Even sixty years later, New York Timesreporter affirmed that, “Edith’s broad cheekbones, dark shining hair and close-set eyes were her Indian heritage…” Mrs. Wilson “to see how much of the Indian ancestry showed” and attributed Edith’s “firmness of line and straightness of feature” to it. White House seamstress Maggie Rogers would often “study” the face of Mrs. One respected journalist even recorded that, “it is a fact that the Bolling men were mostly tall and dark with aquiline noses, straight black brows and high cheekbones…” The one aspect of her identity which held value, however, was as the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Pocahontas.Īfter Edith’s 1915 marriage to the widowed President Woodrow Wilson, the press and public found racial physical attributes in her to affirm her status. she was excluded as “trade” from the city’s social elite, with the status of the merchant class.
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After marrying Norman Galt, whose family owned a famous jewelry and silver store in Washington, D.C. Edith had never experienced any of this, but as the companion of her infirm grandmother Bolling, she was filled with romantic ideas of the family’s privileged plantation life. When he was a child, her father William, a lawyer, had been given a slave boy as a servant. Her grandfather Archibald Bolling had owned a plantation near Lynchburg and over 100 slaves. She, her parents, siblings, two grandmothers, She herself admitted it was “shabby and inadequate.” The Civil War and the end of slavery meant sudden poverty for families like her own. The seventh of eleven children, Edith Bolling was born in 1872 on the top floor of a commercial strip building in the small, rural town of Wytheville, Virginia in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Certification of descent from the settlers and Virginia Company of London investors who established Jamestown as the first permanent English colony was provided by “The Order of the First Families of Virginia,” begun in 1912. Over time, ancestry became just as important a factor as wealth and power in choosing a potential spouse. Royalists, not Revolutionaries, they controlled Virginia from seats of political power inherited by succeeding generations and retained wealth by marrying with their network of families.
#Princess pocahontas free
They were descended from the English aristocracy who immigrated not for freedom but with land grants to establish tobacco plantations generating astounding wealth with the free labor of African slaves. Even wealth or achievement barred the unqualified from breeding into their bloodlines.
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Seeking to assess what might lay beneath her motives winds through a secretive, elite society with entitlement to privilege and political power, encoded beneath a cloak of gentility which they declared to be exclusive to Virginians. At a glance, her emphasis on being a “Red Bolling” seems perplexing, considering the denigrated status of Native Americans at the time and her own bigotry documented in private letters and remarks but her memoirs, the most permanent public record of her own life. It was no haphazard tag affixed by hyperactive reporters, however, but an identity Edith Wilson embraced and flaunted.