MALUNGU: THE MBUNDU-AFRICAN ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN MELUNGEONS
by Tim Hashaw
Writer’s biography: Tim Hashaw is an award winning investigative reporter who has worked in radio, television and print. He has been honored by the Radio and Television News Directors’ Association, the Associated Press, United Press International, the National Headliner’s Club and others. Tim is a descendant of John Geaween of Virginia, who, in 1640, was the first African-American yet documented in British North America, as “free”.
INTRODUCTION
“And a mixed multitude
went up also with them.” Exodus 12:18
CARRIED AWAY IN THE NIGHT
The following advertisement was placed in the North Carolina Gazette on April
10, 1778 by Johnson Driggers, a desperate Melungeon father seeking his abducted
children.
"On Saturday night, April the 4th, broke into the house of the subscriber
at the head of Green's Creek, where I had some small property under the care of
Ann Driggers, a free Negro woman, two men in disguise, with marks on their faces
and clubs in their hands, beat and wounded her terribly and carried away four
of her children, three girls and a boy, the biggest of said girls got off in
the dark and made her escape, one of the girls name is Becca, and other is
Charita, the boy is named Shadrack..."
This early newspaper notice described a common threat to
free blacks and Melungeons in 18th century America. The
lucrative American slave market enticed man-stealers to prey on free African
and free mulatto communities. Freeborn mulatto Drury Tann of the Melungeon Tann
family of North Carolina, applied for his Revolutionary War pension in 1834.
In his pension application is an account of his early abduction by
man-stealers.
"He (Tann) was stolen from his parents when a small boy by persons unknown
to him, who were carrying him to sell him into Slavery, and had gotten with him
and other stolen property as far as the mountains on their way...his parents
made a complaint to a Mr. Tanner Alford who was then a magistrate in the county
of Wake State of North Carolina, to get me back from those who had stolen me
and he did pursue the rogues and overtook them at the mountains and took me
from them."
On March 12, 1754, John Scott, a "free Negro" of
Berkely County, South Carolina with Melungeon ties filed an affidavit notifying
authorities in Orange County, North Carolina of a similar abduction.
"Joseph Deevit, Wm. Deevit, and Zachariah Martin entered by force the
house of his daughter, Amy Hawley, and carried her off by force with her six
children, and he thinks they are taking them north to sell as slaves."
These three cases among many illustrate that by 1750, free
blacks and mulattos in the American colonies were living under the threat of
illegal abduction and loss of liberty. Any hint of African blood could
possibly land a free Melungeon in court, fighting allegations that he or she
was a fugitive runaway. The “mystery” of the Melungeons often talked about
today is a result of attempts by mixed, 19th century groups to deny
an African heritage with its past American disadvantages. The ancestry of
Melungeons became more obscure in proportion to America’s discriminatory laws
and attitudes against Negroes.
Individual descendants claim the name Melungeon today with pride, but
from the 1790 federal census up to the present, Melungeon communities have
avoided and denied the label. However, there is evidence that before the 1790
census, Melungeons named themselves in their native Mbundu tongue shortly after
leaving their homeland in the Malange highlands of Angola Africa.
It was just a few months after their departure from the Angolan port of Luanda, some 400 years ago, that an armed man-o-war, the “White Lion,” emerged from a storm off Point Comfort, Virginia in Chesapeake Bay. Its captain was a legendary pirate. He carried a human cargo of Mbundu Bantu war captives he had “liberated” from a Portuguese merchant slaver leaving the western African port of Luanda. The captain of the White Lion traded “20 and odd” of these Mbundu Angolans to Virginia planters. This well-known incident in August 1619 is the earliest documented entry of Africans into British-ruled North American colonies; the first Middle Passage out of Africa. Not known however is the connection between those Mbundu on board the White Lion and the “poor whites” of Appalachia who are called “Melungeons”.
Later, from 1620-1720, other privateers with Angolan captives followed the White Lion to Virginia. Arriving before chattel slavery was universal in North American colonies, many of these black men and women escaped plantation bondage. They voted, held office and intermarried with whites in the South. Many of their mixed Mbundu Angolan descendants achieved prominence in America; Abraham Lincoln’s mother Nancy Hanks, scientist Benjamin Banneker, humanitarian Ralph Bunch, athletes Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, and such celebrities as Tom Hanks, Elvis Presley, Ava Gardner, Heather Locklear, Rich Mullins, and comedian Steve Martin, to name a few. Also include infamous outlaw Sam Bass and former NAACP director Benjamin Chavis.
From the time of
their first arrival, these Mbundu Angolans called themselves “Malungu” which in
their native Kimbundu language meant “countrymen who had crossed the water on
the same ship”. In time the name came to convey the idea of “friend.” This series explores the ancestry of the
original Malungu and presents a brief history of their Melungeon descendants
through 400 years in America.
MALUNGU: Part 1
THE NEW AMERICAN BREED
They landed in Virginia one year before the Pilgrims
reached Plymouth Rock. They sparked a major conflict between the English
Crown and the American colonies one hundred and fifty years before the American
Revolution. They lived free in the
South nearly two hundred and forty years before the American Civil War.
Yet the African ancestors of the American Melungeons have remained
elusive ghosts for the past four centuries; the missing characters in the saga
of America’s largest and oldest mixed communities. Vehemently denied by some descendants
and misunderstood by others, the African fathers and mothers of Melungia have
yet to take their place in American history. Most scholars remain reluctant to
tackle the so-called “mystery of the Melungeons”. Those who have tried have often found themselves retreating from
earlier positions. The Melungeon story
is complex and has, so far, eluded even the most determined researchers.
Perhaps the greatest misconception about the origin of the Melungeons stems
from the complexities in the 17th century status of the
African-Americans who, along with whites and Indians, gave birth to the
Melungeons. Modern scholars assume that mixed African heritage begins
with the offspring of white plantation owners and black female chattel slaves
in the years 1780 to 1820.
Wrong on two counts. In fact:
1. The first black ancestors of the Melungeons appeared in tidewater
Virginia, not in the 18th century, but as early as 1619.
2. Not a single Melungeon family can be traced to a white plantation
owner and his black female slave. The vast majority of the African
ancestors of Melungia were free.
This is worth repeating.
Melungeons descended from free colonial Africans with American roots reaching
back to the days of Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame. The African ancestors of Melungeons were
frequently black men and women who entered America as indentured servants, no
different from the way many white English-born settlers arrived in the 1600s.
In fact, a great number of these free African-Americans became successful and
even owned white English, Irish, and Scottish servants in the southern British
American colonies prior to 1770.
The original ancestors of the Melungeons were free African-Americans who
married whites in Virginia and other southern colonies. Paul Heinegg in
his revealing book, "Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware," provides strong evidence that less
than one percent of all free Africans, including Melungeon ancestors, descended
from the unions of whites slave-owners and black slaves in the original
tidewater colonies. The background of
the colonial social status is critical to understanding the history and the
origin of the mixed "Melungeon".
TRADITIONAL VRS ORIGINAL DEFINITION OF MELUNGEON
The traditional definition of “Melungeon” has been limited to descendants of regional 19th and 20th century mixed people of Appalachian Tennessee and clustered areas of Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky. But new research calls for a broader definition of Melungeon to include some forty variously named mixed groups who all descended from early free blacks of 17th century colonial America.
Genealogical records show that these different groups, now scattered from Maryland to Ohio to Louisiana, first appeared in the original southern tidewater colonies on the Atlantic seaboard from 300 to about 400 years ago. Records indicate that most of these 40 mixed groups came from about 200 common ancestors from 1619-1720 Virginia who married whites and Indians and who likely referred to themselves by the Kimbundu Angolan term “malungu” before they separated into smaller clans to begin migrating west from 1790 through 1860. Many scholars have noted a common “Melungeoness” in these variously identified mixed groups, linked by a handful of identical surnames traceable to free black people in the 17th century Southern colonies.
For example, the surname “Goins” can be found, not only among traditional Melungeons, but also with the Lumbee, Redbones, Free Issues, Ramps, Moors and other variously named mixed groups. It should be acknowledged that no local community identifies itself as “Melungeon” today, nor have any identified themselves as such in the past 200 years. Their Lumbee brothers and sisters call themselves “Lumbee”, and their Redbone brothers and sisters call themselves “Redbone”, but Melungeons after 1790 never identified their own communities as “Melungeon,” though few scholars would deny that Melungeon communities have existed from that time. A new definition of Melungeon should be based on four documented points.
1. Melungeons are descendants of black colonial settlers of the 17th and early 18th centuries in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.
2. The vast majority of 17th and early 18th century blacks arriving in British North America were from the Kimbundu-speaking area of Angola, Africa’s Malange district.
3. Mbundu Angolans in 17th and early 18th century America called themselves “malungu,” meaning “those who came in ships from a common homeland”.
4. The general migrations of the original 17th century mixed Negro families and their descendants coincide where these 40-odd mixed groups eventually settled. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, descendants of the original Angolan-Americans migrated from Virginia into North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries they moved along two general lines: a. Northwest to Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana in that order. b. Or south from the Carolinas into Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas in that order.
MELUNGEON ETHNICITY
The word “Melungeon” in an American-English dictionary first appeared in the Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia, 1906, which defined Melungeons as a dark people of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina with a discernable mix of “white, Indian and black blood”. New research further specifies the earliest Melungeon ancestors were white northern Europeans and Kimbundu-speaking Africans who intermarried in 17th and early 18th century British-America. From northern Europe, white ancestors of Melungeons include among others, English, Scot, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, and German parents. It is also possible that, in the later 18th century development of some Melungeon families, there is a connection to the French Huguenots of Virginia and the Carolinas.
The African ancestors of the Melungeons came from northeast Angola and southern Kongo. They arrived in Virginia generally from 1619 to 1690. It was previously thought black people in 17th century Virginia arrived from Africa via Spanish and Portuguese settlements in Central and South America. But new evidence disputes this. Most black 17th century ancestors of the Melungeons came directly to Virginia from sub-Sahara west central Africa as captives of war. Also at the same time a significant number of Angolans were shipped to New Amsterdam (New York) and from there sold to the southern colonies.
The North American Indian ancestors of Melungeons are
alleged to come from communities of the Powhatan, Mattaponi, Monie, Nansemond,
Rappahanock, Pamunkey, Chickahominie, Catawba, Haliwa-Saponi, Occaneechi,
Monacan, Cheraw, Meherrin, Nottoway, Pochick, Tuscarora, Cherokee, Choctaw and
others. However, some scholars dispute
a Melungeon descent from several of these Indian communities. It is unlikely that all Melungeons are
related to a single Indian group. The Choctaw contributed to two or three
Melungeon famlies in one area, as did the Saponi, Cherokee and other Indian
people at different times and in different places. Some Melungeon families may have absolutely no Indian ancestry. But all Melungeon descendants have West
African and northern European ancestors.
