Another missionary has appeared in my family tree.  Leighton McCutchen died as a Presbyterian missionary in the Congo in 1936. He was 30 years old.

Born in 1906 to a large, companionable family in South Carolina, Leighton married a woman from Texas in 1930. A few years later, they had a son.

By 1935, Leighton must have felt a call to missionary work in the Congo. The UK Passenger Lists of March 31, 1935 show Leighton, his wife, and his one-year-old son sailing to Southampton, England on the S. S. Statendam. On April 8, 1935, the New York Passenger Lists record them returning to the states.

On that trip, I suppose, Leighton may have been making arrangements in England to join the American Presbyterian Congo Mission.

Here is the next record of Leighton that I have. The first part:

So Leighton died on December 9, 1936 of septicemia—that is, a severe and suppurating infection. He was buried in the Bulape Cemetery in the Belgian Congo. His death must have occurred no more than 20 months into his missionary work.

Here is the second part of that record:

His wife took his belongings with her. A cousin seems to have already been in the Congo, at the Mission, to accompany her to Leopoldville and support her in filling out this form. I see no mention of a child here, but the question is not asked.

Yet I did find this picture of Leighton, his wife, and his son. It must have been taken within the 20 months after his trip to England and before his death:

If only I could find a speech, or a journal, about Leighton’s aspirations to be a Presbyterian missionary to the Congolese. What kind of idealism and purpose? Why the Congo? Leighton may have been named after our family’s famous missionary to Africa, John Leighton Wilson. Did he feel Africa was his destiny?

Some history may help us put ourselves in Leighton’s shoes.

King Leopold II came to the throne of Belgium in 1865. Working with the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, (1) Leopold strong-armed local Congolese tribal leaders into signing over their land rights to him. He called his resulting colony the “Congo Free State.” Free? Hardly. From 1885 to 1908, Leopold forced indigenous people into life-threatening labor. Millions of Congolese died under Leopold’s brutal working conditions, while Leopold’s Belgium grew rich and famous from the yields of rubber and copper.  

Does this scene sound familiar? This is the Congo of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, woven from Conrad’s own previous experiences as an employee of Belgium in the Congo. This is the Congo whose foreign tyrant is satirized by Mark Twain in King Leopold’s Soliloquy.  This is the Congo described by Adam Hochschild (1999) in King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. This Congo is a nightmare of colonialism and rapacious inhumanity.

Some might think this Congo evokes the South in the days of slavery. Others might object that the South was not that bad. But is it wise to dispute degrees of inhumanity? I’d rather notice the irony that in 1865, when Leopold ascended to the throne, freedom was being granted that same year, by constitutional amendment, to all blacks on America’s plantations. History! Injustices wax and wane.

Another trick of history, in this case, is the fact that American Presbyterian missionaries to Africa—several of them from the South—worked to expose Leopold’s savage inhumanity. Lachlan Vass, a Southern Presbyterian missionary, wrote this in 1898:  

• “How bad are the conditions? . . . I am in a position to say from personal experience . . . that the conditions in the Congo have not in the least been exaggerated . . . . I am a Southern [white] man from the black belt of eastern [North Carolina] and I don’t think we are often loaded with praise for our love of the Negro . . . but I wish to protest in the strongest terms to the absolutely inhuman way these poor people in their own country are being butchered by the white man, and all under the cloak of Philanthropy.”

The writings of Vass, Morrison, Hawkins, Sheppard, and other Presbyterian missionaries helped open the world’s eyes to Leopold’s crimes against humanity. According to Wikipedia here,

• “In January 1900 the New York Times published a report that said fourteen villages had been burned and ninety or more of the local people killed in the Bena Camba country by Zappo Zap warriors sent to collect taxes by the Congo Free State administration. The report was based on letters from Southern Presbyterian missionaries Rev. L. C. Vass and Rev. H. P. Hawkins . . . and the subsequent investigation by [William] Sheppard who visited the Zappo Zaps’s camp. . . .  In January 1908, Sheppard published a report on colonial abuses in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) newsletter, and both he and Morrison were sued for libel against . . . a prominent Belgian rubber contractor in the area.”

In 1908, Leopold’s personal rule ended. After Leopold’s overthrow, and moving forward into the 1920s and 1930s, the labor situation in the Congo was a few notches less inhumane, yet it was still hostage to the colonizing Belgians. Missionaries could improve education and health care, but they were themselves in a position vulnerable to co-optation by the greedy Belgian government. This photo is from this link:

 

Now back from the Congo to the South. Back to William Henry Sheppard, a black Presbyterian missionary from Virginia, whom we just mentioned as protesting with others against Leopold II. (2) In his earlier years, as a young man, he wrote to the Presbyterian Foreign Missionary Board in Maryland. He asked them whether he might start a mission in Africa. After enduring two years of their vague rejections, he approached them in person. He was directly told that the board would not send “a black man without a white supervisor.”

The white man who volunteered to go with Sheppard was Samuel Norvell Lapsley (Lapsley is one of my surnames), described as an “eager but inexperienced white man from a wealthy family.”  Together, they resolved to work with equal numbers of white and black missionary assistants.

