I don't think any of my people owned slaves. But they might have.
This is to ponder because the South is real; it hasn't been erased by American homogenization. The South is distinguished by history, by its relative pauperism, and by having been incubator to America's original sin. Southernness is a kind of problem to be worked out by those of us with complex and contradictory feelings about our home. It matters if my people owned people.
According to the 1860 census, 32 percent of white families in the states that would secede from the Union owned slaves. In Georgia, the figure was 37 percent, which is a bit lower than it was in Mississippi (49 percent) or South Carolina (46 percent) and a bit higher than North Carolina (28 percent), Arkansas (20 percent) or Missouri (13 percent).
(It's interesting to note that 12 percent of Maryland families and 3 percent of Delaware families owned slaves in 1860. Because these states stayed in the Union they weren't subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves there had to wait until July 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, to become free citizens of the country where they had lived and worked for decades.)
Now 32 percent is a sizable number, a lot more than certain Lost Causers might have you believe. (And not owning slaves didn't keep you from benefiting from the peculiar institution.) Still, it's not a majority.
While my maternal grandfather eventually acquired a medium-sized tobacco farm, he didn't own any land until the 1920s. Before that he's listed in census records as a laborer. I've never heard any family legends that dispute my intuition that I'm descended from convicts who came over with James Edward Oglethorpe. (Oglethorpe envisioned Georgia as a place where Britain's destitute could start anew. It wasn't so much a penal colony as a kind of bankruptcy relief for those in debtors' prison. But that didn't work out because, as one contemporary journalist put it, "as many of the poor who had been useless in England were inclined to be useless likewise in Georgia." Georgia was never a penal colony.)
That doesn't mean my ancestors didn't see slavery as part of the natural order and sustaining of their way of life. They may have aspired to one day own slaves. White supremacy was a given; the idea that they might live alongside a legally enfranchised black population that rivaled their numbers (slaves made up 44 percent of the population in Georgia; they were a majority in South Carolina and Mississippi) would have been inconceivable. It probably would have terrified them.
It's also possible that my paternal grandmother's folks, the Bells, owned slaves. They had a little money but they made it after the war in the North Carolina furniture trade. I don't know much about them except that the Depression was hard on them and their money didn't last. My grandmother claimed to be one-quarter Cherokee, smoked a lot, and was famous in some circles for the clothes she sewed for Barbie dolls. I remember her and her sisters, Mary Jo and Kathleen, but they are all gone now, as is my father and his brother and sister.
There's no one to ask anymore except the Internet.
When I do, it's not hard to trace it--through a database of gravestones, starting with my grandmother's--to my great-great-grandfather Henry Bell. I've never heard of Henry before though I have heard of his wife, a Tiernan from Ireland's County Cavan who married him weeks after she arrived in this country, but I'm able to glean a little information. He was born in Tennessee in 1845 and lived most of his life in Knoxville, where he was eventually buried in 1928, having lived long enough to see all his granddaughters attain adulthood.
On the Internet there is a photograph of his grave marker; a simple stone with his name and dates of birth and death and, across the bottom, the line: Private, Battery H, 2nd Ohio Heavy Artillery.
My great-great-grandfather from Knoxville was a Union soldier.
His company mustered in September 1863; Henry would have been 18 years old. He would have had to travel to Cincinnati or Covington, across the river in Kentucky, to volunteer.
Battery H didn't see much action during the war, though from May to October 1864 its troops occupied the railroad town of Cleveland, Tenn. (A historical marker in the town quotes President Abraham Lincoln: "To take and hold the railroad at or east of Cleveland, Tennessee, I think is as fully as important as the taking and holding of Richmond.") They repelled a raid from Confederate Gen. Joseph Wheeler's cavalry in August with minimal casualties. (Regimental records indicate that of the 176 men the 2nd Ohio lost during the war, only one officer and two enlisted men died in battle. The rest died of disease.)
Obviously I don't know what compelled Henry Bell to join the Union army. Most of the soldiers who fought on both sides weren't ideologues; like a lot of people who enlist in the military today, they may have been looking for economic opportunity or a way out of bad circumstances. Union soldiers were better paid and fed than their Confederate counterparts. It might have come down to that.
I never expected to find a Union soldier in my background. I've decided to be proud of him. In my heart, maybe I'll erect a little statue to Pvt. Henry Bell.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 09/03/2017