COUSIN ROSETTA?

“This communication may excite much surprise and possibly indignation, I beg you to read without either.” -Rosetta Alexander in a letter to W.H. Seward April 11, 1866

       Progressive views of the abolitionist North were seen by Southern aristocrats as irresponsibly naive, and unsustainable. Too much was at stake to upset the status-quo of this very delicate American economy. Abolitionism was a dead issue in the South. Any abolitionist was regarded as a northern agitator. The issues were purely monetary, not societal, revolving around crop production, and how to increase it with more slave labor. Whips and chains just went along with stable economics. 

   Over half of Seward’s Union Academy seventy student enrollment was female. There were much more interesting topics of conversation on the mind of Henry Seward than slavery, and market economy. Henry was about to turn eighteen, it was March in Putnam County and soon the honeysuckle would be in bloom. 

       Not long after he had settled into his position as rector, young William Henry Seward abruptly left Putnam County; and returned to the family farm in New York. As he wrote his mother in early March, “It is more than probable (I think) that I shall be home by the 25th of June at least. But if on the contrary Madam I must inevitably be detained in this Country (which I pray may not be the case) let me assure you that the first moment which shall free me from an engagement which though rashly and precipitantly made is on my honor not the less binding.”

      Seward’s departure from Georgia was as sudden and unexpected, as his arrival. Historians again gloss over the reasons for Henry’s move back north, attributing it to homesickness or money. This could be true. But other motivating factors were also at play. A pregnant slave girl could be another reason for Seward leaving so abruptly.  

     Soon after Henry left the Alexander plantation, a young slave girl named Milly was noticed to be pregnant. Nobody made any connection to Rector Seward, nor paid the least attention to the girl. A pregnant slave girl on a large southern plantation was considered money in the bank, but no cause for notice, or celebration. “Breeding” was encouraged as soon as a young slave girl passed puberty. It was no more newsworthy an item than a horse coming into foal. The father may have been white or black, the act consensual or not; it was of little interest to the planters or anyone else, besides the young mother herself. The baby was named Rosetta Alexander meaning “little rose,” taking her master’s last name, as was the custom, and convenience of the time.

     Forty-seven years later Secretary of State William Henry Seward received a letter in Washington D.C. from Rosetta Alexander, a now middle-aged, mixed-race mother, struggling to raise her own family of eleven children “both black and white.” Dated April 11, 1866, in graceful, flowing script, the letter explained that Rosetta Alexander had been raised by her mother Milly and her mistress Elizabeth Alexander to believe she was the daughter of the famous abolitionist William Henry Seward. Her “mistress,” Major William Alexander’s wife, had taught Rosetta to read and write, and now the woman called upon the man she had always been told was her biological father, to help with her struggles with newly acquired “freedom.” There is no record of a reply from Seward. As Seward scholar Alison Reynolds explained from The University of Rochester, “Rosetta Alexander’s possible relation to William Henry Seward is a mystery that no one I know of has been able to solve.” In closing Rosetta writes: “I forgot to say I am nearly white.”

      The adoption of the Osterhout or Jennings surnames by their former slaves sketches a kind of parallel universe of “ghost family trees,” what our distant relatives over on the Fonda family website refer to rather derisively, as “strays.” Having a last name was, for many slaves, a completely new experience. Lineage, (or any sense of kindred relationship) had been denied slaves for centuries, as they were buried in unmarked graves like family dogs. Actually, family dogs’ graves were usually marked. If you dig a little into our Osterhout family dog Duke’s royal Irish Setter bloodline, you can still carefully scrutinized “Duke of the Wallkill’s” pedigree records. It’s not so easy with the black Osterhouts. No ancestry.com diagram exists to let us know from whence they came. At least the black Fondas can trace their lineage to a specific will, listing the slave Lundon Fonda, as an inheritor of the surname and a “son.” 

    As freedom loomed last names were to become increasingly important, and in the end indispensable, as the sins (or benevolence) of the masters and mistresses were visited on their former property; now branded with family surnames. Like Thomas Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings, it would take comparing Seward and Alexander D.N.A. to prove or disprove paternity. I’ve scoured original letters from Henry Seward to no avail, looking for that spot of alien blood. What difference would it make? How many black “Alexanders,” related or not to Rosetta must there be? Henry Seward left Putnam County in June 1819, never to return, and as far as we know, paid no attention to the letter he received from Rosetta Alexander. I doubt that being named Seward (instead of Alexander) would have made any difference to Rosetta’s eleven children.