 After his heroic missionary service, Sheppard returned to his native Virginia in the early 1900s. One Sunday, he spoke from the pulpit at a Presbyterian church. A rich white woman invited him to a dinner reception afterwards, at her house. She led him to the back porch, built off the dining room. From there, he spoke through a raised window to her guests eating dinner. He answered their questions about his experiences in the Congo. Link here.

Sheppard’s treatment is a typical Southern anecdote, and a comparatively mild one. I am juxtaposing the Congo with the South because I think my missionary relative, Leighton McCutchen, may also have had such a juxtaposition in mind, in some way. I can only speculate about his thoughts and feelings. Of course, it was idealistic and dangerous to join a mission to the Congo. That quest killed Leighton and left his family bereft. But at least in the Congo the path forward was clear. The good guys and the bad guys were both identifiable.

By contrast, back in the South, lynchings were at a peak in the early 1900s. The victims were blacks and black sympathizers. The South was filled with conflict, violence, and uncertainty when slaves were freed in 1865, and more uncertainty when the freed slaves struggled to make their freedom real—no easy task. How could you be sure exactly what your neighbors were thinking? Southern politics were hopelessly complicated, tied up with the disenfranchisement of blacks, Jim Crow laws, segregation, secret murders, sharecropping, the Red Shirts, and all the other trappings of “slavery without the chains.”

The South in those days would disorient anyone’s moral compass. And those stiff winds—which way were they blowing?

Notes:

(1) This is indeed the famous explorer Stanley who was said to ask, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” He was not known to be respectful of blacks. 

