[cure-news] The Bush Family's Slaveholding Past - Was their dynasty built on slavery?

[Ida Hakim]

The Bush Family's Slaveholding Past
Was their dynasty built on slavery?


By Edward Ball

The image most people have of slavery involves a cotton
plantation with a big white house, a black village
where 300 people live in cabins and a cruel overseer in
the wings. This was not the model followed by the
ancestors of President George W. Bush when, 175 years
ago, they enslaved about 30 people on the shores of the
upper Chesapeake.

It is an apt time to contemplate the link between
slavery and the White House. This week President Bush
is in the midst of a six-day trip to Africa, his second
tour of the continent. He will visit several countries
- including Benin, Ghana, and Liberia - from which the
United States once drew slaves. That the trip falls on
either side of President's Day, which honors
statesmanship in the White House, makes the occasion
all the more fitting. The moment is mature for the
president to speak about slavery, especially given his
personal connection to slavery's legacy.

A new book by Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy,
mentions in passing that at one time some of the
president's family owned slaves. Weisberg doesn't dwell
on the links between the White House and the antebellum
past except to say the Bush clan's story is a long-held
"family secret." The Bush Tragedy, a revealing book
about family dynamics in the Bush political dynasty,
treats the slavery matter only briefly, focusing
instead on the "spectacular, avoidable flame-out" of
the receding administration. But the story that joins
the 43rd president to predecessors who held title to
dozens of people bears retelling in detail.

The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an
amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his
research in the Illinois Times, a small paper out of
Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that
during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households
of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his
father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been
slaveholding farmers. The evidence is simple but
persuasive: genealogies of the Bush family match up
with census data that counted farmers who used enslaved
workers. With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen
million living white Americans who trace their roots to
the long-gone master class.

It's not as though the president is the only politician
whose family owned slaves. Of the first eighteen
presidents, from George Washington to Ulysses Grant,
twelve owned people, eight of them while in office. At
one time, Andrew Jackson was even a slave trader. Since
Emancipation in 1865, a number of presidents have come
from families that once contained slave masters. Even
the current presidential hopefuls are likely to have
slave owners among their ancestors. The descendants of
slaveholders do not wear special tattoos or announce
themselves in secret handshakes, but most know who they
are.

The tragic story of America's slave days inspires
disabling levels of fear among whites and anger among
blacks. Probably neither the 43rd president nor his
father, the 41st, possesses the introspection needed to
grasp the relationship between the Bush family's
slaveholding past and its present circumstances without
escaping into defensiveness. Still, President Bush has
talked about slavery from several microphones, most
memorably in a 2003 speech on Goree Island, one of the
"slave castles" in West Africa from which captive youth
and children were dispatched to the Americas.
Speechwriters likely supplied the words on that
occasion when the president said, "slavery was one of
the greatest crimes of history." But the words fell
short of an accounting by the White House for America's
role in the Middle Passage, and they came before the
revelation of the Bush family's own link to the slave
past.

As for the African Americans in this tale, the Walker
family slaves, neither names nor biographical details
about them have survived.  According to the genealogist
who uncovered the records, Robert Hughes, the census
accounts show that they lived at four different farms
in Cecil County, Maryland, on a string of land called
Sassafras Neck, which separates two slender rivers that
empty into upper Chesapeake Bay. There, in 1790,
William and Sarah Davis, direct ancestors of the
president, owned seven people, while another branch of
the family owned five. Twenty years later, in 1810, a
third couple in the president's ancestral clan were
counted as masters to eighteen people. The last
appearance of the family as slaveholders of record
comes in 1830, when George E. and Harriet Walker,
great-great-great grandparents of President George W.
Bush, owned 321 acres and two slaves, a female between
10 and 24 and a male between 24 and 36. The
namelessness of the slaves is the fault of the so-
called slave schedules used in the census, which called
for nothing more than approximate ages.

