Politics & Power Quote by John Sergeant Wise

Lineage is doing political work here. John Sergeant Wise isn’t just offering a family fun fact; he’s building a credential, the kind that mattered in postbellum Virginia when the old planter class was trying to reassert its authority after military defeat and social upheaval. By starting with “the first American ancestor of our name,” he frames identity as a continuous brand, something that can be traced, verified, and therefore treated as legitimate. “Our name” is less intimate than it sounds; it’s a social asset.

The phrasing is carefully curated. “A younger son” imports a familiar English gentry narrative: not the heir who stays, but the spare who seeks fortune abroad. It turns emigration into an aristocratic subplot rather than an act of necessity. “Old Devonshire people” wraps the claim in soft antiquarian prestige, suggesting rootedness, land, and pedigree without having to spell out titles. Then comes the clincher: “came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First.” That timestamp doesn’t just date the arrival; it sanctifies it. Early enough to be “foundational,” royal enough to feel pre-republican, it places the family on the right side of age and hierarchy.

The subtext is exclusionary. In an America arguing over who counts as “real” and who belongs, Wise’s sentence draws a boundary around legitimacy: English, colonial, early, and implicitly elite. It’s ancestry as argument, not memory.