September Crossroads from UGA

Leslie Albrecht Huber has the cover story in the current issue of Crossroads, published by the Utah Genealogical Association and executively edited by my friend Christy Fillerup, on "How to Write a Page-Turning, But True, Family History."

Also to be found inside are Rondina Muncy on a very important six-letter word in land platting, and my review of Gordon Wood's marvelous Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Reupblic, 1789-1815, under the heading "Re-Learning History."

Genealogy has its familiar handful of top-notch scholarly magazines, and -- even in this day of the internet -- many that publish whatever comes in. Crossroads is aiming to occupy some middle ground, and welcomes contributions and inquiries. As UGA's statement of objectives says, it seeks to "raise the standards of genealogy and family history research."

Bookends Friday: The Genealogist and "Empire of Liberty"

I really should just pony up for a subscription to The Genealogist, possibly the most obscure of the top-echelon genealogy magazines. The other day I came across a free library duplicate of the Spring 2003 issue containing an excellent and lengthy article by Cameron Allen, "Lucinda Depp and Her Descendants: A Freed Black Family of Virginia and Ohio," a companion to an earlier article tracing the white Depp family from Powhatan County, Virginia, to central Ohio.

The black Depps were freed under an 1801 deed of emancipation (effective on the death of the grantor and wife), and John Depp's 1829 will, probated in 1831. Allen writes:

The most startling fact in the settlement of Depp's estate was the extreme expedition with which it was accomplished on the heels of the death of his widow, Elizabeth. Her will, made on 7 January 1835, was proved on 2 February 1835 in Powhatan County. In just two weeks from the probate of her will, all the land left to the freed slave family was sold and all the slaves not freed by the will of John Depp were sold on 16 and 17 February 1835. That has to be a record! ... Quite obviously the four projected grantees under the will had decided [ahead of time] ... that they would not take title, but, rather, sell their interest through the executor of the will and take the cash to start a new life elsewhere.

About the time I read this I had just finished Gordon S. Wood's magisterial (and to me very informative) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. One of his major themes is how the high-minded cosmopolitan visions of the Founders generation morphed into the bumptious, militantly provincial, and rather raw democratic enthusiasm of the next generation. (Just compare the characters of George Washington and Andrew Jackson.)

A tragic part of that story is that in the 1790s there were some good reasons to think that slavery was on the way out, in part because it grossly contradicted the ideals of liberty that had animated the American Revolution. Virginia slaveholders were less willing to break up families; Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other southerners deplored the institution's injustice; new evangelical Baptist and Methodist denominations stood against slavery; the College of William and Mary conferred an honorary degree on the British abolitionist Granville Sharp.

It was a false dawn. A combination of technological changes, fear that the black revolution in Haiti might spread, and a few actual slave conspiracies turned things ugly. The evangelicals backed off; in 1806 a new Virginia law required freed slaves to leave the state; and the ideology of racism was reborn to justify the repression.

In this context it comes as no surprise that the white Depps' estate was probated in record time and that the black Depps had already planned to leave their home for free soil. Virginia's loss was Ohio's gain. History can illuminate genealogy.

Empire of Liberty

That's the title of historian Gordon S. Wood's new history of the early republic, 1789-1815 -- 738 fascinating pages on a period so fuzzy and dull in my recollection that I almost didn't pick it up off the library shelf.

Having finished it, I'm glad I did pick it up. Not only does Wood understand the cast of characters, he understands what was happening. Textbooks and summaries portray this period in general, and the War of 1812 in particular, as a second war for independence. True as far as it goes, but false in the implication of a natural and foreseen unfolding.

This was a generation of surprises. From most of the Founders' point of view, the new country veered wildly out of control. Americans in 1815 were more commercial-minded, more egalitarian, and less willing to defer to their "betters" than any of the Founders were comfortable with.

The Revolutionary leaders....had an opportunity to realize an ideal world, to put the broadminded and tolerant principles of the Enlightenment into practice, to become a homogeneous, compassionate, and cosmopolitan people, and to create the kind of free and ordered society and illustrious culture that people since the Greeks and Romans had yearned for....

But little worked out quite as the founders expected.... their high-minded promise to end slavery and respect the rights of the native peoples were no match for the surging demographic forces accelerated by the Revolution. ...

The transformation Americans had experienced was unintended, for the character they celebrated in Andrew Jackson and the Hunters of Kentucky -- the romantic, undisciplined, and untutored heroes of the battle of New Orleans of 1815 -- was scarcely the character they had sought in 1789. The bumptious nationalism and the defiant abandonment of Europe expressed at the end of the War of 1812 were both repudiations of the enlightened and cosmopolitan ideals of the Revolution and attempts to come to terms with the largely unanticipated popular commercial society that had emerged from the Revolution.

Read it and discover a new aspect of your ancestors' world. And if you're looking for something about this period but a little more specialized, let his 13-page postscript bibliographical essay be your guide.