If there’s anything that seems to run in the Bush DNA, it’s the willingness to do almost anything for money:
Thomas “Beau” Walker, the great-great-great grandfather to U.S. President George W. Bush, was a notorious slave trader who either personally led or heavily invested in expeditions to kidnap Africans from their homeland and bring them to America as slaves, a journalist and historian announced this week.
Word of the presidential ancestor came by way of retired journalist and genealogist Roger Hughes and historian Joseph Opala, who illustrated their findings to Slate.
They made the discovery by comparing the signatures of known Bush ancestor Thomas Walker with a notorious slave trader of the day who bore the same name. Stacked side-by-side, the signatures looked almost exactly the same.
They also recovered several letters Walker wrote, in which he complains about the cost of the people he’s kidnapped.
“Times on the coast is by no means as favourable as I expected,” Walker reportedly wrote. “Slaves is at the price of 150 [illegible] and the coast seemes [sic] to be lin’d with vessels of all kind.”
“I have purchased seventeen fine negroes and am this day proceeding down the coast to try what I do can there,” another of Walker’s letters reads. “Slaves is at a very greate [sic] price.”
Surprised to see this here. Sins of the fathers…? There is enough directly attributable to Dubya and Daddy.
You could have used this space to link to something by, oh, say John Renbourn. Don’t recall seeing him here. Brilliant.
“Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & ye Grene Knyghte.” Best album title ever.
*As a young oilman and before he became the CIA’s spymaster G.H.W. Bush (Poppy) founded the Zapata Offshore Oil Company. A CIA front. The Bay of Pigs operation was code-named Zapata. Two of the unflagged armada of ships in the Bay of Pigs attack group were called the Houston and Barbara. ** One of the first people Lee Harvey Oswald made contact with after moving to Texas was Baron George De Mohrenschildt. The FBI contacted De Mohrenschildt shortly after the Kennedy assassination. His daughter said he wasn’t home and the agents left. Later that day De Mohrenschildt blew his head off with a .20-guage shotgun. In his papers was an address book with this entry: “George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.”
And let’s not forget Prescott Bush, who organized an armed overthrow of the US government in the 1930’s that was foiled at the last minute by an actual American hero.