Yes they owned other people and profited through them

Slavery.
Ugly word.
Ugly practice.

Some of those who owned other people believed they cared for them.  They deluded themselves that taking care of people who worked for them meant enough care and love.  They deluded themselves that the Blacks were better off being slaves.
No way.
No person should lack the same freedoms that our country was founded upon.

I've long tried to be reasonable about all the other aspects of the Civil War, since so many of our Southern Families fought and many men died for the things the South stood for.  I doubt highly that anyone was out there shooting Yankees because they wanted to keep their slaves.

But the long and the short of it is that all those who fought for the Confederacy not only were fighting for their own livelihood, their own families, but for the big illusion that had given wealth to a few, and not a fair competition in the world marketplace, but an unfair advantage of so much "free labor."

Once that the slaves were freed, their labor suddenly was costly.  The South never recovered.  Neither did the free slaves.  And neither did their owners.

I think of how our economy is so messed up these days.  Nobody is a slave, but there are certainly a lot of people living in poverty, who still work two jobs at minimum wage and barely get by.  There is again a great disparity between a small group of very rich people, and they make sure to keep the poor where they are.

On a more personal level...I like looking at my ancestors.  And as I dig through their correspondence I am finding the Southern voice.  One great great grandfather wrote following the Civil War to his brother, and then wrote to President Andrew Johnson.  His letters are long and full of his thoughts.  He was a man of some consequence, having lived through the Civil War, and actually having military duty during the War of 1812.  He was 70 when he wrote his brother in 1866. He bemoans the end of the Civil War as causing more pain for the freed slaves, as well as their masters, and one of these days I'll type it out because his writing is very hard to read.  It's on his Ancestry page, written to his brother.

I try to understand his point of view.

Then I scanned some documents which were sent to my grandmother who lived in Galveston and Houston Texas, born in 1886, and she asked her uncle to tell her about some of her ancestors.  He wrote that her grandfather, William Phillips, who died as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, was the son of a man "who traded in Negroes with his brother."  The brother lived in Virginia, and he lived in Georgia, which was where William was born.  William's father had died and his mother remarried, and they all settled in Texas.

I'd really like to forget that phrase "they traded in Negroes" again.

But I won't, and I can't.

My white privilege means I can stand up and say how bad that makes me feel.  I had many ancestors who sold other people of another race, who profited from the mindset and business that perpetrated slavery.

I had known my ship captain, another great great grandfather, Alexander G. Swasey Jr,  had transported some slaves from Charleston SC to New Orleans, LA, from the ship manifests which he signed.  But that didn't feel as if he was actually doing the business of profiting by slavery.  Not true.  He was part of a system that was as bad in its day as the racism that still is around today.  In between has been the Klu Klux Klan...and Jim Crow laws and illegal practices of racism run rampant.

So even though these people are individually guilty of their outrageous part in the system of slavery, the system is the problem.

I say again, the system of racism is the problem.  There is a lot of institutionalized racism, where everyone closes their eyes/ears to practices that demonstrate this ugliness still...or may tut-tut about it, but don't do anything to change it.

These ancestors are long gone, and their spirits are telling me that I need to stay aware of the systems that I don't pay enough attention to today.  Many of today's systems mirror the slavery of the south in 1860.

Yes, there are certainly some almost invisible systems still eroding our freedoms.  People who march for their rights are usually talking about these systems.

Can you think of a few of them?

On May 29, 2018, Rosanne Barr's show was canceled by ABC, because she tweeted a racist statement about an African American woman who was advisor to President Obama.  

Let's talk about the whispered facts

The old South had many secrets, and racism is sure one of them, which wasn't talked about in "good company," but was included by innuendos and facial gestures...an understanding.

Picking cotton

I've been talking about 2 races that I know I descended from, the Native Americans and the English (and other western European) colonials for the last week or so.

No longer slaves, but blacks picking cotton

It's impossible to talk about my ancestors without running smack into the fact that slavery existed in their lives.  There was a big gulf between the "whites" and the "colored" or "Negroes," or "blacks."  I don't even know what slang might have been used in referring to "red" peoples.  But I'm sure they weren't as accepted by the majority group as they were by their own - and I'm even more sure that the mixed blood people, of which my ancestors were part, were also not accepted readily into white culture.

