Rebel rebel
Rebel rebel
Juneteenth hit differently this year after I learned more about my family history, dotted with rebellion (both righteous and wrong-headed)
I was listening to Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)” in the car with my 3-and-a-half year old son the other day. “What’s this song called?” he asked. “Rebellion,” I replied. “What’s rebellion?” he asked. I paused to think—it’s always a challenge to explain complex ideas to a 3-year-old. “Rebellion is when people say they’re not going to follow the rules anymore,” I said.
I saw his next remark coming before I even finished my sentence.
“I’m not going to follow the rules anymore!” (facepalm)
I scrambled to recover. “Well… rebellion is when people say they’re not going to follow bad rules anymore. Your rules are all good rules.”
“My rules are bad rules.”
Oh brother.
My in-laws gave me and my husband each a 23andMe DNA test kit for Christmas last year. The DNA sites give you plenty of disclaimers and warnings: “Are you sure you want to look behind this curtain? You might find out something you can’t unlearn!” The odds of either of my parents harboring a deep dark secret seemed ludicrous, so I was more concerned about potentially learning I was a carrier for some debilitating disease.
What I did not expect was that it would turn me into a 38-year-old genealogy nerd.
For those who’ve never done 23andMe, once you’ve gotten your results and clicked through your health reports and ancestry pie chart, you see a list of everyone else who’s done 23andMe that is remotely related to you, including any family info they’ve shared like grandparents’ birthplaces and family names. For some closer relatives, 23andMe will attempt to place them on a draft of a family tree.
Seeing this naked, scrawny family tree and so many unplaced cousins left me wanting to start filling in the blanks. I signed up for a two week free trial on Ancestry, snarking to myself, “Who would pay $50 a month for this stuff??” [Narrator: Two weeks later, she would.]
I’d previously been content with what, in retrospect, was an extremely crude understanding of my own ancestry. My dad’s side is 100% Irish immigrants, and this was the ethnicity I most strongly identified with. My first name and maiden name was such an Irish-American combination that I was teased incessantly by my Irish classmates while studying abroad in college; a Dublin bartender once looked at my credit card and exclaimed, “Now there’s a name for St. Patty’s Day!” My mom’s side was a more nebulous “Cajun-French.” She grew up in south Louisiana in a working class family; her parents spoke French fluently but did not teach it to the kids due to the social stigma associated with it. Even though my sisters and I grew up in the suburbs of New Orleans, I always felt like more of a cultural transplant than a native; an Irish-American fish out of water.
Despite my ignorance of any details, and despite the fact that I believe none of us ought to feel personally guilty for the sins of our ancestors, I have to admit that I’d been taking some relief from a strong presumption that no one in my family lineage could have possibly owned slaves.
I was wrong.
My 3rd-great grandfather Morris, on my mother’s side, was born on Louisiana’s German Coast in 1830. His father had moved to Louisiana from Kentucky and was himself the descendant of English settlers in colonial Virginia tracing back to at least the 1670s. After he moved to Louisiana, Morris’s father married a local woman, but then he passed away a full 8 months before Morris was born. Despite this, or perhaps partially because of it, Morris grew up striving to establish a reputation as a prominent planter among the wealthy plantation owners along the north coast of the Mississippi river. Morris became an overseer and a manager at several of the many plantations that constituted the bulk of the local economy.
By the time he was 30, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, Morris owned two slaves himself, a 22 year old man and a 45 year old woman (according to the 1860 Census). He went on to join the Confederate Army. Like the men of the Washington Artillery out of Louisiana pictured above, Morris at one point served under Lieutenant Colonel William Freret, as a Lieutenant.
The New Orleans region (including the German Coast) was seized by the Union Army relatively early in the war during the Battle of New Orleans in April of 1862. Later that year, President Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1, 1863, freeing slaves in territories under Union control—with some prominent exceptions. In a twist I only learned about last week, Lincoln explicitly exempted the Union-controlled area of Southeast Louisiana from the proclamation as part of an attempt to re-admit seceded territory to the Union by requiring at least 10% of residents to swear a loyalty oath. This exemption led to massive confusion in the area, with thousands of enslaved people escaping, but not technically free either; the Union Army was not permitted to forcibly free slaves, nor were they permitted to capture and return them to their former masters. Masters were forbidden from using physical force over slaves and would be arrested if they did. Confederate forces temporarily re-took the territory and re-enslaved many who had escaped in the summer of 1863, but their victory was short-lived, and Union forces re-took the territory by the fall. By October, former slaves who had escaped were attempting to join the Union Army by the hundreds, still in legal limbo but nonetheless free from enslavement.
After the Union Army … re-liberated “hundreds upon hundreds” of formerly enslaved people, Union Army Lt. Lawrence Van Alstyne wrote about the all-night celebrations of [New Orleans’s] Black residents, who were “wild with joy” and eager to enlist to further the end of slavery.