Today, communities identified as “Melungeon” by outsiders
still thrive in Hancock County, Tennessee, in Lee and Wise counties in
Virginia, and in other enclaves on the Cumberland Plateau. Appalachian Melungeons are sometimes designated
as “poor whites”. Elsewhere Melungeons are known by many
regional names; the Redbones of Louisiana and Texas, the Lumbee Indians of
South Carolina, the Moors of Delaware, the Brass Ankles and Turks of South
Carolina, the Brown People of Kentucky, the Carmel Indians of Ohio, and the
Guineas of West Virginia. In all there
are about 40 of these early mixed African-American groups scattered through the
South. These mixed communities do not
share the same American origin as the later Gullah people, though Melungeons
and Gullah both have roots in Angola.
The Gullah (f“Angola”) arrived in the early 19th century as
chattel slaves. The Angolan ancestors
of the Melungeons lived free in America 150 years before the Angolan ancestors
of the Gullah arrived.
The European conquest of interior Angola began in 1618 when Portugal attacked
the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo in a military campaign lasting until 1621. At the
time, England and its American colonies had no direct trade in African slaves.
Nevertheless, during Portugal's war on Ndongo, Africans began appearing in
British Virginia aboard Dutch and English ships robbing Iberian
merchant-slavers leaving the Portuguese slave-port of Luanda, Angola.
THE EARLIEST ACCOUNTS OF NEGRO MELUNGEON ANCESTRY
Of all the ethnic groups presented as possible ancestors of Melungeons, not one provokes more heated debate today than the claim that Melungeons have forebears who were African. (Ironic because tolerance is the lesson Melungeon history is uniquely qualified to teach). Every single observer who visited Melungeon communities before 1890 without fail noted their African ancestry. From 1813-1890 mixed people in that region tried their best to deny the name “Melungeon” because the African ancestry of anyone called a Melungeon was common knowledge in the original tidewater colonies. In the earliest published appearances of the word “Melungeon,” people in Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee always reported Melungeons as having mixed black and white, or black and Indian ancestry. But any combination always included Negro. The name “Melungeon” is first found in writing in 1813 in western Virginia in the minutes of Stony Creek Primitive Baptist church. The Melungeons on the church rolls were Gibsons, Collins, Sextons, and Bolins described in earlier census records as “mulattoes” and “other free persons”.
The term Melungeon also appeared In 1840 when future Tennessee governor William Gannaway “Parson” Brownlow, originally from southwestern Virginia, used the name in a popular political newspaper. According to C S Everett in the Appalachian Journal magazine:
“In the Jonesboro Whig and Independent Journal of October 7, 1840, Brownlow, later the editor of the Knoxville Whig, used the word “Melungeon” to refer to a presumably half Indian/half Negro from “Washington City”: “[A]nd withal an effort was made, to get an impudent Melungeon…a scoundrel who is half Negro and half Indian, and who has actually been speaking in Sullivan…” Over the course of the next two weeks, Brownlow referred to the same individual as “the big Indian Negro,” “the Negro,” “impudent Free Negro”- “a miserable loafer” who was “a half-breed Cherokee Indian” and a “half-breed Cherokee Negro.” In the October 28th edition of the Whig, Brownlow reported:
“[a] half Negro and half Indian has been speaking to the citizens of Sullivan on the subject of politics! This surely is a great insult and ought not to be tolerated…we have seen and heard the vile scamp. And he was put up by the Democratic party, and by that party sustained, an now apologized for, on the ground of his having some Indian blood…”
Everett continues:
“In a final affront a week later, the Whig referred to the speaker as an “infamous and discipated [sic] Mulatto” as well as a “kinky headed villain,” while also acknowledging that the Sentinel [the Democratic opposition paper] referred to the individual as “part Indian”….In Brownlow’s language, the connotations are unambiguous- “Malungeon” unequivocally meant “black-Indian”.
Today’s political mudslinging is tame in comparison to the inflammatory rhetoric used by politicians in Brownlow’s day. His effort was to taint and besmirch his opponent as an inferior based on his ancestry. Obviously Brownlow was repeating the term in a context understood by folks in Tennessee and Virginia.
Later in the same decade, the name appeared in print again in a travelogue in the Louisville Kentucky Examiner. Reprinted in the Knoxville Register in 1848 and in Littell’s Living Age Boston in 1849, the article is the first yet documented to apply “Melungeon” to a mixed ethnic community at Vardy, Newman’s Ridge, Hancock County (then Hawkins County,) Tennessee according to Everett. The article contained a supposed conversation of “Melungens” at the Vardy community. Everett writes:
“During a rather “spirited” dance one evening, a Mr. Jord Bilson, while “cutting the pigeon-wing,” clodded ungraciously upon the toes of one Miss Syl Varmin. Syl remarked that Jord needed to keep his feet off her, or she would “shorten ‘em for him.” Jord responded that Syl was “nothing but a cross-grained critter, anyhow.” “And you’re a darned Melungen,” snapped back Syl, an insinuation to which Jord retaliated, “Well, if I am, I aint nigger-Melungen, ANYHOW- I’M Indian-Melungen, and that’s more ‘an you is.”
Here, the term, in a supposed Melungeon conversation was a slur, as in the cases of Brownlow and the members of Stony Creek Baptist, claiming Negro blood.
In 1889, an article appeared in the October issue of American Anthropologist again referring to the Melungeons on Newman’s Ridge as “a mixture of the white, Indian, and Negro.” Everett writes that a further example of the “opprobrious” nature of the designation was published when the writer, Swan M. Burnett noted of these Melungeons:
“they resented the appelation [sic] Melungeon, given to them by common consent by the whites.”
20TH CENTURY WRITERS WERE THE FIRST TO PUBLISH NON-NEGRO ORIGINS FOR MELUNGEONS
From 1813 to 1890 all external literary observations of Melungeons stated they were of a mixed ancestry which always included “Negro.” The first conflicting claim occurred when newspaper articles, theorizing that some Melungeons were not part black, were published shortly before 1900 by Will Allen Dromgoole, an inexperienced writer who was in her 20s when she first visited Big Sycamore, Hancock County. Yet even Dromgoole acknowledged that other Melungeons were indeed black.
“I found here…Malungeon women with brown babies and white babies, and one, a young copper-colored woman with black eyes and straight Indian locks, and two black babies, negroes, at her heels and a third at her breast.”
But Dromgoole went on to claim that certain groups of Melungeons she called “Portuguese Indians,” were of Cherokee descent, and lived apart from Negro Melungeons. Responses to her articles in the Daily American according to C.S. Everett, led to heated exchanges in late 1890.
“Dromgoole was challenged on several fronts, the most forceful complainant urging that “Malungeons” were nothing other than mulattoes – meaning of course, the progeny of black-white unions. On September 14, 1890, a letter to the editor of the Daily American signed “C.H.” of Hancock County stated, “When we ask (old Negroes) who the Malungeons or Ishes [Issues] were, they said they were runaway Negroes, who had married Indians…These Negroes, both blacks and mulattoes, held these Malungeons in great contempt. They were always insulted if called a Malungeon.”
After the Dromgoole articles suggested that some Melungeons were not mixed Negro but rather “Portuguese Indians,” a flood of articles advocating non-Negro Melungeon origins began to appear at the turn of the century. Everett cites a number of cases. Borrowing Dromgoole’s theories, the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1894 published, “Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed.” The report repeated Dromgoole’s Cherokee theory and for the first time made the claim that the term “Melungeon” was a “corruption of ‘Melange,’ a name given them by early settlers (French) which means mixed. Everett writes:
“This report made use of Hamilton McMillan’s and Stephen Week’s writings on a “mixed” Indian community in southeastern North Carolina. Weeks, who was in communication with McMillan, cited Dromgoole, and the works of both McMillan and Weeks certainly influenced the Interior Department’s report, which accepted at face value the assertions of the Melungeons themselves that they were Indian.”
Dromgoole, who had no background in historical research or ethnography, was the first to introduce a non-Negro origin for the Melungeons, though in her case, not for all Melungeons. And only after her articles appeared shortly before 1900 did the name “Melungeon” receive a French etymology. Dromgoole largely ignored the testimony of outsider sources. Rather she relied totally upon the claims made by Melungeons who had much to gain in denying Negro ancestry at that time in the Jim Crow South. Everett notes that after Dromgoole’s publications, “the literary exploitation of the Melungeons took off.” He cites the short story “Though the Gap” written by John Fox Jr. in 1897. Fox described Melungeons as half-breed Indians rather than mixed Negroes. Also published in 1897 was the story “A Visit to the Melungeons” by Presbyterian missionary C.H. Humble who, according to Everett, “suggested that the Collinses, Gibsons, and Williamses had no Negro blood but were-according to their own words-a “pure blood people.” Humble believed the Melungeons he visited were Indian. Also cited by Everett is the fictional story “The Melungeon Girl’s Duel” by Lucious Evins Smith about 1900.
“Evins saw the Melungeons as an American Indian tribal community. While she was no Melungeon and neither a trained ethnographer nor ethnologist, Evins made constant reference to the Melungeon “tribe” and its clandestine “tribal council” (and described a Melungeon elder) as being “dark as an Egyptian, straight as an Indian.” C S Everett, Melungeon History and Myth, Appalachian Journal 1999.
Such late claims, made at the start of the 20th century and ongoing, provide support today for the repeated attempts by some who regard themselves as Melungeon, to seek government-recognized status for a Melungeon Indian tribe. There is certainly a ton of 20th century literary fodder for such a movement, though rarely from trained historical researchers. Everett also mentions Paul Converse who, in The Southern Collegian described Melungeons of “swarthy complexion, with prominent cheek bones, jet black hair…deep set dark eyes” and according to Everett, “that the small boys…look like young Indians fresh from their smoky wigwams.”
20TH CENTURY CLAIMS OF EXOTIC AND MYTHIC ORIGINS FOR SO-CALLED “MYSTERIOUS MELUNGEONS”
It is at this time, Everett writes, that theories of exotic and mysterious Melungeon origins began to appear.
“The mythical image can be traced through documents spanning roughly 50 years. Still, while about 50 percent of the descriptions of the east Tennessee Melungeons from about 1890 to 1940 maintained that they were primarily of Indian stock (several even reporting that Melungeons referred to themselves as such), about 50 percent of the descriptions espoused an exotic or mysterious origin. Interestingly, it was only during the early decades of the current (20th) century that the “mystery” began to develop.”
