Posted on 04/17/2015 5:02:05 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Ben Affleck asked the producers of PBS’ Finding Your Roots television show to edit out details of an ancestor who owned slaves, according to a Sony internal email exchange leaked this week.
In an email sent to Sony CEO Michael Lynton shortly before the show’s second season premiere, Harvard professor and Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that an unnamed “megastar” had asked producers to “edit out something about one of his ancestors – the fact that he owned slaves.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
In the early decades after the American Revolution, as English-speaking settlers began to settle in southern Ontario, including some from the US, there was still slavery in Ontario. On a visit to Canada about 20 years ago I picked up a pamphlet about the topic which said there were cases of Canadian slaves escaping to freedom in the US (since slavery had been banned in the Northwest Territory).
We're all related to people who don't know that they are related to us and probably don't care. But it's a tenuous and distant relationship. The father one goes back, the more people we are somehow related to.
My grandfather was shot and killed during a bank robbery. My grandmother, sweet woman that she had, was Alvis Karpis friends.
I think that was part of the reason why Jefferson's clause in the Declaration of Independence blaming the king for the slave trade was cut out, because the delegates from the North were conscious of their own involvement in the slave trade.
Yes.
Well, he’s no relative of mine, then.
How about you? Do you need any money-grubbing relatives? I’m really good at spending other people’s money. I can go through two, three million bucks a week. I’m a big tipper.
Ambrose Bierce has a definition of genealogy that goes somewhat like: “tracing your ancestry back to an ancestor who didn’t particularly care to trace his.”
We’re probably distant cousins. I have Estes in my family tree also.
LOL.....don’t need any “new” relatives, greedy ones or not; so I must decline your inane offer.
Oh I love Bierce, but was quite unfamiliar with that quote. Many thanks for posting it !
Probably.
"GENEALOGY: n., An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own."
Way over emphasized by the neo-confederate propagandists.
Before the American Revolution was strictly in the hands of British owned slave ships. During the Revolution, the British ships obviously quit sailing to Massachusetts, and during that war, in 1780, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania banned the further importation of slaves into their states.
After the war ended American vessels began sailing to West Africa in the slave trade, mostly sailing from Newport RI. and New York. Their markets for those slaves were mostly in the Caribbean, South America, and the American South, specifically Charleston. By 1808, it was illegal for any American registered vessel to carry slaves in international commerce (obviously violated) but it was considered an act of piracy.
But the short answer is that the vast majority of slaves in the US came on British ships before the Revolution.
It’s been decades since I’ve read any Bierce.
Thanks for the new info.
In New England, they were buying sugar and selling rum. The ships were British owned and operated.
On one side of my family, my ancestor tribesmen owned slaves. On the other side of my family, Buffalo Soldiers attacked my ancestor tribesmen. My family has stopped owning slaves. It’s a good bet that the descents of Buffalo Soldiers are still attacking people.
“Inane offer”? Is that like a Final Offer? I can come down from the millions of bucks. Two or three hundred thousand bucks will get you a Fathers Day Card from me. Or, if I’m older than you, I could take you to Chuck-E-Cheese and we’ll fight the other families.
I found William Brewester, the pastor of the Pilgrims that came over on the Mayflower. I found some of the very first settlers of Massachusetts, and Virginia, and North Carolina, and West Virginia, and Maryland, and Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and New York, and Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Ohio, and Illinois, and Indiana, and Missouri, and Iowa, and Nebraska, and Colorado, and Oregon, and California.
I found men and women who fought the Indian Wars, and the Revolution, and the War of 1812, and the Civil War, and every other war this country ever fought.
If you want to call them names, that's your call.
But something tells me you're not qualified to be their judge.
An accurate accounting of history.
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