. For all I know, of the millions of our ancestors who have not yet made it into paper-trail databanks at ancestry.com ... more of mine may have been recently African than hers.

And I guarantee you: we are all of African descent. The amount of melanin we bear has as much to do with deservedness as nostril hairs. We have simply chosen a methodology of valuing one another. Our methodology of assigning values has no useful or meaningful measure. It fails any test of reason. Racism derives its authority from mere convention.

I assume it will not be a Herculean task to simply develop new conventions and put an end to race-based attempts at domination.

*UPDATE: Researching James Berry (1752-1822), great-grandfather to the above Amelia (Turner) Leer (1852-1915), I discovered Berry's peers using the term "yellow devils" to describe Native warriors. Those Kentucky pioneers had not yet been inculcated to use racial descriptor "red."

What's in a Slave Name?

Through my family history research I've come to know (virtually) my cousin Ardis. We met when I found someone online researching Squire Turner (1793-1871). I'm keen to know as much as I can about this gr-gr-grand uncle who worked so hard to defeat emancipationists as Kentucky gathered for a Constitutional Convention in 1850. It surprised the heck out of me to discover an African American woman was looking into this character.

Ardis is likely descended from a rape by Turner of one of his many slaves. Ardis and I have chosen to be 'related by slavery.' We likely both descend from 'Trading Tom Turner (1764-1847).

It's a difficult thing to prove.

What I did not appreciate, as I busied myself with collecting, sorting through and making sense of data pulled from court records, published family histories, and actual historical texts in some cases, is how easy I have it. Sure, I'm working with tiny and frustratingly incomplete data sets, but I'd never really considered how sparse slave records are.

Some of you might have seen Ron Allen's piece, Priscilla's Story, on NBC. (It includes an interview with Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family.) Allen claims Priscilla's is the only story documenting lineage from a free child stolen from her people in Africa ... all the way to contemporary, living Americans.

Could such documented history really be so rare? Given the psychic scars left among torn-apart families, a compelling desire to know and to heal must have produced a body of complete and extensive accounts.

Consider how difficult it is to research slave ancestry. Family units were fractured by slave auctions of individual family members as well as capricious, unreported murder or (like Martha Custis Washington) a complete unwillingness to acknowledge a person's own kin ... living in squalor a hundred yards away on Slave Row. Whether a mother was worked to death, died of disease, or was sold off; her children may never have realized they did not descend from the woman who raised them.

I felt compelled to blog about this when I read a well-intentioned white man, chiding fellow genealogists for using secondary sources in their research; implying that their labor was less significant for their failure to cite more of the official record. I found myself writing:

"Our whole endeavor is speculative: I don't for a moment think that, just because a government put it in a document, a fact has more veracity than if it came from a lyric in a folksong - especially if the dominant culture has a vested interest in deceiving its populace."

And I got to thinking about the deep desires among our cousins, to know as much of their Africa-to-America history as they can, and of the tremendous odds of having that curiosity fully quenched. What an ache.

Whether it was through arrogance or shame or simple neglect, my ancestors did little to record the lives of slaves they'd forbidden to become literate. I suspect my people were breeding some of their slave stock for brute strength, docility and low intelligence. I assume they contemplated no future where free men and women would one day be curious about their lineage. While they were keen to document the lineage of the finest mules they bred, my ancestors did less to publicize the name of a child's father, brought in from a neighboring farm to serve as a stud. How difficult is genealogy for descendants of children who were kept from ever touching their parents?

Genealogy angel Dr. William L. Smith drew my attention to a 4-page tool, The Historical Biographer's Guide to the Research Process. Mill's Identity Triangulation Model encourages even certified smart people believe identity is more than a name on a federal form.

"It is every known detail of a human life. Identity is determined by triangulating three things: persona, relationships, and origin."

Whether you and I are busy mining databases running on huge computer farms or thumbing through musty leaves stored in granite courthouses, we benefit from men and women who taxed themselves to build vaults and employ archivists over intervening generations. Great social endeavor went into preserving many of the records I have discovered.

Was it more than benign neglect that kept the record of millions of slaves so sparse?

If we are to live soundly in the present, we would do well to acknowledge the reality of our past. We may owe a debt of gratitude to people like my cousin Ardis, who labor under tremendous disadvantages when re-creating ancestors' identity. Brothers and sisters, calling for reparations after the inter-generational horrors of slavery, have sensitised me to appreciate how emotionally difficult this search must be.

My cousins know with certainty that identity is more than a name. The surname they bear could have been imposed by men who treated their ancestors as property. A slave name burns in a way that simulates the branding iron my ancestors likely employed as a right of ownership, as a means of establishing identity.

Pompey & London - Death in the Wilderness

History has a means of setting up contrasts. In an earlier post I explored tremendous risks for slaves, especially when on the frontier of what is now called Kentucky. Two notable men - both with relatively recent African ancestry - died in a no man's land only a day or so apart. Each embraced initiative when the slave experience tends not to reward such behavior.

