Secrets of the Past

Setting aside the personal surprise and potential discomfort that such a revelation would produce, I'm not quite sure why the press has made such a big deal about an ancestor of Al Sharpton being owned as a slave by a relative of Strom Thurmond (from the description in the article, it sounds to me like the slave owner was Thurmond's first cousin twice removed). It's the little secret that we all know but that we try to avoid thinking through to its logical conclusion. This country was built on slavery. Slavery, in both the North and the South, provided the underpinning of the economy throughout the time that economy was being established.

Here's a fact that's not well known for some reason but makes perfect sense once you know it. With the exception of the Adamses of Massachusetts, John and John Quincy, every one of the first dozen slaves presidents owned slaves while they were in the White House or had owned slaves before they were elected. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were all members of the Virginia planter aristocracy--of course they all owned slaves. Jackson was a frontiersman from Tennessee, where society was a bit rougher, but he was enough well-to-do that he owned slaves, as well. In fact, although it's not conclusive, there's evidence that Jackson was even a slave trader.

New Yorker Martin Van Buren is a bit of an odd-man-out, in that he didn't own a lot of slaves, but he did own at least one for a short time as a younger man before the practice was outlawed in his state. William Henry Harrison of Ohio originally came from the Virginia aristocracy, but he owned slaves before he moved west and gave them their freedom. (I believe that's right, though I'm going on memory. Instead of freeing his slaves, he may have sold them all to others, but one way or another, he'd divested himself of them for several years before he served his month in the White House.) With John Tyler, we're back to the Virginia planter class, and then James K. Polk brings Tennessee back to the executive branch. Zachary Taylor, one of the heroes of the Mexican War, was also one of the largest slaveholders in Louisiana.

After Taylor died in office, there were a succession of non-slaveholding presidents. Not coincidentally, they each came from the North, Millard Fillmore from New York, Franklin Pierce from Vermont New Hampshire, and James Buchanan from Pennsylvania. Buchanan is almost a special case, though, because although he never owned slaves, he did live for a number of years in household with William Rufus King, a congressman, senator, and vice president from the South who did own slaves. So although Buchanan didn't actually own slaves, he did live in a household that was served by them.

And then there was the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. But we're not through yet. Although slavery was abolished shortly after the end of the war, the two presidents who followed Lincoln had each owned slaves earlier in their lives. The first, of course, was Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, and that's no surprise. But the next chief executive, and the last president to have ever owned slaves during his life time was none other than Ulysses S. Grant. Grant owned a slave whom he freed two years before war broke out. His wife, Julia Dent Grant, came from a Missouri slaveholding family. So it wasn't until 1877 that the last president who ever owned slave left office.

I hadn't meant to go into a lecture on presidential history here, but to comment on the recent Sharpton/Thurmond revelation. It can't be surprising that the ancestors of some prominent African-Americans were owned by the ancestors of some prominent white Americans. Slavery is woven into the fabric of America, and those kind of connections will be plentiful if we bother to go look for them (and a case could be made that we shouldn't bother).

Sharpton had a few very insightful comments on addressing his new information:

You think about the distance that you've come, you think about how brutal it was, you think about how life must have been like for [my great-grandfather]. And then you start wondering whether or not he would be proud or disappointed in what we have done.

He also said, "In the story of the Thurmonds and the Sharptons is the story of the shame and the glory of America." I agree with that wholeheartedly.

[UPDATED--This proves I shouldn't write from memory or so late at night. A couple of people, including Jason in comments, corrected my typing error replacing presidents with slaves, and my history professor father reminded me where Franklin Pierce was really from.]