It's at least partially a measure of how long your family has been in the country. I don't have any ancestors who lived in America for any but the final years of slavery.
I am purer than all those WASPs since all my ancestors immigrated in the early 1900s.
My wife on the other hand has family in the US dating back to the 1600s so she's super racist.
US, colonies, whatever- we supreme beings don't trouble ourselves with such trivialities.
I wonder if Anglo-ness persisted in names a bit more than in genes because of marriage choices - was a non-Anglo, white woman more likely to marry an Anglo man than their population proportion (and have more children) because they had more status and money than other men?
I tried to check this a while back with ACS data and couples who both identified their ancestry, but I don't remember getting a conclusive result.
1: yes, this bit caught my eye:
In addition, President Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president - except Donald Trump - are direct descendants of slaveholders: Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and - through his white mother's side - Barack Obama. Trump's ancestors came to America after slavery was abolished.
The casual assumption, right there, that really the only sort of slavery we are interested in (or possibly the only kind that existed?) is American slavery. Trump's ancestors were Highland crofters and Bavarian peasants - poor people in countries that never had a very well developed slave economy - so they almost certainly didn't own any slaves, but there will be others who are very probably the descendants of slaveowners. It's clear from the article, though, that Reuters didn't even consider the possibility.
I wonder if Anglo-ness persisted in names a bit more than in genes because of marriage choices
Also people changing their names on immigration to fit in, no?
Yes. If Charles Ponzi had called himself "Thomas C. Perkins", he probably would have gotten away with it.
The other possibility they don't explore is that if you're the descended of enslaved people in the US, you are also, probably, descended from slaveowners.
Estate threshold before inheritance tax applies in the US is about 13M. About 10% of net wealth is inheritance for top 1-9% of households (top by wealth), 5% for top 1%. That excludes lifetime transfers.
whoops, here's the source for numbers in 9: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-and-income-concentration-in-the-scf-20200928.html
That's federal. You still have state inheritance taxes at lower levels of assetry.
5: That's true, but most immigration to the US throughout its history has been mass immigration of poor people. The sorts of people who were wealthy enough to own slaves in their home country were also unlikely to leave it. Certainly it happened occasionally as a result of political unrest and so forth (Haiti in the 1790s is a prominent example), but relative to the overall scale of immigration it would always have been a small number of people.
The casual assumption, right there, that really the only sort of slavery we are interested in (or possibly the only kind that existed?) is American slavery.
I dunno, I think that's an an entirely reasonable assumption for a news organization to make in this context. US slavery really was distinct from slavery in other parts of the world, and current US laws are being made by currently alive US policymakers who are connected to that monstrous history.
Sure, on an academic level I'd be curious to know if US policymakers had ties to elites in other countries that imposed their own monstrous systems, but it's not really germane to their current political roles. Whereas their connection to USian slavery is often startlingly relevant (if only in who they they identify with -- e.g., I got a very defensive response at one point when I was talking with someone about a Virginia exhibit that centered the 'unfairness' of enslavers not being compensated for their emancipated 'property.).
And it's indisputable that virtually anyone descending from enslaved people in the US is also descending from enslavers, but I think the US history of "one-drop rule" pretty much explains why that history doesn't usually translate into implications for racist policymaking.
I'm betting that Trump's ancestors were fucking shits who had to leave because stabbing people was a viable option for their Scottish neighbors.
There's also getting rich on the slave trade, which was primarily outside what became the US, and there has been research I think on at least some institutions that profited off that. IHPMHB this seems likely with my Bostonian ancestors.
I do wonder about the "everyone's descended from Charlemagne" thing -- the article acknowledges that there's no well accepted number for what percentage of the US population is descended from slaveholders (or, more meaningfully, what percentage of the part of the population with pre-1865 US ancestry is).
The implication of the article is that because so many powerful people are descended from slaveholders, that means that the money and power they acquired from slaveholding stayed in the family, and that's why they're powerful. But if the vast majority of people who were descended from slaveholders aren't rich and powerful, that doesn't hold up.
"US slavery really was distinct from slavery in other parts of the world"
Some parts of the world yes, other parts no. The worst aspects of US slavery are pretty similar to the norm in much of the Caribbean and Brazil, no?
