I didn’t know any people whose ancestors owned slaves when I grew up.
Growing up in Southern California, the only thing I knew about my “roots” was an alleged connection to Abraham Lincoln.
In my teens, I had eyebrows like Abraham Lincoln, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine myself distant kin of the Great Emancipator.
In 1995, I began to investigate my family’s history. We had just enough information written down to get me to Old Abe‘s generation and I began my hunt for the “correct” Nancy Hanks–because while the 14th President had no direct descendants, he had tons of cousins.
The first clue
August researchers Gladys Hanks Johnson (from Texas: “we were told not to mention kinship to Lincoln outside of the house”) and Adin Baber finally concluded there was no real way to make that connection because some 24 possible Nancy Hankses lived at the appropriate time and place.
So, we’ve just claimed him. I’m Abraham Lincoln’s second cousin seven times removed–maybe.
Meanwhile, though, I turned my attention to the person I could claim–James Hanks, whom I believe was the president of the United States’ second cousin. Hanks was a Colonel in the Confederate Army.
What?
I’d grown up with that Lincoln connection. Where did the CSA come from?
And worse–I’d always seen myself as the Clara Barton type: tall, handsome (not beautiful), hard-working, Union supporter.
Who was I really?
The truth was straight out of Gone With the Wind: my great-great-grandmother Louisa had red hair, slaves, three husbands and grew up on a cotton plantation in South Carolina.
But it was the slave ownership that transfixed me. How? Why?
Prowling through microfilm in a darkened family history library, I found evidence that turned my stomach. At the start of the Civil War (or the War of the Northern Aggression, if you prefer), James Hanks owned 28 slaves on his farm in east Texas.
I called up my father to demand, “Why didn’t you ever tell me we owned slaves?”
“What are you talking about?”
“28 slaves, Dad, at the start of the Civil War. How can the family have forgotten they owned slaves in two generations?”
He didn’t have an answer.
The slavery connection only got worse
Genealogy is a puzzle, you explore backwards. The further I worked on my family lines the worse the slave ownership got.
My family, the people I’d seen as one-at-the-hip on this issue with Abraham Lincoln, owned slaves as early as the mid-17th century. 200 years of owning living souls.
You can’t judge the past by the mores of the present, I know that and so do you. But it made my skin crawl.
And I still haven’t gotten over it all these years later.
I can’t quite wrap my brain around God-fearing people who peppered their stories and wills with references to the same God I worship, selling other people.
Yes, they may have loved them, they worshipped with them in churches through Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas.
They traveled vast distances through deadly woods, to set up new lives. They nursed each other through sickness, taught each other to read. But one set held the upper hand and their blood runs through my veins.
Friends from the south remind me that well-loved slaves were practically members of the family and life with well-meaning people actually would be better than the sweatshop mills immigrants endured in New England. I can see their point–sort of.
What does it mean to own another person–to control their freedoms, their movements, all the points of their lives? And who wants that sort of responsibility?
Slaves owners had to provide food, lodging, clothing. They were dependent on their owners.
The tables turned
But their owners also were dependent upon them. Louisa Hanks’ slaves were free by the time my great-grandmother was born in 1865 Texas. Louisa had never had to care for a baby before.
She’d never cooked, never cleaned, never taken care of farm animals or done laundry. A beautiful red-headed beauty, she’d borne six children, watched several die, but didn’t have hands-on experience with day-to-day life.
In a sense, she was as crippled as the people she’d recently freed in terms of every day life.
All these years later I still don’t know how to reconcile my family’s history with how I view all men and women as created equal in the eyes and plans of God.
It’s a mystery I cannot explain. But I’m writing a novel about Southern slave owners, and I’m trying hard to understand.
Any suggestions?
This is lovely! My southern forebears were dirt farmers, I’ve always been told. That reads as: “too poor to even think of owning slaves.” But I don’t know for certain. When I have some spare time…. 🙂
I’ve wondered if some of the racism I encountered with several old and now long-dead relatives was related to that sense of being poor but at least not a slave. Hanks’ wealth plummeted after the war, but that’s because of the monetary value of the slaves. I wonder if once they were freed, the family realized how desperately they were needed. Tricky topic.
Even those of us who accept that we are sinners have a hard time looking back on forebears who lived a life so contrary to God’s will. I think each of us have a very hard time seeing the sins that are common in our particular era because we are so surrounded by them. That’s why C.S. Lewis suggests we read old books–“to keep the clean breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”
Amen! 🙂
Somewhere in all my googlin’ I found an interesting take on those dirt poor Southerners; I believe it was in a letter home written by a Union soldier. He said that in Murfreesboro, the poor white folk were a large step down the social ladder from the slaves, who were much better dressed, fed, etc., by and large. I’d never thought of it that way. But of course, I pictured myself as a member of that dirt poor class until I recently discovered that it appears my great-great-grandfather had three slaves; a female over 45, one between 26 – 45, and a young child under age 10! I assume they were probably a family, mother/daughter/daughter’s child, but where were the men? And that same great-great-grandfather left over 1200 acres of land to his nine children! I had no idea anybody’d had any money/property, I thought we’d always been poor but hard-working hill people :-). I had no idea your Hanks family intersected with Lincoln’s — very interesting, and your history certainly does put you smack in the middle of both sides of the Civil War. Have I told you (lately) that I can’t WAIT to read this book??? I expect it’ll be very insightful, and will have a LOTof depth and shading…
I also had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. In the 14th Virginia Infantry, to be exact. I don’t know for certain that my ancestors owned slaves. The only scrap of information I have is a comment my grandmother once made, quoting her grandmother, who said, “When the slaves were freed, all the children had to tote their own water.” Did she mean herself and her siblings, her own children, or the children of people she knew who owned slaves? Do I even have that quote right, second or third hand as it is?
Family history is fascinating, disturbing at times, enlightening, humbling. While researching my last novel, I ran into a mention of my second cousin six times removed who was living smack in the middle of the 18th century history against which I was setting my story. Small world. And a surreal moment to find and recognize his name in a history book.
You have the wrong John Hanks! Yours would live in Macon County, Illinois. None of the Hanks family Lincoln was related to owned slaves.
You may look at James Hanks, but to this day, there is not one James Hanks in the family tree of the Hanks family in which Lincoln was descended from. The North Carolina Hanks had slaves, as did the Benjamin Hanks line, and the other Virginia Hanks line. There are NONE in the line of Thomas Hanks, and his descendants, Joseph Hanks, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The first Thomas Hanks came to America as an indentured slave, himself, as a captured soldier of Cromwell’s Army. Don’t mix all the Hanks branches together, as they are not related to one another, proven by DNA.
Thank you for your insight, Vicky. I do trace to the original Thomas Hanks of Cromwell’s army. Do you have additional info on that lineage?