(2) See William Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo (Nabu Press, 2010), and William E. Phipps, William Sheppard, Congo’s African American Livingstone (Geneva Press, 2002).

 ~~~

 

Goodbye for a short while, everyone!

Your comments are always welcome!

I’ll return to my post(s) sometime after the first week in June.

Family events are summoning me now.

 

 

Last post:  Rev. William Jones Boone, Sr. sets out to China in 1837 as an Anglican missionary, intending to bring the Gospel to the Chinese. He envisions over 300 million people there as potential converts. He believes the Chinese are an industrious and obedient people, ready to receive the good news and hope that Christianity can bring them.

Flash forward to 1884 in Shanghai, where Rev. Boone Sr. is still a revered memory to both Anglicans and Chinese.

In 1884, Rev. William Jones Boone, Jr., his son and namesake, is in trouble. He plans to be consecrated as the fourth Bishop of China in the fall. Yet loud voices are directed against him, during the summer months, from within the Anglican Church: charges of incompetence, calls for a thorough investigation. These voices speak against his consecration. Some want him to resign.

Objections to Rev. Boone Jr. (my 3^rd cousin 3 x removed) are found in columns of The North China Daily News, as well as letters to The Southern Churchman, the Board of Missions, the Foreign Committee, and targeted individuals.

The entire correspondence is available at this link.  Caveat reader: This is a long, verbose set of accusations and defenses.

 

 

In these pages, Mission members in Shanghai express their opinions, as do Anglicans from the United States. Many fire complaints at Rev. Boone Jr. for the way he runs the church services and the mission school, St. John’s College. My own summary of their heated claims:

• Boone’s services are too “Romish” or Roman Catholic, with too much “ritualism.” There are too many colors in the garments. Rev. Boone is said to have heard confessions. He has a gold-colored cross on the altar. He makes the sign of the cross too much. He uses red for Easter, to please the Chinese, instead of pure white.

• Boone’s college teaches too much English language and not enough of the pure Word of the Gospels. There is insufficient discipline. Older Chinese students have been found at St. John’s gambling in the evening hours instead of studying. This mission is not worth financial support.

• The Rev. Boone and Mrs. Boone do not work hard enough. Boone’s Chinese is only mediocre. He does not supervise the mission activities closely enough. Is he relying upon the name of his famous father? Will the Chinese mission become a “sinecure for Boones”? The Presbyterians now have more missionaries to China than the Anglicans. Something must be done.

My one observation:  These complaints seem to be primarily about the status and purity of the Anglican Church itself, and its reputation, rather than about the spiritual welfare of 300 million Chinese souls. I’m just sayin’.

This lengthy correspondence includes only a few letters from Boone himself. He resists being dragged into the controversy. Here is a brief excerpt from Boone’s short letter on June 17, 1894:

• We have a grave and reverent ritual at St. John’s. We have no ritualism. The distinction is a real one, and easily understood by those who are conversant with the revival of Church life following on the Oxford movement.

This comment draws a swift and angry reply from one of Boone’s main accusers, Ferdinand McKeige. An excerpt:

• I must confess my inability to draw the hair line between a “grave and reverent ritual” and “ritualism”. . . . The wearing of cassocks, birettas, and varied colours upon different occasions, together with such paraphernalia as a brass cross, a super-alter, etc., certainly leads one to presume that ritualism abides on the premises, unless informed to the contrary.

 

 

On October 28, 1884, Rev. William Jones Boone, Jr. is officially consecrated as Bishop of China, with all due ceremony. He seems to have relied upon his fellow bishops – Moule, Scott, and Williams – to support him and quell dissent by essentially ignoring and “rising above” it.

News of this famous controversy reaches London. On November 4, 1884 (a week after Boone’s consecration), the most popular song at the Lyceum Theatre during a burlesque drama is this one:

There is a Mission place,
Out Jessfield way;
Where they teach the young Chinese,
Day after day;
There they thought ‘twould be a “boon,”
If they had a bishop soon.
But now I see they’ve changed their tune,
Far, far away.

In 1891, seven years after his consecration, Rev. William Jones Boone, Jr. dies and is buried in China.

His one surviving daughter Phoebe Elliot Boone, born in China in 1873, emigrated to the United States and married a man from Delaware, in April of 1895. She and her husband settled in Missouri and had three children.

It seems that Phoebe Elliot Boone escaped just in time.

Around 1900 the Boxer Rebellion erupted in China. It was “the worst disaster in missionary history.” The Boxers killed many Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians, especially in North China. After that, “the West lost the certainty of its conviction that it had the right to impose its culture and religion on China.” (1)

I wonder how Bishop William Jones Boone, Sr. would have interpreted the Boxer Rebellion.

 

Notes:

(1) Larry Clinton Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion: Heroism, Hubris, and the Ideal Missionary.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing Company, 2009, 1. Quoted in Wikipedia.

Really. William Jones Boone (my 2^nd cousin 4 time removed) decided at age 26 to leave South Carolina for China. He was the first Anglican missionary to China, with the title of Bishop.

 

In this long 1837 address, Boone explains the reasons for his choice. A summary:

1. Christ’s words in Mark 16: 15 are explicit: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” There are 300 to 400 million people in China, a third of the human race.

2. The Chinese are obedient, because they are used to patriarchy and despotism. They are cheerfully industrious and lovers of education. They will be easily converted to Christianity.

•  The gospel once fairly established in a nation where order, peace, and industry thus dwell, may be expected soon to extend over the whole empire; for we know that it is the orderly and industrious of every country who constitute the great class from which the Christian Church is filled . . . the further removed they are from savagism, the sooner shall we be able to make them acquainted with the gospel of Christ.

3. The Chinese are idolaters and heathens who need to be rescued “from the shades of night and death.” Who can resist this call to be “a co-worker with God”? Who can resist “millions of perishing sinners calling upon us by their destitution to supply them with the bread of life”?

4. Christian missionaries are excluded from China at present. (That’s because the Jesuits made the Chinese government think Christianity was a scheme of political intrigue.) But we can still send missionaries to the Chinese “out of empire,” to the islands of Batavia, Singapore, Penang, Bianca, and so forth. We can thus create “internal ministers” to return to China. We can also send books to China, translated from English to Chinese—for instance, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

 

These are Boone’s reasons. Looking at his expression in this picture, I believe I can see a zealous and unstoppable resolve.

In June of 1835, Boone sailed from New York with two other Episcopalian ministers to Batavia. Two years later, he returned to America to marry Sarah DeSaussure from South Carolina. He sailed with her in 1837 from Boston to Batavia and Singapore.

 ~~

Boone was certainly sincere. His life’s work was to spread the word of God. The Episcopal Mission worked hard to help the Chinese.

Yet people are to some degree shaped by their culture. In Boone’s address, I hear not only a minister but also a Southerner who comes from a long line of slaveholders, back to his 2nd great-grandfather who founded Boone Hall.

As I read Boone’s words, I substitute “African slaves” for “Chinese.” I compare and contrast his probable understanding of the two groups, so as to further comprehend why he spent his life in China. American slavery, after all, is somewhat like an “at-home” version of colonialism, with its mix of cruelty and paternalism.

