My “coolest ancestor” kept people in slavery

I’ve mused a little bit before on this blog about how much we should look to our ancestors as a source of pride or shame. And honestly, I derive more pride than is probably warranted from some of the admirable things I've uncovered in my family's past. A case in point is Martha McFarlane McGee Bell, who I enthused in a post a few years back was “Quite Possibly My Coolest Ancestor.” Martha Bell was a nurse, midwife, and the richest woman in her county in North Carolina. Two of her children, John and William McGee, became preachers and helped launch the Second Great Awakening. Most awesomely, she is said to have been a spy for the patriots in the American Revolution.

But I'm writing on Memorial Day after a day of thinking about the Civil War and my family’s role in it. I recently confirmed that my great-great-great-grandfather William Burrow—Martha’s great-grandson—died fighting for the Union in the Battle of Fayetteville, which is another source of pride. I was totting up the Union soldiers and sympathizers and the Confederate soldiers and sympathizers and feeling good about mostly being on the right side of history.

Then, I started thinking beyond the war to slavery. I have known for years that one of my great-great-great-grandfathers in Arkansas, William Shumate, kept people in slavery; it is mentioned casually in a couple of accounts of his family. His son Bennett, my great-great-grandfather, is the only Confederate soldier in my direct ancestry. Beyond them, though, I had always had a vague notion that my Scots-Irish, hill-dwelling ancestors were not prosperous enough to have held people in bondage.

Today, though, my thoughts turned to prosperous Martha and William Bell, who owned a mill in North Carolina. Nothing I had read about them had ever mentioned that they held people in slavery, but what are the odds that they didn’t, I suddenly wondered.

The answer came too easily. I went to Ancestry.com and found that someone had transcribed Martha’s will. She died before her husband, so it seems to have gone unsaid that he—the executor of her estate—would inherit most of her property. But the will is otherwise concerned with only one thing: her bequest of 11 human beings to her grandchildren.

After I found Martha’s will, I found this 1847 newspaper account of old revolutionary times that, while remarking on Martha’s spirit, casually mentioned the Bell’s “negroes.” Raleigh (NC) Register, 11 Sep 1847.

Reading this straightforward, seemingly casual dispersal of living people as property was a gut punch. “First I give to my grandson, William McGee, the son of John McGee. one Negro boy named Charles. Then I give to my grandson, John McGee, the son of William McGee, one Negro boy named Sampson. Then, I give to my grandson, John Welborn, the son of Jenny Wellborn, one Negro woman named Fan, with the youngest child she now has.” It goes on until she has gifted 11 people to 10 of her grandchildren.(My great-great-great-great-grandmother Martha McGee Burrow is not among them.)

I had put Martha on a pedestal. I saw her as a feminist pioneer—looking after women's health not for money but as a calling—and a champion of liberty in her efforts for the Continental Army. But as with so many heroes of that era, we have a terrible contradiction to live with: the fact that they espoused liberty—and risked their lives for it—while holding people in a sickeningly cruel and unjust system of bondage.

I’m still trying to assimilate all this. For years, I have had idle thoughts about trying to write a novel about Martha, but that story would now be darker and more complicated.

I should add that you don't have to find slaveholders in your family tree to find yourself complicit in our nation’s defining sin. My white family benefited for generations from systemic advantages denied to black people, beginning with slavery and suffrage but continuing through the Homestead Act, Jim Crow, the Federal Housing Act, the G.I. Bill, and more. Our nation owes African Americans a tangible debt for these centuries of systemic theft of their wealth, and I for one support a national program to make it happen. (If you haven’t already, read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s excellent article “The Case for Reparations” for an excellent argument along this line.)

I just want to end by remembering the people that Martha enslaved. Here are the only names I know for them: Charles, Sampson, Fan and her youngest child, Becky, Solomon, Absalom, Judy, Gains, Jacob, and Fanny. May light perpetual shine upon them, and may they have their reward in Heaven.