Slavery

Margaret Seidler was researching her family's history in a library archive and discovered a shocking secret. A member of her family was a prominent figure in the buying and selling of enslaved African people in the early 1800s.  Margaret went public and wrote a book about her discovery of this history. When she encouraged other families with similar histories to go public as well, she met fierce resistance. 

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Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When We Disagree is a show about arguments. How we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. What does a persuasive message sound like? In other words, if you really wanted to be convincing, how should you use your voice to maximum effect? Should you speak softly or loudly?

Michael Lee: Slowly or quickly, with a high or a deep voice, with no ums at all, or with some ums and likes and you knows and pauses scattered throughout. In much of the literature on vocal impact on audience's perceptions of trust and affinity, one vocal quality stands out as effective. Variability. Think about how you sound when you're enjoying a conversation with a close friend.

Michael Lee: Your tone goes up and down. Your volume changes. Your speed goes up and down. And you use your voice naturally to highlight, embolden, even to underline key [00:01:00] phrases. You draw attention with your voice. You're likely far from monotone, and you signal your pleasure about enjoying this conversation you're in, as well as your comfort and confidence with how your voice sounds, not necessarily the exact words you're saying.

Michael Lee: Some researchers, and this is kind of hard to quantify, though some have tried very hard, Have even suggested that the sound of a speaker's voice can account for nearly 50 percent of an audience's response to a message. And this is not just a modern preoccupation. What was then called elocution or how to speak clearly, effectively, and persuasively was a formal course of study in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Michael Lee: And it's much older than that as well. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, the oldest surviving book on persuasion from 2, 000 years ago, included delivery as one of the five canons of rhetoric, an ancient checklist for making a great speech. I'm Michael [00:02:00] Lee, Professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston.

Michael Lee: Our guest today on When We Disagree is Margaret Seidler. She's a retired leadership and organization development consultant who specialized in conflict management and polarizing issues. She's been retired since 2020, and she recently published her second book, Painful Business, Charleston's Journey to Truth.

Michael Lee: Tell us an argument story. 

Margaret Seidler: Well, first off, Mike, thank you so much for having me today. And it's so exciting that you're heading the civility initiative at the College of Charleston because my story actually has a deep ancestral connection to the college. The topic of the disagreement is about historical research that I did around my family here.

Margaret Seidler: And so what I've done is I found myself in square in the middle of a conflict that I never imagined that I would ever be a part of. So, [00:03:00] the disagreement for me is about how people respond differently to hard truths, and the conflict that it creates within me. And I really am not sure, since this is so personal, how to handle it, so I'm hoping maybe you'll have some insight for me today.

Margaret Seidler: We'll get this 

Michael Lee: solved very quickly for you, I'm sure. Well, thank you. Yeah, no worries. 

Margaret Seidler: So, just as background, um. In 2018, I made a family discovery of my fourth great grandfather here in Charleston that I knew nothing about, that my mother and my grandmother here had never spoken about, who was, in fact, the biggest slave trader, the biggest human trafficker in Charleston in the first three decades of the 19th century.

Margaret Seidler: Um, I've actually documented that he, he advertised the sale of over 9, 000 people in his 30 year career. And so this truth about my family, because I [00:04:00] thought my family was working class. I had no imagination that they were wealthy brokers on Charleston's historic business district on Broad Street. And so what it did is I went through the information, and as I did it, actually created a newfound empathy in me.

Margaret Seidler: And, and really drove an openness about things that I'd never even considered in my hometown, because I always believed that my family was exempt from this stain of slavery. So as I was telling my friends about my discoveries in the newspaper ads that I was finding online, I got some really different responses.

Margaret Seidler: I was finding new cousins that are predominantly white, that are of European descent. Um, I was also finding descendants that are here today from other very large slave trading firms that took over after William Payne died in 1833. [00:05:00] So what I did initially is I worked on a marker at 34 Broad Street to talk about the fact that people were being sold in those buildings.

Margaret Seidler: We were never told that as Charlestonians. It really wasn't very much discussed. So in my research, one of the things that I, I found, we had a graduate student here at the College of Charleston who was then in public history. She's now working on her doctorate. She found the ad in the newspaper for the largest advertised slave auction in the domestic, and by that I mean these are not people coming over on ships.

Margaret Seidler: These are people and families living here in the urban area of Charleston, living all around South Carolina, also living, many living on plantations. Um, and this was the firm of Jervie, Waring, and White. And so I decided that if it was important to bridge the racial divide, to make a more complete truth in search of [00:06:00] people of African descent here, knowing that white people can own their families.

