Stories about my Father 5
My great-grandfather was named for a Confederate Civil War general who was killed in the Battle of Shiloh. My father was then, in turn, named for him.
General Albert Sidney Johnston was considered by the Confederate States President Jefferson Davis to be the finest military officer in the Confederacy before Robert E. Lee rose and took his place. When he was younger, he fought as a private in the Texas War of Independence. By the following year, he was a Brigadier General in the Republic of Texas’s army. He was then appointed to the US army by President Zachary Taylor.
In 1857, then-President James Buchannan sent US troops to Utah to remove the Mormon leader Brigham Young from the governorship of the territory. Johnston led the forces in what came to be known as the Utah War.
The Mormons had moved west in the hopes that they could preserve their freedom to worship as they pleased by isolating themselves. They settled over a large area of land that no other white settlers were all that interested in, and it all was going according to plan until gold was discovered in California. When that happened, hordes of prospectors headed west through Mormon territory. The LDS church proposed that a big area of land that encompasses much of present-day Arizona and Utah as well as parts of eastern California, and other states be admitted to the union as the State of Deseret. They wanted to be part of the United States, but they wanted to be able to govern themselves under church leadership. Congress created the Utah territory, still covering a substantial area but only about half the size of the previously proposed one. President Millard Filmore appointed Young as its Governor.
The LDS church at the time believed in plural marriage. Nearly a quarter of all members of the Latter-Day Saints were part of polygamous households. The practice remained an integral part of church doctrine until 1890.
Yes, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole, but stick with me for a minute.
At the time that all of this was happening, the Republican party formed. The Democratic party believed in the basic principle of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty is the belief that everyone has the right to rule over themselves. Groups of individuals can band together and choose someone to represent them and the views they hold in common in government. That person agrees to govern according to the will of the people. In the mid-1850s, as the country expanded, what people were arguing about were the two issues of slavery and polygamy.
Slavery was obviously a very divisive issue. It led to the Civil War. States and newly formed territories wanted to retain the right to choose for themselves whether it was allowed. There were many, however, who believed that slavery anywhere was immoral and should be banned on a federal level. During the 1856 election, the newly formed Republican party successfully campaigned by intertwining the issue of slavery that some people wanted, and some didn’t with the issue of polygamy which almost nobody wanted, and putting them both under the banner of popular sovereignty. A vote for the Democrats was made to seem like a vote for polygamy. The Republicans won.
Remember that 170 years ago the Democrats and Republicans were almost completely reversed in what they believed in. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. Nobody in the Republican party these days believes in anything that Abraham Lincoln or the founders of their party stood for.
James Buchannan won the presidency and in true present-day Democratic fashion was alarmed by any territory being governed by church doctrine. He sent General Albert Sidney Johnston out west to stop it. He did and installed Alfred Cumming in Young’s place.
Nearly 170 years later, nothing on this ideological front has changed very much. We are still fighting over the idea of states’ rights vs. federal legislation. It is still as divisive now as it was then.
While all of this was going on, my great-great-grandfather John Chesley Hester was farming in Alabama. He was in his twenties. He owned, by my father’s guess, two or three enslaved families who worked the farm. He was married to a woman named Mary Ann King. My grandfather’s twin sister Mary told my father that she had visited them once. “The house was crowded with visitors and numerous family. Mary had to sleep on a crude mattress filled with straw. She did not like her grandmother. She said she was mean and ignorant.” John and Mary had twelve kids and, as my father pointed out, “Bringing up all those children probably didn’t make her any sweeter.”
During the Civil War, “Chess,” as John Chesley was called, fought with General Johnston. Johnston was a firm believer in the institution of slavery. He referred to abolitionism as, “fanatical, idolatrous, negro worshipping.” After the war, Johnston’s widow Eliza lived happily in California where there were far fewer people of color than she had been used to in the South. She wrote, “where the darky is in any numbers it should be as slaves.” I am sure she would have had plenty to chat about out with my great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann King.
On April 6, 1852, Johnston surprised General Ulysses Grant with an all-out attack in what came to be called the Battle of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee. During the fighting, he was hit by a bullet behind his right knee but kept going. About an hour later, he died. The bullet had nicked an artery and he bled to death.
My great-grandfather was born a year and a half later, on Christmas Day, “in the last year of the war,” as he told my father, and was named Albert Sidney Hester in honor of the fallen general.
After the war, some of the people who had been slaves on the Hester farm stayed on as sharecroppers. What else were they going to do? They worked the fields alongside Chess and Mary Ann and all their children. Cotton was the crop that they grew to sell, but they also cultivated food for themselves - both vegetables and livestock. Everybody had to work. The only schooling any of the Hester children got was over a six-week period in the summer while everything was growing. This gave them a rudimentary ability to read and write and a basic facility with numbers.
