"Oh! ...never mind."
Posted on 06/20/2013 11:09:10 AM PDT by zeestephen
Thomas Walker, a direct ancestor of George W. and George H.W. Bush, was a notorious slave trader active in the late 18th century along the coast of West Africa.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Thanks for posting. I find this kind of stuff interesting. I have been doing genealogy for about 30 years. Most of what I have found on my family has been pretty mundane. Some of it hasn’t. I’m okay with it either way. That’s history. So Bush’s ancestor from over two centuries ago was a slave trader. The idea that he should be made to squirm about that is ludicrous.
Must have been a slow day for Simon today. The boy needs to get a real job.
Humorously, by derivation, you may be on the victim side (by ancestry) of this equation. If they came from one of the 'Slavic' countries, where do you think that name comes from?
As for significance of a 64th portion of ancestry, well, a certain mASS US Senator used a 32nd portion to claim minority status for 'high cheekbones'! JUNK SCIENCE par excellence!
I have a better response to this idea of demonizing the innocent of today with the sins of the past...
Who cares.
Oh...well, then I'm with them.
Virtually all of the British colonists, whether in the US or the Caribbean, were slave traders. And they traded in both African and American Indian slaves.
The Spanish colony of St Augustine (now known as Florida) permitted the African slaves of the English colonies to the north (Georgia and the Carolinas) to gain their freedom if they could get across the Florida border. They had to accept Christianity, swear allegiance to the Spanish Crown, and start learning Spanish.
This ended in the 19th century, when the pressure from the formerly British American colonies made it too dangerous for the Spanish to continue this policy.
Also, when the British destroyed the Florida mission chain in 1702-1704, some 11,000 Indians were captured and sent to the British Caribbean to be slaves on the sugar plantations.
Slavery was practiced in the Spanish colonies, but it was more like indentured servitude: slaves could earn money, buy their freedom, be freed by their masters (something not permitted in much of the South), had to be permitted to receive the sacraments of the Church (evangelization was actually forbidden in much of the non-Spanish South, and there were jail terms for the Protestant ministers who tried it), and marriages had to be respected.
The Spanish had been forbidden by the Pope and Queen Isabella to enslave the Indians, and Columbus actually went to jail for bringing back a few Indians to show off at court. Naturally, in the Spanish colonies, the Franciscan mssionaries and the Spanish governors had to fight constantly against the “property developers,” as we would call them now, who attempted to enslave the Indians in one form or another. And sometimes the missionaries had to fight against the governor.
But chattel slavery was not practiced in the Spanish colonies, while it was the norm in the British colonies.
Brazil, btw, being a Portuguese colony, was a separate case, because the Treaty of Tordesillas gave both Africa and Brazil to the Portuguese. They completely ignored the papal bull forbidding the enslavement of the native peoples and started buying slaves from the Arabs in Africa, since Portugal had been given the “rights” to Africa.
The British-American colonists were really the big US slavers in Africa, buying the slaves from the Arabs and shipping them to the US. The major Spanish participation was with the ships, and the “Amistad” (upon which the movie was based) was one of the ships that a Spanish captain had leased out for the transportation of slaves to New England. Being a Spaniard, he didn’t keep them chained up in the hold, he let them up on deck...and the rest is history.
Oh...for...God’s...sake... Enough already.
That's NOTHING. I'm a descendent of Jesus and directly related to him.
Many Africans sold themselves and their children into slavery to avoid starvation. There are parents in Africa today who sell their children into slavery. Oprah had a show about it. I think it was Lisa Ling who did the documentary. I remember her saying we shouldn't judge the parents, or those that held the children as slaves, because it was part of their “culture”. I remember thinking how strange it was that she, and Oprah with her silence, would hold blacks, who currently engage in slavery, less accountable than the white descendants of those who owned slaves hundreds of years ago. I'm sure the white slave owners in Dixie thought slavery was a part of their culture too.
Africans hated whites for ending slave trading with them. Slave trading was how they got their guns and rum.
The mainstream media is a joke. They will not look at what happened to Obama five minutes ago and are still trying to dig up dirt on Bush even if it happened hundreds of years in the past. And they don’t understand why few if any really trust them. The media is just pathetic.
So.... Blame Bush for slavery.
Interesting that they didn’t look into the backgrounds of Presidents from former slave states, like Johnson, Clinton or Carter.
Sorry, but while i have no interest in the Bush’s near the WH again, the actions of the press are just like the actions of the IRS going after enemies of the Despot-in-CHief. We may not be able to control it, but we should reserve a lot of disdain for such actions and let them know about it. (IMO)
"Oh! ...never mind."
Now why would they do something like that???
I recall reading that one of Bambi’s x-times removed ancestors on his mother’s side was a slaveholder. And his father’s family, African-Arab Muslims, had certainly been slaveholders - and probably still are.
The sins of the father are visited upon the fourth generation; or, in the case of white people, the sixth.
Or Obama, slavers on both sides.
Actually might have. My understanding is that the source of the slaves was often one tribe capturing another tribes people to sell to the slave traders.
Emmitt Smith discovered on “Who Do You Think You Are” that his fifth great grandfather was likely a slave trader. He also found out the Africans are involved in the slave trading business to this day.
Who knows, maybe W's ancestor sold those slaves to Obama's ancestors.
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