Margaret Seidler: actions and that it does have that impact of bringing people together, I decided to do genealogy on the descendants of Jervie Waring and White. So I found that Alonzo James White was actually a member of the College of Charleston's Board of Trustees and a prominent member. And I also found that he was the biggest slave trader in Charleston upon William Payne's death in 1833.

Margaret Seidler: And so as I went to descendants of Alonzo White, many of these people are people that my family has known for my whole life or people that I've known who they are. And I looked them up and I contacted them and I told them about Or asked them first, I asked them, did they know about Alonzo James White?

Margaret Seidler: And they [00:07:00] said, no, I don't think I've ever heard that name. And I said, well, he was the father of Martha Alston Buist. And they said, oh, we didn't know that her name was ever white. So these are people that really stand firmly on our history here, our family genealogy, and they're always sharing. what their families have done for the Charleston community, the positive things that they've done.

Margaret Seidler: So they were all, each, and I called them individually, and they were all in shock. Nobody had ever been told about Alonzo White, that he was, uh, the biggest slave trader, human trafficker in Charleston's history. And so it's the responses that I have gotten that are varied, that has created this conflict in me.

Margaret Seidler: About how hard do I choose to push people coming forward in the community in a way that allows us to [00:08:00] bring the racial divide and close it. 

Michael Lee: Just to make sure I understand the lineage, you discover that William Payne has enslaved and sold 9, 000 human beings in the first several decades. Of the 19th century.

Michael Lee: Is that right? And that, and he would have been a grandfather to you many times ever fourth grade grandfather. And up till that point, you thought, as you said, that your family had been exempt from the mass enslavement and Charleston central role in mass enslavement in the 19th century and before, what was that like for you to make that discovery?

Michael Lee: And then second, how, why did you believe that your family was exempt from mass enslavement? 

Margaret Seidler: Well, let me answer the second question first. Um, being from Charleston's east side, not in the, the beautiful historic district, um, we always [00:09:00] were told that our, we were from Germans that had come here in the 1850s.

Margaret Seidler: Hmm. And that my, my grandfather had a third grade education, he was a bricklayer. So, although I went to school with a lot of the kids from the historic area, we didn't have any of those names that visitors might see when they come to Charleston, like Pinckney or Middleton and that sort of thing. So, I just had no belief that we were in it because we didn't have the money.

Margaret Seidler: I mean, my mother's family really, we didn't really talk about that side of the family much. So when I found out, which was through an archive at the College of Charleston's, um, South Carolina Historical Society's archive at the College of Charleston's library, um, I got down on my knees and just 

Michael Lee: What? How did you feel in that moment?

Michael Lee: I mean, obviously, stigma, the shame, the power to know this, this [00:10:00] person's kind of central role in this. But for you and your story of yourself, your story of your family, the kind of sense that you've made of who you are and where you've come from. What was that moment like?

Margaret Seidler: It hurt so deep that I screamed from my toes. Mm. And And given that the Mother Emanuel AME church massacre had happened just three years before this discovery, where a young white supremacist had gone in and murdered nine parishioners while they were praying in Bible study, um, that had really impacted.

Margaret Seidler: impacted me and impacted my husband Bob, and we'd done a lot in the community and so we were attending a predominantly African American church when I found this out. So I don't know that I've ever had such a deep pain, and I don't mean to have a pun [00:11:00] using the word pain. 

Michael Lee: Is it fair to say that you had a kind of powerful reckoning with a past that you didn't know You came from and then you'd like others who were in similar positions, whether they, whether through ignorance of their own past or that they've willfully turned a blind eye to their own past.

Michael Lee: You'd like for others to have that same kind of a reckoning. 

Margaret Seidler: I would, because I see the, yes, you're absolutely on track. I think that the reckoning. is the, the secret sauce to building bridges across differences about 

Michael Lee: Let's stay there for a second. Say more about that. What, what is the kind of chain of causality you're stretching out there that the reckoning is the way that bridges are built across lines of difference racially and otherwise?

Margaret Seidler: Well, if I, if I can reckon with and through a newfound [00:12:00] empathy, try and step into the shoes of someone who's had a very different life experience for me as a Charlestonian, simply because of the color of their skin and everything that that impacts, whether it's education, healthcare, um, opportunities in the private sector, you name it, education, I mean, just everything.

