The Honest Record
Across both lines, ancestors who told the truth at a cost, and one whose diary told the truth in spite of him.
Samuel Sewall · Robert Carter III · William Byrd II
Samuel Sewall's Public Apology
★ ★ ★
Samuel Sewall was one of the nine judges who condemned people to death in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. He was the only judge who ever publicly accepted personal blame. Five years after the trials, he stood in his pew at Old South Church while his written confession was read aloud to the congregation, and stood in silence while every word was heard. The same Samuel Sewall wrote The Selling of Joseph in 1700, one of the first anti-slavery pamphlets published in America. He argued directly that enslaved Africans were fully human and that the slave trade was a moral abomination. He was publicly ridiculed for it. He published it anyway.
The Deed of Gift
★ ★ ★
Robert Carter III was the grandson of Robert "King" Carter, the most powerful planter in colonial Virginia history and a direct ancestor in this family tree. In 1791, after a religious conversion, Carter quietly filed a legal document arranging for the gradual manumission of 452 enslaved people, the largest single act of private emancipation in American history before the Civil War. He did this without fanfare and without seeking credit. Virginia society largely shunned him for it. He died in relative obscurity. The 452 people he freed have descendants alive today.
The Counterpoint Within the Family
The Deed of Gift matters because it came from within the family that built the system. A direct descendant of "King" Carter looked at the same inheritance and chose to do something entirely different with it. That tension, and that choice, is part of the honest history of this family.
Samuel Sewall's public apology, Abraham Davenport's refusal to adjourn, Robert Carter III's Deed of Gift: these are the moments where members of this family looked at the world they had inherited and pushed back against it at real personal cost. That pattern, repeated across generations and across both family lines, is one of the things worth carrying forward.
William Byrd II Writes It All Down
Our colonial ancestor and the founder of Richmond kept a diary in shorthand, for his eyes only, which turned out to be sound editorial judgment. When it was decoded and published in the 1940s, it revealed a man who recorded, in the same flat tone he used for the weather, what he read in Greek before breakfast, his morning calisthenics, his marital relations, and the routine and brutal violence he inflicted on the people he enslaved. It is now considered one of the most important documents of colonial Virginia, precisely because of that flatness.
“I said my prayers and had good thoughts, good health, and good humor, thanks be to God Almighty.”
Postscript
A Second Diary
There is a strange symmetry worth noting. William Byrd's diary, above, was kept in secret, and it earned its secrecy.
A second Byrd diary, attributed to Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, has circulated on conspiracy forums since the 1970s, purporting to record a flight into a hidden world at the North Pole. The diary describes a temperate land beyond the ice, complete with lush greenery, mammoths, and a city of giants, none of which is there. It is not real. The Admiral's actual papers are held at Ohio State. So the record stands at one diary meant to be secret that earned it, and one meant to be public that never existed at all. Make of that what you will.