“They were more anxious to enlist than we were to have them. Even the women and children wanted to go, and we had more trouble to make them understand that only able-bodied men were wanted, than we did to get them to enlist,” he wrote in an Oct. 16, 1863, diary entry.
“That night they built a big bonfire, and hundreds upon hundreds were dancing about it.” (Source)
Louisiana finally ended slavery in September of 1864, the second Confederate state to do so, through the adoption of a new state constitution by residents of Union-controlled areas. However, the Reconstruction era which gave way to the Jim Crow era still greatly restricted the freedom and civil rights of black residents. A contract labor system continued to ensure white residents could attain cheap labor to make their plantations economically feasible while denying black residents the ability to own land themselves.
It was in this environment that Morris himself, now a proud Civil War veteran (and self-described as a “stanch Democrat”), purchased 1200 acres of land to start his own plantation around 1882. Morris’s obituary speaks highly of his plantation’s corn syrup, “unequaled in purity … this table delicacy was known favorably in Washington, DC, and in many Northern cities,” thanks to Morris’s reputation as “one of the most successful planters of the upper coast.”
Morris died at the age of 80. What kind of man was he? His obituary is so over-the-top as to be unreliable.
As one of the best known citizens in St. John, [Morris] was loved and esteemed for his kind and noble impulses. He was unselfish and charitable to a fault, a kind and gentle father and a warm and true friend. … With a splendid physique and a rugged constitution, [Morris] still gave promise of a longer lease of life. Youth seemed to linger with him and his wonderful vitality was often commented upon by his friends. … He had a pleasant smile and warm greeting for all, of whatever station in life. He was an optimist and always saw something in life worth living for.
I’m not entirely sure what happened to Morris’s plantation. One of his sons, my great-great grandfather, lived there and managed it for a while and was the father of seven children. Over time, the area where the plantation once existed lost white residents and whatever wealth they had left, and a majority of the area’s current residents are black. Morris’s great-grandson, my grandfather, was born in the area but eventually moved with my grandmother (also from the area) around the state and eventually settled in Baton Rouge where my mother was raised with her older siblings. If I didn’t know better, I might have assumed that Morris’s descendants would be wealthy beneficiaries of the slavery-based economy, but my mother grew up in a typical, even sometimes financially precarious, working class home. Perhaps Morris had so many heirs over the generations that any assets were split up beyond recognition? It is also possible that this is an example of wealth simply disappearing as the economy changes, dragging down the fledgling, marginalized local black community with it.
In 1811, 19 years before Morris was born, his maternal grandfather (my 5th-great grandfather) Andre was a 31-year-old resident of the German Coast, part of the Territory of Orleans and not yet purchased by the United States. By 1820, Andre owned 11 slaves: 5 men, 2 women, and 4 children were listed in the 1820 census. I do not know for certain if, or how many, slaves Andre owned on the night of January 8, 1811. But regardless, he was almost certainly involved in or impacted by what would turn out to be the largest slave revolt in American history.
Charles Deslondes was a slave at the Woodland Plantation several miles east of Andre’s family land. Deslondes served as a slave driver for the other slaves on the plantation and he was trusted by the Andry family (no relation to Andre) who enslaved him. But secretly, he was working with the other slaves to plan a rebellion.
Haiti had just emerged from a 12-year long revolution in 1804 where the formerly enslaved had battled and finally defeated their former owners and colonizers, resulting in an independent nation led by black citizens. Many of the white planters of Haiti had fled to Louisiana over the course of the war, bringing their slaves with them and establishing new plantations. Knowledge of the Haitian revolution was widespread among Louisiana slaves and free blacks alike, and Deslondes built upon this to inspire a group of slaves to rise up.
Deslondes and his roughly 15 co-conspirators met on the evening of January 8, gathered machetes, clubs, and axes, and launched their plan. They attacked the plantation’s master, Manuel Andry, and killed his son Gilbert. They then began to march eastward toward New Orleans with the goal of overthrowing the government and establishing a new, black-led nation. Along the way they killed one other planter and caused extensive property damage. Every plantation they passed along the journey added to their band and eventually they numbered in the hundreds.
Meanwhile, the white planters assembled militias and called for military reinforcement to put down the rebellion. After the slaves had been marching for nearly two days, they encountered military forces in battle. The rebels were severely outnumbered and outarmed. They turned back west in retreat and were eventually cornered. The band largely dispersed and the surviving participants were re-captured.
