New discovery: George W. Bush’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Notorious Slave Trader

[cali]

welve American presidents owned slaves, eight while serving in office, and at least 25 presidents count slave owners among their ancestors. But new historical evidence shows that a direct ancestor of George W. and George H.W. Bush was part of a much more appalling group: Thomas Walker was a notorious slave trader active in the late 18th century along the coast of West Africa.

Walker, George H.W. Bush's great-great-great grandfather, was the captain of, master of, or investor in at least 11 slaving voyages to West Africa between 1784 and 1792.

<snip>

But this is the first time an ancestor of Bush has been directly linked to the brutal trans-Atlantic trade in which millions perished. When I queried the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which publishes ancestries of American presidents, the only other president they flagged up with definite slave dealer ancestry was Thomas Jefferson, whose father-in-law, John Wayles (1715-1773), was a planter, slave trader and lawyer in the Virginia Colony. (The NEHGS did acknowledge that there could be other presidents with slavers as ancestors.)

<snip>

The historical evidence suggests that Thomas Walker died at sea in 1797 when his own crew mutinied and threw him overboard. Documents in the British House of Lords Sessional Papers indicate Thomas Walker is the same man as a “Beau Walker,” whose unpleasant end is in turn recorded in the journal of Zachary Macaulay, a British anti-slavery activist, sometime governor of Sierra Leone and father of the celebrated Whig historian Thomas Macaulay.




Macaulay’s journal entry for Oct. 24, 1797, is as follows:

“You have heard of the noted Beau Walker, an English slave trader of these parts. He arrived at the Isles Du Los [off present-day Guinea] lately in an American Brig being bound to Cape Mount [in present-day northwest Liberia] for slaves. He had scarce arrived at the last place, when exercising his usual barbarities on his officers & crew, they were provoked to conspire against him. As he lay on one of the hencoops a seaman came up & struck him on the breast with a handspike, but the blow being ill directed, did not produce its intended effect and Walker springing up wd soon have sacrificed the mutineer to his fury, had not a boy at the helm, pulling a pistol from his breast, shot him dead on the spot. His body was immediately thrown overboard. Thus ended Walker’s career, an end worthy of such a life. The vessel left Cape Mount, and it is supposed has gone for the Brazils or South Seas. There could not possibly have been a more inhuman monster than this Walker. Many a poor seaman has been brought by him to an untimely end.”

<snip>

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history_lesson/2013/06/george_w_bush_and_slavery_the_president_and_his_father_are_descendants_of.single.html

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Blah

Chris Rock: "It's alright - because it's all white."

Everyone is supposed to get upset about this when black people are still lowest on the totem pole in this so-called 'recovery'. Blacks still have the highest unemployment rates.

That's news.

This isn't.

But it's only black people in America today so it's not as big a deal as what some guy did a couple hundred years ago just because he is some white related to a Bush.

[SoCalDem]

2. A person in anyone's "heritage" could have been a "bad" person

GW is bad enough for me ..and Poppy too

[cali]

3. it's a very amusing story. it's history

I'm not suggesting that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the sons.

[HiPointDem]

36. It's not that thomas walker was 'bad'. it's that the family fortunes were built on slave profits, &

thomas is far from the only bush ancestor who got his living from slavery. the whole walker-davis-mercer side were plantation owners.

[HiPointDem]

4. no surprise; scratch a rich/connected family & you're going to find slaving, opium, arms, graft,

crime.

not the bush family's only connection to the slave system either, or the nearest temporally.

[Berlum]

7. ...and AWOL Republican chickenhawks

goes with the territory...and besides, the RepubliBaggers demand to follow chickenhawks, as the record shows

[WestStar]

14. Not to mention bootlegging and stockmarket manipulation

n/t

[Igel]

24. So which was JFK's?

I mean, the Kennedys were rich and connected. So I have to deduce you were speaking of them, as well.

Lots of slavers involved in bringing more than a million Africans to the New World, even if only a small percentage came to the US.

Probably even more slavers involved in bringing the even greater quantities of African slaves into the Muslim world.

Judging from my mother's side of the family, they weren't involved in slave holding. Don't know for sure--the records that I've seen stop mostly in the 1850s and only a few records go back earlier. Irish immigrants, those, not from the later and more infamous potato famines. White trash, they'd probably be called today. "Hillbillies" in the lowlands of NE. Virgina.

Don't know squat about my father's side, except his grandfather came from Richmond, VA in the early 1890s.

Guess either most Virginia white trash Irish immigrants became Slavic linguists and high-school science teachers or genetics, even 200 years after the fact, don't say much about such things. I go with the latter. It's probably pretty much ruled out by any reasonable view of inheritance that the actions of one man, generations removed, dictate the actions of a descendant. But that's science, not politics.

[HiPointDem]

28. haven't done a kennedy genealogy, so i don't know.