Watson’s Magazine in 1913 published “Romantic Account of the Celebrated Melungeon Case” in which Everett notes, the Melungeons became a people who “crossed the Atlantic and settled in the coast of South Carolina” but who were later driven out and “wandered across the mountains to Hancock County, East Tennessee.” This tale promoting an unknown and exotic Melungeon origin was followed in 1914 by an article written by Samuel Tyndale Wilson in The Southern Mountaineers. In which Everett quotes him as writing, “[o]ccasionally the student of ethnology may stumble upon a community that is a puzzle, as, for example, that one occupied by the ‘Malungeons” of upper East Tennessee.” The word “mysterious,” was first used to describe Melungeons in 1923 when John Trotwood Moore and Austin P. Foster wrote Tennessee, the Volunteer State. According to Everett, the authors described Melungeons as:
“a distinct race…as different from all the other races in the Western Hemisphere as the Negro is from the Indian. Moreover, this race is found nowhere else in America…It is the race of the Melungeons, a mysterious race, few in numbers, whose origin is open to speculation.”
Everett adds, “It seems the allure of the exotic and the romantic proved too powerful for common sense.” Yet another example he cites using the description “mysterious” was published in 1939.
“Otha Walraven and Leo Zuber, writing for the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Guide series, further enhanced the Melungeon mystery in two separate pieces. In “The Melungeons at Oakdale” Walraven discussed “a small colony of that mysterious race of people known as the Melungeons” living in southeastern Morgan County approximately 35 miles west of Knoxville”.
Exotic theories followed published accounts of “mysterious” origins. Some of the exotic examples cited by Everett include the theory of Bonnie Ball in 1945 who compared Melungeons to "South Sea Islanders.” William Worden introduced the Welsh and Phoenicians as likely Melungeon progenitors in 1947. In 1952 North Calahan in the book Smoky Mountain Country, mused that the Melungeons descended from the North African Moors and alluded to the 1913 theory of Lewis Shepherd, that Melungeons were ancient Carthaginians from Morocco. Everett also includes the exotic origins presented by Paul Brewster in a 1964 Ethnos article.
“[Brewster] concluded that the best [theory] was that they were the descendants of Portuguese pirates who mutinied off the Carolina coast. The crew attacked a local Indian village, took all of its women, and fled to the hills. Brewster’s article ends on this note: “Whatever they may be-Welsh, English, Phoenician, Portuguese or just Indian-[they] will probably be found on Newman’s Ridge as long as any are left”.
By the 1970s the exotic Melungeon origin theories also included Gypsy and Chinese. These 20th century claims took a scientific turn when Dr. James L. Guthrie included Mediterranean possibilities in the 1990s with a reinterpretation of DNA data originally presented by William S. Pollitzer and William H. Brown. In a 1969 article, “Survey of Demography, Anthropology and Genetics in the Melungeons of Tennessee: An Isolate of Hybrid Origin in Process of Dissolution” Pollitzer and Brown had determined Melungeons to be of black, white and Indian genetic ancestry after analysis of 177 Melungeons in mixed communities in Virginia and Tennessee.
Regardless of the singular merit of each of these 20th century descriptions of mysterious, exotic and non-Negro origins of the Melungeons, those theories would have been news to the observers of the previous century who never failed to mention the Negro ancestry of the Melungeons they knew. From the first written appearance of the name “Melungeon” in 1813 to the 1890s, no non-Negro origin for Melungeons and no French etymology for the word “Melungeon” were ever proposed. In addition, from 1813 the name “Melungeon: always carried with it a stigma of mixed “Negro” ancestry that Melungeons sought to avoid. While Melungeons themselves claimed they were non-African Portuguese prior to 1890, they made the claim under stress while facing discrimination. Outside observers who noted the possible Portuguese ancestry of Melungeons always included the Negro ancestry,
There are however, reasons to conclude that the name “Melungeon,” like the people it identified, originated in an era of American history before African-Americans faced legal discrimination and the contempt of white neighbors. It was during this time, more than a century before 1800 that Melungeons had no cause to deny their African heritage or their name.
THE KIMBUNDU-ANGOLAN ORIGIN OF THE NAME
"MELUNGEON"
The changing evolution of the name “Melungeon” reflects
the history of the Melungeon community; first welcomed in mainstream American
society, then later vilified and shunned.
Evidence indicates the name "Melungeon" came from the
Kimbundu-Angolan word “malungu”, which originally meant "watercraft".
The word came to mean, “those who crossed over on the same ship from the same
homeland”. Kimbundu was a language of
the Mbundu nation, which included the kingdom of Ndongo. The first Africans
coming to Virginia in 1619 and for many years afterward were Mbundu. This Kimbundu
word “malungu” identified Mbundu Angolan people in the Americas. John
Thornton of Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and Linda Heywood of
Howard University, have found this definition applied to other New World
Africans of the same origin and destiny as that of the Africans of Virginia.
"In Brazil, which had a heavily Kimbundu-speaking African population, the
term “malungu” was used to mean anyone who had traveled on the same ship
together, and gradually extended (by definition) to other close companions or
friends. Since the word derives from Kimbundu (the same word is also used
in Kikongo) and not Portuguese, there is no reason that it can't also be used
in areas outside Brazil where the Angolans went."
The Mbundu in Virginia, as in Brazil, used "malungu" to describe
their countrymen in the Americas. Professor Robert Slene, of Brazil
University, wrote an article entitled, "Malunga, ngoma vem! Africa
encoberta e descoberta no Brasil" [Malungu, ngoma comes! Africa uncovered
and discovered in Brazil]. Thornton and Heywood quote Slene as noting
that in Brazil the word was borrowed into Portuguese as "melungo"
(shipmate) from the Kimbundu and Kikongo languages. He cites the philologist
Macedo Soares as giving a definition of "malungo"in 1880 (in
Portuguese):
"companheiro, patricio, da mesma regiao, que veio no mesmo comboio"
parceiro da mesma laia, camarada, parente." (translated: companion, fellow
countryman, from the same region, who travels on the same conveyance, from the
same background, comrade, relative).
Soares quotes a 1779 Portuguese dictionary with the example, "Malungo, meu malungo...chama o preto a outro cativo que veio com ele na mesma embaracao" which is translated ("Malungo, my
malungo"...the black calls another captive who came
with him on the same ship)"
Slene finds the etymology of the later Portuguese word melungo in the earlier
Angolan malungu from the languages of Kimbundu, Kikongo, and Umbundu
(spoken in central Angola). In the modern languages, the definition of
malungu can mean "companion". Thornton and Heywood write:
"...the idea that the term means "shipmate" and could be
extended to "countryman" or "close friend" and
“relative" makes great sense to us and gives the term
"Melungeon" great significance."
Likewise, C S Everett of Vanderbilt University consulted several Portuguese language scholars and Portuguese and Brazilian sources for “terminology and slang”. In the 1999 issue of Appalachian Journal he wrote of two definitions of the Portuguese “melungo”.
“The first is a Brazilian-Portuguese term originating as a West African neologism during the Portuguese colonization of South America. It meant “shipmate” but only in the sense that newly transported African slaves utilized the term to refer to other slaves recognized as having been aboard the same slave vessel or as having originated in the same native region of sub-Saharan Africa. As the term was domesticated in Brazil, it was gradually applied exclusively to young children who were known to have nursed at the same breast (like siblings, regardless of actual familial relations).”
The North American name "Melungeon" developed as an English
elongation of the Kimbundu “malungu” used by Angolans to describe themselves:
companions, shipmates, fellow passengers from a common homeland who had endured
the trans-Atlantic crossing together. The word "Melungeon" did not
derive from the Portuguese "melungo". Rather, the English
“Melungeon” like the Portuguese “melungo” came directly from the Kimbundu
African word "malungu".
From the beginning, two important social features uniquely
marked Melungeons; their close-knit communities and their mixed blood. Records reveal these two features in
Melungeon ancestors as early as the 17th century. These visible features of 17th
century ancestors of the Melungeons were identical to the features of 19th
century Melungeons. Since the
observable characteristics remained the same, the 17th century
ancestors were likely known by the name “Melungeon” even if a variation. These ancestral mixed black families
originated in the same generation of the Kimbundu-speaking Mbundu Angolans who
arrived in Virginia in 1619 and other Angolans who continued coming to the
southern tidewater colonies through 1700. Shipping records show that the
vast majority of Africans arriving in British North America at this time were
taken from pirated Portuguese ships leaving Luanda, Angola. Early Kimbundu speaking Angolans in the New
World described themselves with the Kimbundu word "malungu". In the
17th century, after serving about 7 years as indentured servants,
the Angolan ancestors of the Melungeons were free to move from county to
county. Some were free as early as 1640 to purchase property. It makes sense that they identified
themselves in the Kimbundu language since Kimbundu speaking Africans were alive
and free at the time the Melungeon similarities are first evident in Virginia.
There was no plantation assimilation, no loss of African identity among the
ancestors of the Melungeons. The sense of “malungu” developed on the trans-Atlantic
voyage regardless of whether the ship made it to a Portuguese-American colony,
or was captured by English privateers and sent to the British Virginia colony.
“Melungeon” or some other form, was likely a name they originally called
themselves when white America accepted them in the 17th century.
Stony Creek church records near the Virginia-Tennessee border in 1813 show the
name "Melungeon" first appeared in Virginia. By the 19th century the origin of
the name “Melungeon” was forgotten or denied by mixed descendants desiring to
avoid the discrimination directed against African-Americans. They were called this name as a slur by
white Virginians whose grandparents would have remembered their earlier origin. The slur is evident in the Stony Creek
Primitive Baptist church minutes. The gradual westward development of America
resulted in ignorance in new settlements over the ethnic origin of the
Melungeons. However within Virginia and
the older colonies white people were very sure of the Negro ancestry of the
mixed Melungeons.
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE FOR AN ANGOLAN ORIGIN OF THE NAME
"MELUNGEON"
1. People who were ancestors of Melungeons, and who exhibited the social
and ethnic characteristics of Melungeons, formed identifiable communities
within the lifetimes of the first Kimbundu-speaking Angolans to arrive in
Virginia in the 17th century.
2. The Melungeon community began to be isolated from mainstream America
near the end of the 17th century when Virginia and the other
original colonies started passing laws partially depriving free African
Americans of equal rights. This legislative discrimination, beginning about
1670, further defined the Melungeon community.
3. Melungeons are descendants of northern Europeans, Native Americans,
and Kimbundu-speaking Angolan-Africans. Therefore it is likely that their
name came from one of the languages of those people. No English, Welsh,
German, Dutch or Indian etymology for "Melungeon" is considered at
present. Only the Mbundu referred to
their community with any word similar to Melungeon; "malungu".
It is likely that this Kimbundu name became the source of the anglicized
word "Melungeon" in America.
