BACKWARD HO: July 2009

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Bone & Blood, Abolitionists & Slaveholders

I'm reading Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, written by three journalists of the Hartford Courant newspaper, so my thoughts are on the ideas that sparked the American Revolution on this 4th of July, as well as on the failure of that Revolution to follow through completely in its promise.

We had to fight a terribly bloody Civil War to end slavery, and then many more years of civil war called Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the protests that turned bloody, the jailings of demonstrators, all to come to where we are now. It amazes me how recalcitrant human beings are to change. And, don't we all have the premonition that change is going to come, anyway?

My ancestors fought in the American Revolution. I am still researching the Dressers who were at Valley Forge and in the various battles. I had maternal ancestors who fought on both sides of the Civil War. The Browns were on the Union Side, and the Shannons on the side of the Confederacy.

My ancestor George Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis & Clark expedition became a slave owner of seven slaves in Missouri. I may very well have black relatives in Shannon County there. His relation, Wilson Shannon, was the interim governor in the period known as Bleeding Kansas, which launched John Brown's acts of revolution.

I spent last weekend in the mountains with a group of women friends: two were African-American, one Chinese-American, one Irish-American, and another Jewish-American. We were an encapsulation of America's current ethnic diversity, and all of us, middle-agers, are dealing with family stories--the ones spoken and the ones not. I don't think America can move forward until it truly comes to an honest appraisal of its past, which is not to say we must focus on criticisms and disparagements.

I do not hold my ancestors guilty of anything except surviving, but I do need and want to know why they may have acted as they did and whether or not they caused harm in their actions that may need repair. I am the bone and blood of my family's stories as much as of their DNA, and there is still a lot of work to be done to make this the greatest country ever.

What's It All About?

It has been said that Americans are an ahistorical people: we focus on what can be, what we can make of ourselves, more than we spend time on where we have been.

"Backward Ho" is part family history, part American history, and part personal history. My intent is to explore the segues between what happens to us as Americans and how we shape our lives and futures.

I am a traditional "typical" white American woman, with roots to the 17th-century Puritans, the 18th- century revolutionaries and social reformers, the 19th-century pioneers and preachers, and to the explorers and politicians, farmers and prairie wives who created American history.

My ancestors fought in America's War of Independence and on both sides of the Civil War; they fought for abolition of slavery and temperance, but some owned slaves and drove moonshine trucks.

I am a daughter of the 1960s and bought that "come on people, smile on your brother, everybody get together and love one another" equality, affirmative action, personal liberties stuff, which is, as well, rooted in America's core values. My friends are from many ethnic and religious/spiritual backgrounds, and I am a converted Jew.

As America struggles in the post-9/11 era to move forward, we have blundered terribly into the mythologies that cling to our past; we have become more xenophobic and less free as a result. I hope to bring a perspective that allows us to understand and embrace a vastly richer history than what we forged in the first 10 years of the 21st century.

I welcome constructive feedback and related stories.
Thanks for visiting my blog.

Four Threads to Weave

Each of us has two sets of grandparents, two distinct families for each. We could go back many lines and lose ourselves in our ancient ancestries. Instead, I concentrate on my four great-grandparents and their direct ascendent who carried the family name. I have used colors to identify the families discussed in my blog entries.

DRESSER Arrived in 1638 from Yorkshire, England to Rowley, Massachusetts as part of a Puritan separatist group; then migrated to Gloucester, Mass. and to Maine, Buffalo, New York and finally to the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Involved in shipping and fishing on the northeastern seaboard.

SHANNON Arrived in 1790 from Ireland, but probably of Scots-Irish, Protestant ancestry (MacDonald Clan) to Wilmington, Delaware. Swiftly moved west, then south. George Shannon, my fifth great-grandfather was the youngest member of Lewis & Clark's Corps of Discovery. The Shannons were involved in politics, and sadly were slave-owners in Missouri.

LANHAM Arrived in the mid-19th century likely from Southern England, just in time to fight in the Civil War. Settled in the Washington D.C. environs, the family struggled with poverty.

BROWN Arrived from Scotland, likely Perthshire area, in early to mid-1800s, and became midwestern, then western farmers, teachers, politicians and preachers (Presbyterian). My great-great grandfather was a Presbyterian missionary in the west. My great-grandmother came to California in a wagon.

A Long Strange Trip

It wasn't until I serendipitously met a very distant (10th) cousin that I learned of my Puritan ancestry. My father's father was descended from English Protestant separatists who, along with the congregation of Ezekiel Rogers in the East Riding of England, abandoned home and history for the New World in 1638, taking part in what became known as England's Great Migration. They fought in the Revolutionary War, fished out of Gloucester harbor, and migrated to Maine, rarely living beyond sight of the sea.

On my mother's side, two families were exiled from their native Scotland to become explorers, pioneers, settlers, ministers, railroad workers, ranchers and farmers, moving across the North American continent with the tide of Manifest Destiny. They eventually settled in the farthest West, the Central Valley of California, where I grew up.

As I stand at the extreme edge of the continent, a modern American woman of northern European ancestry, I struggle to come to terms with what was left behind, what was sacrificed, and who was harmed as my relations became Americans. My kind no longer epitomize the image of the "real" American, yet some still cling to that myth.

Americans have always been a motley crew. As our new President put it: we are all mutts. What I hope to do in this blog is record my research and explore some ideas about what it means to be American, taking the symbolic strands that exist in my own DNA as a starting point. I am interested in learning when a new immigrant "becomes" American, and to what degree more recent immigrants are accepted as Americans. And, I want to know what unites us, what divides us, and what we can do to be a "light unto the nations" as the Puritans would have wished it.

BACKWARD HO

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Bone & Blood, Abolitionists & Slaveholders

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