An American Story?

This goes to post on July 4, 2021, rather obviously.

But it's about events in the 1860s and 70s.  And maybe about today as well.

Just recently I ran across an article about an African American woman who was researching her family's history.  She was aware that she had white ancestors, and indeed nearly every African American whose family is traced back to the 19th Century does.  By the same token, while its rarely mentioned, nearly every white Southern American whose family can be traced back to the 19th Century in that region also does, making all the fighting and whatnot from 1865 forward over race really odd.  

There's a lot of interpretations on what this means, of course, with the word "rape" commonly appearing in such discussions.  This isn't gong to go into things like that.

Rather, what the article revealed is an oddly human story that probably ought to just cause everyone to pause and ponder it.

It dealt with a  man who came from a slaveholding, relatively well off, plantation owning family.  Not a massively wealthy, Gone With The Wind type situation, but relatively well off.  Not so well off that, when the Civil War came, he entered the Confederate army as an officer, however.

He did enter it, was wounded, convalesced at home, and then reenlisted and fought again.

Now, the cause of the South, anyway you look at it, was slavery. That's what the war was about.

And in his household among the slaves was a young female slave.  

When he was home convalescing.  Something happened.  Nobody noticed until he'd gone back into the Confederate army.  She was pregnant.

He was the father.

He returned from the war alive, and this story doesn't go in the direction you'd suppose.  Interracial marriage was illegal in the South (and often elsewhere as well) but he did not abandon her, or their child.  In fact, in the early 1870s when there was very briefly a brake in the prohibition on interracial marriage, they married, and they lived the rest of their lives as a married couple.

That couldn't have been easy. They lived in the South, and they must have been outcasts.  But they carried on anyhow.  When he died, he was buried in an all white cemetery. When she died some years later, she was buried in an all black cemetery.  That shows, I suppose, the attitudes of those around them.

I suppose the fact that their descendants today are regarded as African Americans also does. The half white, half back, children of that union were black under the strange American "one drop of blood" viewpoint, and they must have slipped into the black community where they lived.

It's an interesting story, however.  A son of a planter and a Confederate soldier develops a relationship with a black slave owned by his family, during the war, and later marries her.

Postscript.

Oddly enough, on the same day I posted this, I ran back across this being linked into one of my cousins' Facebook feeds.  A very powerful essay.

You want a Confederate Monument?  My Body is a Confederate Monument.