Boone sees the Chinese people, unlike the African slaves he grew up with, as perfectly obedient and industrious. The Chinese thrive under a despotic system. The Chinese are cheerfully industrious and eager to learn—the opposite of the stereotype for African slaves. Maybe Boone’s silent undertext goes like this: How much more the Chinese would appreciate our religious instruction than the slaves back home ever could! From these 360 million souls, Christianity could spread throughout world!

Such a vision may have helped motivate Boone to sail to the other side of the planet.

Boone presumed that he understood the Chinese people, just as Southern slaveholders presumed that they understood their slaves. The white man, carrying the “white man’s burden,” used to believe he knew what was best for those heathens and savages of a different color. (Perhaps in some circles he still does, alas.)

The slaveholders were wrong about their slaves. They did not understand them. They were astonished, when freedom arrived, to know what their slaves had actually been thinking and feeling:

• Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education . . . white contemporaries were astonished by their “avidity for learning” . . . when [a Freedmen’s Bureau agent] informed a gathering of freedmen that the “were to have the advantages of schools and education, their joy knew no bounds. They fairly jumped and shouted in gladness.” (1)

• [In Sherman’s wake] on plantation after plantation, “perfect anarchy and rebellion” reigned, as the accumulated resentments of slavery burst forth in violence and in the conscious flouting of the planter aristocracy’s authority and self-esteem. Planters’ homes, smokehouses, and storerooms were plundered; an overseer was murdered; on one plantation blacks refused to listen any longer to the local white minister, but “would shout and sing after their own fashion.” The magnificent plantation home at Middleton Place near Charleston was burned to the ground, the vaults of the family graveyard broken open and the bones scattered by the former slaves. Charles Manigault, who had considered himself and indulgent master, was stunned by the “recklessness and ingratitude” of his slaves . . . (2)

• [Freedmen] took particular offense at contentions that American slavery had been unusually benevolent and that “harmonious relations” had existed between master and slave. ‘All of us know how happy we have been . . .’  declared one black orator. . . . (3)

• Northern whites who ventured South to proselytize among the freedmen proved no more successful than Southerners in winning black converts, partly because of their ill-disguised contempt for uneducated black ministers and their emotional services. Teachers employed by the American Missionary Association used Bible classes to inveigh against “heathenish habits such as shouting” and “unchristian” behavior like that of the black funeral mourner who “clapped her hands, threw them over her head screaming ‘glory to God’ . . . dancing up and down in front of the pulpit.” (4)

Yes, the slaveholders were wrong about the slaves.

So was Boone similarly wrong in his preconceptions of the Chinese? What conflicts had to be “sorted out,” as the British would say?

There is more to this story. I’m about to read some lengthy correspondence in The Southern Churchman. That will inform me about the heated objections to the consecration of Boone’s son, William Jones Boone Jr., as the 4^th Anglican Bishop of China.

To be continued in the next post . . .

 

Notes:

(1) Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. 1863-1877.  Harper & Row, 1988. 96

(2) Foner, 71-72.

(3) Foner, 78-79.

(4) Foner, 91.

(5) The East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis, commanded by Lieutenant W. H. Hall, with boats from the Sulphur, Calliope, Larne and Starling, destroying the Chinese war junks in Anson’s Bay, on 7 January 1841.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My South Carolina ancestors profited greatly, in wealth and influence, from the institution of slavery.

Several plantations are perched on the branches of my maternal family tree.  At least two of them, Boone Hall  and Hopsewee, have been destinations of Joseph McGill’s courageous slave-dwelling project.

Let’s get this naming of plantations dispensed with. Here are those I’ve found on my tree so far. Each is listed after an ancestor of mine who bought the land, supervised the building, sold the house, lived in the house, or was related to someone who did one of those things.

Linked to my 8^th great-grandfather, Nathaniel Johnson (1644-1712), Governor of South Carolina from 1702-1709:

 

Linked to my 7^th great-grandfather, Jonas Lynch (1650-1691):

 

 

Linked to my 6^th great-grandfather, Edward Croft (1696-1756), is Bermuda or Belleview Plantation on the Wando River. No photos available.

Linked to my 6^th great-grandfather, Thomas Boone (1696-1759) and my 5^th great grand uncle Thomas Lynch, Sr. (1727-1776):

 

Linked to the wife of my 6^th great-grandfather Thomas Lynch (1675-1738), Margaret Fenwick   (1680-1716):

Linked to my third cousin four times removed, Robert Boone Jenkins (1821-1884 ):

 

Ensconced in homes like these, my ancestors became influential in their local and national governments. A first cousin six times removed, who lived at Hopsewee, even signed the Declaration of Independence.

The residents of such great houses may have gained their whole world. Yet after admiring these buildings, I must ask myself:  Did they lose their own souls?

No one can know another person’s heart—not even in the present, much less the past. And it’s not up to me to judge my ancestors or anyone else. Yet I have to wonder Why they lived as they did. I wonder How they felt about creating and sustaining their lifestyles with slave labor.

Here is the hypothesis I’m now testing: My ancestors and the people of their class, without realizing it, swallowed a profound guilt for the unnatural act of owning other human beings. That guilt lodged in them so deeply that they couldn’t even feel it as such, much less admit it to themselves.

Meanwhile, their psychological defense systems were silently working overtime to deny and palliate that core of guilt, so as to distance all hints of guilt from their conscious thoughts.

I’ve found some support for my hypothesis by getting to know my ancestors and their white antebellum culture. These characteristics stand out to me:

They worked hard to prove to themselves their own goodness. My ancestors and their fellow planters were avid churchgoers: Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians. At services and in assemblies they would rehearse overlapping arguments that slavery was God’s will, that the sons of Ham were cursed, that the slaves were better off on plantations than in the wilds of Africa, that as a group they were good slaveholders who treated their slaves kindly (except for “necessary” discipline, of course), and that teaching their slaves to be Christians was the Lord’s work. In letters, they insisted that their own slaves loved and respected them, no matter what might be the case on a neighbor’s plantation.

They held fast to their belief in themselves and their virtues. Looking back, we might well be convinced (as I am) that slavery was an evil and inhuman institution, which inflicted immeasurable devastation and despair upon hundreds of thousands of human beings. My ancestors and their class, caught up in the daily workings of this evil system, could not realize its magnitude and survive at the same time. Tied to their communities, they would be hard-pressed to have “Amazing Grace” moments. Their psychological defenses automatically supplied them with attitudes that were insular and delusional, beliefs in the graciousness and courtesy of a slave-based society. These beliefs held back the self-doubt that would have destroyed them.

They blamed the victims. This mechanism is commonly used throughout history, mainly without conscious intent, to keep groups of people from blaming themselves. It seems that this unconscious strategy is built into our neural software, for our own psychological protection. As if by magic, we look at those who threaten our self-image and see our own imagined worst faults, magnified, in them. It’s not us, it’s them.

Because the very presence of African slaves threatened the good self-images of white owners, a host of negative stereotypes about slaves arose and took hold in Southern culture—to deflect unspeakable guilt away from slaveholders. We carry the legacy of these stereotypes about blacks to this day.

