Facing Facts

I had every intention of posting last night. I had even started writing a really interesting article. But I got distracted. (Big surprise, I know.) I was doing a little genealogy last night, and learned something I was not expecting.


My family has been in America for at least two centuries. In that time, we have never lived north of the Mason-Dixon Line. If you cut us, we bleed hominy grits. That being said, we have also not been particularly wealthy. Sometimes, we were dirt poor. I'm not just talking about the Rhodes family, also the Ray and Latham branches.


Of course, everyone likes to dream of being descended from royalty or war heroes or Pilgrims or Crusaders, or something equally glamorous. Sadly, the reality is usually more mundane. Our ancestors were usually just as boring as we are. They worked hard to make ends meet, they lived and died quietly, and the world moved on. That's not to say there aren't interesting stories about them, they're just not terribly glamorous or remarkable to anyone who's not kin to them.


This brings me to my point. I was doing some research on the McCafferty family. I wasn't expecting anything remarkable. My maternal greatgrandmother was Annie Louise McCafferty Jones, and before she died, she lived a quiet life in her little house on Union Chapel Road. They were poor, my grandmother's upbringing was far from privileged. I was expecting to find generations upon generations of small-time farmers. That's not quite what I found.


My family is southern through and through, and if you know anything about the South, you know that our scars are just below the surface, and they run deep. But I have always been able to remain fairly aloof from this. I always took the moral high-horse and told myself, "My family never owned slaves. We were too poor, many of us were illiterate. Yes, we fought for the Confederacy, but we were defending state's rights! That's what the war was about, after all!"


And to an extent, that's true. I wasn't kidding myself, we weren't a bunch of bleeding heart abolitionists, but we didn't participate in it. It was simply a way of life. In fact, most Southerners didn't own any slaves. Less than a quarter of white Southerners owned slaves, and half of those owned fewer than five.


That's why I was floored to discover that Mr. William McCafferty, my fourth great grandfather owned sixteen slaves at the time of the Civil War. He owned twelve in 1850, and nine in 1840, and nineteen back in South Carolina in 1830. In the 1850 and '60 censuses, an overseer and several named house slaves lived with them in Pickens County.


I only found out about the slaves from some documents called "Slave Schedules." They were only made in 1850 and 1860, at the same time the census was taken. The names are not listed, just the name of the owner, their sex, age, and race (black or mulatto). They ranged in age from 2 to 75. One of them was my age. I found myself desperately wanting to know their names and what became of them. I hope they weren't separated from their families, but I'm not stupid. I know some of them likely were.


I wasn't expecting something like that to make me sad, but it did. I mean, I read about historical tragedies practically every day without blinking. But this was different. More personal. 


I'm going to do some more research and see if I can find anything else. I think some of them took the name McCafferty, and by 1870, they were living side-by-side as neighbors with their former master. (I know, they were possibly sharecroppers, but I'm not sure how my family fared during the war. It's possible they lost everything.)


I can only hope they were treated well. My grandmother is a good woman, as was my MawMaw. That goodness had to come from somewhere. Hopefully they were treated as well as a slave can be. I'll likely never know. However, it seems reasonable to deduce that they weren't treated too poorly, since there were several in their 60s and 70s at a time when the average male life expectancy was only 39. Another hopeful indication is that when they were freed, they chose to take the surname of their former master, instead of the surname of an American hero like "Washington," the most common surname chosen by freed slaves.


I hope they lived long and happy lives. Maybe I'm being to optimistic, but facing facts is hard sometimes.