RWM's dad's family has a lot of old American wealth, including a signer of the declaration of independence and some rich people from the south who very likely have wealth coming from slavery. But the wealth ran out by her grandfather's generation (who were rich as kids), and her dad's generation saw none of it and are typical poor white people. By contrast on her mom's side her great-grandparents generation are immigrants from Poland and the Carpathians and her grandfather started working at 13 when his dad who was a coal miner died, and then got shot in WW2 and worked almost his whole life at IBM and left significant wealth due to decades of being paid two pensions.
There are families with genuinely old wealth (I was thrown off recently to realize the reason I hadn't heard of the Elizabeth Islands is that most of them have been privately held by the Forbes since 1842!), but for the most part it's about your parents and grandparents wealth and not about the 19th century. For most Northern black people, housing discrimination plays a bigger role in lack of wealth than slavery (which you can see in Coates's argument for reparations based on housing discrimination where the damage on living people is both clear and trackable).
But then along came the War Between the States (ba-ba-ba-baaaaa)...
The worst aspects of US slavery are pretty similar to the norm in much of the Caribbean and Brazil, no?
Yes and no. I am very far from a historian of slavery, so would love corrections on this, but my understanding is that Caribbean slavery was so (environmentally and socially) brutal people often died in 2-3 years, while in the US slavery was equally socially brutal but slightly less environmentally brutal, and people did survive longer, and thus had children, and thus had the particularly awful ripple effects of having your children enslaved with (or more often, NOT with*) you.
*I only learned a few years ago that New Year's Day was often a mournful time for enslaved people:
[T]he end of the year was filled with trauma and trepidation for Black folks living under the yoke of slavery. Enslavers would settle their accounts as the year came to a close, and that meant those they enslaved might be hired out to other enslavers, or sold on the first day of the year. Among enslaved Black folks, New Year's Eve was spent worrying that they might be ripped from family and loved ones, auctioned off to the highest bidder to erase an enslaver's debt.
And as such, New Year's Day was known as "Hiring Day" or--in words that more precisely named the cruelty they experienced--"Heartbreak Day."
"Of all the days in the year, the slaves dread New Year's Day the worst of any," Lewis Clarke, who fled enslavement and became an outspoken abolitionist, stated in 1842, one year before Rhode Island banned legalized racial bondage. "For folks come for their debts then; and if anybody is going to sell a slave, that's the time they do it; and if anybody's going to give away a slave, that's the time they do it; and the slave never knows where he'll be sent to. Oh, New Year's a heart-breaking time in Kentucky!"
I am very far from a historian of slavery, so would love corrections on this, but my understanding is that Caribbean slavery was so (environmentally and socially) brutal people often died in 2-3 years, while in the US slavery was equally socially brutal but slightly less environmentally brutal, and people did survive longer, and thus had children, and thus had the particularly awful ripple effects of having your children enslaved with (or more often, NOT with*) you.
Yes, this was a distinctive feature of slavery in the US compared to other New World slave regimes. Among other effects, it meant that banning the Atlantic slave trade wasn't a devastating blow to the domestic slave economy the way it was in some other places.
It also meant that as some older plantation regions saw soil fertility decline their economies became increasingly oriented around exporting slaves to newer plantation areas further south and west. This was particularly the case in the Virginia tobacco-growing areas.
I believe 21 is correct, certainly as far as slavery in Haiti*. There's some survivorship bias to it - back to the beginning in the 17th century, planters were A/B testing like crazy, like comparing indentured whites vs. enslaved Blacks, or seeing exactly how badly they could treat those they enslaved and not lose profits, etc.; the Haiti model made massive profits but required a robust slave trade and of course prompted (justified) a bloody rebellion; whereas the American planters may have done the same in many places and at many times, they broadly shifted to be "self-sufficient" in terms of reproduction. So it makes sense the one that survived longer is the one that was resilient to the end of the slave trade and that also perhaps resulted in slightly fewer Turners/Louvertures.
Also I think there's evidence the 19th century laws preventing literacy, intermarriage, etc. were trying to specifically learn from the example of Haiti, where part of the picture mixed-race people with an in-between status and often themselves slaveowners, whose revolt initially kicked things off.