With their small farms, the Walkers and their cousins
did not belong to the class of oligarchs, whose vast
plantations held scores or hundreds of workers. I've
looked, and there were dynasties in Cecil County,
places like Cherry Grove, former residence of a
Maryland governor, and Mt. Harmon, a vast tobacco
estate with a Georgian mansion. The president's
forebears probably saw themselves as little people in
competition with these fat-cat neighbors.

Still, all slaveholders were also slave traders. The
president's family had to avail themselves of a slave
auction on at least two occasions: initially, to buy
people, and later, when a Walker farm failed, to sell
some of the same people, much the way a stockholder
liquidates an investment. No story has surfaced about
how it happened, but in the mid-1830s, it appears that
George E. Walker, the president's third great-
grandfather, lost his land. After that, in 1838, he
packed his family into a wagon and went west, settling
in southern Illinois on a homestead near the town of
Bloomington. It is from this branch of migrants that
the current Bush clan descends.

Since the Walkers, in effect, declared bankruptcy, and
there is no evidence they kept slaves after 1838, it is
difficult to follow a money trail from the family's
commercial stake in slavery to the White House.
However, before he took his family west, it's likely
that George Walker sold the people he owned, handing
them off to a speculating slave dealer; thereby
financing the family's fresh start in Illinois. Things
get worse when you contemplate the probable
circumstances. In the 1830s, the old tobacco economy of
Maryland and Virginia was waning, while the new king,
cotton, had caused Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to
boom. The tobacco states were selling tens of thousands
of slaves to the cotton states, and sending these
people south. It is quite possible the Walker slaves
were marched 500 miles from Maryland to Alabama to end
up on a giant cotton plantation, where the work regime
- large crews on vast, unshaded fields - was crueler
than the one they'd left behind.

The Walkers eventually quit farming and made a fortune
as dry goods wholesalers in Missouri; later, they made
another as investment bankers in New York. Nearly all
the Bush/Walker family money dates from this more
recent period, after the Civil War.

The family, nevertheless, seems to have looked back
with nostalgia on their old slave hold. There are two
pieces of evidence for this. In The Bush Tragedy, Jacob
Weisberg refers to one of the later patriarchs, David
Walker, as "a believer in eugenics and the 'unwritten
law' of lynching," and cites as proof a letter Walker
published in the St. Louis Republic in 1914. Black
people, he wrote at the time, were more insidious than
prostitution and "all the other evils combined."

The second piece of evidence is within living memory.
In 1930, when they could afford it, the family again
embraced the antebellum lifestyle. That year President
Bush's great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, bought
Duncannon plantation, an old cotton estate in South
Carolina, to use as a hunting retreat and vacation
home. His namesake, George Herbert Walker Bush, the
current president's father, spent many youthful
vacations on Duncannon, where teams of black cooks,
valets, and drivers served him and opened doors when he
approached. The Bush heirs no longer own Duncannon
plantation; but for a time, the estate provided a
version of the baronial life, to which the antebellum
Walkers aspired, but never achieved.

The heirs of slaveholders are not responsible for the
past; but in a better world, they would be accountable
for that past. They would make an effort to deal with
the slave story, talk about it, and try to come to
terms with it.

At present the Bush political dynasty seems to be dying
in misrule, finished off by a president who, as
Weisberg writes, is "driven by family demons,
overflowing with confidence, and lacking any capacity
for self-knowledge." The Bush clan may not be capable
of reckoning personally with the tragic inheritance of
the slave days. But this week, on a state visit, the
president sets foot in three countries that sent
hundreds of thousands of captives to America. Today,
some of the tens of millions of descendants of those
captives want a White House that is accountable. In
West Africa President Bush has a superb opportunity,
like one presented to a physician attending a wound. A
sound physician would chose instinctively to apply
medicine, not simply turn away in denial and neglect.

[Edward Ball is the author of Slaves in the Family and,
most recently, The Genetic Strand. Slaves in the Family
was the 1998 National Book Award winner for non-
fiction.Edward Ball was a columnist for the "Village
Voice" from 1989 to 1994]