4. The Melungeons were not the descendants of helpless African-American
slaves. They descended from free blacks with the power to buy and sell
property, to move from place to place and to name themselves. The name
fit them. They were people who had all come by ship from a common
homeland (Angola) and they were people who remained together for many years
after in a number of far-flung communities-they were malungu.
THE MALUNGU STORY IN A NUTSHELL
The original Melungeon community began with Mbundu Angolans arriving in
Virginia in the early 1600s. These Africans called themselves “malungu” during
the first generations of the Kimbundu-speaking Africans arriving in Virginia.
By the 1650s, the Mbundu malungu community had begun to include the mixed
descendants of whites and Indians who were intermarrying into their families.
Then, from 1670-1720, the Virginia legislature enacted a series of laws
restricting certain rights of free African Americans and their mixed
descendants. Previously, many of the black ancestors of the Melungeons
had enjoyed full civil liberties as freemen after they had served their few years
of indenture. Free blacks could purchase white servants to work their
growing farms. In1670 the Virginia legislature forbade free
African-Americans from owning white servants. In 1691, Virginia outlawed the
manumission of slaves and banned black and white intermarriage. In 1705,
Virginia denied slaves the ability to pay for their freedom when it seized
their farm stock. .
These laws indicate that virtually all African-Americans who were free in
Virginia after 1720 were born of free black ancestors; the original Angolan
Bantu of the 1600s. And indeed other
evidence supports this conclusion. Many
of the surnames of free 18th century African-American in the South
can be traced back to the Angolan Virginians of the 17th century.
The first ship carrying the Mbundu ancestors of the American Melungeons sailed
into Chesapeake Bay as a result of a savage African war and the daring attack
of Dutch and English pirates which followed it in 1619. A 1619 census
discovered by William Thorndale and published in the Magazine of Virginia
Genealogy in 1995 was initially believed to indicate the presence of 32
Africans in Virginia prior to the arrival of the Mbundu Angolans in August
1619. However, many scholars now believe
that the Thorndale census covered the fiscal period of March 1619 to March
1620. Apparently the Thorndale census
reflected the number of Africans in Virginia by March of 1620. If so, the “20 and odd” Angolans arriving on
the “Dutch” man-o-war in August 1619 would remain the first recorded Africans
in the British-North American colonies.
FROM PLATEAU TO PLATEAU AND THE VALLEY BETWEEN
The Melungeons of the Cumberland Plateau in Appalachia originally came from the
Melange Plateau of Angola. Today the beautiful mountain district of modern
Malange, Angola is home to many of the maimed poster children of the current
international peace initiative to ban landmines. The Malange plateau
became a civil war battleground immediately after Portuguese colonialism ended
in the 1970s. However, 400 years ago, the highlands were home to the
flourishing pre-colonial villages of the realm of Ndongo. The Ndongo
kingdom, populated by the Mbundu Bantu, lay along a thin stretch of land, 30
miles wide and 50 miles deep between the Lukala and Lutete rivers, described as
a cool plateau over 4,000-feet high. The king in the royal capital of Kabasa in
1617 was Mbandi Ngola Kiluanji. Angola's name comes from Ngola, meaning
"ruler".
In late 1618 Portuguese general Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos launched a military
campaign
against Ndongo to capture slaves. When the campaign ended in 1621, the
Portuguese had taken captive some 50,000 men, women and children from Ndongo
and surrounding kingdoms. Professor John Thornton, in a 1997 article for the
William & Mary Quarterly, found that this large number of captured Africans
was "far more than were exported before or would be again for some
decades."
Forty years earlier, Ndongo had thrown off servitude to the king of Kongo in a
battle on the Lukala River. Vasconcelos was not about to under-estimate
Ndongo and its allies in the highlands. According to Thornton’s research
the general planned his campaign to include the mercenary African tribe called
the "Imbangala". These hired warriors were feared cannibals
who, according to one European eyewitness in the 17th century, practiced
witchcraft; a "quasi-religious cult devoted to bloodlust, selfishness and
greed". They were ruthless fighters, burying alive any infant born
in their camps so that they might always be ready to move. The Imbangala
maintained their numbers exclusively by training the children of their victims
to be warriors. Thornton says of their battle tactics:
"The Imbangala generally made a large encampment in the country they
intended
to pillage, after arriving near harvest time. They forced the local authorities
either to fight them outright, or to withdraw into fortified locations, leaving
the fields for the Imbangala to harvest. Once their enemies were weakened by
fighting or lack of food, they could make the final assault on their lands and
capture them. The presence of Portuguese slave-traders who also provided
firearms, made the raiding of people as profitable or even more profitable as
raiding food and livestock had been before"
Vasconcelos hired three Imbangala mercenary
companies to join his army in the assault on Ndongo in
1618. At this time, the African kingdom was ripe for outside attack.
Brothers-in-law of the king Kiluanji, exploiting royal ties to commit
crimes, had enraged local chiefs. A rebel soba [district
chieftain], Kavalo Ka Kabassa, had lured his king into a trap in 1617 and
deposed him. Kiluanji's son, Ngola Mbandi, was still wooing rebel sobas when
Portugal attacked in 1618. The Portuguese, with Imbangala companies in front,
struck and defeated the armies of Prince Mbandi's soba, Kaita Ka Balanga,
across
the Kwanza River. With the loss of Balanga's forces, the royal palace in
Kabasa fell to the Portuguese and thousands of Mbundu were captured.
After the winter season, the military campaign resumed in the spring of 1619
with Portuguese forces defeating the armies of 95 assembled Ndongo sobas.
Prince Mbandi fled Kabasa, abandoning his family and many wives who were
captured with a great multitude of Ndongo commoners.
Later, under the dynamic leadership of the famous Jaga queen Ann Njinga,
[1624-1663] Ndongo resisted Portuguese colonialism for decades, while bleeding
thousands of captives to Portuguese plantations and mines through out the 17th
century. Some of these Mbundu prisoners were stolen from the Portuguese
at sea by Dutch and English privateers. They would become the African
ancestors of the Melungeons.
EVENTS, CUSTOMS AND CIRCUMSTANCES IN EARLY COLONIAL VIRGINIA
The first Angolan-Africans came to Virginia at a particular time and under
circumstances exclusive to the 17th century colonies which would shape the
future for them and for their Melungeon descendants.
1. Manpower Shortages in Early 17th Century Virginia
When Portugal attacked the kingdom of Ndongo in 1618, the British Virginia
colony in North America was hardly a decade old. Settlers, recently
discovering economic salvation in a new tobacco hybrid, needed a large work
force to exploit the lucrative product. Smoking was the rage in Europe,
and Virginians, backed by their long-suffering London financiers were eager to
finally declare a profit. However, the ranks of white laborers willing to
come to America in the early 1600s did not meet demands for colonial manpower.
Virginia was a ready market for black labor in 1619.
2. Equality Among Blacks and Whites in the Early Virginia Class System
An important custom in the development of the Melungeon community was the
institution of indentured servitude. Newcomers to slave trading in the 17th
century, Virginians were still relatively unfamiliar with the permanent slave
chattel system used by Spain and Portugal. The English custom of
indentured servitude freed servants after 7 or 10 years regardless of skin
color. This equal status in colonial America initially offered a bright
future for aspiring black Americans.
Describing the status of bound Virginians, 23 year-old English servant George Aslop in 1635 wrote the following letter to his parents in England:
“The indentured servants of this colony (Virginia) which
are stigmatized as slaves by the clabber mouth jaws of the vulgar in England,
live more like Freemen here than most Mechanic Apprentices in London, wanting
for nothing that is convenient or necessary and accordingly are extraordinarily
well used and respected”.
The Virginia Company required former masters to provide freed servants with
food supplies, clothing and livestock so that they could make their own start
in the colony. Once they had fulfilled the terms of their indenture
contracts, the new freemen, black and white, were entitled by colonial law to
the following:
Items:
1. A tract of land of at least 25 acres.
2. Enough corn to last for twelve months.
3. A new house.
4. A cow worth 40 shillings.
5. Armor for defense against Indians.
6. Farm implements and tools.
7. Two sets of clothing.
a. A suit of kersey and a suit of cotton.
b. One pair of canvas drawers.
c. One canvas and one lockram shirt.
d. One felt hat.
e. One gun and a year’s supply of ammunition.
Thus equipped to start life as 17th century American
farmers, freed blacks set out as equals with their white peers. Successful
African-Americans bought white and black, male and female servants.
Lerone Bennett Jr. writes about 17th century America for Africans.
"In Virginia, then, as in other colonies, the first black settlers fell
into a well-established socio-economic groove which carried with it no
implications of racial inferiority. That came later. But in the
interim, a period of forty years or more, the first black settlers accumulated
land, voted, testified in court and mingled with whites on a basis of equality.
They owned other black servants and certain blacks imported and paid for
white servants whom they apparently held in servitude.
Not only did pioneer blacks vote, but they also held public office. There was a
black surety in York County, Virginia in the first decades of the 17th century,
and a black beadle [court bailiff] in Lancaster County, Virginia."
Maryland elected an African from Iberia to its colonial legislature in the early
17th century.
Marriage between blacks, whites and Indians was legal in Virginia for most of
the 17th century. Genealogist Paul Heinegg found that 99% of all mixed children
in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas before 1810, came from intermarriages
of free blacks with whites. Cases of white masters having children by
black slaves in the original tidewater colonies were virtually non-existent,
making up only one percent of the free mulatto population.
Although indentured servitude offered future freedom, it had a dark side. During a bound laborer’s contract of indenture there was for him no distinction between the words “slave” and “servant”. Servants were temporary slaves subject to the temperaments of masters. Many white Europeans were forced to enter the colonies like the Africans, with little or no choice. Poor parents bound out their sons through the enticements of colonial agents promising an easy land of milk and honey. In early 1623, after enduring a hard winter on a plantation in Martin’s Hundred, Virginia, bondservant Richard Frethorne wrote home to his parents in England complaining of scarcity of food and ill treatment. He told of fellow Virginians who pitied him and who…
“… marveled that you would send me (as) a servant to the (Virginia) Company…(saying) I had been better knocked on the head. And indeed so I find it now, to my great grief and misery, and saith that if you love me you will redeem me suddenly.”
Hundreds of white British citizens were kidnapped outright since not many were eager to face the challenges of the raw hostile American frontier in the 1600s. The premature mortality rate in Virginia before 1620 was an incredibly high 50%, and for the period of 1620-22, some have argued convincingly that the death rate was even higher.
