Following on from Ireland’s slave-owning past, and present (part 1), in this post I want to profile the walking tour I led in Dublin city in early February.
What if some of those who inherited slavery tainted funds paid their own reparations to the people their relative “owned” before embarking on an antislavery campaign of their own. Would this have been enough to wipe away the taint of a family having owned slaves? To never have contemplated owning another person or selling them into servitude would be the ideal. But once such and act is countenanced, what then for the generations that follow?
You make an excellent point here, Suzanne. Thomas Neilson Underwood was himself a complicated character, so it's not that surprising to me that he seems to have been simultaneously on the right and wrong sides of history. I know that you're referring to his immediate case in your comment, but the dilemma you articulate has metastasized with the passing years. The question of what can "wipe away the taint" of this kind of past has grown complicated, indeed. There are descendants of enslavers in the UK who have undertaken to address their families' slave-holding past. 'Mr. Atkinson's Rum Contract' by Richard Atkinson and, especially, Alex Renton's 'Blood Legacy' are accounts of the process of witnessing and making amends in some sense. Still, most descendants have not the wherewithal to come close to compensating in monetary terms for the lives erased and destroyed, to say nothing of the damage to generations of survivors' descendants. Here in the US, where I live, we're seeing a cultural retrenchment--a lot of fingers stuffed in ears and people singing, "Loo-loo-loo!" That's why what Maeve and others are doing is so important: pointing out who did it, what they did, and what they built with the money they extracted from the suffering of their fellow human beings. It is a discipline we all must learn because we are "the generations that follow."
Thanks for your shout out, Maeve! I read with dismay the article you linked to about Irish Americans "jumping on the Trump train." This is a shameful chapter for my country, and I hate to think of anyone in Ireland imagining that descendants of those who emigrated to the US are especially vulnerable to his call to greed and spite. Your reflections on Thomas Neilson and his nephew Thomas Neilson Underwood open up an interesting area of inquiry. Thomas Neilson Underwood does seem to have made the claim that his grandfather William was a United Irishman and a relative and sometime-abettor of Samuel Neilson. If the connection between William Neilson and Samuel Neilson did exist in the late 18th century, then William's family in Strabane would have been aware of Samuel hosting Olaudah Equiano who was on an abolitionist speaking tour in May 1791, just a few months before the founding of the UI. Thomas would have been a toddler at the time, but his brother Robert--who also went to Trinidad and made a fortune in the slave-based economy--would have been ten. Some skepticism is warranted, though. TNU was an unreliable narrator: the case of Thomas Neilson's disputed will turned partly on a forged document TNU produced and at least some of his jail time appears not to have been for his Fenian activities, but instead for malfeasance in his work as a solicitor. But if Thomas and Robert Neilson truly were exposed to cogent moral arguments against slavery *before* they embarked for the sugar islands, that makes their story all the more complex and, frankly, ugly.
What if some of those who inherited slavery tainted funds paid their own reparations to the people their relative “owned” before embarking on an antislavery campaign of their own. Would this have been enough to wipe away the taint of a family having owned slaves? To never have contemplated owning another person or selling them into servitude would be the ideal. But once such and act is countenanced, what then for the generations that follow?
You make an excellent point here, Suzanne. Thomas Neilson Underwood was himself a complicated character, so it's not that surprising to me that he seems to have been simultaneously on the right and wrong sides of history. I know that you're referring to his immediate case in your comment, but the dilemma you articulate has metastasized with the passing years. The question of what can "wipe away the taint" of this kind of past has grown complicated, indeed. There are descendants of enslavers in the UK who have undertaken to address their families' slave-holding past. 'Mr. Atkinson's Rum Contract' by Richard Atkinson and, especially, Alex Renton's 'Blood Legacy' are accounts of the process of witnessing and making amends in some sense. Still, most descendants have not the wherewithal to come close to compensating in monetary terms for the lives erased and destroyed, to say nothing of the damage to generations of survivors' descendants. Here in the US, where I live, we're seeing a cultural retrenchment--a lot of fingers stuffed in ears and people singing, "Loo-loo-loo!" That's why what Maeve and others are doing is so important: pointing out who did it, what they did, and what they built with the money they extracted from the suffering of their fellow human beings. It is a discipline we all must learn because we are "the generations that follow."
Thanks for your shout out, Maeve! I read with dismay the article you linked to about Irish Americans "jumping on the Trump train." This is a shameful chapter for my country, and I hate to think of anyone in Ireland imagining that descendants of those who emigrated to the US are especially vulnerable to his call to greed and spite. Your reflections on Thomas Neilson and his nephew Thomas Neilson Underwood open up an interesting area of inquiry. Thomas Neilson Underwood does seem to have made the claim that his grandfather William was a United Irishman and a relative and sometime-abettor of Samuel Neilson. If the connection between William Neilson and Samuel Neilson did exist in the late 18th century, then William's family in Strabane would have been aware of Samuel hosting Olaudah Equiano who was on an abolitionist speaking tour in May 1791, just a few months before the founding of the UI. Thomas would have been a toddler at the time, but his brother Robert--who also went to Trinidad and made a fortune in the slave-based economy--would have been ten. Some skepticism is warranted, though. TNU was an unreliable narrator: the case of Thomas Neilson's disputed will turned partly on a forged document TNU produced and at least some of his jail time appears not to have been for his Fenian activities, but instead for malfeasance in his work as a solicitor. But if Thomas and Robert Neilson truly were exposed to cogent moral arguments against slavery *before* they embarked for the sugar islands, that makes their story all the more complex and, frankly, ugly.