• Stereotype #1: Slaves are poor, dependent, childlike, and unintelligent. This stereotype reassured white owners that they themselves were truly intelligent, rich, and in solid control of the plantation. They could believe they acted like kind and generous parents to their slaves.

• Stereotype #2: Slaves are unreliable, dangerous, and savage, ready  at a moment’s notice to kill their white masters. (1) This stereotype reassured white owners that they themselves were blameless, that there was no violence inherent in slavery, and that slaveholders were not the barbaric ones.

• Stereotype #3: Slaves are lazy and deceitful and shiftless, a burden to manage. This stereotype helped convince white owners that they themselves were hard workers who labored constantly for the good of the household. Others might tend the crops, but whites did the real work.

~~

Except for the abolitionists, the whole country—looking the other way—colluded to preserve the institution of slavery until the Civil War erupted. This de facto acceptance of slavery may well have caused widespread, unacknowledged guilt in the “land of the free.” For that sufficient reason, the nation in general may have hastened to adopt these negative, guilt-allaying Southern stereotypes of blacks. Even now, too many people believe them.

In Reconstruction, Eric Foner explores the ways that many whites in power after the Civil War ignored the needs of the emancipated slaves for education, jobs, and suffrage.(2) I would imagine that the more completely our citizens became aware of past wrongs, the more they had to deny their own complicity, and therefore the more they dismissed the pain of the newly freed black population. We can recall Ronald Reagan’s infamous fiction of the “welfare queen,” now a staple of popular culture. That myth has been quite useful in helping white citizens deny their historical guilt.

• “The Negro is always with us, as we are with him. There he is before our eyes, the symbol of our sin, the living reminder that our words are wrong.” (3)

We are in the same story still. As a nation, we seem unable to confront our history of slavery and its continuing effects. My parents never mentioned slavery, probably for shame—though they would never have admitted to shame. I thought all my ancestors were poor—and they were, after the Depression. Yet I did not learn about my slaveholder ancestry until I was in my 50s.

Here is an artful, ironic documentary film about our national dilemma: Moving Midway. A contemporary Southern family, still feeling attached to their old plantation home, choose to move the entire structure, in one piece, away from city traffic and into the nearby countryside. During this project, African-American relatives and descendants of the family’s former slaves appear and weigh in.

 

This film includes many soft-spoken and carefully nuanced conversations that are amusing, sad, and bristling with loose ends.

 

NOTES:

(1) Of course, enslaved people want to break free. The American Revolution bodied forth that truth for the new nation.

(2) “Rehearsals for Reconstruction,” in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. HarperCollins: 1988, 35-76

(3) James McBride Dabbs, The Southern Heritage. Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. 267-68. He is speaking about desegregation here, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, 1954.

 

Remember Boone Hall, that much-toured plantation house in South Carolina? It was the subject of my January 8^th post.

My ancestors include a host of Boones, a genealogical labyrinth. Today I’m looking at John Boone’s 1776 will, which bequeaths Boone Hall to his nephew, also a John Boone.

Three things about this will strike me as important.

First, this will names nine enslaved people: Will, Will’s wife Hagar, Israel, Murriar, Gate, Hagar the Cook, Big Tony, Mulatto Frank, and Bob. These first names may help some people search for enslaved ancestors. Relevant last names would be Boone, Durand, White, and Croft. When I finish identifying all my slaveholder ancestors, I’m going to post all their wills with all the first names of slaves mentioned.

John Boone tries to preserve slave families in his will: “My desire is that my Negroes be Divided in families, and if it should so happen that it cannot be Equally done that the Difference be paid in Money.” That is, if anyone disputes the division of slaves, money (rather than breaking up slave families) should settle the argument.

Listing each slave by a single name, although somewhat helpful to family researchers now, still reveals a method of dehumanizing people during slavery. Paring a person down to one “friendly” name is a paternalistic mask for absolute power. This practice goes beyond condescension. It robs descendants of the records used to build a family history—yet one more reason that slavery is called this country’s “original sin.”

Second, this will exposes the irony of history and the potential blindness of human nature. It was written on June 22, 1773, and signed on June 4, 1776. Revolution was in the air. John Boone himself had served in South Carolina’s second Provincial Congress, which (like the congresses in all the colonies) opposed the authority of Britain’s Parliament. Soon the world would hear that famous Declaration from Philadelphia:

• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

Yet on the threshold of this proclamation, in June of 1776, the Boones were signing this will and divvying up their Negroes just like they divvied up their swampland, carts, and stock. Treating people like chattel plainly violated the principles on which the Revolution was based. Somehow, our young country allowed this blatant contradiction. I find it ironic that the Boones and their fellow planters fought in the American Revolution to free themselves from British rule, only to live for the next 85 years in absolute dread of a violent revolution against their own persons–in the form of slave revolts.

• “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”– George Santayana, 1905

I would put this challenge to Santayana’s ghost: Are people actually capable of changing their behavior in the light of history?

 

Third, this will of John Boone reminds me once more that family historians cannot expect to complete their jobs.

Here are those I can identify in the will:

• John Boone, author, is the youngest son of my 6^th great-grandfather, Thomas Boone I.
• John Boone, inheritor, is one of (probably) three surviving children of my 5^th great-grandfather, Thomas Boone II.
• Sarah Gibbes is the (future) wife of John Boone, inheritor.
• Capers Boone is an older brother of John Boone, author of the will.
• Levi Durand is the husband of Susannah Boone, daughter of Thomas Boone I.

Here are those I cannot identify, although I have tried:

• “My Nephew William Boone”
• “My Niece Mary White daughter of James White”
• “My Nephew Henry White”
• The two (2) Mary Whites who are signers

Maybe I’ll make even further efforts to identify this second group. And maybe I won’t.

You’ve heard the saying, “Art is long, life is short”? Hippocrates, its author, meant that it takes a long time to acquire expertise (as in medicine—and I’d add genealogy), but you have only a short time in which to do it.

Put simply: I have too many ancestors to research in one life span.

So far, family members (and my own research) have supplied me with over 900 people in my family tree, most of them not completely researched. Added to these, I’ve inherited a sketch of the Boone-Fraser genealogy containing 294 people, all needing to be checked and connected to official records. I’m in a sea of waving leaves. Not to mention the bushels of documents, letters, photos, and newspaper stories waiting be archived beside the ancestor charts I am methodically building, one Lego at a time.

I’m dancing as fast as I can in this game—or I should say, this art.

Guess what?  I’m not going to finish. Hippocrates was right.

Some kind relative is going to inherit this odyssey from me. In digital copies, in photo and archive boxes . . . whatever I can manage.

Meanwhile, I hope to tell more Stories—in this blog—about Why and How my ancestors made their decisions and lived their lives. These Stories will naturally involve Why and How this whole country is still struggling to heal from the trauma of chattel slavery and racism.

For each Story, I’ll need to pause my research train and invoke my muse. And life is short.

I’d love to hear from readers. How do you prioritize your own work? What do you hope to accomplish in your lifetime?