The rebellion terrified white slave-owners in the region and nationwide. To dissuade would-be copycats, they were horrifyingly brutal in their response. Charles Deslondes was executed without trial by first having his hands cut off, then his legs shot until his bones broke, then he was burned alive. The remaining suspected participants were interrogated and tried before all-white juries. At least 30 of the accused were executed by hanging in the public square. Then their heads were cut off and placed on spikes—a grotesque display to serve as a warning to any future would-be revolutionaries.
Was Andre himself a part of the white militia? Did he participate in the trials or cheer at the executions? I will likely never know. But his active participation in the local enslavement economy puts him at the heart of the rebellion’s root cause. Only 53 years later, after Andre’s future grandson Morris and his fellow Confederates were defeated in battle, would the simple cause of freedom for all finally start to win ground on the German Coast.
On the other side of my family, my 4th-great grandfather Murtagh was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1770. The island of Ireland had been under British rule since the Middle Ages but the dynamic became increasingly hostile starting in the 1500s when the British government began seizing land from Catholic landowners and giving it to Protestant settlers from England, Scotland and Wales. Throughout the following centuries, native Catholics still made up a majority of the population of Ireland but were politically and economically subjugated to Protestants loyal to the British government due to the forced lack of land ownership. Catholics were denied the right to vote, run for office, or acquire land. Resentment festered, and calls for equality gave way to calls for independence from English rule.
Murtagh certainly must have grown up in an increasingly revolutionary milieu. As the Irish watched the Americans, then the French, battle through revolutions on the basis of values like freedom and equality, Irish demands for independence and nationhood grew.
In 1791, the Society of United Irishmen was formed to advocate for peaceful reforms to advance the civil rights of Catholic Irishmen. Founded by a Protestant, Wolfe Tone, its goal was “to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter under the common name of Irishmen in order to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils.” Legal advances were made, but inequality and oppression of Catholics was still rampant, and anger continued to grow.
The British grew increasingly concerned by the violence of the French revolution and the alignment of the United Irishmen with the French and began to suppress the United movement. As the movement went underground, it became more radical, and dropped the prioritization of peaceful action and unity across religious lines.
Hostilities came to a head in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The violence swelled across the island over the course of only the three months of summer, with rebel United forces and British Loyalist forces escalating the atrocities in turn. The climax of campaign came on June 21 in County Wexford. Rebel forces were surrounded and many were slaughtered in a bloody battle at Vinegar Hill. Violence from the Loyalists was met with violence from the rebels in a vicious cycle that did not fade until late August.
Throughout the rebellion, Tipperary was under martial law, enforced by a particularly vicious High Sheriff Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald who was intent on suppressing any rebellious inclinations in the county. Stories abound of his cruelty; he was known to flog citizens in the public square to within an inch of their lives, without trial, for anything and everything—including funny looks and rumors that they had spoken ill of him. He would publicly torture suspected United men until they supplied the name of another member, and the lashings would start over again. (Later, in a court of law, Fitzgerald claimed he had “done nothing on the whole but what was honourable, tender-hearted and humane,” a claim which elicited guffaws from the local spectators.)
Family legend has it that Murtagh, age 28, was one of the dozens of Tipperary men flogged in the public square that summer under the martial law enforcement of Sheriff Fitzgerald.
We don’t know for sure if he was actively involved with the United men, or what part he might have played in the rebellion that summer—according to family lore, he was a local leader. But regardless, it’s clear that he continued to commit small acts of rebellion throughout his life. In 1836 he was arrested for refusing to pay tithes (taxes collected by local Protestant church leaders) as a form of collective action taken by the Catholic farmers during the Tithe Wars of the 1830s. In 1842, he was elected as a local Poor Law Guardian, part of a board responsible for overseeing an early form of a public welfare system; he donated his own money to the cause in the depths of the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. Murtagh’s descendants continued to be involved in revolutionary activity throughout the duration of British rule: his son (my 4th-great grand uncle) was a Fenian; his grandson (my 1st cousin 4x removed) allegedly participated in the Fenian Rising of 1867 and subsequently fled to America; later generations of cousins were active leaders of Sinn Fein and IRA units during the Irish War of Independence in 1919-1921.
Only in 1922, after centuries and generations of rebellion, were the Irish people granted independence from Britain under democratic self-rule.
History has an interesting way of separating the righteous from the wrong-headed. All of these rebels used violence and were met with even more violence. All of them felt deeply that their rights were being suppressed by a powerful oppressor—yes, even Morris would have believed, wrongly, that Union forces were invading oppressors who aimed to take his freedom and decimate his people’s “way of life.” Finally, all of these rebels were unsuccessful in their efforts. Only through sustained effort over centuries did the righteous win the day; the “long arc of history” gradually bending towards justice.