Men, women, and children from England, Scotland, and
Ireland were coerced or compelled into coming to America as felons, orphans,
religious dissenters, prostitutes, the unemployed and the penniless
ne’er-do-well sons of gentleman. The
earliest European middle passages could be as terrible as the African
passage. Crammed aboard overloaded
ships swarming with vermin and filth, white servants were sometimes quarantined
to rot offshore in the Chesapeake if disease broke out. Small pox and starvation claimed large
percentages of each shipload of whites coming from England to the American
colonies. Those who survived were sold
to the highest bidder. White and black
indentured servants were totally at the mercy of masters who could injure and
even kill them without legal repercussion.
Colonial life was sometimes so harsh that white and black servants
joined together from time to time to attempt escape through the wilderness to
other settlements. Temporary servants
might endure greater cruelty than slaves because the slave-owner had more of an
incentive to protect his life-long investment in the latter.
IDENTIFYING THE FIRST AFRICANS OF VIRGINIA AS MBUNDU ANGOLANS
Circumstances indicate that Africans arriving in Virginia in the 17th century
were mostly from Angola. England was not a significant slave-trading
power before 1680. To obtain Africans, the British colonies relied completely
on English and Dutch freebooters who attacked Portuguese slavers sailing from
Africa to the Americas with Angolan prisoners. Only very late in the 17th
century would British ships begin taking captives directly from Africa.
Early Africans came to Virginia by freelance opportunists like Captain John
Powell of the pirate ship 'Hopewell', and John Colyn Jope of Cornwall who
privateered under a Dutch marque. Another buccaneer bartering with
Virginians was Captain Arthur Guy of the ship 'Fortune' who traded "many
Negroes" he had taken from a Portuguese ship in Luanda, Angola.
Captain
Daniel Elfrith of the man-o-war "Treasurer" also preyed on Iberian
slavers, as did Samuel Axe in the 1630s in the employ of the Providence Island
Company owned by Warwick and Pym.
In addition, Dutch privateers shipped Angolan captives to the New Amsterdam
(New York) Dutch, who then sold them to southern British-American colonies.
These Protestant sea-raiders concentrated their attacks exclusively on Catholic
Portuguese and Spanish slavers carrying Angolan prisoners to the New World from
1619-1680, according to Thornton and Heywood.
"Our contention is that until the English developed their own slave
purchasing posts along the coast of West Africa...all their slaves came from
privateering on Portuguese ships, and these in turn almost all...came from
Angola. In De Laet's History of the West India Company (pub.1644, a
report on all the privateering activities of the WIC from its foundation to
1638), all but one of the ships they took was from Angola."
Privateers were seizing Angolans from Portuguese slavers during the relatively
short period when British colonial law gave blacks equal rights with whites in
America. In the young 17th century settlement of Virginia, these freed
Angolans began forming kinships, which eventually became communities.
Thornton:
"It is probable that, in the decades that followed, those who survived the
first year in Virginia eventually encountered more Angolans from their homeland
or from the nearby Kongo, brought especially to New York by Dutch traders and
resold to Virginia colonists. These new captives perhaps gave a certain
Angolan touch to the early Chesapeake."
The common experience of the original Kimbundu and Kikongo-speaking Mbundu
bound them together as "malungu";
shipmates and companions of the arduous
middle passage. This bond was not broken in America. It defined
their children, the Melungeons, and prepared them for four centuries in a
hostile land that eventually became uniquely theirs. Indians came from Asia, whites came from Europe and blacks came
from Africa. But Melungeons are strictly an American breed.
MALUNGU: Part 2
CAPTIVES OF WAR
In the aftermath of the brutal Portuguese invasion into Ndongo, historian
Manuel Bautista Soares recorded that, by September 1619, the bodies of
thousands of butchered casualties polluted the rivers and a "great
multitude of innocent people had been captured without cause."
Professor John Thorton writes:
"The demographic impact of this war was starkly obvious when the
[Portuguese] campaign was resumed the next year [1619]; the army met no
resistance in any part of the back country [Sertao], these provinces having
become destitute of inhabitants."
Deaf to the pleas of priests and the protests of Portuguese settlers whose
lands were being ravaged, Vasconcelos let the uncontrolled killing and
enslavement continue for many months. The conduct of rampaging Imbangala
mercenaries was chronicled by Vogado Sotomaior, the ouvidor geral de Angola,
who complained of the destruction of the royal Ndongo city of Kabasa, that it was
"sacked in such a way that many thousands of souls were captured, killed
and eaten".
The historian Soares concludes that with the presence of the Imbangala,
"the wars were without any danger, but with discredit to the
Portuguese." Vasconcelos, who permitted his marauding mercenaries
to pass beyond the
Ndongo realm into the villages of his own African allies in Kongo, also stood
by as Christian baggage handlers in his own military train were seized in the
frantic rush for slaves.
THE SLAVE PORT OF LUANDA
From 1618 through the spring of 1619, the slow tread of hundreds of Angolan
captives grew to a steady forced march of many thousands streaming into the
Portuguese-built port of Luanda. Tens of thousands of prisoners from the
interior Angolan highlands choked the capabilities of the port to hold them.
Those surviving Ndongo who had not been slaughtered and eaten by the
Imbangala, were packed into flimsy, hastily built facilities, which could not
nearly contain them all.
The Portuguese had not planned on the overwhelming success of their enterprise.
Only 36 merchant-slave ships arrived in Angola in the fiscal year of
1618-1619. Each slaver was capable of holding an average of from 350-400
captives. The logistics of sheltering, feeding and guarding 50,000
prisoners were woefully underestimated. This was one of the largest slave
expeditions ever mounted in the history of Africa. The Angolans waited,
bound in the heat and rain for months, as the trickle of arriving slavers
loaded them for the dangerous Atlantic crossing to the Americas.
The common regionality of the thousands of Angolan captives assembled at Luanda
between 1618 and 1620, differed greatly from the routine trade of Africans
crossing by single shiploads, arriving in a new country to be lost among the
blacks already present, their tribal identity quickly removed on chattel
plantations. To the contrary, 50,000 Angolans were a nation who came to
America before any other African-American culture and before there was a
plantation system to swallow them up. Thorton writes:
"In America, when Kimbundu-speaking people were able to communicate and
visit each other, a sense of an "Angolan Nation" emerged. It
was certainly observable in Spanish America, if not yet at the very beginnings
of English-speaking Virginia's reception of Africans."
The Angolans in Virginia recognized fellow countrymen from their native land.
By the time chattel slavery began in the colony, early Angolans and their mixed
descendants had already formed a separate freeborn community. Later, Melungeons
moved west together in large wagon trains like the hundred-family Mayo party
rolling into Louisiana and Texas in 1857. Even on remote western
frontiers, they settled
together. They were bound together at
different times by different pressures, external and internal. As smaller groups fractured off to settle on
various new frontiers, they retained many of the same family surnames in, for
example 1880 Louisiana, as they had in 1680 Virginia.
In his book
“Melungeons- The Resurrection of a Proud People”, author Brent Kennedy shows
Melungeons spreading out original tidewater colonies westward. The many of the
surnames of the Virginia and Carolina Melungeons of the 1600s are the same
among the Louisiana Redbones.
LOUISIANA
MELUNGEON-REDBONE NAMES
Adams, Ashworth,
Bedgood, Bench, Bennett, Berry, Bolan - Bolen, Boone, Braveboy, Bunch, Butters,
Buxton, Chavis, Clark, Cloud, Cole, Coleman, Collins, Criel – Creel, Cumba –
Cumbo, Dalton, Davis, Dyal – Dial – Doyle, Dye – Dyas – Dyess, French, Gibbs,
Goins, Goings, Hall, Hyatt, Hopkins, James, Johnson, Jones, Keith, Kennedy,
Maddox, Martin, Miner, Mullins, Nash, Nelson, Nichols, Orr, Patterson, Perkins,
Pinder, Powell, Pritchard, Poberson, Robertson, Robinson, Russell, Smiling, Smith,
Strothers, Sweat, Swett, Swindall, Thompson, Ware, Williams, Williamson,
Willis, Wisby and Wright.
Genealogist Johnnie
Blair Deen has found the additional surnames of Ivey, Mancil, Maricle, Mayo and
West.
Particularly
revealing are the two names; Sweat and Goins, together in 19th
century Louisiana. John Gowen (or
Geaween), ancestor of the Goins, had married Margaret Cornish two hundred years
earlier in Elizabeth City, Virginia.
The couple had at least two sons, including Michael Gowen. But in 1640 Margaret Cornish had an affair
with a white man named Robert Sweat and she bore his mixed child. The relationship was discovered and the
Virginia court censured Sweat and had Margaret publicly whipped. John Gowen
reacted to the scandal by immediately suing in court to remove his six-year old
son Michael from his mother’s custody.
However 200 years later the mixed black and white Goins and Sweat
families remained neighbors in mixed communities in far away Louisiana.
Redbones, as
Melungeons in Louisiana were called, settled together in the same
counties: Opelousas Parish in the
Territory of Orleans in 1810, Natchitoches Parish in 1810, Rapides Parish in
1810, St. Landry (Opelousas Parish) in 1820, and Rapides Parish in 1820.
Beginning in the
1840s many of these Louisiana families moved together into East Texas. Boone, Dial, Guynes (Goins), Johnson, Odom,
Clark, Maddox, Perkins and others can be found together in the Texas counties
of Walker, Trinity, and Houston in the early 20th century. Records
in Newton County, Texas west of the Sabine, show the presence of Adams, Bass, Bennett, Bond, Brack, Brown,
Clark, Coleman, Cole, Collins, Davis, Droddy, Hall, Harper, Hart, Hames,
Johnson, Knight, Lee, Lewis, Martin, Mattox, Moore, Nash, Page, Parker,
Perkins, Powell, Smith, Taylor, Thompson, Weeks, West, White, Willis, Williams,
Woods, Wright and Young. Most of these
Louisiana names can be traced back to 17th century Virginia blacks.
From Angola to Texas
in a span of 200 years, the Mbundu and their children traveled together even as
their skin turned from black to tan to white.
The single greatest event forging their common identity was the slave
port of Luanda.
THE PORTUGUESE
INFLUENCE IN ANGOLA BEFORE 1619
Europeans and their customs were not entirely alien to Mbundu Africans before
they came to colonial Virginia. By the 15th century Portugal had already
made contact with people of Kongo north of Angola. During this time,
Ndongo was a vassal state, subject to Kongo rulers. King Alphonso,
[1509-42] of Kongo, opened his nation to Catholic missionaries and merchants
very early in the 16th century.
Portugal was unlike other colonial powers in that it regarded its colonies as
"states" and, according to "Brittanica", Angola was the
largest state of Portugal. Catholic Portugal required African captives to
be baptized into Christianity before they were shipped west to the New World.
