The current kerfuffle over how the public schools should deal with the more challenging aspects of American History — like slavery, genocide of indigenous Americans, intentional economic inequality, and unwarranted wars — makes me think of a story I learned in the course of doing genealogy research over the past decade or so.
A little background: I began my genealogy research when I retired from teaching in 2012, and within a couple of years I discovered that my roots ran deep in America — back to 11 of the original 13 colonies (only Delaware and Georgia failed to make the cut). My ancestors included passengers on the Mayflower, settlers in Jamestown in 1610, and colonists in New Amsterdam in the 1640s. After establishing this framework, I began more systematic research on the people I had discovered.
You know the saying “Be careful what you wish for?” Well, in the course of my research I have found troubling information about some of my ancestors — including, specifically, that some were slaveholders in Virginia and South Carolina. I wasn’t happy about this information, but it was a little abstract for me.
A couple of years ago, I made a discovery while I was researching my 6th great-grandfather Seth Botts (1713-1776). He was a wealthy plantation owner in Stafford County, Virginia, whose land actually encompassed the site of the current Marine Corps base at Quantico. He owned dozens of slaves; he willed three of them (Solomon, Anthony, and Sarah) to my 5th great-grandfather John Botts, who took them with him when he moved to Kentucky a couple of decades later.
Anyway. I was randomly googling Seth Botts one day, seeing what I could pop up, and I came across a reference to a different Seth Botts — an enslaved person who escaped to Boston in 1850, changed his name to Henry Williams, and raised enough money to buy the freedom of his wife and children who were still enslaved in central Virginia. A little more research convinced me that this Seth Botts was a descendant of “my” Seth Botts — probably a great-grandson.
That brought me up short. Over the same years that my ancestors — the white descendants of Seth-Botts-the-plantation-owner-and-slave-holder — were accessing land on the expanding American frontier and moving up in the world, the black descendants of the same Seth Botts remained enslaved. Seth’s black descendants, undoubtedly the product of rape, desperately sought freedom.
I figure that Henry (the enslaved Seth Botts) was my 4th cousin 3x removed or thereabouts. Henry’s generational peer in my lineage was most likely my 3x great-grandfather, Joshua Botts (1813-1863). At the same time that Henry (still Seth Botts at that time) was desperately trying to figure out how to save his family, Joshua was farming in western Illinois. Joshua was Seth’s great-grandson — born in Boone County, Kentucky, securely part of a family that was rising in prominence in that frontier community. His father, Joseph Botts, was ordained as a Baptist minister in Boone County before he moved his family to Illinois in 1837. There, Joseph founded St. Mary’s Church in the village of Plymouth. According to The Portrait and Biographical Record of Hancock, McDonough, and Henderson County, Illinois, published in 1894, Joseph’s “honorable, upright life won him the confidence and esteem of all.”
Meanwhile, Henry (Seth) had been successful in freeing his family — but there’s one reason we know anything about “this” Seth Botts today. One of his children, Mary Mildred Williams, caught the attention of Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts. According to Jessie Morgan-Owens, a historian at Bard Early College in New Orleans and the author of Girl in Black and White: the story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement, Sumner had helped Henry raise the funds to buy his family’s freedom. Mary joined Sumner on stage in a series of lectures in the spring of 1855 (she was seven years old at the time).
You should read this book. I got it at my public library.
Why did Sumner choose Mary to appear with him? She was very light-skinned — the daughter of Henry and his wife Elizabeth, who herself was the daughter of an enslaved woman named Prudence and a neighbor, Capt. Thomas Nelson. (That’s a name Virginians will recognize.) Prudence was very light-skinned and apparently was able to “pass” if she chose to. Mary’s brother Oscar was also freed through Sumner’s contributions. But Oscar was dark-skinned and he didn’t fit Sumner’s narrative, so he wasn’t put in front of an audience.
