Malachy Salter was the great mythical ancestor of my mother’s family. We held him up as a kind of buccaneering merchant hero who operated two privateers under Letters of Marque from King George II and King George III, first out of Boston and then, as was the case of many of the what the Canadian historian John Bartlett Brebner called the “neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia,” out of Halifax.
Malachy was a complex man who maintained residences in both cities until the events of 1776 made that impossible. Many of his Canadian descendants remembered him as a heroic United Empire Loyalist (my maternal grandmother would sometimes proudly append the suffix “UE” to her name) and the government of Massachusetts confiscated his property in what is now Allston for his presumed loyalties to the Crown. Yet, in Halifax, where the driveway leading from Malachy’s home to the waterfront now hosts some of the city’s grandest hotels, and where, Brebner notes, he “seemed more the official than merchant,” he was arrested and charged with sedition in July 1776.
After all, Malachy had been the “Hand of Boston” in Halifax, who numbered among his associates John Hancock and John Adams, and whose Boston townhouse, in a close off of Summer Street, was in a neighborhood thick with radical taverns and committees of correspondence. He was a member of the Old South Meeting House along with Benjamin Franklin. If guilt by association was not enough, Malachy was condemned by his eagerness to maintain his Boston business connections and his lack of enthusiasm for Lord North’s ministry, which he rarely failed to make plain.
My ancestor was hardly the committed loyalist of my grandmother’s memory, or even the dangerous rebel imagined by British authorities in Halifax; he was, above all, an opportunistic businessman sniffing the direction of prevailing winds. Yet, growing up in Canada in a bicultural family, Malachy was my one undeniable connection to North American history and, through that, my claim to a kind of cultural capital – indeed, citizenship – usually denied to a scion of central European Jewish immigrants. I never really thought about what that connection to history really meant, or what might be my responsibility to it.
Malachy was the illustrious ancestor whose grave I visited in Halifax’s Old Burying Ground when I was out East and, when I moved to the US in 2005 (reversing his trajectory more than two centuries later) I made a point of visiting the graves of four generations of his family in Boston’s King’s Chapel Burying Ground. Malachy fascinated me and, as a historian, I dug deeper and deeper into his history, until one document stopped me in my tracks.
It was a receipt in the Dalton Family Papers at the University of Michigan for a sale by my illustrious ancestor to a fellow Boston merchant. It reads: “Boston Novr. 14. 1749. Recd. of Capt. James Dalton One hundred & Eighty Five pounds old tenor in full for a Negro Boy sold him this day at Publick Vendue — £ 185 – Malachy Salter, junr.”
In the family stories, there had been occasional mentions of a “servant” in the grand house overlooking Halifax harbor named Susanna, like Malachy’s wife Susanna Mulberry, but I never thought to ask if she had been an employee or… property. Shortly after, I came across a letter from Malachy to his wife Susanna in 1759, who was then visiting family in Boston. He complains about his slave Jack, “a deceitful villain” on whom he must “exercise the catt or the stick almost every day.” And would Susanna “pray buy a negro boy” while she was there, in the event that he must dispose of Jack?
Canadians like to think about the history of African slavery in our country even less than Americans do. We celebrate the fact that Sir John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant Governor, and simultaneously a hero north of the border and a villain south of it, emancipated African slaves in Upper Canada (today’s Ontario) in 1793, with the rest of the British Empire following by 1833. Typically, we regard the institution of slavery as an aberration, an uncommon, infrequent occurrence. Yet, here was my distinguished ancestor, writing to his wife, expressing his love – “I find it hard for a man to be alone, I am weary of life without you” – and listing all the things that she should buy in Boston: “… a half a barrel of good beef, & some butter, some nutts, green pepper” and while you’re at it dear, can you pick up a slave?
It seems like such a mundane transaction, and that is what makes the letter so chilling. Today, I now know of five people whom my ancestor owned: Jack, a woman named Hagar whom he mentions in his letter, the “servant” named Susanna, the unnamed human being whom Mrs. Salter doubtless bought in Boston in 1759, and the unnamed boy who Malachy sold to Captain Dalton at a public auction in 1749.
As if this was not enough to send a chill up my spine, I had to confront the most difficult truth of all: Malachy Salter was a merchant. Specifically, he was a shipowner who, like his friends John Hancock in Boston, and Joshua Maugher in Halifax, plied the trade between Britain, North America, the Caribbean, and back again: The sharp point of the 18th century triangular trade. Malachy imported rum to Boston, where he was also an investor in a distillery, and he owned the largest sugar house in Halifax.
His fortune was tied up with the plantations of Jamaica and Barbados, and even if he was a not a full-time slave trader like his friend Maugher, it is beyond the realm of possibility that he did not transport slaves in his ships. In the 18th century, after all, African slaves were a valuable commodity, and Malachy was, more than anything, a businessman whose livelihood was dependent on delivering commodities to the home market.
