Location of Rutherford County in 1790
In 1790 Rutherford County, North Carolina was still frontier. To the county’s southwest, sovereign Indian territory stretched all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. To the northwest, only about a hundred thousand people lived between it and the Ohio River, in lands soon to become the states of Tennessee and Kentucky. Its population was 7,808, including 609 people enslaved. One of the latter was owned by my mother’s ancestor Elisha Melton, a 23 year old Virginia native of colonial English descent.
I know very little of this person, who could have been male or female; who may have been born in Virginia, the Caribbean, or Africa; and who was either unrelated to Eli or his own brother, sister, or cousin. I also don’t know what happened to this person after 1790. By 1810 Eli was no longer a slave owner, having removed first to Kentucky, then across the Ohio River to Indiana Territory. His slave could have been sold to a relative or neighbor, been freed, escaped, died childless, or had dozens of descendants born into slavery.
Eli Melton and family, 1790
My father also had ancestors who owned slaves, in Maryland and Kentucky, but his ancestral lines that lead to them had moved on to Pennsylvania or the Midwest by 1810 or 1820. This is a difficult barrier for a long-term genealogical project of mine, which is to find descendants of slaves owned by my ancestors. The 1850 and 1860 censuses included columns for slaves’ age and sex, which makes it possible, though difficult, to trace their histories forward past Emancipation. Not so for the 1790 census. Unless I can find a detailed will, Eli Melton’s slave will probably remain anonymous. I have a detailed will for Edward Bussey of Harford County, Maryland, my father’s ancestor, which includes names of slaves and the relatives he left them to, but as the will is from 1786, I haven’t been able to trace those men and women forward.
Why do I want to find my ancestors’ slaves’ descendants? Because they are my cousins. Even if they are not my cousins by blood—and some likely are—they are my kin. While racial slavery and the legacy of skin color hierarchy helped structure our republic’s institutions, opposition to this legacy strengthened our republic by perfecting its morals. These principles have gradually transformed the United States’ dominant public identity from racial to non-racial and national. But this process will not be complete until it is reflected in our everyday identity as people: as families become post-racial. This may be the way things naturally go in the future, as families continue to “mix”, but it is also important that we take another look at our families’ hidden pasts. In doing this, we neither assign blame to the sons, nor absolve the father of his sins. We instead focus on the present and the future. We reconnect with lost kin, separated by the consequences of these past sins. To do so is one more step toward becoming one nation, indivisible.
