Ben Affleck and the slave state of New Jersey

Ben Affleck and the slave state of New Jersey April 22, 2015

It seems actor Ben Affleck was reluctant to have his slave-keeping ancestor discussed when he appeared on Henry Louis Gates’ PBS show Finding Your Roots.

That reluctance is a problem because denying the past is a way of denying the present. And because it reflects Old World superstition about “blood will out” and such that suggests heredity is destiny. For those of us from northern states — like Affleck, or me — such a refusal to acknowledge historic complicity in the evil of slavery can also feed into a cartoonish South-bad, North-good view that evades responsibility by evading guilt.

My family is from New Jersey. Richard Clark settled in what would later become Union County in 1640, and that’s where I was born. (We Clarks missed the memo on that whole “westward, ho!” business. Took us nearly 350 years to cross the Delaware River.) So my family isn’t southern — we’re not even from South Jersey.

Seal_of_New_Jersey
New Jersey was a slave state when it first adopted “Liberty and Prosperity” as its motto.

But Richard Clark kept a woman as a slave — just like Jonathan Edwards and Ariel Castro did. My great, great, etc., granddad’s, will includes “a negress” among his “property.”

That’s the actual history of my family and the actual history of New Jersey — where slavery was perfectly legal for more than 200 years. The state passed a gradual abolition in 1804, but still permitted the enslavement of those born before that year. A generation later, in 1846 — the same year Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress — New Jersey nominally “ended” slavery by reclassifying former slaves as indentured “apprentices” for life.

Slavery in New Jersey didn’t really end until the 13th Amendment was adopted after the Civil War. And even then it took two tries and more than a year for the state to ratify the 13th Amendment (which it did after Georgia, North Carolina, South Caroina, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana had already done so).

I wasn’t taught any of that history when I attended school in New Jersey. We learned about slavery in the South, but not about slavery in South Brunswick and South Orange and South Plainfield.

That’s why it’s good to see that New York City will soon be erecting a historical marker on Wall Street near the site of the official slave auction that the city operated there from 1711 to 1762. (New York didn’t pass it’s gradual emancipation law until 1827. Slavery was legal in the Big Apple for longer than it has been illegal there.)

Mary Elizabeth Williams suggests that Ben Affleck — and the rest of us — should take a cue from his fellow actor/director Bill Paxton, who recently appeared on TLC’s knock-off version of Gates’ show, Who Do You Think You Are? When Paxton learned of his ancestor’s slave-keeping, he said it was “disappointing,” but that “Your history, good and bad, is your history.”

Williams also discusses something that gets at why I don’t like the name of that TLC show:

We look for ourselves in our family — and we look for explanations of others in theirs. We watch fictional shows like Outlander and Game of Thrones — stories that regularly explore the question of whether the sins or the superpowers of one generation can be passed to another. We wonder, is blood destiny? But why? Why, especially here in the United States, where we pretend to pride ourselves so greatly on the notion of self-made identity, do we give so much power to our ancestors? Why do still permit them to reflect upon us? I can understand if the connection is recent — it must’ve been a horrible burden to live as Charles Manson Jr., or as the son of Bernie Madoff. You can certainly understand why, if you’d been living in the memory of the Holocaust, you wouldn’t want to have the same nomenclature are your relative named Hitler. Conversely, if you’re trying to get into an Ivy League school, maybe your father and mother’s great achievements and prestige are a stepping stone. And there is no way in hell that a guy like Affleck, who spent most of his childhood in Massachusetts, is not familiar with the infamous “My family came over on the Mayflower; how long has your family been here?” question. But even in our knee-jerk, nonsense-fueled, blame-tastic culture, why ascribe any real connection between an ancestor — whether he was a Revolutionary War hero or a slave-owning Civil War veteran — and the person one is today?

I like the name of Gates’ program because “Finding Your Roots” can be enlightening. But ancestry is not destiny. It does not define who we are. Our history, good and bad, is our history, but it need not determine our future.*

Yet while blood is not destiny, a blood-money trust-fund can be. And while the guilt of our ancestors shouldn’t be ascribed to us as their descendants, we are responsible for what we do with the legacy of injustice they have bequeathed us. Jim O’Grady gets at this in his WNYC article on that slave-auction historical marker:

New York and other northern cities accrued vast wealth from slave labor and profited for centuries from dealings in the slave trade. Africans who passed through the Wall Street slave market contributed to the prosperity of some very famous companies, some of which are still around: Aetna, New York Life and JPMorgan Chase, to name a few. Various units of these and other financial companies bankrolled southern plantations, insured slaves as property, and used slaves as collateral for loans.

Past guilt does not entail present guilt. But it does entail present responsibility.

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* That’s why I can also tell you about another (less-direct) ancestor of mine without any sense of personal shame or guilt. William Potter was hanged in 1662, in Connecticut, for “the sin of bestiality with sundrie creatures.” We have a record of his trial, which included a startlingly detailed tally of Potter’s crimes:

He acted first with a bitch, which he hanged thinking he should be free from the temptation when she was gone, but it still pursued him, & he acted this wickednes with two sowes, one of which was that of which his son testifies, there is alsoe a yeareling heifer, a two yeare old, and a cow that he had beene vilely naught withall this spring, alsoe three sheepe, of which he said he told his wife which they were; these was all he said, only his attempting with his old mare which is now dead.

Given the way genealogy works, pretty much any white American family that’s been here for centuries will be linked in some way, with some degree of cousinhood or kinship, to the family of William Potter. He is thus my go-to reference in response to the Mayflower business Williams mentions above.

“My family came over on the Mayflower.”

“Oh, then you must be related to William Potter.


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