Robinson - Dawsons Fall

Francis Warrington Dawson and Sarah Morgan Dawson are my great-grandparents. I grew up hearing stories about them.

All families have origin myths: we tell our stories to remind ourselves of who we are. The stories are handed down through the generations to reinforce our beliefs about ourselves.

One of my ancestors came here from Wales in the seventeenth century. He wrote this message in the family Bible:

I, David Morgan, Gentleman of Wales, bequeath to my descendants in America, this comfortable certainty; they come neither from Kings nor nobles, but from a long line of brave gentlemen and women with unstained names. [I am] son of Evan, and grandson of David, gentleman of Wales, whose ancestors returned to its mountains rather than be enslaved by William of Normandy, called William the Conqueror.

Principle is important in my family. I wasnt surprised to learn that my Welsh ancestors had moved into the mountains rather than submit to a foreign invader. But I was surprised by the dates: William the Conqueror arrived in England in 1066. This means that the Morgan family had been telling this story, handing it down from generation to generation, for seven hundred years. Clearly it was an important part of who we were.

WE WERE TAUGHT that principle was more important than money or comfort or peer pressure, that conscience was a reason to act. My parents converted to Quakerism; my brother did community service during the Vietnam War. Our family believed in honoring your conscience.

My mothers family had deep roots in New England. Many of them arrived in that early surge of searchers for a place to practice the religion they chose. Religion played a big part in my mothers family. Many were ministers, and many were outspoken: Lyman Beecher and his son, Henry Ward Beecher, my great-grandfather. Harriet Beecher Stowe was my great-great-great aunt. We spoke out for what we believed in.

My fathers side of the family had roots both in New England and in the South. Principle played an important part in that history as well: one ancestor had been put to death by Henry VIII for his loyalty to the Catholic Church.

But the story of my Southern family and their principles was more complicated than that of my New England family because of slavery. I couldnt ignore its presence. All Southern families, regardless of their race, who trace their bloodlines back before the Civil War are affected by the presence of that peculiar institution. They may not mention it, but it helps shape who they are. My great-grandfather Frank fought for the Confederacy, and my great-grandmother Sarah grew up in a privileged household in antebellum Louisiana. Certainly slavery played a part in their lives.

So I wondered about this. How did people of principle navigate the ethical maelstrom of slavery? How could they maintain personal integrity during that dark basilisk reign, or during its terrible aftermath?

Frank and Sarah were both writers, so I could read their thoughts in hundreds of pages of editorials, essays, letters, and journals, both published and unpublished. They wrote about their joys and excitements, grieved over their losses, set down their hopes and fears, and told their own moving and tender and hair-raising stories. But in one sense, even before I read their stories I knew who they were: they had bequeathed their beliefs to me. I was the recipient of the family culture, I was part of it.

I wanted to learn more. I wanted to learn how they had maintained the code of honor of my Welsh ancestors. I wanted to learn and tell their story, a modern version of the one my family had been telling for seven hundred years. How we had climbed up into the steepest, most inaccessible mountain heights rather than give up our principles. If we had.

HERE IS THAT VERSION. All the facts in it are true as far as I could determine. All the letters and diary entries are real, as are all the other published sources.

As a biographer, I hewed to the facts, even when they made me uncomfortable. The language, words, and attitudes are drawn from published and unpublished material. These are sometimes shockingly racist, reflecting the reality of those shockingly racist times. As a novelist, I wrote this as a living, breathing tale, one that unfolds to span the lifetimes of my great-grandparents. Frank Dawson was born in England and Sarah Dawson died in France, but they are both buried in Charleston, South Carolina, where they spent their happiest years together.