Finally, ending the slave trade might have helped the slave power in that it cut off the enslaved from cultural inheritance that helped them fight and organize. A lot of Haitian rebels had experience in organized African warfare and put to good use.
*yeah, yeah, Saint-Domingue
To 22 after composing the above: Wouldn't my description of the American model probably hold for Brazil and other continental models too?
Brazil has similarities to both the US and Caribbean systems but was also distinctive in many ways. Demographically it was more like the Caribbean with high mortality but Portugal was able to maintain the population with imports for much longer because of its colonies in Africa and large role in the transatlantic trade even after it was banned on paper.
The continued contact with Africa also meant that African cultural traits survived more robustly in Brazil. There was also a lot of marronage, so there were whole-ass states organized along African lines in the rainforest, some of which survived for decades.
Some of the maroon communities still exist.
I had taken your context to be saying USian slavery was uniquely *bad* and thereby not the same kind of thing as slavery in England. Of course I agree that every country is different and has its own unique history, and that USian slavery is distinguishable in many important ways from the Caribbean. But you could say the same thing about variations within the US (as teo mentions), and I'm not convinced that say the difference between the US and Brazil is clearly more significant than the difference between Virginia and Mississippi. At any rate, Haiti is a particularly outlying example in a lot of ways.
I also wonder if the British Caribbean was as horrendous as Haiti. Possibly so, as they were in competition & keeping an eye on each other?
"Also I think there's evidence the 19th century laws preventing literacy, intermarriage, etc. were trying to specifically learn from the example of Haiti, where part of the picture mixed-race people with an in-between status and often themselves slaveowners, whose revolt initially kicked things off."
Interesting. Within the US you see a similar pattern in Louisiana, right?
I also wonder if the British Caribbean was as horrendous as Haiti. Possibly so, as they were in competition & keeping an eye on each other?
Yeah, they were all pretty much equally bad. The Danes in the Virgin Islands were reputed to be the worst but they were all doing the same thing in the same way so variations were slight.
29: It seems as though the main factor here isn't which country that does the colonizing, but rather that sugar cane plantations specifically had insanely high mortality compared to any other crop. Here's an article about Jamaica for instance:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41409688?seq=1
I can believe that Haiti was somehow even worse, but at any rate the sugar cane centered British colonies had awful mortality rates.
Yes, it was specifically about sugar, which was both extremely profitable and insanely dangerous.
Because it keeps you out of ketosis.
I was going to say the US didn't really have sugar plantations, and then felt very dumb when I remember one of the big bowl games is the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans...
Yeah, it was a thing in Louisiana and a few other parts of the Gulf Coast, but not really elsewhere. The big slave-grown cash crop in the US was cotton.
But one other distinctive thing about US slavery is the variety of crops that were grown on slave plantations. Tobacco, indigo, rice, and hemp were all grown in various areas. There was also limited use of slaves in industrial production, most prominently at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond.
(In this respect Brazil was somewhat similar although sugar was its primary slave crop.)
That seems more a function of having slavery over large landmasses with many different biomes and potentials, versus islands that tended to focus deeply on specific cash crops, no?
So US slavery was less deadly than Caribbean slavery, but mostly just because most of the US isn't well suited for cane sugar cultivation.
I seem to recall Haiti also had a significant coffee industry next to sugar, particularly at higher altitudes. Smaller-scale, easier for new entrepreneurs including mixed-race, not as deadly. Maybe also indigo?
I think it's primarily just about the geography of sugar cane, and not about islands per se (see Brazil!). There's just very few places in the US that are close enough to the equator to grow sugar cane.
I seem to recall Haiti also had a significant coffee industry next to sugar, particularly at higher altitudes. Smaller-scale, easier for new entrepreneurs including mixed-race, not as deadly. Maybe also indigo?
Indigo is actually more like sugar in that it requires a lot of processing (which was also done by slaves). In the US it was a niche crop mostly grown in South Carolina.
What about sugar beets?
Those came later and totally changed the sugar market. I don't know much about the details though.