But not all baptisms were forced. Jesuit priests who came in 1575,
translated catechism into the Kimbundu language for the growing number of
Angolan converts. Professor Thornton writes:
"Such a rudimentary instruction was probably oriented to the syncretic
practice of the Angolan church, which followed patterns, already a century old,
from the Kongo church that had originally fertilized it. Thus, early 17th
century Spanish Jesuits, conducting an investigation of the state of knowledge
of the Christian religion among newly arrived slaves, found that, for all the
problems they noted, the Angolan slaves seem to have adequate understanding of
the faith by the time they arrived."
Many Mbundu Angolans bound for the mines of Mexico had at the very least, a
basic education in Christianity before arriving in the 1600s. In the
North American colonies and later in the states, a number of Melungeons argued
they were Portuguese Christians and on that basis, they insisted they should be
exempted from life-long chattel slavery. In 1667 in Lower Norfolk,
Virginia, an African slave named Fernando sued in court for freedom insisting
that he was a Christian. He presented documents in "Portuguese or
some other language" which the county court could not read and his suit
was denied. Thornton and Heywood have found that in the early American
colonies:
"People with a Spanish/Portuguese last name that is also a first name like
John Francisco or John Pedro (on the 1625 census) are following an Angolan
naming pattern. The source of the Iberian names, in our opinion, is not
the
forced baptism given by the Portuguese in Luanda. In our opinion, whatever
names people might have received in those circumstances would probably have
been either forgotten or rejected when circumstances changed. Rather we
think these names were taken voluntarily in Africa long before their owners
were enslaved when the people were baptized.
In Kongo, the Christian Church goes back to 1491 and was so well established
by the 17th century that virtually everyone had a "Portuguese" name,
but it was not so well established in Kimbundu-speaking areas. On the
other hand, the bishop of Angola did complain that during the 1619-20 campaign,
the
rampaging armies of Mendes de Vasconcelos captured some 4,000 Christian porters
and sold them into slavery. In 1621, the campaigns went deep into Kongo,
and thousands were
captured at the battle of Mbumbi at the very end of the year. These would
all have been Christian, indeed, probably third or fourth generation Christian.
Since they took the Christian names voluntarily, they would make these
names known to their new masters in Virginia. The many people who are not
listed with any names in the census of 1624 and 1625 and in the headright
documents, might be, in our opinion, the non-Christians from the
Kimbundu-speaking areas"
Claims of Portuguese
nationality by early Melungeons have been presented as mere attempts to escape
slavery by denying African blood. In
this Melungeons have been mis-interpreted.
It is true that such was the motive of later 18th century
Melungeons. But English custom frowned
on the practice of Christians enslaving other Christians in the early 17th
century. A citizen of Portugal was
recognized as a baptized Christian by other Christians regardless of skin
color. Such recognition had offered
exemption from slavery before colonial legislatures set up the color bar.
Throughout the 1600s and 1700s the basis of the protests of the Mbundu in
America was not that they were not African, but that they were Christians of
Portuguese Angola. However, in order to keep their slaves, many Virginia,
Maryland and Carolina slave-owners conspired to deny or conceal evidence of
Portuguese baptisms.
The letters of an
Anglican missionary in early South Carolina reveal the hostility of many slave
owners against missionaries attempting to evangelize blacks. Doctor Francis Le Jau of the St. James
Parish in South Carolina wrote in 1710, of the desire of Portuguese Africans to
convert from Roman Catholicism to the Anglican faith. On Febrary 1, 1710 Le Jau wrote to the Church’s missionary arm,
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, (SPG) that:
“A few Negroe
Slaves..born and baptised among the Portuguese…express a great desire to
receive the Holy Communion amongst us…”
These Catholic
Africans had been previously converted in Angola, Kongo, or another Portuguese
territory before being brought to South Carolina. They, as Christians, had voluntarily approached the Anglican
priest of Goose Creek seeking to participate in the Protestant Eucharist
ceremony. The priest sent them away,
suspicious of their motives. But some returned a year later still desiring to
join the Anglican congregation. In
other letters Le Jau complained to the mission office of hostility from certain
plantation owners against his efforts to win souls among black slaves in his
parish. Le Jau, who had married the
daughter of a plantation owner, relented to adding a clause in the baptism
ceremony of Africans in order to convince white slave owners to allow the
gospel to be preached to black slaves.
“To remove all
pretence from the Adult Slaves I shall baptize of their being free upon that
Account, I have thought fit to require first their consent to this following
declaration, You declare in the Presence
of God and before this Congregation that you do not ask for the holy baptism
out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your
Master while you live, but merely for the good of Your Soul and to partake of
the Graces and Blessings promised to the Members of the Church of Jesus
Christ” Francis Le Jau, October 20,
1709.
But three years later
the missionary was still battling against white resistance to his efforts to
convert African plantation workers.
“…I thought to have
baptized some more Negro Slaves this Advent they are well-instructed and I hear
no complaint concerning them. Their
Masters Seem very much Averse to my Design, Some of them will not give them
Leave to come to Church to learn how to Pray to God and to Serve him, I cannot
find any reason for this New Opposition but the Old pretext that Baptism makes
the Slaves proud and Undutiful: I endeavor to convince them of the Contrary
From the Example of those I have baptized and Chiefly those who are Admitted to
our holy Communion who have behaved themselves very well,…” Le Jau Dec 11,1712.
What else would cause
African slaves to appear “proud and undutiful” (in the eyes of slave owners)
but their belief that their common faith made them equal with white Christian
plantation owners? There can be little doubt that Africans, free or slave,
believed Christian baptism protected them from abusive treatment. Le Jau constantly urged slave owners and
overseers to show restraint and mercy.
For example, South Carolina law ordered runaway slaves to be punished by
maiming; males by castration and females by mutilation of the ears. The missionaries countered man’s law with
God’s law, citing Exodus 21, that any master who maimed a slave was to set him
free. The colonial clergy vigorously
preached that slaves should be treated humanely and it is certain that Africans
in America welcomed the sermons, even if some slave owners did not.
While it is clear
that Melungeons claimed Portuguese nationality during times of stress, the
claim was technically true even though they were not ethnically
Portuguese. The use of “Portuguese” by
the first generation changed among their descendants over time. The former used
“Portuguese” to mean “Christian” while the latter, because of ethnic
discrimination, used “Portuguese” to allege they were “not African”.
By the 1720s, several laws had appeared, including requirements that all
Africans arriving by sea, regardless of Christian faith, must be regarded as
permanent chattel slaves. America’s growing prosperity demanded more labor.
Slavery gangs illegally kidnapped free Melungeons from their Virginia and
Carolina homes. The line separating free and slave Africans was
occasionally ignored to the dismay of the mixed free population and their
response was to claim other origins.
William Dowry, a grandson of Mary Dove, was detained as a slave in Maryland in
1791. Dowry claimed in court of being held illegally. Witnesses on his behalf testified that
Dowry's grandmother was a granddaughter of a woman brought into the country by
the "Thomas" family, as a "Yellow Woman", said to be either
a Spanish woman named "Malaga Moll" or an East Indian. However,
records indicate the Dove family descended from John Dove, a mulatto slave of
Doctor Gustavus Brown of Charles County, Maryland.
In another case, the Perkins family of Accomack County descended from Esther
Perkins who had a child in 1730. This son, Joshua Perkins, was taxed as a
"free Negro", but in 1858 in Tennessee his great-grandson, Jacob F.
Perkins brought a lawsuit against a man for slandering him as a
"Negro". By then, the Perkins family, after three generations
of intermarriage, was light-skinned and claimed to be of” Portuguese"
descent. Witnesses were called to testify for both parties in the lawsuit.
John E. Cossen said of the Perkins ancestors: "Can't say whether...full
blooded. The nose African. Believe they were Africans...always
claimed to be Portuguese. All married white women."
Reuben Brooks stated of the first Perkins patriarch: "He was a very
black and reverend negro..."
88-year old John Nave testified of Perkins: "...black man, hair
nappy...Some
called Jacob (his son) a Portuguese and some a negro..."
Larkin L. White swore on the stand concerning the Perkins: "...as black as
any common mulatto. Hair short and curled and kinky..."
The Johnson County court ruled that Jacob F. Perkins was indeed an African, and
denied his claim of Portuguese nationality.
During the days of early colonial America, life in the tidewater
colonies was harsh and few regarded the color of a helpful neighbor in the
rugged wilderness. One old colonial settler,
Daniel Stout of Tennessee, was also called to testify about the African
ancestry of the great grandfather of Jacob Perkins and in 1858 Stout, a white
man, summed up perfectly the great change that had occurred in America when he
said of Joshua Perkins:
“Never heard him
called a Negro. People in those days
said nothing about such things.”
MALUNGU: Part 3
THE FIRST MIDDLE PASSAGE FROM AFRICA TO VIRGINIA
A giant step in
recovering the African past of the Melungeons was made when historian Engel
Sluiter located Spanish records of the Atlantic passages of some of the Mbundu
Angolans captured in the 1618-21 Portuguese campaign and loaded aboard ship in
Luanda on the African coast. His research was published in the 1997 issue of
William & Mary Quarterly. Sluiter was also able to document the first leg
of the voyage of the Virginian "20 and Odd Negroes" before they were
taken from a Portuguese slaver in the West Indies by English privateers. Now, new light offers more details on the
second leg of the passage that began when the privateers engaged the Portuguese
slave ship and ended with their historic arrival in Jamestown. This information, along with the evidence
from Engel Sluiter and Dr. John Thornton completes the picture of the first
middle passage of the Mbundu Angolan ancestors of the Melungeons to Virginia in
1619.
The Portuguese-Spanish slave traffic from Angola to Central and South America
in the 17th century was managed by a general contractor called an
asentista. As the highest bidder the asentista had the exclusive
commission to export African slaves for Spain and Portugal. The asentista
agreed to pay a set amount annually to the Spanish king. A Lisbon banker,
Antonio Fernandes Delvas, held the asentista contract from 1615-1622. For the
sole right to export slaves, Delvas paid the Spanish crown the sum of 115,000
ducats annually. He was permitted to ship not more than 5,000 but not less than
3,500 African captives per year, and only to two ports; Vera Cruz and
Cartagena.
Records from the Vera Cruz treasury in Mexico for the fiscal year June 18,1619
to June 21, 1620 show the amount of taxes paid on incoming Africans. Sluiter
writes:
"During that year, six slavers arrived at Vera Cruz. All had loaded their
human cargoes at Sao Paulo de Loanda, the capital of Portuguese Angola.
Out of some 2,000 blacks they had taken aboard in Africa, 1,161 were
delivered alive in Vera Cruz. The losses were caused not only by the rigors of
the middle passage, but also by shipwreck and, in one, by corsair attack."
This is the account from Spanish records as translated by Sluiter, of the
single Iberian slave ship attacked by privateers in fiscal year 1619 as it
sailed from Angola to Mexico.
