Many US Presidents were either slave owners or have slave owners in their geneology. But new historical and geneological research has revealed that the great-great-great-great-great grandfather of the 43rd President of the United States, George WALKER Bush, son of George Herbert WALKER Bush (41) was a slave trader. Walker is an old family name that the Bush's are obviously very proud of and preserve by using it in their children's names. It comes from a notorious 18th century slave trader, Thomas Walker.
The discovery of the slave-trading ancestor of the Presidents Bush was made by two men: Roger Hughes, a retired newspaper editor and genealogist in Illinois who has previously documented other Bush ancestors as slave owners in the United States, and Joseph Opala, an American historian who has spent much of his adult life in Sierra Leone, the former British colony on the West African coast.
Opala heads a project to preserve Bunce Island, a slave fort 20 miles upriver from Sierra Leone's coastal capital, Freetown, where Thomas Walker bought Africans in the late 18th century. On Bunce Island thick jungle hems in the hulking ruins of the slave fort, abandoned after Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and left largely untouched since then. Gravestones record the names of long-dead slavers.
As Hughes conducted genealogical research into Bush's ancestors, he began to suspect that two Thomas Walkers in the historical record—one a British-born merchant and known ancestor of the Bushes, the other a slave ship captain who journeyed to Bunce Island—might be the same man.
These two historians sent scans of Thomas Walker's signatures to Yale handwriting expert Maija Jansson who confirmed them as belonging to the slave trader, and the Bush ancestor. The first signature was from his marital record in Burlington, NJ and the other from two slave trading letters from the coast of Sierra Leone.
The letters, addressed to Bristol slave dealer James Rogers, show Walker complaining about the high cost of slaves. The June 23 letter states: "Times on the coast is by no means as favourable as I expected. Slaves is at the price of 150 [illegible] and the coast seemes [sic] to be lin'd with vessels of all kind."
The July 2 letter says: "I have purchased seventeen fine negroes and am this day proceeding down the coast to try what I do can there. Slaves is at a very greate [sic] price."
Oh and this:
The historical evidence suggests that Thomas Walker died at sea in 1797 when his own crew mutinied and threw him overboard.
Thomas Walker's youngest son George (there's that name again) is the one through whom the currently living ex-Presidents descended.
When George W. Bush visited Senegal someone wrote these nice words for him and he read them:
On his 2003 visit to Goree Island, a former slave fort off the coast of the Senegalese capital, Dakar, George W. Bush denounced the slave trade as one of "the greatest crimes of history.”
"Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters," he said. "Some have said we should not judge their failures by the standards of a later time. Yet, in every time, there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by name."
Who knows if the idiot even understood what he was saying.
The Bush family spokesman in Houston had no comment on the findings. The George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas was contacted repeatedly, and had no comment. Jeb Bush's spokeswoman had no comment.
Today President Obama and his family started their visit to Africa by visiting Goree Island.
Almost four centuries after Africans started being shipped to North America as slaves, the first U.S. president of African ancestry visits Goree Island in Senegal -- the point of departure for those destined for lives in chains. On the first leg of an eight-day visit to Africa the first family visits the House of Slaves, a fort built in the late18th century as a transit point for human traffic.