When he was about 13, my great-grandfather got his hand caught in a cotton gin. A cotton gin had a rotating core with sharp tines that separated the cotton from the pods it grew in. His hand was mangled and permanently disfigured. Chess decided that Albert would be unfit to continue farming so he sent him to school.
That decision changed his life. That decision changed the direction of every life that followed down that branch of the family including mine. From almost no education at all, my great-grandfather, alone among his twelve siblings, was sent off to boarding school where he would eventually learn enough to go to law school in Birmingham, Alabama. That meant that my grandfather would go to college, my father would go to college and so would I.
The only time my father remembers his grandfather alluding to the reconstruction period following the Civil War when he was growing up was after World War II when my father was trying to decide between Dewey and Truman in the national election. Albert Sr. said that you should always vote for the party, “He would always vote for the Democrats even if they put up the mule. He said that the Republicans were the only party that ever caused a war between the people in our country and afterward came down and ‘took all of our money and property away from us’.”
Remembering again, the platforms of the two parties then were opposite of what they are now.
In recent years, one of the issues we all dealt with was what should be done with all the monuments to the Confederacy that still dot the south. In 1916, the University of Texas at Austin put up several statues of confederate veterans including one of Albert Sidney Johnston. In 2017, they were all taken down. In 2018, several schools named for the general in Texas were given new names.
It’s relatively easy to take down a statue or rename a school, but what if the confederate memorial is your actual name? I imagine that my great-grandfather was proud to be named after a man he thought of as a hero. What did my father think about it? I never asked him. I didn’t even think about it until very recently. I drove into Shiloh once when I was working in Nashville or Memphis and found the spot where Johnston died. I took a picture of it and sent it to my dad. I can’t remember what his response was. My guess was that he was likely proud to be named after his grandfather and tried to ignore their common confederate predecessor.
Was my grandfather Morris trying to make his own dad happy by naming his son after him? Things were probably already tense in the law office they shared. Maybe this was a way to get on his good side?
There aren’t a lot of repeat names in our family tree. Starting with my great-great-grandfather and going back, each generation had an enormous number of children, so there was some repetition, but there are many names that only appear once. I got my middle name, Morris, from my grandfather, but I think I am the first Richard. That my father was named the same thing as an ancestor is a historical anomaly in our family.
What else traveled down with that name?
The Washington Post published an article yesterday about how robots trained using Artificial Intelligence became racist and sexist. One robot was programmed to scan pictures of people and label the ones they thought were criminal. The robot repeatedly chose a black man. When asked to assign words like “homemaker” and “janitor” to images, the robots often chose women and people of color. The programmers had consciously tried to program them without bias, but clearly, some of it slipped through. If intelligently designed robots can’t look at everyone equally, what chance do the rest of us have?
I never met my great-grandfather, but I spent a lot of time with my grandfather and my father. When Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman came out, everybody was upset because the character of Atticus Finch turned out not to be the squeaky clean, morally upstanding man that generations had come to believe he was in To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Atticus, my grandfather was a lawyer. Like Atticus, my grandfather often represented people of color. They both believed in the law whether a person was black or white. Outside the law, however, was a different matter. There were plenty of black people that my grandfather liked and admired, I just don’t think that most of them ever walked through his front door.
My grandfather’s occasional racial slur would make my father very uncomfortable, and he would usually call my grandfather on it. My father, however, was named after a slave-owning Confederate Civil War general. In some ways, through no fault of his own, he could be considered a walking, breathing racial slur. That’s not at all who my father WAS, merely what he was called.
Michael and I happened to see a performance of Hamlet the night before last at the armory. I am sure because I was thinking about it, I was struck by one of Claudius’s lines, “But, you must know, your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his…” Each subsequent generation has much the same experiences at similar times in their lives. As much as we’d like to think we are unique, we are just repeating an endless pattern. With each repletion, something gets added into the design that, in turn, we pass on. How do we take some of those flourishes out?
I would be fascinated to know if my dad ever felt or even thought about the burden of carrying his name throughout his life. My grandfather Morris - the good parts and the bad parts - I am realizing, lives on in my middle name. I’m starting to get to know him a little bit more by reading the things he wrote and listening to my father’s stories about him. How much of him is in me? I can recognize some of it. How much of who Albert Sidney Johnston was, was carried through after he died into the two men that were named for him - whether wittingly or unwittingly?
What’s in a name?