The Clamorgans
One Family's History of Race in America
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ISBN10: 0809095173
ISBN13: 9780809095179
Hardcover
432 Pages
$35.00
CA$40.00
The historian Julie Winch uses her sweeping, multigenerational history of the unforgettable Clamorgans to chronicle how one family navigated race in America from the 1780s through the 1950s. What she discovers overturns decades of received academic wisdom. Far from an impermeable wall fixed by whites, race opened up a moral gray zone that enterprising blacks manipulated to whatever advantage they could obtain.
The Clamorgan clan traces to the family patriarch Jacques Clamorgan, a French adventurer of questionable ethics who bought up, or at least claimed to have bought up, huge tracts of land around St. Louis. On his death, he bequeathed his holdings to his mixed-race, illegitimate heirs, setting off nearly two centuries of litigation. The result is a window on a remarkable family that by the early twentieth century variously claimed to be black, Creole, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Jewish, and white. The Clamorgans is a remarkable counterpoint to the central claim of whiteness studies, namely that race as a social construct was manipulated by whites to justify discrimination. Winch finds in the Clamorgans generations upon generations of men and women who studiously negotiated the very fluid notion of race to further their own interests. Winch's remarkable achievement is to capture in the vivid lives of this unforgettable family the degree to which race was open to manipulation by Americans on both sides of the racial divide
Reviews
Praise for The Clamorgans
"The Clamorgans is nothing less than an epic family saga of black and white life on the Mississippi. Magisterially compiled out of the archive, it recounts with sharp insight and infectious verve the story of a great American family from the days of its swashbuckling white French progenitor, claimant to more than one million acres of western lands, to his mixed-race descendants still trying into the early twentieth century to reclaim their patrimony. The true patrimony Winch reveals in this stunning historical re-creation is one of racial mixing and crossing that challenges our ideas of family, law, and order in the American past."—Ezra Greenspan, Kahn chair in the Humanities, Southern Methodist University
"As free persons of color, the Clamorgans aped a world of wealth and patronage that flourished in a society otherwise obsessed with distinguishing white from black Here, Julie Winch explores the Clamorgan family histories with energy, insight, and grace. In her fluid narrative she locates the Clamorgans at the heart of the American experience."—Louis Gerteis, Professor of History, University of Missouri-St. Louis
"This delightful read transcends the Clamorgan lineage and simple tales of passing to open to general readers and scholars a refreshing vista of the fluid and variable construction and meaning of whiteness and race in America."—Library Journal
"What exactly did race mean in 19th-century America? The Clamorgan clan vividly embodies its ambiguities and historical shifts....Winch's tone is entertaining and almost merry—she clearly enjoys her material. Her sense of timing is strong, too. The Clamorgans gains a new layer of meaning read now, when the United States has a biracial president who is almost always described as African American." —American History
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BOOK EXCERPTS
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Clamorgans
1
Sieur Jacques
IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1781. Jacques Clamorgan was not supposed to be in St. Louis and he knew it. He had tried to get the necessary licenses from the Spanish authorities in...