See, here’s what Sumner was doing in the spring of 1855. He was using Mary as a prop to illustrate that even white children might be endangered by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. If people realized that a runaway slave could look like Mary — could look white — then people seeking the bounty offered by the Fugitive Slave Act might turn their attention to other children who looked like Mary — white children. The Fugitive Slave Act, Sumner argued, was vile not only because it targeted runaway slaves; it was vile because it could also be a threat to white people. That got the attention of his white audiences — which was of course his point. Mary appeared with Sumner a number of times in the spring of 1855 — at least twice with Solomon Northrup, whose memoir Twelve Years a Slave was made into a movie in 2013.
Meanwhile, back on the prairie in western Illinois: Joseph Botts’s oldest granddaughter, my 2nd great-grandmother Mary Ann Botts (1837-1913) married twice and raised five children in Hancock County. Mary Ann was Mary William’s 5th cousin. A few years after seven-year-old Mary was being paraded around by Charles Sumner, 20-year-old Mary Ann was enrolling at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where she was probably in the audience for one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1859. (I say “probably” because I don’t have direct evidence that she was actually in the audience. I have evidence that she was enrolled in the college at that time, and I have evidence that she boarded with a family in the town. If she wasn’t actually in the audience, she certainly knew about the event.) Mary Ann was a teacher for one year before she married.
Mary faded from the scene after the spring of 1855. By 1865, Mary had moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, along with her parents and sister. Five years later, she was living with her mother and sister in Hyde Park, a suburb of Boston. It is unclear why her father did not join them there. The three Williams women were classified as white. Both Williams and her mother identified as white women for the remainder of their lives. When her mother died in 1892, Williams gave her mother's maiden name as that of her white father: “Elizabeth A. (Nelson) Williams.”
Williams never married or had children. She “passed” — lived as a white woman — which allowed her to hold down a job as a clerk at Boston’s Registry of Deeds, where she worked until at least 1900. She rented an apartment in the Eleventh Ward of Boston where she lived there with her partner, Mary Maynard, and apparently never married. The people who had pushed her forward as a prop for abolitionists in the 1850s left her alone; one of them, abolitionist preacher Thomas Wentworth Higginson, said he “willingly lost sight of her” so she could “disappear . . . in the white ranks.” After moving to New York in the early years of the 20th century, she died there in 1921. Her body was returned to Boston and buried with her family in an integrated cemetery. I would like to know more about this.
The Botts surname is not unusual in central Virginia. A quick search reveals that there are hundreds of people with this surname. I have not pursued this connection, in part because I don’t know how to go about it. I’m pretty sure that I have both white and black distant cousins in central Virginia. A friend of mine, Bill Sizemore, has investigated a similar situation in his family, discovering his black cousins who live in the same county where his white ancestors lived. He wrote a book about it entitled Uncle George and Me. You should read it also.
I have taken a small step by joining a website called Beyond Kin (https://beyondkin.org/) which was created to leverage ancestral knowledge easily accessed by white descendants of slaveholders to assist the black descendants of slaveholders (and the enslaved persons they raped) to fill out their less-documented family trees. I have summarized the story of the two men named Seth Botts and submitted the information to that website. I haven’t received any responses yet.
So what does all this mean? I’m not responsible for the fact that my 6th great-grandfather was a slaveholder. I’m not responsible for the fact that at least one white man named Botts raped enslaved women. But I have to acknowledge that I am the beneficiary of a system that rewarded Seth’s white descendants with land, education, and economic opportunity while denying these benefits to Seth’s black descendants. The only thing I can do is work for political and social change that begins to redress these generational grievances. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.
Great story! I do not have that deep American history in my background. My relatives arrived much later than yours and were all northern travelers/settlers. Your story should resonate with all who work for equality and equity, though.
I am also a decendant of Seth Botts, through his son Aaron. I do geneology and I too came across the book about the enslaved Seth Botts aka Henry Williams. I am confused though, because the author of the book says Seth Botts, the slave is desended from Seth Botts the planter, but later in the book names a James Tolson as his father. I cannot find that connection. I too have many of the same feelings as you do. As a genealogist I would love to put all the pieces together.