Confederate veteran grave
Confederate veteran graveiStock

My great-great granddaddy, seven generations back, owned slaves in Mississippi. You see, I'm at least seventh generation American on my father's side.

It was some time before the US Civil War. It was an age when industrialization was just starting in the US, and when a great economic expansion followed the westward growth of the country.

This engendered a huge demand for labor to support this growth. But there was no such thing as power tools; all work outside of only the newest factories was manual labor – work done literally by hand. There was so much work to do that there was no such thing as unemployment. In fact, producers had to resort to some rather desperate measures in order to get work done, such as excessively long work days (14, 16, even 18 hours per day, 7 days per week), child labor, and, oh yes, slave labor.

One thing most people don’t realize about the Black slaves in America was that although they may have been many “things”, such as oppressed, downtrodden, and culturally eviscerated, one thing they were NOT was cheap. The price of a slave was comparable to the price of a house. This is why the slave trade was so lucrative. It was something of an ironic tribute to the slaves.

As a result of this, the stereotypes we see of large southern plantations having many slaves working for them was actually extremely rare, the province of only the most wealthy.

Much more common was the situation of our forebear, a farmer in Mississippi. He couldn’t afford to own a slave, so he pooled resources with some of his neighbors and, as a group, they bought a slave, with each of the farmers owning a share in the slave. The slave would go from farm to farm in rotation.

My father once called into a radio talk show that had an historian as a guest. He told him about our ancestor’s situation and the historian said that this was a very common arrangement, and that even the owners of those large plantations would often rent out their slaves to others to recoup some of the costs.

Now, our ancestor was a Bible-reading man, and in his Bible, he read that one is required to free a slave after owning him for seven years. Not knowing nuances, when the slave came around to him in the seventh year, he set him free. It didn’t occur to him that his neighbors might not concur with this action. After all, they all read the same thing in their Bibles as he did. Well, they didn’t quite see things that way and he ran into quite a bit of trouble with them. As the story has it, he was tarred and feathered, run out of town, and as a result, a branch of the Sones family now appeared in New York, where my father was born.

My slave-owning, slave-freeing great granddaddy. He was quite the radical, the subversive renegade nonconformist, and they called him "nigger-lover", injured him bodily, and banished him.

Does he deserve a statue in his honor? Or for a statue of him to be torn down? What does he represent? He would have continued owning his share in his slaves and using them indefinitely, had he not been ostracized for his deviation. But in his day, the act he performed may have been the most enlightened recognition of his slave's humanity to be found. Can we judge those people according to our values? Do we know anything about them?

The spectacle of ignorant barbarians tearing down the landmarks of a nation's past brings to mind a passage from Richard Weaver's classic 1948 masterpiece Ideas Have Consequences: "It is said that physicians sometimes ask patients, 'Do you really wish to get well?' And, to be perfectly realistic in this matter, we must put the question of whether modern civilization wishes to survive. One can detect signs of suicidal impulses; one feels at times that the modern world is calling for madder music and for stronger wine, is craving some delirium which will take it completely away from reality. One is made to think of Kierkegaard's figure of spectators in the theater, who applaud the announcement and repeated announcement that the building is on fire."