Coton plantation house, not belonging to any of my ancestors that I  know of

I get a kick out of my post about the most racist man I know, Plecker, who kept all the records and honored the "Racial Integrity law" in Virginia, a law passed after the Civil War was over by 60 years...known as a Jim Crow law.

"On March 20, 1924, Virginia passed the "Act to Preserve Racial Integrity," which defined as "colored" all persons having any discoverable nonwhite ancestry and therefore subjecting all persons of mixed-race ancestry to the racial segregation laws and laws against interracial marriage."

But Virginia had a Pocohontas clause, when many of the Virginia "old families" were related to Pocohontas, so there was an exception for those mixed-blood people, namely by denying the Native blood at all, if it was less than 1/16th.  In thinking about that, a grandparent would give you 1/4 blood, a great grandparent had 1/8, so it would mean 5 generations removed to get to 1/16.

Anyway, there were many economic reasons that kept racism alive for decades, and slavery also, but the racism that was rampant following the Civil War is shameful, and much of it is still alive though hidden today.  Just think "good old boys" or "those people." We're still a tribal culture.

Rev. Elias George who immigrated from Alabama to Louisiana

My families were among those that profited from the work of slaves.  There's no question about that.  And many of them were very religious too, going to church often, praying, reading and quoting scripture.  It didn't make any difference to their belief that slaves were there to work and give all the products of their labor to the white families which owned them, in return for bed and board.

When I quoted my cousin Lou George Tompkins last week, she had talked about having a Mammy.  A black nurse cared for her and her siblings, and helped mid-wife their births as well.  There was a close and intimate relationship between them.  But they were held apart by the misguided belief that one should be working unpaid for the other.

They were held apart by white privilege and racism.

Steamboat Times by Currier and Ives

It is ugly.  I have much DNA guilt for all those misdeeds perpetrated in the name of racism.  Slavery was and is the worst practice imaginable for one person or race to inflict upon another (except maybe blatant torture itself.)  But the psychological abuse of slavery is unimaginable.

And of course I'm almost positive there's black blood in my veins too.  There are as many Bass families which were listed as black as there are who stated in the census that they were white after the Civil War.

Not just in Virginia after 1943 when Plecker said "there were no more Indians in Virginia," and they all got listed as black.

This happened in Louisiana and Texas and all across the south too.  There were many families named Bass.  Only if you lived there would you have known who was truly white or black or mixed races.  But since one was the "superior" race, you can imagine that as many as could, would list themselves as white, would "pass."  But their survival depended upon the secret.  The secret depended upon racism.

Integrated schools and workplaces have happened in my lifetime.  More and more black history and literature is being taught.  And mixed-marriages have become more accepted in our larger society, though I don't miss that many heads still turn when a mixed race couple walks by. I still live below the Mason-Dixon line.

There's a "police vs. black men" thing happening now, which I hope can be solved in the next generation, but I think, unfortunately many more will suffer before it cools down.  This doesn't seem limited to the south.

Whites may be tolerant, or accepting, but they still walk in shoes that provide white privilege. This is the insidious and invisible thing that remains...no matter how hard I try, I don't have the same feelings as someone walking this earth in a black skin.

But most important to me today is letting go of the generational guilt of my ancestors.  They did what they did, and they were responsible for their acts.  I hope they treated their slaves with kindness, and when they freed them following 1864's emancipation, I hope they were able to adapt their very changed lives in a positive manner, both for the white families as well as the black ones.

Reconstruction has been an interesting thing to imagine, but there were many southerners who didn't cope very well during that time.

And that's on top of losing a war, with many of the white men having died, or returned home wounded and unable to carry on their own lives.

It boggles my mind to consider the changes that the families all endured in the late 1860s and 70s and even 80s. In order to feed your family, you had to have a crop of some kind, and in order to grow it you needed to pay laborers. A black family would have the same needs, and suddenly didn't have any owners providing their food and clothes, and maybe even a place to live.  Then there were the laws which skewed rights of blacks away from them with silly excuses, the Jim Crow Laws.

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE ABOUT ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S BOOK, COMING IN MAY...AND HER INTERVIEW WITH THE LAST SLAVE TO ARRIVE FROM AFRICA...
Here.

The Last Slave

In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston sought to publish the story of Cudjo Lewis, the final slave-ship survivor. Instead it languished in a vault. Until now.