[Downwinder]

5. Some genes run true.

[RebelOne]

6. Everyone has some infamous ancestors.

My great-great-great-great uncle was Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard the pirate.

[cali]

8. no they don't.

in any case, not everyone is President of the United States.

[RebelOne]

22. I have some ancestors from over 300 years ago with the name of Bush,

and I just hope they were not related to George Bush. They were pioneers on the way to the West and became lost in a snow storm, so I do not know if any of them survived.

[louslobbs]

9. That's some apple tree all those Bushes have been falling from all these many years.

The seeds must have come from the same strain used to plant the Koch brother apple trees, and many of us know what kind of apples have been falling off that tree. Just using these two families as an example, imagine years ago, someone cut down those apple trees from which all of these bad apples have subsequently fallen instead of cutting down the Kennedy trees, King tree and so many other trees that most likely would have produced good, delicious and nutritious apples. You would think that Monsanto engineered the Bush and Koch brother apple tree seeds which were used to grow the Bush and Koch variety of bad apples that have fallen from those trees and poisoned the masses over these many past decades.
Lou

[JustAnotherGen]

10. Wait

Isn't Obama related to the Bush family? Or is that Dick Cheney?

[Puzzledtraveller]

11. I thought it was Bono.

[JustAnotherGen]

13. Naah

It's the Lucky Charms guy. I just checked.

But hte Lucky Charms guy was a slave trader of the worst kind.

[Octafish]

12. Helps explain the eugenics, class and racial superiority thing.

Rothschild and Freshfields founders had links to slavery, papers reveal

[Nye Bevan]

20. What "racial superiority thing"?

Bush had many faults (now there's an understatement) but I don't remember seeing any evidence that he's a racist.

[Vinnie From Indy]

27. He did hate frogs however!

Cheers!

[ananda]

15. Well ...

I have to say that's not a very illustrious ancestry.
My ancestry aint so hot either.

My ancestors owned slaves and that side of the family
is still very racist. But I have another side of the family
that has a totally different world view, fortunately.

[geek tragedy]

16. Could be written "Slave trader would be appalled to find GW Bush in his bloodline." nt

[alsame]

17. DUzy!!

[pinboy3niner]

18. This is why I don't do geneology

I might find that way back, my forebear slew his brother.

[Nye Bevan]

19. If it wasn't for people like Jefferson and Washington who owned hundreds of slaves,

the slave trade would not have existed.

John Adams is my favorite Founding Father for a reason.

[enlightenment]

29. Really? Please support that statement.

The slave trade was well in place long before either Jefferson or Washington were a twinkle in their daddys' eyes and the fact that they held slaves made them pretty much like every other large-scale farmer/planter in the new Republic. Suggesting it would not have existed is beyond absurd. It could be argued that without Jefferson's signature, the Importation Act wouldn't have become law - since he was President and all . . .

And you do know that while Adams did not keep slaves, he also did not believe in abolition? He was pretty much on board with gradual emancipation, but that's hardly something to crow about.

[Nye Bevan]

31. John Adams: Slavery is "a foul contagion in the human character"

and "an evil of colossal magnitude".

Not bad, for his time.

And the point I was making was that without any demand for slaves, there would be no slave trade.

[enlightenment]

35. But Jefferson and Washington, in and of themselves

did not create the demand. The plantation system did that. Stating - rather unequivocally - that had they not held slave there would have been no slave trade is absurd - and I think you know that.

Yes, Adams did say that - he also said

"The Abolition of Slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and Circumspection. Violent means and measures would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice. Neither Mr. Mifflin nor yourselves, I presume would be willing to venture on Exertions which would probably excite Insurrections among the Blacks to rise against their Masters and imbrue their hands in innocent blood.There are many other Evils in our Country which are growing, (whereas the practice of slavery is fast diminishing,) and threaten to bring Punishment on our Land, more immediately than the oppression of the blacks."

John Adams to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley
Washington, D.C., January 24, 1801
------------------------
Certainly better than being a slave-owner, but not exactly a fervent opponent.

[Cooley Hurd]

21. His g-g-g-g grandfather lived a spell in my neck of the woods...

...and married one of my paternal g-g-g-g aunts. Lucky me... I'm related (by marriage) to Shrub!

[FarCenter]

23. One of my ancestors was a clergyman who presided over executions in Europe

I believe that the method at the time was the headsman with an axe.

[Ilsa]

25. My great-to-the-12th-uncle might have

been one too. It appears as though part of the family tree traded goods and people in the Caribbean three hundred years ago, but I'm not certain.

I can't hold Jr Shrub responsible for what his ancestors did, only for how he's chosen to conduct himself.

[MADem]

26. Yep, that's him....

Thomas Walker died at sea in 1797 when his own crew mutinied and threw him overboard.