~~~

Here is the will of John Boone (1734-1777). It is a transcription, preserving abbreviations, spelling, punctuation marks, and line breaks. 

 

WILL OF

JOHN BOONE

 

In the Name of God Amen I John Boone of Christ Church Parish

now of sound memory do make this my last Will and Testament

Item I Give and bequeath unto my Nephew John Boone Son of

my Brother Thomas Boone & his heirs after the death of my

Mother, my Plantation in Christ Church Parish, Item I Give

my Mother the work of Will and Hagar the Wife of Will, Israel,

Murriar, Gate, hagar the Coock, big Tony Mulatto Frank &

Bob, during her life, I also Give her the use of my boat

Carts & Stock on said plantation during her Life, Item after

The death of my Mother I Give & bequeath unto my Nephew John

Boone Son of my Brother Thomas Boone five negroes Namely

Will, Hagar wife of Will, Israel, Murriar & Gate & their in-

Crease, but if the said John Boone dies before my Mother,

Then I Give the said five Negroes & their increase to my Ne-

phew Thomas Boone son of my Brother Thomas Boone & his heirs,

I also give my Nephew John Boone, my Boat, Carts, & Stock on

said plantation, Item. I Give to my Nephew Henry White the

Will of John Boone Page 2.

use of fifty Acres of high Land out of my Plantation in

Prince Frederick’s Parish, to be run Square from his House up

the Branch. I also Give him the use of fifty Acres of Swamp

out of said Plantation beginning at the Head of the Lake and

Continue up the Swamp, during the Space of ten years and no

longer Item. I Give & bequeath unto my Nephew William Boone

& the Issue of his Body My Plantation in Prince Frederick’s

Parish, but if my Nephew William Boone should not have any

lawfull Issue at the time of his Death, I then give the said

Plantation to my Nephew John Boone Son of my Brother Capers

Boone and his heirs but if he should be dead at the time of

the Death of the said William Boone I then Give the said

Plantation to the Eldest son of my Brother Capers Boone then

Living and his heirs, And I Give all my Stock on said Plan-

tation to my Nephew William Boone Item. I Give and bequeath

the remainder or Residue of my Estate including the Negroes

given to my Mother and not otherways Disposed of with all

their Increase to my Brother Capers Boone and my Nephew  Levi

Durand & their heirs, to be Equally divided between them,

out of which I Will that each of them shall pay to my Niece

Mary White Daughter of James White, the sum of four thousand

pounds, and I do farther Will that the money remain in their

Hands they paying her the Interest half Yearly, And I do fur-

ther will that the Money be paid to her in one year after

she is married, and in Case she dies before Marriage I then

Give her full power to dispose of it by Will, as she pleases,

my desire is that my Negroes be Divided in families, and if

it should so happen that it cannot be Equally done that the

Difference be paid in Money, My Will is that my Brother

Capers Boone and my Nephew Levi Durand shall pay all my Debts

and funeral Charges Lastly I do hereby Constitute Nominate

and Appoint my Brother Capers Boone and my Nephew Levi Durand

Executors to this my last Will and testament given under my

hand and Seal this twenty Second Day of June in the Year of

our Lord One thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy three. This

was Signed the fourth day of June One thousand Seven hundred

Will of John Boone Page 3.

and Seventy Six Witness

Mary White

Sarah Gibbes

Mary White

In 1853, John Leighton Wilson was 44 years old. He and his wife Jane had spent the last 18 years doing mission work in West Africa.