These men, one slave, one free and both black, performed diametrically different roles in this event.

London was enslaved. He was the property of Nathaniel Henderson (1736-1794). London probably helped Daniel Boone (1734-1820) in 1775 to cut the Transylvania Path (also called the Wilderness Trace) to a remote, 20,000,000-acre claim made by Tory investors.
In September 1778, Boone had only just fled captivity among Shawnee in what is now Ohio. The talent most responsible for Boone's ability to communicate with his captors belonged to Pompey. Like Jonathan Pointer, Pompey was valued for his ability to speak English. According to Shawnee Heritage, Pompey was born about 1740. By 1755 - sometime after his capture/liberation from slaveholders on the Virginia frontier - this bilingual asset had been adopted into the tribe. Pompey had married and fathered at least one son when he - in the company of over 400 native warriors with at least 40 pack horses, the largest force to invade Kentucky en masse - approached the crude stockade later to be called Boonesborough. That he had attained some status may be inferred by the fact that Pompey bore the war party's flag of truce as braves sallied to the fort, seeking the Americans' surrender.

After negotiations broke down, natives besieged the 40 or so able-bodied defenders and their families. In most accounts, Pompey taunted the trapped pioneers with profanities. As translator, it was Pompey who sent word that fellow warriors had heard of the beauty of Boone's daughter (Boone had used cunning and force to free Jemima after her 1776 capture) and were requesting an opportunity to look upon her. Supposedly desiring to postpone attack, Boone persuaded several women to comply: it was Pompey's voice urging the women to let down their hair. Few remaining accounts declare it, but it is more than likely that the besieged "harbored a great deal of bad feelings about the presence of Pompey." In Anglos' world view, it was certainly out of place that a black man would curse them, let alone call their women to such revealing behavior.

It is unlikely that Boone - a former Quaker known to be investing in slaves by 1781 - would have thought himself profane when, as a captive earlier in the year, he deprecated treatment he found demeaning. Yale professor John Mack Faragher, quoting a Boone descendant in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, has the famous pioneer telling Black Fish, the Shawnee war chief who had adopted him, "When I am at home I don't do this kind of work. I have Niggers to work for me. You and your Squaw calls me your Son, but this don't look like you love me."

It is not reported whether Pompey translated this for Boone.

It is worth noting that slaves confronted by Black Fish that September were armed ... and expected to defend those holding them in servitude. When he is freed in 1782, one of the first actions Monk will take is to produce gunpowder: once he has a vested interest in public safety, Monk takes steps to assure it, even though he also defends men who force his fellows to ceaseless labor, insufficient diets, and inferior clothes and shelter.

It was likely Boone who ordered London to a sentry post at the fort's kitchen when Shawnee warriors began pressing the encircled fort. Accounts differ as to whether the twenty-four-year-old "bravely volunteered" or was "directed by the Commander" to take a tremendous nighttime risk. According to Faragher:

"A small fence that adjoined the back wall of one of the cabins was set afire, and, fearing that it would burn through, several men dug through the cabin floor and London, a slave whose master was away from the settlement, squeezed out and succeeded in pushing the blazing timbers away with a forked stick. As he lay in the dark outside the fort, London saw a Shawnee warrior hidden nearby behind a tree stump. He whispered to the men behind him to pass up a loaded gun, took aim, pulled the trigger; the lock snapped failing to ignite the powder, and the warrior jerked toward the well-known sound, peering into the darkness, without making out the shooter. London cocked and pulled again, and this time the powder in the pan flashed, but the gun failed to fire. Now the Indian saw his attacker clearly, illuminated by the burst of powder, and shot him dead."

In most surviving accounts that mention him, London is lauded for his courage ... and for daring to take aggressive measures while exposed to danger. One assumes London was not provided a faulty firearm, for he defended whoever handed him the gun as well as his own life.

A nearly continuous exchange of vulgar gibes, a practice Americans called 'blackguarding,' went on for days. After some time came an insistent question from defenders: "Where's Pompey?"

Perhaps in broken English, the Shawnee or their French escorts reportedly replied, "Pompey has gone to Chillicothe to fetch more Indians."

No longer hearing the former slave's raucous jeers, 'forters' continued pressing: "Where's Pompey?"

"Pompey has gone to hunt in the woods for some of the white men's roaming pigs," came the reply.

From Faragher:

"Pompey, who took a special pleasure in infuriating the Americans, was one of the most active participants in the blackguarding. He challenged their courage and manhood and dared them to come out and fight or else surrender. But he got carelessly involved with the game, popping up from the bank of the river to hurl repeated insults and fire his gun toward the fort. The men in the bastions answered in kind with words and fire, while others took aim at different spots along the bank where Pompey might next appear. Unable to resist another retort, he jumped up one time too many and took a shot square in the face."

"Where's Pompey?" was the insistent taunt.

