Genealogy, Part I (William)

Pandemic project No. 108: working out my family genealogy.  Discovering my roots.  Here's what I've learned so far.

William Hart was a white 18th Century saddler from somewhere in Pennsylvania who moved south to Virginia and then later settled in Burke County, Georgia in the 1790s.  He had two sons, Daniel and Isaiah. Prior to William, I can find no more. 

William was unrelated to the infamous Nancy Hart and her family, who lived in the Broad River valley of East Georgia in the 1770s.  Nancy was a rebel heroine of the Revolutionary War credited with many fanciful exploits against British Loyalists in the Georgia backcountry.  Picture a colonial Annie Oakley combined with Wonder Women combined with Little House on the Prairie, all directed by Quentin Tarantino in full Hateful Eight mode.  However, she moved to coastal Brunswick, Georgia in the late 1780s and then to Kentucky by 1803, and it is unlikely that Nancy or William ever met.

For the record, I was really hoping that I would have been able to trace my genealogy back to Nancy, as she has such a colorful lore, but it seems that it's not to be, and it's William, not Nancy, who first carried my DNA down to Georgia.

In 1801, William moved his family (and my DNA) further south to East Florida while the area was still a part of the Spanish Empire.  William became a citizen of Spanish Florida, served in the Spanish militia, and received a 640-acre land grant from the Spanish governor. It is not clear if William was an English Loyalist who left the newly-formed United States out of discontent (if so, all the better for him that he never met Nancy), or if he was just opportunistic and saw a chance to make his fortune in Spanish Florida.

A brief review of the political situation at this time is in order.  Way back in 1693, Spain had enacted an edict granting refuge to any runaway slaves, and many fugitive slaves from Georgia and South Carolina had managed to escape into Spanish Florida.  But Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, forced Spain to give up its edict, and the 1790 Treaty of New York with the Creek tribe, the first treaty in U.S. history, turned the Lower Creeks into slave-raiding allies for the United States. Ironically, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the two Founding Fathers who laid the foundations for the “free world,” destroyed the only beacon of freedom that existed for African slaves in the South. 

However, in an act of provocation, the Seminole tribe allowed escaped slaves to take refuge in their villages. The African slaves often lived in their own separate dwellings from the Seminoles, but there was much intermarriage between the Seminole and the Africans and soon there were mixed Seminole-African villages, which enraged Southern slave owners who saw this as a lure to their own slaves seeking freedom.  They claimed that over five million dollars worth of their slave “property” had fled to Seminole territory in Spanish Florida over the years. 

Georgia’s settlers feared the possibility of a slave insurrection perpetrated by free black militias under orders of the Spanish Crown. Armed free blacks in such close vicinity to plantations on the St. John’s and St. Mary’s rivers exacerbated their fears that armed and organized blacks could influence slaves to revolt by their mere example alone.  This was the real background to the operation known today as the “Patriot Rebellion” of 1812.

William and his sons, Daniel and Isaiah, who had left the colonies to become citizens of Spanish Florida, sided with the Anglo "Patriots" during the rebellion.  Most of the Patriots were really just disaffected farmers and woodsmen from Georgia led by rich plantation owners, covertly encouraged by Washington so that the United States would have an excuse to seize Florida. William and his sons organized bands of marauders and raided Spanish plantations for slaves and cattle, and then drove them both north back into Georgia, where they were then sold as livestock at auction.

So William, and not the revolutionary Nancy, is my legacy, the furthest back I can trace my ancestry. William, who left colonies after they achieved independence to become subject to the Spanish  Crown. William, who then turned against the very Crown that had granted him 640 acres of land.  William, who stole slaves and cattle, and sold them both like they were identical livestock properties. William, who subjected escaped and liberated slaves to captivity again, continuing the cycle of torture and misery that constituted their short but miserable lives.  William.

This is just the beginning of the genealogy I've discovered.  It's a long story, and fortunately it gets better.  But after describing all this, I need a break.  And a bath.  I need to get the stench of treasonous, treacherous William off of me.  

I'll continue this story in a later post.  I'm relieved to report I think you'll like where this story ultimately goes.  I promise.