An antebellum literature scholar’s diary on the Alabama Humanities Alliance’s Healing History initiative, shared descent, and the Cabaniss manumission papers
Drove out to Eutaw this week for one of the Alabama Humanities Alliance’s Healing History gatherings, part of their broader initiative bringing together people doing history work across the state ahead of the nation’s two hundred fiftieth anniversary next year. Found myself at a folding table with genealogy charts spread between two families, one Black and one white, both descended from the same plantation two centuries back, comparing notes with a directness I genuinely wasn’t prepared for.
What Actually Happened At That Table
Both families had done real archival digging, one tracing an enslaved great-great-grandmother, the other tracing the family that had enslaved her, and they’d apparently been corresponding for over a year before this convening finally put them in the same room. Watching them compare specific dates and names, filling gaps in each other’s records, was considerably more moving than any lecture I could have prepared for the occasion.
How This Connects To My Own Current Research
I’ve been working with the digitized Cabaniss papers, a Civil War era attorney who served as executor for a plantation owner’s estate specifically because that owner wanted to manumit and leave property to the people he’d enslaved, a genuinely rare intention for the period that generated a legal paper trail worth serious study. Sitting at that table in Eutaw made those documents feel considerably less abstract than they typically do on a screen.
Why This Kind Of Convening Matters Beyond The Individual Stories
Because the archive alone can’t do reconciliation work, it can only supply the material for people willing to do that work themselves. The Alliance’s stated goal, bringing together people doing similar history work who might not otherwise know of each other’s efforts, sounds modest on paper and turned out to be genuinely transformative in that actual room.
Where I’m Taking This Going Forward
Reworking my own presentation of the Cabaniss material specifically to include living descendant voices wherever I can locate them, treating the documents not as closed historical record but as an ongoing, unfinished conversation between families still very much alive today.