Why? Because Wilson believed the South had wronged Africa by kidnapping and enslaving so many of its people. Bringing the Gospel to Africa was his gesture toward repaying that enormous debt. He also felt called to this mission. His “lifelong interest in the spiritual welfare of the Negro” (1) began in the Presbyterian church of his South Carolina childhood. The congregants there included both whites and slaves.

 

But why did Wilson return to the United States in 1853? There are hints that he was exhausted and worried about his health, and perhaps his wife’s health also. The record also shows, I believe, that he wanted to write about Africa and slavery—to educate whites, and especially his fellow Southerners.

Upon his return in 1853, Wilson was made secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in New York City. His position, held from 1853 to 1861, allowed him time to write Western Africa: Its History, Conditions, and Prospects (Harper and Brothers: 1856), a book now digitized by Google. He had traveled widely in West Africa, taking many trips into the interior and along the coast.

Wilson also wrote to protest against the slave trade. His protest writing began in Africa. In 1850, on a trip near the African coast, he noticed ships from Spain and Portugal. Natives told him those ships belonged to slave traders, who by night collected cargoes of slaves to sell in Brazil.

Those activities were illegal. The slave trade had already been abolished in 1807, by both England and the United States.

Wilson took action. He wrote to a friend in England, who convinced the prime minister to print Wilson’s letter and distribute it as a pamphlet. As a result, British warships were sent to the African coast.  By 1855 the slave trade there had been choked off.

A few years later, back in the United States, Wilson again found himself writing to protest the slave trade. For in the 1850s, many Southerners were pressing to revive the slave trade and legalize it.

Wilson must have felt a strong call to answer these Southerners. As a minister, he was a credible author for an article in the Southern Presbyterian Review, entitled “The Foreign Slave-Trade: Can It Be Revived without Violating the Most Sacred Principles of Honor, Humanity, and Religion?” (October, 1859). (2)

Wilson’s article suggests several nuances in his character. Not only was he a good man – he was a strategic writer and a powerful persuader.  I would make three points about his article:

First, Wilson knows his audience – the slaveholding Southerners. More than anything else, these people want to believe they are good and honorable. They would turn a deaf ear to anyone calling them callous or greedy. Wilson knows that. He says:

• We have too high an estimate of the good sense, the Christian moderation, and the honorable bearing of the Southern people, to believe that they ever will, either from motives of retaliation, or the hope of gain, lend their countenance knowingly to the revival of a traffic which, in its progress, must necessarily trample in the dust every sentiment of honor, humanity, and religion.

Whether or not Wilson fully believes this statement, it makes an excellent persuasive strategy.

Second, Wilson knows that many Southerners (and others) in his audience have persuaded themselves that slavery is good for Africans, that it “civilizes”  unfortunate savages. Instead of disagreeing, Wilson folds this same pro-slavery idea into a theological concept. Slavery itself is inherently evil, but God in his mercy has turned it into a good:

• Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in connection with the original establishment of [slavery] . . .  every right-minded and honest man must see that it has been overruled by a kind and merciful Providence for the good of those of the African race who were brought to this country. They are happier, better, and more useful men and women, than they would have been if born and brought up in the wilds of Africa, or than they would have been if their forefathers, upon their arrival here, had been turned loose to roam the swamps and woods of America . . .

. . . and so forth, elaborating on a concept that is transparently paternalistic to us today. Does Wilson believe what he is saying? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s hard to reconcile his words here with his own conviction that the South has wronged Africa by kidnapping its people, or with his wife’s decision to free her 30 slaves in 1833. I can’t help doubting whether Wilson is totally behind his argument here.

Still, it would be plausible to Wilson’s readers for him to express this popular idea—an idea voiced by such others as Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.  And Wilson’s theology does help to win over his audience, for he’s implicitly claiming that slaveholders are instruments of divine Providence. If Wilson is being less than thoroughly candid, he’s doing so for a cause he deeply believed in—keeping the slave trade outlawed.

 

Third, Wilson purposely leaves a loophole in his own argument, only to close it swiftly and with an expertise that overrides all objections. The loophole is built into the second point. It goes like this: “If God has now made slavery into a good thing, then we should probably buy some more slaves so that we can do some more good.” Wilson easily counters this mischievous conclusion:

• [Resuming the slave trade is] not only to practice a deception among ourselves, but is virtually doing evil that good may come, and sanctioning the odious Jesuitical dogma, that the end justifies the means.

Wilson’s article is really a kind of Story.  The heroes are Southerners. The plot is that they are brave enough to let go of the slave trade, thereby keeping their honor and nobility.

By writing this particular Story, Wilson chooses not to abandon his friends and neighbors and family members. Instead, he exhorts them to be heroes. If he hates the sin of practicing slavery—and I believe he does—he still loves his own people who are complicit in that sin.

~

 Wilson finally returned to the South in 1861, by coincidence on the last day the trains were running before the Civil War changed life for everyone. He and his wife rented a small farm near his boyhood home and lived there throughout the war and afterwards until their deaths.

As home mission secretary for Southern Presbyterians, Wilson helped arrange the chaplain service for the Confederate armies.

When Sherman burned Columbia in 1865, not far from his home, John Leighton Wilson was the first one to send food to that shattered city.

 

Notes:

(1) The Daily Item of Sumter, SC, August 13, 1970, 23.

(2) Wilson’s article can be found in “From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909,” in the Library of Congress.

