The Slave Owner Ancestor

It is sadly true—I have finally looked into my Southern ancestry and found that my great-great-great grandfather James Whittington “owned” slaves. I put the word in quotes, because, as you can imagine, this concept is repugnant. I find it impossible to allow that anybody ever “owned” anybody else. That in the eyes of his society and in the laws of his time this was reality is the sad past. But I will not allow it a present nor a future in my world-view.

I think I have always known this might be the case, that the family from Tennessee that had come from North Carolina, and much further back had settled soon after arriving in the New World in Virginia, would have probably been typical of their time and place in the matter of slavery. But I had hoped my family would prove to be either too poor, or better yet to be too principled to participate in the shame.

I found in the 1850 Census that James, who had been born in North Carolina during the Revolutionary War, at the age of 74 was living in Madison County, Tennessee, with his younger daughter Telitha Cumi Whittington, and two of his younger sons, Othaneil and Quintillian Whittington, and his later wife (not the mother of these children), Kettura. (He married twice; first to Frances Maynard, and after she died in 1839, to Kettura Lester in 1848).

When I looked for his family in earlier census records, I first found him in North Carolina in 1820, and those innocuous tick-marks provided the damning evidence. The columns show he had four little boys under ten—Solomon Yancy, Othaneil, Cason Coley, and James Henderson—and three boys between 10 and 16—Gibson, Weston, and George Arthur (who was really 9 but might have been rounded up)—and two daughters—Agatha and Telitha. His wife Frankie was there, and there were two young men between 18 and 26 living with him—his eldest sons, William and Richard. But then there are two tick marks in the slave columns—a male between the ages of 14 and 25, and a woman between 26 and 45. Who are they? Were they a mother and her son? I want to believe that at the very least my ancestor would not separate family members.

Ten years later, still in North Carolina, the family had grown up and changed as it should, but the slave question was different too—two women, one aged 10-24 and the other 24-36. Again, did they keep a family relationship together? Not likely. People who held just two slaves would not have bothered to keep a family together. The economics would not have been in favor of mercy.

Not finding the family in 1840, I turned with some trepidation to the 1850 Slave Schedules. These were separate census schedules prepared to count the slave holdings of southerners, and they are about as inhuman as documents dealing with human beings can be. They give the name only of the slave holder. Listed are the number and individual details about each slave, but with no names and certainly no relationships:

Jas. Whittington

1, age 60, Female, Black

1, age 25, Female, Black

1, age 23, Male, Black

1, age 9, Male, Black

The elder woman draws me—she is of the right age to have been in the family continuously since that 1820 document, but is she the same? She is just old enough to live to see the Civil War. Did she survive? What happened to her? Is there any way at all to find out anything about her? I wonder where her descendants are now.

I feel a possibly illogical responsibility to know these things. But how to find out?