Margaret Seidler: And so I just believe that the more people can own, people like me who are white, predominantly white, can own The past, then it enables the person who suffered the past to be able to reduce their weariness, their level of distrust, their perhaps anger or resentment that they hold with them today so that we can move forward together as a country.

Michael Lee: Do you think that there's so many people who refuse to acknowledge what their families had [00:13:00] done in the 19th century, and so they can sort of wipe their hands of slavery and say, well, we had nothing to do with that. And it's that refusal to acknowledge what really happened within their own families, within their own lineages, that prevents the possibility of racial progress, or at least in part.

Margaret Seidler: I think it is that sort of refusal. I think it's what's under that refusal that really matters. Uh huh. Um, one of my mentors said to me many years ago that, you know, um, anger, refusal, whatever you want to call it, floats on a sea of fear. And I think that's what's under it, whether it's a fear that, um, that they'll have to say for the first time that their ancestors, while maybe they had some great ancestors, They have some despicable ancestors.

Margaret Seidler: Maybe they have to say that I'm not from the most [00:14:00] wonderful family in this country that I thought I was from, that there are different parts of my family, some that are abhorrent. 

Michael Lee: Well, and there's a material context too, I imagine that many of the folks you're talking about are folks that have materially benefited from free enslaved labor, from the sale of other human beings.

Michael Lee: Or from goods produced and traded by people who weren't being paid. 

Margaret Seidler: Great wealth. And the thing is about my family is because we weren't, um, of this big group downtown that when the Civil War was over, they had all these, and my grandmother had told me this and I never made sense of it until just, you know, until I learned this a few years ago.

Margaret Seidler: She told me as a child, and she was born in 1882, that she would go up in the attic and play with their barrels of Confederate money. Wow. So the Payne family went [00:15:00] from extraordinarily wealthy to broke. 

Michael Lee: Yeah, that's basically kindling after the war. 

Margaret Seidler: Exactly. And so these other families that are descendants of Jervie Waring and White, they were all connected to professional businesses and people in addition to the slave trade.

Margaret Seidler: So they were able, on certain sides of their family, to maintain their wealth. It's just this one part or this one part of their family that went broke. 

Michael Lee: You said this line that really stuck with me, anger floats on a sea of fear. So much of what you're talking about is about anger, but so much of what you're talking about is about avoidance as their.

Michael Lee: Avoidance with their own past and, and perhaps an avoidance too directly with the way the past continues to influence the present in terms of the material conditions we were just talking about. What does avoidance float on? What is that avoidance motivated by? 

Margaret Seidler: [00:16:00] Well, I've thought about it and I think maybe it's shame, um, maybe feeling less than, maybe having their status shattered.

Margaret Seidler: Um, you know, I worked in conflict resolution for over 20, 20 years, and basically when I look at conflict resolution, there are certain choices you can make, and the most, the most ineffective or the least effective choice in the long run is avoidance, um. Inavoidance is like playing that game whack a mole, right?

Margaret Seidler: You know, you might whack it down with a mallet and it pops up somewhere else. And so I have been fortunate in my Practice in my in my business that I learned how to to deal with things head on So I have turned this this [00:17:00] pain into hope. I just don't think that most people have the skill sets that, that you and I walk around with, okay?

Margaret Seidler: I think that's a small percentage of people that work in the field. of conflict. And so this is sort of new to me. And, and this is where maybe you can give me some advice because I'd love it. Is what do you do in the face of conflict where you really don't have necessarily any influence over that person privately?

Michael Lee: What is your hope when you make one of these kind of confrontations where you approach somebody and say, I've discovered these painful truths about your family's past? Then let's, let's just create a hypothetical person whose last name is Jervie Waring or White. Okay. Right. And you just make a discovery that they were a prominent enslaver, slave trader in the 1840s, hypothetically.[00:18:00] 

Michael Lee: And they auctioned a thousand human beings over the course of the 1840s on a street here in Charleston. And you go to them and you say, here's the discovery. What's what's the ideal response from them for you?

Margaret Seidler: Well, thank you for that question. That's the question I've been looking for that I didn't have And I just it's thank you. This is a great question. And so for me what just bubbles up is I'm asking them to put community over self I'm asking them to recognize the valuable, unique role that they can play in making this a community better for all of us, and I have never been able to articulate it till right now, and that is what I'm really asking them to do, is to put it forward.

Margaret Seidler: Community over [00:19:00] self. 

Michael Lee: Margaret Seidler, thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. Thank you. When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at whenwedisagree at gmail. com