Genealogy, Part VII (Miscegenation)

Miscegenation is such an ugly word.  It sounds ugly, and it looks ugly on the screen or page. Appropriate, as it includes ugly presumptions.  The on-line Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as "a mixture of races, especially: marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race."  My grandfather's three-volume Webster's dictionary, published in the less politically correct year of 1942, is even more specific:

mis'ce-ge-na'-tion, n., [L., mi'scere to mix + genus race] 1. An interbreeding of races. 2. Law Intermarriage or interbreeding of whites and other races; - used chiefly, in the U.S. of marriage with Negroes, but in some States including Orientals or Indians, and frequently made unlawful and criminal by statute. 

Just the mere fact that Webster's definition portrays it as an issue between whites and "other races," as if "whiteness" was the natural and assumed state of existence, is offensive.  Reducing the acts of falling in love and conceiving children to mere "breeding," when done between races, is offensive.  To be clear, there's nothing inherently ugly about "marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse" between two races; the ugliness is that there's a specific word for it, one that typically is used to express contempt for the action, a contempt often enforced with the power of law.   As I said at the top, it's an ugly word, one thankfully being left to the dust bins of history, along with the other words in the racial-purity vocabulary, such as "mulatto," "quadroon," "octaroon," and so on.

One more note before we proceed further.  I recognize that I am a 65-, almost 66-, year-old white man, and the beneficiary of generations of white privilege.  Generally speaking, nothing good usually comes of an old white man in 2020 trying to describe race and the African-American experience.  I am quite confident that I'm going to get parts of this wrong, or not express it correctly, or otherwise fuck this up somehow.  It's inevitable.   Please feel free to correct me (teach me, please!), and if you find error in what I say here or if its not expressed with the right amount of sensitivity, please accept that I'm writing this honestly and openly and with the best of anti-racist intentions. 

When he received his discharge from the Army in 1919, the paperwork for my grandfather, the second-generation son of emancipated slaves, identified him as "white," even though his entry papers identified him as "colored," and he had served in the segregated 92nd Division.  This was not just a clerical error. 

Based on several lines of evidence, we can assume that he was quite light-skinned in complexion. Despite the lack of a corroborating photograph (I'm still searching!), there is ample evidence based on his life story to support that assumption.  The 1940 census lists him as "white" - apparently the census-taker completing the form did not question his stated ethnicity.  Although he entered the word "Negro" for race on his First World War draft registration form, when the draft rolled around again for the Second World War, the Registrar checked "White" for his race and "Ruddy" for complexion on his Draft Registration Form.

If my grandfather, Sylvanus Henry Hart, Jr., was light-skinned, it's a reasonable assumption that at least one of his parents, if not both, was also light-skinned, although as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noted in The New Yorker in 1996, "The inheritance of melanin is an uneven business." His father, Sylvanus Henry Hart (my great-grandfather), was known as "Jacksonville's first black banker" and so was obviously a gentleman of color.  We know little about his mother, Emma Louise Trowbridge of Georgia, other than census forms identified her as "black" and that she led a nationwide effort in early 1899 to fund a monument to the memory of African-American heroes of the Spanish-American War.

Let's assume that his father was also of a light complexion and proceed to investigate how that might have come to be.  As explained in a previous post, my great-grandfather Sylvanus Henry Hart, rose from the ranks of Jacksonville, Florida's brick layers to become first a foreman, than a City clerk, and then "Jacksonville's first black banker."  He managed to accrue a sizable fortune, enough to send his son to the finest boarding schools in America, and I find it amusing that the 1920 Census notes that he had two live-in servants in his home.  Salaried workers, I'm sure, and not slaves, but it amuses me that a man born into slavery in 1860's South Carolina was able to rise to a level of success that he could afford servants (not slaves) of his own.  

Because of slavery, it is very difficult to trace African-American genealogy to before the Civil War and, specifically, to before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865.  The 1870 census was the first to include African-Americans among the general population; those people first identified in 1870 did not appear in the 1860 census on the racist and deplorable assumption that they were "property," not "persons." 

