It felt like a kick in the stomach. Exploring an ancestry website, I discovered an 1860 Slave Schedule showing that my great-great-grandfather, William Henry Robertson of Mason County, Kentucky, owned 13 slaves. I had often wondered if any of my ancestors were slave owners. Now I knew.
Feeling this new knowledge like a burn, I embarked on a search for William Henry Robertson. My grandparents’ dairy and tobacco farm I roamed as a boy was likely the land my great-great-grandfather had owned, a few miles from the Ohio River that divided the slave state of Kentucky from the free state of Ohio. In 1860, 15,000 free people lived in the county. Just over 5% of them owned slaves, averaging about 5 slaves per slave owner.
William Henry Robertson attended medical college in Lexington. He married and had five children. He owned a farm and practiced medicine. In 1860, his 13 slaves, 7 of them children, lived in three houses. He signed a document opposing Southern secession from the Union. Being both pro-Union and pro-slavery was the position of the Constitutional Union Party, which carried the state in the election of 1860. He died at the age of 54, three years after the end of the Civil War. This is all I know.
Ancestry websites, with their trove of records, pull us close, but not close enough. It was not the census-taker’s facts I sought, but human stories. I wanted to know how my great-great-grandfather lived his life, what he thought, how he felt. I wanted to know whether he wrestled with the issue of slavery, why he was not an abolitionist. I found no answers.
Though slave-owning was widely accepted in Kentucky, historical relativism helps me to understand, but not to forgive. There were plenty of abolitionists around. In 1849, 535 citizens of Mason County signed a petition calling for the emancipation of slaves. My great-great-grandfather was not among the signers. The well-known abolitionist John Rankin lived eight miles downriver in Ripley, Ohio, one of the most important towns on the Underground Railroad. John Parker, a former enslaved person who lived in Ripley, helped more than 400 escaped slaves in their flight to freedom. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eliza (like the real woman on whom the character was based) ran with her infant from her home in Mason County and crossed the partially frozen Ohio River into Ripley. The spot couldn’t have been more than a few miles from my great-great-grandfather’s farm. There was plenty to impress upon William Henry Robertson that slavery was a contested moral issue.
There is something about ancestors, even those who died a century before we were born, that speaks to us from the past. I can’t escape the feeling that I’m carrying baggage left by William Henry Robertson — whether I want to or not. In this, my perplexed feelings are a microcosm of contemporary American society.
Metaphorically and sometimes literally, white Americans descend from slave holders, as Black Americans descend from slaves. Currently we debate paying reparations, renouncing institutions connected to slavery, and renaming streets and buildings. We wonder how to make good on the bad of our past.
The late Daniel Bell described two strains in the American character, “the piety and torment of Jonathan Edwards, obsessed with human depravity, and the practicality and expedience of Benjamin Franklin, oriented toward a world of possibility and gain.” Both strains are with us still. Puritan righteousness is obsessed with the scourge of evil. Sin stamps us like a brand, and a nation, like an individual, must wear the scarlet letter forever. The cultural Protestantism of Franklin is roll-up-your-sleeves practical, committed to shaping a better future. It favors improvement over punishment. It embodies the American belief that when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Paraphrasing a 19th century abolitionist, Martin Luther King famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It bends not on its own, but by people acting to bend it. Though King denounced the sins of the past, he called people toward the future. He acknowledged the nightmare, but he spoke of the dream. His social gospel had more in common with Ben Franklin than with Jonathan Edwards. Woke is not enough; it must become work to pave the road to the prize.
For the past decade I have taught college classes at San Quentin Prison. I see men who have done very bad things years ago now trying to make themselves better. Convicted felons take classes, commit themselves to self-help groups, organize peace days on the yard, and walk to raise money for breast cancer care. Those with the necessary clearance fight wildfires. Should not our society follow their example?
I believe there is something deeply wrong about defining individuals — or a nation — by their past sins, by assuming they cannot change, by denying that all of us are works-in-progress. Ben Franklin did not become an abolitionist until his last years. Should we cancel him for his earlier position?
When the aggressive part of our nature finds its outlet in self-righteous moralism, replicating the venom of Salem in contemporary life, the moral arc is bent toward hatred, not justice. Instead of making the world better, we bask in self-righteousness or — and this is the other side of the Puritan coin — we marinate in guilt. Rage, whether directed toward others or ourselves, wounds the human soul.
The most likely verdict on William Henry Robertson is that he was a man of his day, acting in accord with the prevailing winds, failing to rise above his time. I had hoped for something more morally heroic. Instead, I am left to transform that kick in the stomach to a kick in the butt. What we need is not a cancel list, but a to-do list. We have a debt to pay — to our ancestors (both the wrong-doers and the wronged), to the arc of justice, and to ourselves.
This piece originally appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal and USA Today.
Bill Smoot is a writer of fiction and essays, a teacher at San Quentin Prison, and a longtime OLLI faculty member. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University. Bill is teaching "Film Noir and Philosophy" with us this fall.