Republican presidential candidate's great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.
I question whether this has any bearing on Mr. Romney's qualifications for the Presidency. It does serve to remind us that he is a Mormon. And the media are ever anxious to stoke the fires of sectarian strife they imagine inhabit the breasts of Conservatives. In their world view, Liberals are open minded people who never let a wicked thought about “those others” enter their virgin minds where visions of love and peace hold court (except that part of the Liberal mind that sorrows over the fact that Dick Cheney was not killed by a suicide bomber).
So it was with some interest that I noted that that good looking, clean Barack Obama has ancestors that (gasp) owned slaves and whose father (not his great, great grandfather) was a polygamist. A polygamist father and slave owning ancestors. The article appeared in the Chicago Tribune. I wonder if this will generate an article by Dobner and Johnson?
I really don’t care who or what any candidate’s ancestors were or what they did. What is fascinating about this is that the news media should report on it. This is certainly not the media that failed to inform the public that Roosevelt was a polio victim confined to a wheel chair by only taking pictures of him that excluded that chair.
As I said, fascinating, and more than a little creepy.
UPDATE: Hold the presses:
Reitwiesner's research identifies two other presidential candidates, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, as descendants of slave owners. Three of McCain's great-great-grandfathers in Mississippi owned slaves, including one who owned 52 in 1860. Two ancestors of Edwards owned one slave each in Georgia in 1860.
2 comments:
Virtually all Americans, no matter what their race, have ancestors who owned slaves or participated in the slave trade. Free blacks also owned slaves (one of the South’s largest slave owners was a freed black man.) If researchers traced Obama’s African lineage, they would almost certainly that his had ancestors who were involved in the African side of the Atlantic Slave trade. Europeans did not kidnap and enslave Africans. They pruchased slaves from African tribes and resold them in the Americas. All African tribes were deeply envolved in the slave trade.
Slavery was practiced in all the Northern states before the Civil War and was still legal in some of the Northern states during the Civil War. That’s why Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in states that had seceded from the Union. New England merchants owned the fleets of slave ships. They bought slaves in Africa and resold them in the Americas. This is the source of the funding for the American Industrial Revolution. (The plantation owners, by comparison, tended to be land rich but cash poor, and most of them lost their land after the Civil War.
American Indians also owned slaves, both before and after the European discovery of America. (The Cherokees were the last Americans to give up slavery. Slavery was still legal on tribal lands following the Civil War. The U.S. government ended slavery within its borders by pruchasing slaves from Indian tribes and setting them free.)
Hispanic or Latin Americans are also decendants of slave owners. More than two-thirds of African slaves transported to the Americas went to Mexico or South America.
The ancestors of virtually all European Americans were once enslaved. The word “slave,” in fact, comes from the word “Slavic,” or Eastern European. Europeans were still being sold as slaves while the Atlantic slave trade was underway. A few white slaves–not to be confused with indentured servants–were transported to America in early Colonial days, but were eventually replaced with African slaves who, it was thought, were more resistants to diseases such as malaria.
Blair,
You have it exactly right.
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