According to Caruso in The Appalachian Frontier, one brave yelled: "Pompey ne-pan." (Pompey is asleep.) Another corrected him: "Pompey nee-poo." (Pompey is dead.) "Redskins and settlers chuckled at the play on words," amidst the very real threat of violent death.

The most sober accounts attribute the fatal shot to William Collins, 'a fine marksman.' A few of the more chauvinist reporters give variations of an account where Pompey climbs a tree and fires into the fort. (Boone is shot in the upper shoulder, but I've found no warrior credited with the wound.)

This is from the U.S. Forest Service:

"One of the most harrassing of the sharpshooters was the negro Pompey. He had been industrially sniping from a tall tree, doing his best to pick off people moving within the stockade over which he could fire from his high perch. Finally, the exasperated Daniel Boone loaded his rifle, ole tick-licker, with a heavy charge. At the crack of his rifle Pompey came tumbling out of the tree dead."

So stunning it almost gives pause for meditation on the implications, is an almost universal allegation that, when the war party withdrew at the end of a 10-day siege, Pompey's body remained on the field of battle. Implied is that, as was custom, native warriors removed all (perhaps 37 bodies) of their fallen comrades, but neglected their adopted African American brother.

Slaves, generally deprived of any advantages to be accrued from formal education, relied on oral accounts as a means of socializing one another to their impoverished condition. It would have been wise for the dominant culture to conclude any account of Pompey's effrontery with his death ... and abandonment by his adopted people. It might serve as a warning to other slaves considering a change of allegiances.

This contemporary, Federal account (unattributed) by the forest service keeps the implied message alive:

"... apparently no Shawnee cared in the least what happened to the black body or the wooly scalp of the Negro slave. Dead or alive, a warrior's honor was safe if he still had his scalp."

It should be noted that Shawnee Heritage declares Pompey not only survived this encounter, but was known to be in Missouri the following year.

By November, 1778, London's owner appealed to the General Assembly of Virginia for compensation for his war-time loss:

"... in defending fort Boon in the County of Kentucky against an attempt of the Indians, your Petitioner had a valuable negro fellow killed - That the said negro was ordered by the Commanding officer to take a gun, and place himself in a dangerous post and to keep watch & fire on the Indians, which he accordingly did and was killed - That if the said negroe had been suffered to remain within his Cabbin, he could not have been hurt, That the loss of so valuable a slave together with the many other losses sustained by your petitioner in that Country distress him very much -"

From a supporting affidavit by W. Buchanan we hear the allegation that London "was worth upwards of Six hundred pounds." Henderson's claim was swiftly rejected.

It seems to me, picking and choosing among extant historical records, that we can believe both Pompey and London were bold ... perhaps to the point of recklessness. Neither seem to have shirked involvement when adventure called. Both expressed commitment to the social fabric webbing them in. In conclusion, I'd like to play a note on that old saw, that 'history is written by the winners.' I think it likely that accounts of Pompey's participation in the Siege at Boonesborough were colored by subsequent generations who sought to preserve a higher status in social order that was based on their skin color. Pompey remains within the folklore as a warning: persons of color should not act rudely. The account of London's behavior plays into a meme later expressed (and presently being discredited); that numbers of slaves so valued their position in southern society that they fought for the Confederacy.

Self-Rule in the Wilderness

In 1775, proprietors of the Transylvania Land Company (Trans = across, Sylvan = forest) have delivered enough goods to 'fill a dwelling' to about 12,000 Cherokee warriors for the right to occupy a vast swath of land in what is now known as Kentucky. At-ta-kul-la-Kul-la (Little Carpenter) says to Daniel Boone: “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.” All present know this is not Cherokee land.

In 1775 this area was a No Man's Land to Anglos. King George III had forbidden colonization west of the Appalachian Mountains. Revolutionary Virgina expected these lands to fall within their purview, and profits from western land sales to fall into their colony's treasury.

Pioneers began an experiment in self-governance. Company proprietors sent James Hogg as their emissary to the Continental Congress. He carried a document (memorial) seeking to participate in their activities:

"From the generous plan of liberty adopted by the Congress and that noble love of mankind which appears in all their proceedings, the memorialists please themselves that the united colonies will take the infant Colony of Transylvania into their protection ...”

Due to objections by Virginia and fear that endorsing a project the Crown had prohibited would dash any hope for reconciliation with the King, the memorial was not presented.

Hogg's report back to his employers contained the same flowery language about liberty.

“You would be amazed to see how much in earnest all the speculative gentlemen are about the plan to be adopted by the Transylvanians. They entreat, they pray that we may make it a free government, and beg that no mercenary or ambitious views in the proprietors may prevent it. They even threaten us with their opposition, if we do not act upon liberal principles when we have it so much in our power to render ourselves immortal."

I found Hogg's next line chilling.

"Many of them advised a law against Negroes.” SOURCE

To me, anyway, it all seems so incongruous. In their minds these property holders believed held a 'noble love of mankind.' It was not at all dichotomous that their slaves were conceived of as property, human beings not in any way to be considered in discussions of liberty and freedom.