By Samantha Dorm
Editor’s note: Samantha Dorm gave the featured remarks at the History Center’s annual membership meeting in September. What follows is a transcribed version of her talk. You can also watch her deliver the remarks in the video here. And if you weren’t able to attend or watch the live stream of the annual meeting, you can watch the video on the History Center’s YouTube channel here.
Good evening, everyone.
I hope you have all had an opportunity to visit the Revolutionary York exhibit and to test that theory: Was York, Pennsylvania, the first capital of the United States? Right? No — the answer’s behind that door. [Laughter]
But when the exhibit first opened and I came in, Nicole Smith came up to me. She wanted to make sure she showed me the exhibits that included African Americans. Why?
Well, on July 3, I was sitting down and thinking about the why. And the why is very simple. We, African Americans — we, too, were there.
On the Fourth of July, I will watch children wave flags. I will see men dressed as Continental soldiers, women in colonial gowns, and families celebrating the birth of a nation. They will proudly speak the names of the sons and the daughters of the American Revolution. Many will celebrate because they can point to an ancestor who fought for liberty.
I will celebrate, too. But I cannot celebrate in quite the same way, because while we share the same blood, we do not share the same experience.
America turns 250 years old this year. For many, that anniversary begins in Philadelphia in 1776. For my family, it begins there, too. But it also begins in the tobacco fields of Virginia, the plantations of Maryland, on the slave rolls of North Carolina, and in the forced migration to Tennessee.
To find my family, I must follow the path of someone else’s family. I’m going to say that again. To find my family, I must follow the path of someone else’s family.
That is an uncomfortable truth of African American genealogy. Our names were often inherited not from our own ancestors, but from those who claimed ownership over them. Smallwood. Outlaw. Gaskins. Nicholls. These names appear proudly throughout Revolutionary history. They also appear throughout my family tree. The same names, the same bloodlines, entirely different stories.
Major General William Smallwood is remembered as Maryland’s highest-ranking officer of the Revolutionary War. His Maryland troops, the legendary Maryland 400, helped save George Washington’s army from destruction during the Battle of Long Island. His courage deserves remembrance. His leadership deserves recognition. After the war, he became Maryland’s governor, founded the Maryland Society of the Cincinnati, expanded his real estate to more than 4,000 acres, and by 1790 he was an enslaver of 56 human beings.
History records both accomplishments. History records both truths. His growing wealth was built not only upon military honor but also upon land grants and the uncompensated labor of enslaved people. The blood was shared. The experience was not.
In Bertie County, North Carolina, another name appears: Outlaw. George Outlaw, son of Edward Outlaw, is listed as the enslaver of Samuel Outlaw, a Black man whose life was uprooted and carried west to Haywood County, Tennessee. Samuel Outlaw — Alfred Outlaw’s brother. Alfred Outlaw is my third great-grandfather, who remained behind in North Carolina.
One set of brothers lies divided by a county line. Another set of brothers lives with the same name, Outlaw, divided by ownership. Families separated not by choice but by commerce. Today the descendants of both lines still carry the same surname. One inherited land; the other inherited survival.
Then comes another familiar name: Gaskins. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gaskins served throughout the Revolutionary War in Virginia’s Continental Line. He stood among the Virginia gentry. He commanded soldiers under George Washington and under the Marquis de Lafayette, and he helped secure American independence.
Military records tell another story as well. Black soldiers fought under his command during the Yorktown campaign. Some of those soldiers were free. Some had been formerly enslaved. All were Americans before America was willing to fully acknowledge them. French soldiers remarked upon the bravery of Black soldiers serving alongside white patriots. They fought for liberty, yet liberty remained incomplete.
The irony is impossible to ignore. The commander returned home to a plantation sustained by enslaved labor, and yet those soldiers were still living in a nation that was debating whether or not freedom actually belonged to them.
Virginia court records later revealed that free Black families still carried that name, Gaskins — my great-great-grandmother, Margaret T. Gaskins. Were they the descendants of that enslaved family? Well, many historians believe so, in referencing those soldiers. Again, the names converge; the histories diverge.
Then the Ball family enters the story: Lieutenant Colonel Burgess Ball. He served beside Washington. The Ball and Gaskins families were intertwined through marriage, through property, through militia service, and certainly through Virginia society. Even George Washington’s own family intersects, because his mother was Mary Ball Washington.
These are the names celebrated in America’s founding. And somehow, through generations of slavery, inheritance, migration, and survival, they became part of my family’s story as well. Not because we attended the same banquets, and certainly not because we signed the same documents, but because history bound us together in ways neither side could have imagined.
And then there’s our home in Bertie County, North Carolina: Liberty Hall. When I say home, I don’t mean the big house — not for my side. Liberty Hall, the home of Captain Edward Outlaw. Liberty Hall.
The words almost stop you in your tracks. Liberty. It’s a beautiful word. It’s also a painful one. How can liberty exist inside a society built upon slavery? Liberty for whom? When the Declaration proclaimed that all men were created equal, who counted? When the Constitution spoke of “We the People,” which people?
These are not questions meant to diminish America. They are questions meant to understand her.
Fifty-six delegates signed the Declaration of Independence, and not one looked like me. Yet my family’s story has been woven into every generation of American history since before the ink dried. We harvested the crops. We built the roads. We fought the wars. We buried the dead. We raised the children. We defended a nation that did not always defend us.
African Americans have never stood outside of the American story. We have always been one of its authors, even when history neglected to print our names.
Frederick Douglass stated that the Constitution is a “glorious liberty document.” He believed that America possessed both extraordinary promise and extraordinary contradiction. He challenged the nation not to abandon its founding principles but — maybe, just maybe — to finally live up to them. Perhaps that remains our unfinished assignment.
So how should I view America at 250? Perhaps with gratitude. Perhaps with grief. But certainly with honesty.
It is possible to love one’s country while refusing to romanticize every chapter of its history. It is possible to wave the flag while acknowledging that generations of people have experienced the flag differently. It is possible to celebrate the ideas of liberty while recognizing that liberty was unevenly distributed. These truths are not enemies. They are companions. Ignoring one diminishes the other.
So the question before us is larger than genealogy. It is a question that every American inherits: How do we grapple with our shared history, the good and the bad, without villainizing one another today?
None of us chose the century we were born into. None of us bears responsibility for the actions of our long-dead ancestors. And yet all of us inherit the consequences of the nation they built.
History is neither a courtroom nor a weapon. It is a classroom. If we hide from truth, we lose the opportunity to learn from it. If we tell only stories of triumph, we misunderstand the cost of that triumph. If we tell only stories of oppression, we overlook the extraordinary resilience that carried generations forward. America deserves the whole story, and so do its people.
So as the nation celebrates 250 years, I will celebrate alongside my fellow Americans — not because our journeys were identical, but because they are intertwined. The names that appear on the Revolutionary muster rolls also appear in my family. Some fought for liberty; some denied it. Some inherited privilege; others inherited chains. Together, knowingly or unknowingly, they created the America that shaped me.
This land is your land. This land is our land. Our history is shared. Our responsibility is shared. Our future must be shared as well.
I am proud to be an American, even when I’m not proud of every chapter of American history, because loving a country does not require forgetting its past. It requires remembering it honestly, learning from it faithfully, and ensuring that those who come after us inherit a nation that comes ever closer to fulfilling the timeless promise once written in 1776: that liberty belongs to all of “We the People.”
Thank you.
Samantha Dorm is a History Center board member and community volunteer who has done considerable research into York’s Black history.