The Genealogy Game - The Mayflower, One Upping The Neighbors, And Prentiss Lancaster The Slaver

Robert Potter was concerned that he had slave-owning blood.  Family stories about ancestors in Georgia and South Carolina hinted at a disreputable legacy, but his family had been descendants of the earliest Virginia settlers whose families had moved from the swamps of Albemarle Sound to healthier and more productive upland lands.  

'Landowners', was all he could exact from Granma Potter, the historian of the family, repository of both physical records and legend, but Bob thought that there must be more.  What large landowner in the South did not own slaves?

Old Mrs. Potter demurred and told her grandson to bark up another tree.  The Potters, she said, were of noble birth, tracing their lineage back to the English Renaissance, blood of kings and courtiers; and before they voyaged to the New World were renowned for their earnest support of empire, the expansion of Christian civilization, and the spread of Western wisdom and knowledge. 

'Colonel Ezekiel Lancaster, your ancestor' said Granma Potter, 'was one of the founding members of the East India Company which transformed the subcontinent, turning it into a model of Eastern development; and long before that another Lancaster, Bishop of Coventry was an aide to Cardinal Wolsey during the reign of Henry VIII and instrumental in the Protestant reforms of the times; and....'

Here Bob stopped his grandmother, disturbed rather than proud at hearing of the elitism and colonial exploitation in which his close relatives took part; and he knew where the old lady was going, right into the maw of the beast, and left to rattle on would limn the praises of the Potter and Lancaster families slave-owning past. 

Yet Bob could not end the story there.  He had to know, did they or didn't they? 

'Of course they did', said Mrs. Potter, 'and you should be proud of it. Why, Prentiss Lancaster hacked and slashed his way from Florida to the Mississippi Delta, through malarial snake-infested cypress swamps, drained the fertile lands along the river, cleared the brush and wild tangle of the land, and created thousands of acres of cotton fields.  He was an adventurer, an entrepreneur, a gallant knight, a...'

Again Bob stopped her.  He had heard enough and the truth he had been avoiding for years was now undeniable.  He was the legatee of the spoils of the worst period in American history, and his blood ran thick with villainy. 

Yet and still, there was some hope - an anodyne, a neutralizing element to counteract the base immorality of his bloodline.  He knew that Southern grandees often slept with their slaves and there was the very real chance that he had black blood. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to claim as nobly distinct from the white supremacist DNA within. 

 

His career, his professional history depended on such a finding.  If it were confirmed that he was a pureblood, white supremacist slave-owning descendant, he would not be able to hold his head up in the ranks of his fellow progressives; so he spit in a cup and waited for the DNA results. 

Nada, nothing doing, Bob was as white as the driven snow. No one needed to know of course, but he knew, and that was enough, and he rededicated himself to the black man. 

Abigail Finchley Cabot had the same storied European family legacy.  One branch of her family ancestors were founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New Haven Plantations, and New Jersey settlements; and the other, like Bob's, the first colonizers of Virginia.  King Carter, one of the wealthiest men on the Northern Neck was her direct ancestor, and his offspring, once tobacco lands wore out moved west to Alabama and the Mississippi Delta and became wealth plantation owners. 

Abigail, unlike Bob, was proud of her past and was a member of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) and the even more impressive Society of the Cincinnati whose members had to have had an officer in the colonial militias in their fight against the British.  Of course her ancestors were slave owners, but so what?  Slavery had been a going enterprise since the Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.  The great Persian, Mauryan, and Han empires kept slaves.  The Gao, Malian, and Ghanaian kings and courtiers were slaveowners.  The black man was not the first and perhaps even not the last. 

She was far more interested in the achievements of the Finchleys and the Cabots whose power, wealth, and influence carried on through the early Twentieth Century.  A Finchley had been a close associate of both Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, and a Cabot was an associate of J.P. Morgan and together they built a Wall Street empire. 

Slave owners? Surely and absolutely.  Shame for this part of her past? Never.  Abigail was a proud American who was angered at the censorious historical revisionism of the Biden years, cancelling Thomas Jefferson for his dalliance with slave Sally Hemmings, renaming institutions honoring heroes of both North and South, cancelling every notable American on the basis of an activity that was as common as sunrise.

 

Yale University, her university, had changed the names of some of its residential colleges because of the discovery of some racial taint; but further investigation showed that all the men for whom the colleges were named had some association with slavery - the shipbuilders for the Three Cornered Trade, the financiers who financed them, the shipowners, the banks which invested their money, ad infinitum ad nauseam. So Yale changed the names to insignificant black women or other socially approved candidates. 

The virus of genealogy is highly contagious, and thousands of Americans are searching past records to see if they were people of merit - princes even, knights, or simply traces of Carnegie, Mellon, or Lafayette. Most come up empty, vessels of an unappealing stew of Polish, Italian, or Irish bits.  Mickey Finn who escaped Dublin with a price on his head but became Mayor of Jersey City; Paddy O'Rourke potato farmer turned highwayman, sought by the English and the Irish but in America founder of the successful chain of Blarney Stone bars. 

A few came up with royalty or at least aristocracy and proudly flew the escutcheoned flag of legacy on the front porch.  Many like Bob looked for black roots, others for Geronimo and White Wolf, still others for a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

None of it all mattered.  It was weekend activity, business, something to do in retirement, folly and at best a notch in the belt, something to show off, to display. 

Identity is all the rage in America, so it is not surprising that so many people are searching for roots; but the past is past and so will the present be very soon, so why bother?  If feels good, that's why, and there's plenty of money to be made.