I suppose it’s possible that this is just an illusion, the idea that the righteous eventually win. History is written by the victors and all that. But I have to believe that society, in the long run, continues to learn and grow and build moral clarity about the atrocities of the past. Morris, Andre, and Sheriff Fitzgerald may have been able to convince themselves in the short run that they were the “good guys” in these confrontations, but they aren’t fooling many of us today. Who knows which of the “good” positions I might be taking today will be considered wrong-headed with the passage of time.
Learning about the actions of my ancestor Murtagh brings me a small sense of pride that I know is unfounded and unearned. Yet pride in our ancestors is rooted in the idea that it’s possible there’s a little piece of this person, some innate bit of their character, that might have been passed along to you; the idea that, in a similar situation, you would display the same courage and tenacity.
And yet, taking any shred of pride in Murtagh’s actions means accepting an equal amount of guilt for the actions of Andre and Morris. They, too, could have passed along a bit of character; I, too, might have made the same choices they did.
The truth is, however, that character traits like generosity, courage, and kindness are not innate; not entirely, anyway. They are largely cultural. They are learned and taught, passed from generation to generation like DNA. But unlike DNA, they can be changed. You can’t reject the blue eyes your father gave you, but you can reject his self-serving ideologies. You can admire your mother’s kindness and generosity, but strive to cast a wider, more diverse net of beneficiaries. Each of us makes a choice as we become adults and leave the nest to start families of our own. Do we adopt and pass along our parent’s values, unchallenged, or do we learn from what we believe to be their wrong-doings and mistakes and pledge to do better for the next generation?
Rejecting the values of men like Morris and Andre is easy at this point in history. It’s free and it’s obvious. But what about the money? What about the wealth, the privilege, the power? Much harder to reject, no?
One of the most interesting realizations in researching my own family history is the paradoxical nature of inherited wealth and privilege. I am a person who enjoys a great number of privileges in this world, no doubt. Many of them are due to the winning lottery numbers I drew when I was born to my parents, specifically. They are both smart, thoughtful, committed to each other, and were willing to make huge personal sacrifices in order to ensure my sisters and I had great educations. They both rejected the frequently racist attitudes of their parents and raised daughters committed to social justice and equality.
But to the extent that either of them inherited privilege from their parents, it was my father who benefited the most from his Irish-descended parents. My great-grandmother grew up in Irish poverty with seven siblings in a two-room thatched roof cottage. Her daughter attended college in New York, married a naval officer, and together they purchased a home and began to build wealth that would eventually help to fund my parochial elementary school and college education. My mother, by comparison, was the youngest of six, whose mother was a widow by the time my mom was eight years old; a mother would not speak her family’s native tongue out of fear and shame. Did my mother enjoy privilege? As a white child in 1960s Louisiana, absolutely. But the wealth that her ancestors once accumulated had long disappeared.
I celebrated Juneteenth on a deeply personal level this year. I brought my son to a festival and began the long process of introducing him to a history that isn’t far-flung, but personally linked to us. I took joy in the idea of Morris, Andre, and the rest of the Confederate rebels being declared the losers in that chapter of history, even while I wondered if I might have been as blind to the moral realities of the situation as they were in their circumstances. I was inspired by the courage of the members of Charles Deslondes’s rebellion, who faced far greater oppression and far worse odds than Murtagh, but still took a chance on freedom. And I hoped that, one day, I’d make my decedents proud—or at least, not give them cause to feel shame.
This was a very interesting post to read! Really appreciated it. The history was fascinating to me.
Now you've gone and inspired me to order one of those 23&Me kits. I've been avoiding doing it for for a few years, for some reason.
The very serious problem which has befallen present day wokers is the insistence that all white people have unjust privilege because Blacks were treated poorly. Blacks are about 14% of the population and it is absurd to assert that bad treatment of 14% is what made the other 86% wealthy. Of course, the other 85% is not wealthy. The moral evil which most current wokers, e.g. The 1619 Project, bring to us is the idea that Whites were only oppressors. They focus on Thomas Jefferson's owning slaves and totally discount the Dec of Indepen which he expressly worded to end slavery. One does not find any acknowledgement that it was White men alone who laid the foundation to end slavery. They did not do it in the Declaration for the same reason American Blacks have not rooted out all predatory behavior in their own community. Some laudable goals are not achievable at a particular time and place. Wokers present a simplistic and racist faux history which always ends up with "Give us Money."
The wokers are bringing a nasty backlash which will result in a deep red Congress after the Nov 2022. The wokers can cry racism all they want, but it will only elect more right wing GOP to office. In MLK's dream, Blacks were not attacking Whites. BTW, Juneteenth day is NOT about equality. It is about Freedom. Freedom and equality are immiscible. We can have equality by simply allowing everyone to be enslaved. I do not recall the salves in Galveston Texas on June 19th yelling for the Whites to become slaves just like thr Blacks so that they would all be equal.