 

 

My grandmother, Laura Fraser, was a woman who knew her own mind. She chose to marry Tom Kirven, a South Carolina farmer who lived two counties away from her family. Their wedding was in 1897, and she gave birth to six children before 1907.

In 1908 a deranged tenant farmer ambushed her husband and blasted him with a shotgun. Tom survived only because a thick memo pad, in the left pocket of his jacket, blocked enough of the shot to keep him alive – but not in good health. Laura saw Tom through his recurrent “bad spells.”

In the years after the shooting, Laura endured two miscarriages and several months in a TB sanatorium before she and Tom had one last child in 1915 (my mother). When Tom died prematurely in 1921, Laura and her oldest son teamed up to manage the family farm.

Yet it was Laura alone who decided in 1933, when the Depression hit Sumter County full force, to yield their farm to the bank. All those now living on that farm (Laura’s son, his wife and children, and Laura herself) had to move 30 miles to Eastover and sharecrop another man’s land. It was a hard blow to the family—a kind of exile. Those were hard times. I have Laura’s account book for the first year of that Eastover period.

Laura died in 1935, before she could know that the family would be able to regain their original farm and finally move back home in 1943.

Let’s try recognizing Laura over the years. Here is a photo from the 1880s of four siblings. One of them is Laura, but I don’t know which one. Their names, in alphabetical order, are Donald, Harriett, Laura, and Miller. Can you see Laura?

The two boys have “Little Lord Fauntleroy” decorative collars, and the two girls do look rather fearless, especially with their short haircuts. Did the family choose a reverse-gender gamin look for the girls, just for fun? Here is Manet’s 1862 sketch of a boy, “le gamin au chien,” meaning “the urchin with a dog.” (It was well into the 1900s before Audrey Hepburn and others popularized the female gamine style.)

You may recall my earlier post of Coit and Marion, two of Laura and Tom’s sons, with bows on their hair. Well, my family did like practical jokes.

Finally, here are the sisters (in alphabetical order) Harriett and Laura, years later, when they were both grandmothers. I’ve been told that this photograph was staged as a joke. Harriett’s nickname was “Hat,” and that’s why each woman is sporting a silly hat.

Can you tell which one is Laura? (This time, I do know.)

How difficult is it to see Laura through the years as a child, young woman, and grandmother?

What about your own ancestors? Can you identify them through the years?

Your thoughts are welcome!

We’ve been reading a historical document written in 1909. It’s a 100^th anniversary retrospective of an old Southern church.

We’ve seen that in referring to the times of slavery, the writer has mentioned “the great interest in the welfare of black brothers manifested by our fathers.” He has assured his audience, “Ample provision was made for the religious instruction of this unfortunate class [the slaves].” We read the church rules for slaves in the last post.

Going further, the records show that before the Civil War this church received 184 colored members “on profession.”  And this church was zealous about raising funds for the Southern Board of Foreign Missions. Both these facts suggest, possibly, that this church was not insular–that it was accepting of all people.

Then came the Civil War itself. Did that earth-shaking event provoke discussions of the issues of slavery, morality, and religion within this church? After all, the entire nation seemed to be debating the justice or injustice of slavery. What did this church believe?

I found only two glancing references in this historical church document to the Civil War and its aftermath.

Here is the first reference:

• “Although the services for the colored people under the shed were discontinued shortly after the war, the records show that quite a number were received into the church as late as 1867, and on the 18^th of May of that year 12 were received, and two weeks later 7 others. On the 19^th of October two others were received, but the days of Reconstruction had come and there were not more accessions. Indeed a large proportion of the colored members had already forsaken the church, and on the 29^th of June, 1869, after having twice cited them to appear and show cause for their protracted absence from the church, the Session dropped from the roll the names of 87 colored members. There were still a number whose name were retained upon the roll, but while we find no record of it, they were in all probability dropped very soon for the same reason.”

This seems to mean that most freed slaves voted with their actions and left this church. Nothing here about the issue of slavery.

The other glancing reference is this passage about how white church members would gather before church services to discuss the progress of the Civil War:

• “[To tell] . . . of the tense feeling and blanched faces as little groups gathered together and repeated in whispers the rumors of some great battle, and the loss of friends and loved ones; the intolerable suspense, long drawn out, often ended only by a confirmation of the worst fears. There is no hint of those sage discussions which went on out under the spreading oaks, as the movements of armies were traced, of the tactics of Lee and Jackson criticized: discussions that grew so absorbing at times that even when the strains of music from worshippers within reminded them that the service had begun, it was felt that it was needful to tarry yet a little, until some point which involved the welfare of the country might be settled. After the lapse of nearly half a century, how the scene comes vividly before us! Even now we can see that good old elder as he takes from his vest pocket that snuff box, and tapping the lid, opens and passes it to his neighbors as they stood around, and then after a flourish of the bandanna, and the conventional sneeze, the discussion would begin afresh!”

Nothing here about the issue of slavery, either. This scene of the “little groups” of parishioners is full of nostalgia and warm emotion—like a story by Hawthorne, that typical romantic American novelist.

By contrast, the account of the slaves’ disappearance from church seems factual and unemotional.

On balance, it seems to me that this church history document is virtually silent on the moral or religious questions about slavery.

What does that silence say to you? Interpretations welcome.

[Thought question. No wrong answers.]