Prolific Yankee Overseers
From: bernhard1848@att.net
It may be inferred from the following that Southern planters were well-advised to keep a good distance between their slave women and Northerners—-Sherman’s war criminals also thought little of the chastity of black women. The senior Roswell King was from Windsor, Connecticut and passed his Georgia-made fortune and slaves on to his son, also named Roswell. Roswell the Younger was very fond of slave women and fathered at least five mulattoes by four black women. King was right though about slavery’s demise if it became unprofitable, and control of this was more in the hands of the New England slave-traders, textile mill owners and British merchants than the Southern planter. Without a market for cotton produced by slaves (introduced by the British), the South might have become slave-free. Thanks to Billy Day for this reference.
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
Wilmington, North Carolina
www.cfhi.net
Prolific Yankee Overseers:
“For many years the two Roswell Kings, father and son, had jointly or separately supervised the vast Georgia estates of Pierce Butler in Glynn County, where the English actress Frances Anne Kemble had lived briefly in the 1830’s…
Miss Kemble detailed “a most interesting conversation” with Roswell King in which they discussed the institution of slavery:
“You may be sure I listened with infinite interest to the opinions of a man of uncommon shrewdness and sagacity, who was born in the very bosom of it, and had passed his whole life among slaves. If anyone is competent to judge of its effects, such a man is one; and this was his verdict: “I hate slavery with all my heart; I consider it an absolute curse wherever it exists. It will keep those States where it does exist fifty years behind the others in improvement and prosperity…As for it being an irremediable evil—a thing not to be helped or got rid of—that’s all nonsense;
For as soon as people become convinced that it is their interest to get rid of it, they will soon find the means to do so, depend on it.”
Miss Kemble then went on to relate how “the all-efficient and all-satisfactory Mr. King” took Betty, a married Negro, as his concubine and fathered by her a son “whose straight features and diluted color, no less than his troublesome, discontented and insubmissive disposition, bear witness to his Yankee descent. Elsewhere she spoke of a lad “whose extremely light color and straight, handsome features and striking resemblance to Mr. King suggested suspicions of a rather unpleasant nature to me, and whose sole acknowledged parent was a very black Negress of the name Minda. I have no doubt at all now that he is another son of Mr. King…” Whatever the truth of Miss Kemble’s assertions, the gravestone of Roswell King in Midway Cemetery pronounces him to have been “a good citizen, an upright man, and a most devoted husband and father.”
(The Children of Pride, A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, Robert Manson Myers, Yale University Press, 1972, pp. 23- 24)