"Enter on the credit side the receipt of 8,657,875 pesos paid by Manuel
Mendes de Acunha, master of the ship Sao Joao Bautista on 147 slave pieces
brought by him into the said port on August 30, 1619 aboard the frigate Santa
Ana, master Rodrigo Escobar. On the voyage inbound, Mendes de Acunha was robbed
at sea off the coast of Campeche by English corsairs. Out of 350 slaves large
and small he loaded in said Loanda [200 under a license issued to him in
Sevilla and the rest to be declared later], the English corsairs left him with
only 147, including 24 slave boys he was forced to sell in Jamaica, where he
had to refresh, for he had many sick aboard and many had already died."
Those Africans taken from the 'Bautista' by English corsairs, probably no more
than 200, were from among the thousands captured in the Portuguese-Ndongo war
of 1618-1619 described by Dr. John Thornton. Sluiter points out that the
Bautista...
"...was the only slave ship among the 36 named as arriving at Vera Cruz
during the fiscal years 1618-1619 through 1621-22 to be attacked inbound from
Angola, by corsairs."
At the time, King
James of England had a peace treaty with Spain and Portugal. Therefore the attack on the Bautista by
privateers was illegal for ships with British marques. The two men of war were the “White Lion” out
of Flushing, the Netherlands, and the famous “Treasurer”, in the hire of the
Earl of Warwick and Virginia governor Samuel Argall. John Colyn Jope of Merefield, Cornwall, captained the White Lion
and Daniel Elfrith commanded the Treasurer.
The attack on the Bautista can also be found recorded in British
admiralty records. A trial was held in
England in the aftermath of the 1619 Bautista incident and sailors from the
Treasurer were called forth to testify.
“Reinhold Booth, of
Reigate, Surrey, gent. Aged 26. He has
known Daniel Elfrith for 10 years. In
1619 the deponent went on the ‘Treasurer’ [man-o-war owned by the Earl of
Warwick of the Virginia Company] to Bermuda from Virginia and at the end of
June 1619 she was compelled while in the West Indies, to consort with a Flemish
man-o-war, the White Lion of Flushing, [Vlissingen, Holland] commanded by
Captain Chope (Jope) who threatened to shoot at the Treasurer unless Captain
Elfrith complied with his wishes. Chope had permission to seize Spanish Ships
and in mid- July of 1619, he took 25 men from his own and Elfrith’s ship and
sailed away in a pinnace [a small, fast boat attending a larger vessel]. After 3 days, he brought back a Spanish
frigate, which he had captured and out of good will towards Elfrith, gave him
some tallow and grain from her.
Immediately after this, the deponent departed from Bermuda, leaving the
“Treasurer” and the “Seaflower”, left Bermuda for England., 23 July 1620”. See also Warwick v. Brewster p. 12ff.
Because the attack on
the Portuguese Bautista was illegal, mention of the Mbundu Angolan slaves (who,
should they be located could testify against them) was omitted by the accused
crewmembers of the English man-o-war Treasurer. However, a letter from the governor of Bermuda reveals that the consort
of the Treasurer and White Lion had indeed taken from the Bautista, not only
“tallow and grain” but many African prisoners.
The Bermuda governor admitted he had purchased a number of the slaves
from the “Treasurer” in September 1619.
(The Treasurer was forced to leave Virginia in August of that year
without selling its African captives). According to Wesley Frank Craven’s
“Dissolution of the Virginia Company”, the governor acknowledged that he had
purposefully concealed the Africans;
“for fear of the
Company’s finding it out and taxing him for not informing them of it” as well
as “for fear of prejudicing your lordship.”
A recently discovered
piece of the puzzle completes the findings of professors Sluiter and Thornton;
the identity of a privateer first referred to as “English” and later called
“Dutch”.
INTRIGUE IN VIRGINIA
In 1624, Captain John Smith who had been instrumental in establishing the
colony, wrote in his "General History of Virginia" a description of
the first Africans arriving in 1619.
"About the last of August came in a Dutch man o warre that sold us twenty
Negars."
However, the famous Captain Smith, penning his memoirs near the end of his
adventurous career, had not himself witnessed the arrival of the privateer. He
was not in Virginia at the time. Smith was quoting a letter written by Virginia
tobacco planter John Rolfe, widowed husband of Pocohontas, to Virginia Company
director Sir Edwin Sandys. Rolfe personally saw the arrival of the ship and
wrote:
"About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of 160
tons arrived at Point Comfort, the Comandor's name was Capt. Jope, his Pilot
for the West Indies one Mr. Marmaduke an Englishman. They mett with the
'Treasurer' in the West Indies and determined to hold consort shipp
hetherward,but in their passage lost one the other. He brought not
anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Merchant bought
for victualle [whereof he was in greate need as he pretended] at the best and
easyest rate they could. He hadd a lardge and ample Comyssion from his
Excellency to range and to take purchase in the West Indies."
A few days after the White Lion
arrived, the Treasurer also appeared.
"...Three or 4 days after (Jope) the Treasurer arrived. At his arrivall he
sent word presently to the Governor to know his pleasure, who wrote to him, and
did request myself, Leiftenante Peace and Mr. Ewens to goe downe to him, to
desyre him to come up to James City. But before we gott downe he hadd sett
saile and was gone out of the Bay. The occasion hereof happened by the
unfriendly dealing of the inhabitants of Keqnoughton, for he was in greate want
of victualle, wherewith they would not relieve him nor his Company upon any
termes." [From the "Record of the Virginia Company of London"
Susan Myra Kingsbury, editor.]
In addition to Rolfe's manuscript, we have a letter from the Secretary of State
of the Virginia colony, John Pory, who on September 30, 1619, wrote from
Jamestown to Sir Dudley Carleton, English envoy to the Hague. Pory sent his
letter by Jope's English pilot, Marmaduke Rayner. The date of the letter proves
the Dutch ship of Captain Jope spent about a month at Jamestown. Pory was also
an eyewitness to the first Africans arriving in Virginia and also to the arrival
of the Treasurer four days later.
"Having met with so fitt a messenger as this man of warre of Flushing, I
could not impart with your lordship...these poore fruites of our labours
here...The occasion of this ship's coming hither was an accidental consortship
in the West Indies with the Treasurer, an English man of warre
also licensed by a Commission from the Duke of Savoy to take Spaniards as
lawfull prize. This ship, the Treasurer, went out of England in Aprill was
twelve moneth, about a moneth, I think before any peace was concluded between
the king of Spaine and that prince. Hither shee came to Captain Argall, then
the governour of this Colony, being parte-owner of her. Hee more for love of
gaine, the root of all evill, than for any true love he bore to this
Plantation, victualled and manned her anew, and sent her with the same
Commission to raunge the Indies."
In Pory’s letter, we learn that the Treasurer had visited Jamestown twice in
1619; the first time in the Spring while Samuel Argall, part owner of the
man-o-war, was Virginia's governor, and the second time later in the Summer
after Argall had been removed from office. Argall’s captain on the Treasurer
was Daniel Elfrith. After that first Virginia call, the Treasurer had sailed to
the West Indies where she accidentally met the "Dutch" man-o-war and
consorted in taking the Portuguese Bautista with its Mbundu Angolan slaves in
July 1619. But during the period of this consortship at sea, Secretary
Pory, a member of new governor George Yeardley's administration, had arrived in
Virginia from England, before the "Treasurer" returned the second
time that year in August loaded with pirated Angolans and trailing Jope by four
days.
When we study Pory's complaint against Argall, we begin to catch glimpses of
in-house Virginia Company politics and the infighting, which would eventually
dissolve the company financing the Virginia colony. To briefly summarize: an older clique of Virginia company
investors who were impatient to finally realize a profit in Virginia had set up
a scheme to defraud newer investors. By
1619, the Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, who was the ring leader of the scheme,
and his crony, Virginia governor Argall, had organized a black market at
Jamestown to sell contraband goods from pirated Portuguese and Spanish
ships. Though both of these gentlemen
were investors in the Virginia Company, they had figured out a way to
double-dip into Company profits; first by exploiting the Company’s monopoly on
goods to Virginia, and second by breaking the monopoly. But the “20 and odd” Mbundu Africans stolen
from the Portuguese slaver and sold in Virginia and Bermuda caused an
international scandal in England exposing the scheme. The single most important event leading to the loss of the
Virginia charter was the Bautista’s stolen Angolans; the same malungu Angolans
destined to become the ancestors of the Melungeons. The capture of the
Portuguese slaver 'Bautista' changed the destination of her Mbundu Angolan
captives but also changed the future of America. For, once the British crown began intervening in the affairs of
the American colonies in the aftermath of the Bautista scandal, it would
continue interfering in the colonies until the American Revolution some one
hundred and seventy years later. The
incident with the Angolan ancestors of the Melungeons in 1619 was the first
event sparking a slow-burning fuse to eventual war between England and
America.
DIE FRIST IS UM…THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
Of the two ships
involved in the attack on the Portuguese slaver “Bautista”, the man-o-war named
“Treasurer” is the more famous. Nearly
half a dozen years prior to 1619 this ship under the command of Argall, had
been instrumental in the abduction of the Indian princess Pocahontas as part of
Jamestown’s endeavor to win concessions from Chief Powhatan. It was aboard the Treasurer that Pocahontas
and the Englishman John Rolfe had met and fallen in love. The Treasurer had anchored off Point Comfort
and fired her cannons in salute when Pocahontas and Rolfe were wed. William Cridlin, in “A History of Colonial
Virginia” makes several excellent points that the Treasurer was far more
instrumental in the founding of colonial America than the more famous
“Mayflower”. The privateering
“Treasurer” and the commercially oriented Virginia colony lost the public
relations battle to the less glorious Mayflower and Plymouth, despite arriving
in America first, because of the nationally idealized religious mission of the
latter. In fact, Lord Rich, a Puritan,
while a major stockholder in Virginia, was also later a very important force in
founding the Plymouth colony of religious dissenters..
Until now far less
has been known of the second ship in the consort; the White Lion which actually
delivered the first Africans to colonial North America. Her captain in 1619 was the privateer John
Colyn Jope out of Cornwall, England and Flushing, the Netherlands. His
descendant, Hugh Fred Jope has researched the origins of the captain and the
White Lion.
Jope's ship, famously painted on canvas, but hitherto un-named, was called the
"WHITE LION" because she had carried this name under three previous
nationalities and languages; Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch.. This was not the
Dutch "Witte Leeuw" that burned and sank in 1613 with a load of china
near St. Helena. The Jope man-o-war "White Lion" was built,
ironically, in the Villa Franca shipyard near Lisbon, Portugal in 1570. She was
originally located in records bearing the name “Leona Blanca;” which is the
Spanish equivalent of "White Lion,"
though she was likely originally christened under the Portuguese translation
"Leao Branca". Her future captain, John Colyn Jope, 1588-1634, was
born in Merefield, Cornwall, England. His father was Roger Jope of Merefield
and his mother was Jane, daughter of Collyn.