[coldmountain]

30. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree

[alp227]

32. there are plenty of other reasons to hate Dim Son. But this story reflects more on his family,

the BUSH CRIME FAMILY.

[loli phabay]

33. meh my grandfather was a gunrunner during the spanish civil war

Also got family who where slavers, cant visit the sins of the fathers onto the sons as the saying goes.

[Spider Jerusalem]

37. Look at most anyone's family tree and you'll probably find things like that.

A significant number of my ancestors were slave owners. My 11x great-uncle was the first English colonist on record as engaging in the slave trade in the New World, abused his position as surveyor-general of the Virginia colony to attempt a blatant land-theft from Maryland, and was put on trial for murdering Indians, burning their villages, and selling their children into slavery (and got off with a slap on the wrist because he was rich, powerful, and had friends in high places...his brother was the king's personal physician).

[HiPointDem]

38. I think it's less significant that thomas walker was an actual slave *trader* who went to africa

than that the whole walker-davis-mercer were rather important planter families in maryland, and that this was where they got the capital that they later extended into finance & politics. These families have been upper-middle-class to rich since they got off the boat.

Bush’s long-ago Walker-and-related forebears, along with some of their cousins and in-laws, owned plantations and farms at Sassafras Neck in Cecil County, Md. This is a narrow strip of land between the Bohemia and Sassafras rivers, which flow into Chesapeake Bay.

A few decades earlier at Cecil County, Harriet and Ann Mercer were growing up on The Rounds plantation, owned by their father, John Mercer.... “As early as 1790, John Mercer had six slaves. In 1810, he had eighteen, and . . . he must have had many more by 1820. A few years later, in the Deep South, each thousand acres of plantation had about a hundred slaves, and John Mercer owned more than 1,600 acres.”

Mercer had three plantations at Sassafras Neck, including The Rounds. The manor house at The Rounds has been variously described by historians, including King: “Georgian in architecture, as it faces the hills, Queen Anne, on its river side, it overlooks the broad Bohemia from a high slope, as Mount Vernon looks over the Potomac. Tradition in the Davis family claims that it was built in 1740 with bricks brought from England. Inside, the house is spacious and well proportioned. . . . ”

Like her future nephew David Davis, born several years later at The Rounds, there probably were many playmates for Harriet. She had her siblings and many cousins. The playmates also perhaps included, as King wrote of the David Davis childhood experience, “the Negro children who lived in the slave cabins on the plantation.”

Plantation life was of such a nature that, as King wrote: “Ann Mercer’s descendants in upper New York still tell that until she went North in her late thirties she had never made her own bed.”

http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfield/article-3993-legacy.html

Thomas Walker's son George married John Mercer's daughter Harriet but lost the 300-odd acres she got from her father in a financial panic. No worries, though, because there were other relatives to help out in Illinois by buying the family a smaller farm and giving their children connections and a hand up.

Those connections to wealth and power are how son David Walker came to found a large clothing concern and grandson H Walker got into banking.

Family connections like this first cousin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Davis_%28Supreme_Court_justice%29

and this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Winter_Davis

and this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_B._Walker

All ultimately derived from stolen land (crown grants) & slave profits.

On the Bush side of the family there's also a direct connection to slave profits through the major cotton trading/shipping & minor slave buying/selling of the Howard-Fay clan (Rev James S Bush, grandfather of Prescott, married the daughter of cotton broker Samuel Fay of Padelford Fay, out of Savannah).

And there's also Prescott's partnership at Brown Brothers Harriman, a firm built on slave profits, which Prescott got connected to via the Walkers:

The outbreak of the Civil War prompted New York financier James Brown to rage against the South in a letter to his brother, William. "As terrible and disastrous as it is," James wrote in July 1861, the war "had to come." The South's "insolence" over slavery and demands for return of runaway slaves were to blame. This from a man whose firm owned hundreds of slaves, operated plantations and financed the cotton economy.

Records and letters at the New York Historical Society show James and William Brown built their merchant bank — today's Brown Bros. Harriman — by lending to Southern planters, brokering slave-grown cotton and acting as a clearinghouse for the South's complex financial system. The firm earned commissions arranging cotton shipments from Southern ports to mills in New England and Britain. It also loaned millions directly to planters, merchants and cotton brokers throughout the South.

Company records show Brown Bros. loaned to plantation owners who told the firm that they needed the cash to buy slaves. When those planters or their banks failed, Brown Bros. took possession of the assets. It used its local agents to run repossessed plantations and manage the slaves working there.

The fullest picture of the Browns as slaveholders comes from 1840s and 1850s Louisiana court records affirming Brown's claim to three Concordia Parish cotton plantations totaling 4,614 acres, and the plantations' 346 slaves, each named in court records. Brown Bros. & Co. merged with two other firms in 1931 to create Brown Bros. Harriman.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/02/21/slave-brown-bros.htm

The Bush family fortunes were built on the slave trade.