Little has been discovered with certainty about his Wylie ancestors. There is a letter written in 1840 by one of Robert's uncles in Scotland to Robert's grandfather in America that provides some family member names. Unfortunately, there is also another family member that provided his assessment of Wylie ancestry that has some conflicting or additional information that has been difficult to parse confidently. Even so, none of the Wylie ancestors found show any evidence of slave ownership or association with the trade.
Robert's mother, Elizabeth, was also born in Brooke, VA. Her father, Oliver, was a Revolutionary War veteran that witnessed and participated in the earliest actions of the war. Oliver was from Massachusetts where slavery had been essentially abolished by 1783.
So far, I have found no Wills or documents describing any slave ownership in that family which had stayed in the Massachusetts area from the earliest days of the colony. One of Robert's ancestors was Digory Priest, who came over on the Mayflower before his wife and daughter arrived in Plymouth 1623 on the Anne after Digory had already died in 1621.
I went on to review the Massachusetts's Slavery Database. I could only find one potential enslaver in Robert's ancestry. Joseph Brown, Robert's 4th great-grandfather was a Deacon and a Deacon Brown's slave died in 1733. From that one piece of evidence, I cannot determine whether this was Deacon Brown's only slave or not. Nor could I be certain that Deacon Brown was Joseph Brown - though it is likely.
Blume Ancestors
Robert W. Wylie married Elizabeth Jane Blume on 1 Dec 1863 in Lawrence County, Oh.
I have not been able to trace her family lines any further than her grandparents. Her father, Philip, earned a living as a merchant, farmer, and saddler. He was originally from Woodstock, VA. He seems to have moved around a little bit before settling in what is now West Virginia. He married Elizabeth Smith in Berkeley, VA in 1819.
Elizabeth's grandfather, Jacob Blume, married Margaret Hart in 1793, also in Berkeley, VA. This seems to indicate a possible relationship with the region despite over eighty miles away. He and his wife had property in New Market, VA that they sold in 1818.
Jacob did possess a single male slave according to tax records of 1818, 1819, and 1820. Given he owned a carriage in 1820, he may have been a merchant providing or couriering supplies in the Shenandoah Valley. Jacob died shortly after 1820, whereupon Philip came into possession of the slave. There is no Will, but suddenly in the 1821 and 1822 tax records, Philip owns a slave. This slave was probably his father's slave. By 1824, he no longer possessed a slave and appears to have abandoned the practice entirely. Whether through sale or manumission, no record has been discovered to confirm how—or why—the change occurred.
Elizabeth's maternal grandfather was Jacob Smith. His estate settlement in 1829 lists his property and while extensive no slaves are mentioned. Jacob had married Margaret Low who was the daughter of a John Low - but at present there is little known about them, let alone whether they were enslavers.
Conclusion:
Robert Wylie's ancestors did not participate directly very much, if at all, in the American slave tradition. The ancestors of his wife, Elizabeth Blume, also appear to have participated very little in the enslaving practices of the 19th century. Neither of them participated in it after the American Revolution.
Observation:
A 21st Century American conscience has no problem understanding and communicating that slavery of any kind and of any magnitude is inhumane. 18th and 19th Century America was not moved by that conscience as a whole. Nonetheless, as individuals experienced it, some chose to abandon its practice. Unless they tell us specifically, we don't know if their choice was based upon economics, conscience, or some unknown practicality. Our hearts want to say it was conscience, but our heads know that we don't really know.
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