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Bush and Africa.
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A common background
Presidents Bush, Mark Twain and the legacy of slavery -- A lesson for Black History Month Saturday, February 2, 2002 By Terrell Dempsey For the Courier-Post This is a tale of slavery, Mark Twain and two American Presidents for Black History Month.In May 1845, Samuel Clemens, the boy who would become Mark Twain, was 9 years old. His father John Marshall Clemens was down and out. Though he had practiced law in Kentucky and Tennessee, he was not an attorney in Hannibal. The only income the family had was the meager fees he received for hearing small cases in the tiny city court - a non-attorney position he held. It was a part-time job at best.John Marshall Clemens was pretty much at rock bottom financially in 1845. He and his wife Jane had sold off the last of the six slaves with whom they had begun married life. He had sold everything else he owned to satisfy his creditors. He could not find a buyer for the large tract of rocky land he owned in Tennessee, so he took a job. On May 5, that year, he wrote to his daughter Pamela who was visiting friends in Florida, Mo.:"I have removed my office of Justice to Messrs McCune & Holliday's counting room where I have taken Mr. Dame's place as clerk - I did not succeed in making such arrangements as would enable me to go into business advantageously on my own acct - and thought it best therefore not to attempt it at present."John Marshall Clemens may well have known the Holliday family from his time in Florida, Mo. His brother-in-law, John Quarles, still lived in Monroe County. Clemens had served on the Monroe County Commission, (then called the county court), before moving to Hannibal in 1839. While John Marshall Clemens had been a business failure, fortune had smiled on Joseph Holliday. Joseph had evidently gone into business with his in-laws. His wife's maiden name was McCune. With his sons, he built up a commission merchant business in Monroe County.The business maintained an office in Hannibal that was overseen by Joseph's son John James Holliday in the mid-1840s. It was in that office Sam Clemens's father clerked and conducted his court. The Hollidays brought groceries and goods up the Mississippi River by steamboat and then shipped them by wagon to Monroe County.The Holliday family is important not just for the job they provided to the Clemens family in time of need. John James Holliday's daughter Nancy was born in Hannibal in 1847. She is the great-grandmother of former President George Herbert Walker Bush and great-great-grandmother of President George W. Bush. She lived until 1942 in St. Louis. The elder President Bush turned 18 that year.Joseph Holliday, like many Northeast Missourians in the days before the Civil War, kept the majority of his money in two assets that were immune from the shaky banking system of the time - land and slaves. In 1850 Holliday owned 10 slaves. By 1860, his human wealth had grown to 16 slaves. Twelve of the slaves in 1860 were identified by the census taker as mulatto or mixed race. It is of course difficult to determine who fathered those slaves, though one must bear in mind the observation of Mary Chesnut, famous southern Civil War diarist and wife of South Carolina Senator James Chesnut:"God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."Joseph Holliday lived until 1870, five years after Missouri slaves were finally set free in 1865. Although he amended his will in 1867, slaves still figured prominently in the will. They were listed because they had already been given or sold to his children during his lifetime. In one of history's little twisted ironies, the Bush ancestor John James Holliday had been given a slave named "Walker" whom he had sold. John James Holliday's granddaughter would marry into a Walker family and two American presidents would carry the Walker name into the White House.The white Holliday family prospered. A town was named in their honor in 1872. Holliday, Missouri was a stop on the Hannibal and Central Missouri Line, later part of the MKT Railroad, better known as the Katy.Some descendants of the Holliday slaves, many of whom took the name Holliday, still live in Monroe County. They are hard-working people. Patricia Louise Holliday Minter is the living matriarch of one branch. She remembers her grandfather Del Holliday. No one knows exactly when he was born nor much about his family's experiences in slavery. There were two things people of his generation did not talk about: slavery and the white folks to whom they were related. It is clear that the black Hollidays lived a very different life than the white descendants of the Hollidays."My grandmother and grandfather could not read or write," Mrs. Minter recalls. She remembers her grandfather as a quiet man who would sit in the corner by himself. He did not seem to enjoy life. "He acted like a slave," she said.Mrs. Minter's father, Delbert Holliday, was born in 1901, one of 16 children. "My father had a few years of school. He had what he called common education. He could read and write."Mrs. Minter, born in 1941, attended her first year of high school in Hannibal. Though she lived in Monroe City, African American students were bused to the all-black Douglass High School 21 miles away in Hannibal. Then the State of Missouri complied with the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and she finished at Monroe City High School. Ironically she says she learned more in the segregated school where teachers had higher expectations of the students.George W. Bush was born in 1946. Despite low grades, he was able to get into Yale as a "legacy student," one of the spots reserved for children of alumni. After being denied admission to the University of Texas Law School because of his low LSAT scores and undergraduate grades, he was admitted to Harvard Business School. As a private school, Harvard could overlook his academic shortcomings and look instead at his family's social standing and political power. Just as Mrs. Minter's race charted the course of her education, the Bush family's prestige opened doors for the president-to-be.Mrs. Minter's father did just about any kind of work he could find in Monroe City. He was a butcher, sheared sheep and planted gardens for people. He had 14 children to feed and clothe. "We were poor," Mrs. Minter says, "but we lived middle class. We had plenty to eat and good clean clothes. Momma washed on a washboard in the back yard. We were spotless."The White House descendants of the former slave masters invested in oil, went to ivy-league schools, and engaged in the rich gentleman's sport of national politics. George W. Bush owned a professional baseball team.Mrs. Minter has no complaints about her life in Monroe City where she has lived her entire life. She says she never had to go in any back doors and could always sit wherever she wanted in the movie theater. She is proud that her mother or father could give her a note to take to the grocer and he would give her the items on credit knowing that her parents would pay the bill.Mrs. Minter has worked since she was 11 years old. As a child she babysat for a white family. In exchange they paid for her lunches at school and gave her a little spending money. Today she still works for the same family. She sits with the mother of the children she babysat. Hers is a fine legacy, but very different from the legacy of the Holliday descendant in the White House.And so a hardworking African American family, two American presidents, America's greatest writer and America's cruelest failure - slavery - are tied together in Missouri history - two branches from a tree named Holliday with two very different legacies. The irony would not have been lost on Mark Twain. He explored the vagaries of race and birth in his book Pudd'nhead Wilson where a mixed-race slave changes her own baby for the master's child. Her child grows up in privilege while the master's son grows up in poverty and ignorance.We call it Black History Month, but that is not really true. It is actually American History Month. Slavery and the echoing racism touch us all.(Special thanks to Barbara Schmidt of Tarleton State University and Vic Fischer of the Mark Twain Project. Without them this story would have lay hidden in the dust of history. Thanks also to Patricia Minter, Guy and Sandy Callison of Holliday, Missouri and Sam Akers, mayor of Holliday for their assistance and gracious hospitality.) All contents
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