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What would be helpful: Am I missing some perspective? What could be left out to improve the account?

The Slave Owners and Their Legacy

My family on both sides lived in the South before the Revolutionary War, and some in my mother’s family lived there as early as the 1600s. I have journals and other records of the well-off and well-educated families in my mother’s family, who were slave owners.

On my mother’s side, I am a descendant of well-off immigrants from the British Isles–England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales–who arrived here in the 1600s and 1700s. Doubtless they viewed their situations in their home countries as unsatisfactory in some way, for why else would they accept the risk and hardship associated with immigrating? There may have been examples of family conflict and other emotional pressures that made it uncomfortable to remain at home, in addition to the desire for greater freedom and financial opportunity.

My mother’s mother, Fannie McLean, was told by her mother that she, her mother, had had a little girl slave of her own as a child. My mother’s grandmother had her own slave as a little girl! Not that long ago. Learning this had a profound effect on my grandmother, Fannie McLean. Later in her life, after the birth of her four children, she became a champion of African Americans in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and early 1960s in the small Southern town where she lived.

Fannie McLean’s children are distinct in their coloring. My mother and one of her brothers have black hair and darker skin and eyes. A sister and another brother are blond with blue eyes.  I have a picture of my mother in which she looks biracial. I think African coloration has shown up in my mother’s complexion. With her jet black curly hair and dark eyes, mother stood out among her blond and blue-eyed friends and her older sister. Fannie Mclean raised mother to value the beauty of her darker complexion, and mother grew up proud of her olive skin and often mentioned it as part of her beauty. We didn’t learn of our African ancestor until a 23 and me report well after the deaths of parents and grandparents. But I have since wondered if Fannie McLean had some hint of her, our slave ancestor, if a vague story had been passed down to her that escaped efforts to repress it. Did our slave ancestor try to escape? Was she able to keep her children? The facts are that her offspring survived, and her line has continued in my family until today.

William Faulkner’s novel, The Unvanquished, is supposedly based on our family. His favorite aunt, Aunt Alabama, for whom he named his infant daughter, married one of Fannie McLean’s older brothers. Aunt Bama, as my mother knew her, probably told Faulkner stories of the family including those about Hugh Lawson White Hill, the grandfather of Fannie McLean’s husband. He owned over 100 thousand acres of land in the Cumberland Plateau, was a United States congressman from 1847 to 1849, and a slave owner of several people who were part of his household and worked in his orchard of peach trees. They helped to hide the family silver when the Civil War began.

The Unvanquished opens with a white boy and his friend, a young slave in the white boy’s family, acting out battles in the dirt of the Civil War going on around them. Faulkner describes how household slaves of the family hide the silver in the woods. The war ends by the end of the novel. Although Faulkner mentions the survival and power of the freed slaves, the unvanquished primarily refers to the white Southerners in the family he describes, who have been financially decimated, the silver taken, the slaves freed by the Civil War, ending a way of life. The hero, the son of slave owners, yet different from his father before him, chooses to reject the violence that was part of his upbringing. Perhaps Faulkner used the theme of physical violence as a stand-in for the ownership of human beings. He himself descended from slave-owning families, and racial injustice preoccupied him all his life. The unvanquished has to do with morality, character, and freedom from family and social expectations to continue a tradition of violence.

Fannie McLean, or Fannie Mac, as we called her, was the daughter of a preacher father and a mother from an educated McLean family, descended from the McLean castle in Scotland. Fannie McLean’s father was Lafayette Jarman, the younger brother in a slave owning family, who at 16 had jumped on a horse to join his older brothers to fight on the confederate side in the Civil War.  Luckily he was shot in the leg and had to return home. The story goes that his older brothers became wealthy through Jarman Shoes. Lafayette was an educated but modest preacher. Slave ownership had contributed to the opportunities for education for all of the sons, and perhaps indirectly provided capital for a successful shoe business after the Civil War.

The families on both sides of my mother’s family owned slaves. For many years I have wondered if my mother’s striking tendency to deny the existence of unpleasant aspects of life could have been passed down to her from generations of slave owning families. How did the white slave owners look away or try to justify owning human beings? From research, slavery existed in a social context that provided justification for it. Some believed that slavery was a moral good. They were influenced by the social norms and people around them. They were careful not to appear to be cruel or unjust to their slaves in order to preserve the good opinion of themselves by the other slave owners. They also avoided expressing ambivalent feelings about owning slaves. If they expressed guilt, it would have implicated their slave owning neighbors as well.

Perhaps some people in my family who owned slaves, like what we have heard of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, knew it was wrong but continued the practice. Owning slaves was a major part of a way of life that could not be sustained without slavery. Slaves were part of a family’s wealth. The slave owning families benefited at the expense of the slaves, gaining social position, education, better health, and overall greater well being due to owning slaves. My father’s family who were relatively poor in the South and had no history of owning slaves that I know of, lacked the education, stability, and opportunities of my mother’s family, even generations after the end of slavery.

How did the white slave owners near Nashville adapt to the Civil War, and to the loss of slaves? Slaves were a part of their way of life and way of making a living. Slaves provided financial security. When did the slave owners and former slave owners become ashamed of owning people? Did owning slaves have deleterious effects on the slave owners? Did owning slaves have a negative effect on people’s health or wellbeing? It is morally inconvenient at the least to wonder if owning slaves may have been only harmful to the slaves, not the owners. The slave owners, with greater leisure and wealth, would have had more attention for their children and other relationships. Perhaps they volunteered in their communities, bringing food and clothing to those in need. They believed they were good people.

I believe that the slave owners in my family were more or less good people, the way I think of good people I know of now. They were probably kind at times. Since the Nashville area, with its Cumberland Plateau, was mountainous, it did not provide a geography that permitted growing cotton or having large plantations worked by slave labor. The slaves probably mostly worked in the households, providing a way of life and leisure for the slave owners. They were viewed to a degree as members of the family, confided in, depended upon, with deep attachment.

Mignonette Keller has presented and written about the emotional system formed by slaves and slave owners. She describes one example of how a young male slave grew up with a higher level of differentiation than his white female friend, daughter of the slave owners. Some of the clearest descriptions of slave owners and the complicated bonds between owners and slaves can be found in slave accounts. Yet, at the same time that they were part of the family, slaves did not have control over their own lives, were separated from their children when it benefited their owners, were treated as less than fully human, and were forced to hide their true feelings.

Is the disrespect of slaves as fully human, which must have been a needed justification for keeping slaves from freedom, somehow analogous to a family’s disrespect for the full humanity of one of our own?

My mother told me that when she was a little girl, her family hired a black maid who came to be considered part of the family. Once, it was convenient for mother to go with the maid to her home one afternoon, which was unusual. The home was in a starkly different part of town that mother had never seen or imagined. While she was there, she came across radical Black newspapers. She was shocked by the attitudes toward white people. When she confronted the family maid about the articles she saw, the maid answered “How did you think we felt?”