This fact has been in my thoughts over the past couple of weeks, as I listened to the righteous voices in social media condemn the recently-deceased Queen of Great Britain for her wealth “built in the slave trade.” I reflected that my own family was not so unlike the Windsors, in that respect; while the bulk of Malachy’s great fortune evaporated at his death in 1781, as his descendants scattered across Canada, and returned to Britain, it was nonetheless built, to some extent, in the slave trade.
My illustrious ancestor, the anchor of my claim to cultural citizenship, was a slaveholder and a slave trader. My personal connection to the history of North America is a connection to a historical obscenity: the centuries-long enslavement of African men, women, and children, whose violence has left deep scars to this day.
We might no longer have Malachy’s great house in Halifax or the financial proceeds of his Caribbean shipping business but, for six or seven generations, members of his family have enjoyed status and opportunities that built upon that wealth and freedom denied to the progeny of Jack, Hagar, Susanna, and all the unnamed. We attended Dalhousie, McGill, and Harvard University, and became lawyers, physicians, scholars and entrepreneurs; they toiled in the great house and in the townhouse off of Summer Street, scraped what livings they could in Halifax’s Africville slum, or they were sold to men like Captain Dalton, and sold again, and then again down the river to the plantations.
I find myself asking what my responsibility is to them, indeed what are my obligations to the past, to the present that it created, and to the future that will follow. Yet my ruminations go well beyond that; if even the Jewish-Canadian grandson of immigrants from Central Europe must confront the legacy of slavery, then how broadly is my responsibility shared?
No part of the former European slave empires – Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain – was untainted by slavery. Few of us whose family trees have roots in any of the great European colonial powers of the 17th and 18th centuries can claim innocence. The mere fact of that genealogy makes us – including Queen Elizabeth’s righteous accusers – complicit in a system of horror, oppression, and genocide that not only informed the past, but defines the present.
It is embodied in the urban geographies of the 21st century, where every city has its black neighborhoods and its “good neighborhoods,” and where central issues of our politics revolve around how to draw electoral maps to maintain racial hierarchies. We encounter it in our culture, where even to this day, race marks the dividing line between the high and the low, between promise and peril, between “civilization” and “savagery.” Our public institutions and schools were funded by the slave trade and built by enslaved labor; we manage our investments in financial institutions like BNY Mellon, ING, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, and Lloyds, that originally built their capital underwriting the traffic in human lives. The history of slavery lives in every corner of the present and it touches everything.
It is a legacy that many of us would rather forget or sweep under the carpet, like when Ben Affleck asked the producers of PBS’s Finding Your Roots to suppress the evidence that his great-great-great-grandfather was a slaveholder. Others will express their horror, shrug thoughtfully, and insist that “that’s just the way it was back then,” as an anodyne for our shared complicity, insisting that we have left that shameful past behind. They will accuse the worst offenders, tear down their monuments, and put the sordid past behind us as we march hand-in-hand to Martin Luther King Jr.’s mountaintop.
The American right is determined to make us forget altogether, to immerse our culture in Lethe and make the past disappear. If they can silence history, they reason, then they can empty our collective memories of any trauma. In its assault on what it calls “critical race theory,” the right seeks to sugarcoat the past to save the tender feelings of their white constituents. And at this moment, with the Party of Trump controlling almost two-thirds of American state houses and likely to sweep to a Congressional majority in November’s elections on a tide of gerrymandering, vote suppression, white grievance, and lies, they appear to be winning.
Rosh Hashana begins tonight. It marks the beginning of a new year of possibilities and opportunities, but also a ten-day period of reflection and atonement culminating on Yom Kippur on 10 Tishrei (5 October this year in the Gregorian calendar). Kipur (atonement) in Jewish tradition is not merely a confession of a transgression; it must be followed by true repentance and a sincere effort to make amends and restitution; and the person whom we offended is under no obligation to accept our apology. Atonement is accomplished through real, concrete effort, and not sentiment alone. It is not enough, in other words, to merely say “I’m sorry.”
I recognize that no apology can ever make up for the sins of our collective past. On a personal level, there is no way that I can make up for the beatings and abuse that Malachy Salter visited on Jack, Hagar, Susanna, and the unnamed others, nor can I wipe away more than two centuries of their descendants’ hardships. But I can begin my repentance by acknowledging my complicity and ensure that the crimes are never forgotten, and I can work with all my energy to oppose the American right’s agenda of amnesia, and I can use all the means at my disposal to ensure reparations for the sins of our forefathers. Indeed, we all can.
We have a collective responsibility for our history, and to fully atone for the transgressions of the past. It will never be enough, but that should not allow us to abjure this obligation. At the center of the Yom Kippur service is the Al Chet prayer, where we rise as a community to confess our sins and begin the process of teshuvah and kipur. This year, we should, Gentile and Jew, say our Al Chet together:
For the sin which we have committed before You under duress or willingly.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by hard-heartedness.
For the sin which we have committed before You inadvertently…
And for the sins committed by our forbears that live on in the world today.
For all these, pardon us, forgive us, atone for us.
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Image: Detail of Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slavers: The Slave Ship, 1840.