Who Are Descended from Slaveholders?

There’s a certain amount of clucking going on about a piece by Tom Lasseter, Lawrence Delevigne, Makini Brice, Donna Bryson, Nicholas P. Brown and Tom Bergin at Reuters on the present political leaders whose ancestors owned slaves:

In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.

Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder.

The entire piece is interesting but not particularly surprising, at least to me. However, I think they’re drawing the wrong conclusion:

As Harvard’s Gates wrote, Sherman did issue a special order in 1865 calling for liberated families under his protection to be issued land and, later, a mule. The property in question was a strip of land down the country’s southeastern coast.

Had the order been followed, it would have provided Black Americans assets upon which to build new lives and perhaps pass wealth to subsequent generations.

But the program ended quickly, Gates wrote. President Andrew Johnson, the Southern sympathizer who succeeded Abraham Lincoln, “overturned the Order in the fall of 1865” and returned the land “to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.”

The United States has never paid restitution for slavery.

There are many reasons why I think that, not the least because at this late date paying reparations for slavery would satisfy no reasonable definition of “justice” since it would involve paying people who were never enslaved at the expense of people who never held slaves. As Dr. Gates also is quoted in the piece:

Gates said identifying those familial connections to slaveholders is “not another chapter in the blame game. We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions.”

But I think it goes beyond that and delving a little into my own family history might illustrate why. Not only do I have no ancestors who held slaves, some of my ancestors were abolitionists, and you would be hard put to find anyone in my family who benefited either from slavery or Jim Crow in any but the most indirect way.

I think there’s actually some prediction criteria for slave ownership:

• Residence in a slave state prior to abolition
• Family wealth in that time period
• English ancestry
• French ancestry

more or less in descending order of significance. I have ancestors who lived in a slave state prior to abolition (Missouri), who had the requisite level of wealth, and were French. Nonetheless my researches have revealed that none of them ever owned slaves. And this is the critical point. Not only do I doubt that I am unique in that regard but I suspect that the percentages of Americans whose ancestors never owned slaves and who never benefited in any but the most indirect way from slavery or Jim Crow is growing. Furthermore, I suspect that the percentage of Americans whose families included American slaves is actually decreasing.

Consequently, I think they’re asking the wrong question. Rather than trying to enumerate the Americans who owned slaves, why not figure out what percentage of Americans’ families never owned slaves? My suspicion is that the issue of reparations for slavery becomes less relevant with every passing year.