Didn't Napoleon develop them to bolster the Continental system and have sugar despite the blockade? That's my cod-historical memory.
sugar beets came later
A side plot in K.J. Charles's Band Sinister! (NSFW same-sex romance novel, but the link is tame)
My Dad's family came over to upstate NY in the 1830s as peasant farmers from Alsace, so I doubt they owned any slaves.
My mom's family I don't know about, but some branches could have. One branch included a avermont mini robber baron. My namesake was a pretty active abolitionist, but I think the organization she was involved with was segregated which seems bizarre.
Speaking of nobility, I'm going to try to get people to translate "Marquess" as "Edgelord."
I bet that the treasurer of Alabama, an old guy named Young Boozer, can fit into this thread.
One of my ancestors owned a slave in New Jersey for several years in the 1830s, who was freed when they reached the age of 21. There must be more to that story, but I don't know it.
New Jersey seems to have tried to both abolish slavery and keep slaves. I'm now an expert thanks to Wikipedia.
Yes, several northern states went with various forms of gradual emancipation. New Jersey actually still had a handful of slaves when the Civil War started.
52: "Markgraf" is definitely "Edgelord." At least until they become a "Kurfürst" at which point they're a "Curing Count." Muah-ah-ah-ah.
13: but the way they've done it implies a lot of things that they don't actually say out loud and therefore don't have to defend, but which the reader (you, for example) gets to assume. Like, as 17 pointed out, the assumption "if you are a descendant of slaveowners, you probably have wealth and position that a non-descendant of slaveholders doesn't have, but only if you're a descendant of US slaveowners".
And "if you are a descendant of slaveowners you will have an instinctive preference for racist legislation, as long as they're US slaveowners".
And "US slavery was so radically different from any other sort of slavery that there's no reason to suppose that someone who is descended from, say, a British plantation slaveowner in Jamaica, or for that matter a wealthy family in Somalia where slave plantations existed until 1905, would have any inherited wealth or position or political preferences regarding US racial politics, but someone whose great^8 grandfather owned one (1) field hand in Kentucky in 1802 has some hard questions to answer".
I have a few ancestors who had slaves in Connecticut and Massachusetts. That's was pretty early, and only or or two at a time, so not a plantation system, but more a household thing, I imagine.
I have ancestors who lived in Virginia pre- and just post-Revolution, but they don't generally seem to have been of the slaveholding class.
I don't have any generational wealth from the 19th, much less 18th century, and vanishingly few Americans do. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves is way more common in the US than centuries long generational wealth.
Confederate deserters prospecting for gold in Montana is a part of our early history here. Descendants of slaveholders yes, but the wealth of their descendants came from Native genocide and environmental destruction. There's sin everywhere you look.
poor people in countries that never had a very well developed slave economy - so they almost certainly didn't own any slaves
Emma Rothschild's _An Infinite History_ has a whole lot of (share-based) slave ownership by surprisingly poor persons in a small non-port French city. It was how to make breakout money, she more or less says, the most likely way to change your status. (Also, whoo, do they sue each other a lot.)
Very possibly the Highland and German poor people were even poorer and less connected.
60: I think these are all more "USians forget the rest of the world exists" than any asserions about our exceptionality. Obviously the former can bleed into the latter, but in this case I think just myopia.
I don't mean to suggest in 61 that having household slaves was ok, or anything like that. The wealth generation aspect would be different is all I'm saying.
62: very possibly! Slavery in the strict sense wasn't huge in Scotland for economic reasons, but there were slaves in Scottish industry - miners and salters - until the end of the 18th century (tied to their jobs, so more like serfs than chattel slaves) and of course there were serfs in mediaeval Scotland, as there were in the rest of Europe, as well as prisoners of war forced to labour. If we extend it to "descended from someone who held serfs" then Donald Trump, and pretty much every member of Congress, would qualify.
62: Super interesting!
61: IIRC OP link (which I only skimmed, the style is so execrable) seemed to show most of the slaveowning ancestors holding more slaves than median slavers of their times. That would imply more wealth and therefore maybe a greater chance of transmission across generations. IDK if that last is actually true, but I bet someone's studied it.
Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'