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27 - Choosing Ancestors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2021

Alasdair Pettinger
Affiliation:
Scottish Music Centre
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Summary

Douglass's occasional claim to be of Scottish descent was playful and not meant to be taken literally, exploiting a pun offered by the historical existence of a ‘Black Douglas’. But some other American slaves did not have to invent a Scottish ancestry. One such was Lewis Clarke, who begins his autobiography thus:

I was born in March, as near as I can ascertain, in the year 1815, in Madison county, Kentucky, about seven miles from Richmond, upon the plantation of my grandfather, Samuel Campbell. He was considered a very respectable man, among his fellow-robbers, the slaveholders. It did not render him less honorable in their eyes, that he took to his bed Mary, his slave, perhaps half white, by whom he had one daughter, Letitia Campbell. This was before his marriage.

My father was from ‘beyond the flood’ – from Scotland, and by trade a weaver. He had been married in his own country, and lost his wife, who left to him, as I have been told, two sons. He came to this country in time to be in the earliest scenes of the American revolution. He was at the battle of Bunker Hill, and continued in the army to the close of the war. About the year 1800, or before, he came to Kentucky, and married Miss Letitia Campbell, then held as a slave by her dear and affectionate father. My father died, as near as I can recollect, when I was about ten or twelve years of age. He had received a wound in the war, which made him lame as long as he lived. I have often heard him tell of Scotland, sing the merry songs of his native land, and long to see its hills once more.

Given that Campbell is an unmistakably Scottish name, this passage indicates that three of Clarke's grandparents were of Scots descent. Lewis Clarke was widely, if over-enthusiastically, believed to be the model for George Harris in Uncle Tom's Cabin (and Clarke certainly made the most of the association). But he is not mentioned anywhere in Duncan A. Bruce's bestselling The Mark of the Scots, a book which lists famous people of Scots ancestry in an attempt to demonstrate – as its subtitle has it – ‘their astonishing contributions to history, science, democracy, literature and the arts’, as if the nation were somehow vindicated by a careful selection of its talented progeny.

Type
Chapter
Information
Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846
Living an Antislavery Life
, pp. 277 - 288
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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