Sylvanus the Senior appears in the 1870 census as a 10-year-old boy living in Darlington, South Carolina.  His parents were Eli Hart, age 35, a brick mason (brickwork was apparently the family trade), and Henrietta Hart, 28, who could neither read not write. Henrietta would have been 18 years old when Sylvanus was born, and possibly as young as 17 when he was conceived.  Eli and Henrietta also had three daughters, Julia, 8, Sarah, 6, and Josephine, 4.  All were listed in the census as "Black," although as discussed above, we can assume that at least Sylvanus was light-skinned. None appear in the 1860 census, indicating they had been slaves but by 1870 were now emancipated.

Despite the absence of Eli and Henrietta, there are other Harts listed in the 1860 census.  Dr. Robert Lide Hart was born in Darlington and raised a large family there, and was listed in the 1860 census as a “physician and planter.”  “Planter” here means he owned a plantation, and his properties were valued at a couple million dollars by today’s cost-of-living standards.  Dr. Hart's parents were Captain Thomas Edward Hart (1796-1842) and Hannah Lide (1796-1875), who had a separate plantation of their own. Prior to them, I have not yet found any records.

Slaves were often given the surnames of their owners or the plantations on which they worked.  Among other things, it helped the owners track their "property" when labor was shared among plantations.  It's not unreasonable, then, to assume that Eli Hart of Darlington had once been owned by Darlington plantation owners Dr. R.L. or Capt. T.E. Hart.

Following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, the Freedman's Bureau was established to help the newly-freed slaves by establishing contracts for the labor formerly performed under slavery.  An on-line list of 1865 Labor Contracts for Darlington indicates Dr. R.L. Hart employed 44 freed slaves at the Jeffries Creek Plantation and six freed slaves at the Village Plantation.  Most of the freed slaves listed did not have surnames, but neither an "Eli" nor a "Henrietta" were listed at either of the two plantations. However, an Eli  was employed by Hannah Hart (nee Lide), Capt. T.E. Hart's widow, as a field laborer at her plantation at Cashua Ferry.  

Although none were contracted to any of the Hart plantations, there were four Henriettas listed among the Labor Contracts at other plantations. There were Henriettas employed by an A.F. Edwards, a Mrs. A.D. Gibson, a Matilda Fraser, and a Samuel Gibson, any of whom may have been Henrietta Hart.

The Freedman's Bureau attempted to force freed women to work by insisting that their husbands sign contracts making the whole family available as field labor in the cotton industry, and by declaring that unemployed freed women would be treated as vagrants just as black men were. However, the Bureau did allow some exceptions, such as married women with employed husbands.  

By 1865, Henrietta was only 23 but already had three children.  I do not know when Eli and Henrietta were married, other than it was prior to 1870.  If it were before 1865, Henrietta may not have been required to have a Labor Contract and would not have been among the listings.  

Light-skinned blacks in the South during this time are evidence that slave owners, their sons, or their white employees raped their slaves.  For the record, there can be no such thing as "consensual sex" between a master and a slave, even in the absence of physical struggle, due to the gross, disproportionate power difference between the two. 

Sylvanus' light complexion may be due to his real father being not Eli, but any of the many white men who had ownership or other power over Henrietta.  It's also possible that either Eli or Henrietta , or both, were themselves the product of slave rape, and were light-skinned "Children of the Plantation," as one term put it.  

Unfortunately, we may never know who Sylvanus' biological father was.  Slave-raping plantation owners neither acknowledged nor denied whether they had fathered Children of the Plantation. People who kept records of such things for white society back then didn't care who fathered whom in the black community, and such things generally went unrecorded.  

If I'm to track my ancestry, I can come to a full stop at the freed slave Eli Hart (1835-date unknown) and go no further. Even if he were Sylvanus' biological father, it may not be possible to learn who Eli's father was, so I've come to a dead end.  However, with an assumption or two about the actions of the Hart family, I can possibly trace Sylvanus back two more generations to Captain Thomas Edward Hart.

I only discovered Eli and Henrietta's records this week.  Obviously, this removes Isaiah Hart, owner of the plantation "Paradise" in Jacksonville, as well as his father, the treacherous William Hart, from my lineage.  You can ignore the previous posts on those two - whatever else they were doing on their Paradise back then, they weren't raping my great-great-grandmother.

Miscegenation (ugh, that word!) resulted in a white bloodstream merging with an African-American bloodstream in Darlington, South Carolina.  The reason for discussing all this is that it apparently resulted in Sylvanus, Jr., my grandfather, being of light enough complexion that he could "pass" for white.