The House of David

Descent from a Founding Father is a matter for celebration to thousands of sons and daughters of the American Revolution and members of the Cincinnati Society, Colonial Wars, First Families, and other sufficiently remote or proud groups. Americans are eager to claim, when they can, ancestry made noble by history if not by “blood.”

The sad irony is that the scholars examining the histories of “founding” families have again and again traced a story marred by conflict, profligacy, and incompetence even when highlighted as well by brilliance, self-sacrifice, and accomplishment. The Adams family is a well-known example, though similar cases had been noted by commentators on the Roman imperium and chroniclers of the House of David long before there was a United States.

In his history of the family of Major Pierce Butler, Malcolm Bell Jr. has given another case in point. This traditional story of pride brought low and a fortune disputed and dissipated over generations is more than a family chronicle, however. Bell has used it to tell the story of slavery, its demise, and aftermath in the United States. Bell’s protagonist, Butler, an impecunious younger son of an Irish baronet, married on the eve of the American Revolution into a wealthy South Carolina family with large holdings of plantations and slaves. When serving his adopted state at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, he was instrumental in shaping the clauses protecting slavery.

Within two generations, the major’s wealth in slaves had been largely dissipated by a spendthrift grandson, but not before it had been the cause of serious family discord. First the major’s children fought over their father’s will. Then British actress Fanny Kemble, wife of the major’s namesake and grandson, published in her journals her revulsion to her husband’s slaveholding. In turn, these became a major weapon in abolitionist hands as well as in the Kemble-Butler divorce of 1849.

Two generations later still, novelist Owen Wister, author of that American classic The Virginian and grandson of Pierce Butler and Fanny Kemble, implicitly took issue with his grandmother’s perceptions of the planter tradition into which she had married with such unhappy consequences. In his second novel, Lady Baltimore, set in a disguised Charleston, he characterized the former slave owners as admirable in many respects and chastised Northerners. On reading his friend’s book, Teddy Roosevelt complained to Wister, “[you] made your swine devils practically all Northerners, and your angels practically all Southerners.” Wister was vehement that he was not betraying his abolitionist heritage, but it could be said that he was honoring Major Butler’s legacy—a legacy not only of wealth, but of conflict.

Bell’s tracing of that legacy is artful in its weaving of the fortunes of the family and slavery. Yet one must recognize that this big book of nearly 700 pages tells and analyzes only part of the story.

There is more to the Butlers than either the overbearing pride that forced children to rebel against parents, or the relationships with and ownership of slaves. Major Butler played an important role in the development of cotton culture and, so, the spread of plantation agriculture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was a politician of rank and vigor who presumably addressed other questions than slavery. His kinship networks united and defined interests and attitudes in telling and hitherto little-considered ways. In concentrating on slavery. Bell has sometimes noted these facts in vivid detail, but he has not analyzed them or explored some of their ramifications in enough depth.

To view the Butlers through the prism of slavery is to give focus to a sprawling story. At the same time, it necessarily limits and distorts the story. Major Butler’s legacy was more complex than even the vexatious slavery issue.

Bell’s themes and emphases are those of another Georgian, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who called slavery and race the “Central Theme of Southern History” in an influential article which appeared in the American Historical Review 60 years ago. Bell’s book does not so much support as assume Phillips’ argument to relate a remote, if often dramatic and important, family history to the preoccupations and assumptions of the late 20th century. This he has done so well that you almost forget to note how exceptional the Butlers were in their connections and behavior as well as wealth and slaveholdings.

The Butler drama is compelling, less for its moral import than for its scope and players—from George Washington to Henry James. Clearly, in this year of the bicentennial of South Carolina’s ratification of the US Constitution, such family links to the Founding Fathers claim our attention. The chain may be tarnished, but it is vital.

[Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family, by Malcolm Bell Jr.; Athens: University of Georgia Press]