John married Katherine, daugher of John Trenouth of Stoke Clymsland. He
was a native of England who would one day sail out of Cornwall and out of
Vlissingen (Flushing), the Netherlands.
Many sources have claimed that Captain Jope (or Jupe, Chope, Choppe etc as he
is also identified) provided the basic model for the main character in Wagner's
opera, "Der Fliegende Hollander". It is commonly known that Wagner
found the source for his "Flying Dutchman" in a Heinrich Heine work.
Hansel Voorhees published "Flemish Archives of Classical Music" in
1872. He wrote:
"Wagner has taken his obvious anti-semitism to new levels in Der Fliegende
Hollander which he copied from Heine's "Memoirs of Herr Von
Schnabelwopsky". He assigned satanic symbolism to the lead role of his
opera and imposed a curse, which condemned him to sail the seas eternally until
he met and married a good woman. Furthermore, it was common knowledge that the
original Flying Dutchman was a "Sea Beggar" who sailed between Antwerpen
and Cornwall under the Marque of William of Orange. His name was Johan Chope,
(John Jope) a man of the cloth and a gentleman also. Wagner's Flying Dutchman
was indeed a finely finished work but alas, his so-called trip to the sea when
he envisioned the particulars of this work differs greatly with the true events
but is without a doubt, where the master got the idea and imposed creative
license on it." [Hansel Voorhees, 29 June1872]
In March 1821, the Virginia Chronicle published a story describing how Captain
John Jope of the White Lion had gotten the nickname of the "Flying
Dutchman". Jope infuriated
captains of ships consorting with him by using a method he had devised whenever
a prize came into view. Jope would launch a pinnace and strip the prize clean before
the other consorters could participate. The Chronicle states,
"It was this maneuver which earned him the reputation of the Flying
Duthman."
In "English Adventurers and Immigrants" by Peter Wilson Coldham, page
182 (Warwick v. Brewster) we read a testimony of this very method employed by
Jope and the White Lion in consort with the "Treasurer" in the attack
on the
Portuguse merchant slaver, 'Bautista' in July 1619.
"Chope (Jope) had permission to seize Spanish Ships and in mid-July, 1619,
he took 25 of his own and Elfrith's and sailed away in a pinnace."
"Der fliegende" Jope also managed to outrace the
"Treasurer" back to Virginia. He had already traded the famous
"20, and Odd" Africans four days before Captain Elfrith arrived at
Jamestown.
The model for Wagner's "Flying Dutchman", Captain John Colyn Jope was
not Dutch, but an Englishman carrying a Dutch marque. The reference to a
"Dutch" man-o-war came from the ship's permit, issued from one of the
titled Dutch provinces prior to 1619. (Captain Jope's father, Roger, may also
have been involved with the Sea Beggars during the time of William of Orange).
From the reign of Elizabeth into the reign of James, many English privateers
routinely avoided the hassle of on-again, off-again treaties by obtaining
marques from foreign governments embroiled with Spain and Portugal. The Dutch
commission gave Jope's privateering the vestage of legality needed to avoid
charges of piracy.
Rolfe and Pory referred to Jope's man-o-war as "Dutch" and
"Flemish" because of Jope's homeport in the Netherlands and the
source of his Marque. Additionally they may have intentionally withheld
his full identity. They were not opposed to Jope's freelance privateering in
Virginia. They were opposed to the Company-related privateering by Rich,
Argall and Elfrith, which could have gotten them in trouble with the English
Crown. The Spanish report on the "Bautista" attack in July 1619
revealed the English nationality and language of the two attacking privateers,
while the Virginians noted Jope’s papers, the Dutch marque, which let the
colonists off the hook with the British government. The colonists were
reporting the freebooting scheme to the Company, not to the government. They
left the task of filing official legal charges against Rich’s “Treasurer” to
Virginia Company director Sandys. Jope, a free-lance privateer, was not a
vested partner in the contraband operation and therefore presented no threat to
the Company. From this perspective there is no contradiction in the Spanish identification
of both men-o-war as "English corsairs". It is important to note that
Jope and the "White Lion" were not employed by Lord Rich, had no ties
to the Virginia Company, and therefore, with his Dutch authority, presented no
legal threat to the Company or the colony in August 1619.
The Mbundu Angolans were the first Africans to arrive in a British- North
American colony, and they were the first of the African ancestors of the
Melungeons. They disembarked at Point
Comfort from the man-o-war "White Lion", commanded by Captain John
Colyn Jope of Cornwall, England, sailing out of Vlissingen, the Netherlands.
NATURAL ADVANTAGES OF ANGOLANS IN EARLY VIRGINIA
Because of the
cohesive identity of the Mbundu Angolans in colonial America we can see how the
black ancestors of the Melungeons survived and even thrived in the new
land. The Angolans found similarities
in the land favoring them over the urban English laborers in Virginia. The Ndongo homeland had been densely
populated in the narrow strip of land between its two major rivers before 1618.
One Ndongo village was said to have held nearly 100,000 residents. This was likely an exaggerated number
according to Professor John Thornton of Millersville University, but it shows
the European perception of the populous region.
At the same time
Thornton notes that Ndongo towns were separated at intervals by sections of
farmland. These Bantu Mbundu were
urban, yet they grew crops and kept domesticated animals. They certainly had an
edge in the North American wilderness over many of their white colonial
counterparts; indentured Europeans plucked from prisons, poor houses, alleys,
brothels and taverns in large squalid sprawls like London and Bristol. The Mbundu were accustomed to markets and
town life and they also knew how to grow sorghum, millet, rice as well as how
to keep large herds of cattle, goats and chickens long before the Portuguese
invasion in 1618. Lerone Bennett Jr.
wrote:
“There were skilled
farmers and artisans among the first group of Africa-Americans, and there are
indications in the record that they were responsible for various innovations
later credited to English immigrants.
An early example of this was reported in Virginia, where the governor
ordered rice to be planted in 1648 “on the advice of our Negroes”.
Bennett also quotes
Washington Irving who said about the colonial African-Americans:
“These Negroes, like
the monks of the Dark Ages, engross all the knowledge of the place and being
infinitely more adventurous and more knowing than their masters, carry on all
the foreign trade; making frequent voyages in canoes loaded with oysters,
buttermilk and cabbages. They are great
astrologers, predicting the different changes of weather almost as accurately
as an almanac.”
The enterprising
character of the earliest Mbundu in Virginia gave their children, the
Melungeons, the necessary qualities as freemen enabling them to escape the
snare of slavery into which they might easily have fallen with the enactment of
anti-African laws in the colonies beginning in 1670.
MALUNGU: Part 4
EARLY ANGOLANS IN
VIRGINIA
The first "20 and odd” Africans aboard the White Lion in 1619 were not the only Mbundu coming to Virginia,
Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas in the 17th century, nor were
they the only Angolan ancestors of Melungeons. Dozens of privateers would
ship Angolans into the southern colonies for decades afterwards. A number
of captives from Kongo were among them but the center of the Portuguese slave
trade had shifted from the port in Kongo, to Luanda, Angola by 1618 and the
majority of Africans in Virginia until 1670 were Angolans.
In 1628, a decade
after the 1618-1621 Vasconcelos campaign against Ndongo in Kabasa, the
Portuguese under Fernao de Sousa mounted another attack on Ndongo that by then
had retreated to islands in the Kwanza River.
The disgraced Ndongo king Ngola Mbandi had committed suicide in
1622. His seven year-old son was placed
in the guardianship of his sister, the acting ruler, Njinga Mbandi. The young prince was quickly slain and
suspicion fell upon the regent. However
Njinga, who had been baptized Ana de Sousa in 1622, prevailed over her
competitors and became queen of Ndongo.
Njinga found her kingdom’s gravest concern to be the encroaching
Portuguese. Linda Heywood of Howard
University and John Thornton of Millersville University write:
“She (Njinga Mbandi)
sought in her first years to get the Portuguese to meet obligations under the
1622 treaty which she had negotiated on her brother’s behalf in Luanda (this is
when she was baptised). For a few years
there were uneasy negotiations, but in 1626 war broke out and the Portuguese
drove Queen Njinga from her base in the Kwanza Islands. By 1627 she was back in the islands and
Fernao de Sousa took the war to her a second time in 1628. Her allies deserted her and she was forced
to quit the islands again,but not without a substantial fight.”
The Portuguese took a
great number of Ndongo prisoners on the Kwanza as they had previously in the
Vasconcelos campaign ten years earlier at Kabasa. They marched their captives to Luanda to be picked up by the
slave transports in 1628. That year the
English privateer, Captain Arthur Guy of the man-o-war “Fortune” was lying in
wait off the Angolan coast when a Portuguese slaver loaded with some of these
Ndongo prisoners-of-war cross his path.
A few weeks later the Fortune appeared off the Virginia coast with a
cargo described in 1628 as “manie negroes”.
Guy traded the Mbundu Angolans for tobacco. These newly arriving war captives in 1628 were no doubt heartened
to find fellow Kimbundu-speaking Angolans from the 1619 Portuguese campaign to
meet them in Jamestown.
Records of the West
India Company reveal Dutch and English privateers robbed only Portuguese
slavers out of Angola, and these raids accounted for the overwhelming majority
of Africans in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Amsterdam, North Carolina and South Carolina for a good
part of the century. Thornton and Heywood have documented colonial
America's reliance on those privateers exclusively targeting Angolan slave
ships from a Bermuda-based operation with:
"...half a dozen
privateering commissions issued by this company (including Elfrith and Axe)
that include specific provisions about taking slave ships and delivering them
to Bermuda, Virginia and even New England...virtually all, if not all, Africans
arriving in Virginia (or any other colony of England or the Netherlands) prior
to 1640, and perhaps even after that for some years, originated in Angola
(either Kimbundu or Kikongo speaking regions).
About 200 surnames of free 17th century African Americans who mixed with white
settlers, have been found by researchers Paul Heinegg and J. Douglas Deal.
Those Africans appeared in America when English and Dutch privateers were
exclusively raiding Portuguese merchant-slavers leaving Angola. Many of
those surnames taken by Angolan-Americans in the 1600s are still carried by
their descendants, the Melungeons, today. The following dates represent either
the time of their appearance in America or their date of birth.
ANGOLAN ANCESTORS OF MELUNGEONS IN EARLY 17TH CENTURY VIRGINIA, MARYLAND,
DELAWARE AND CAROLINA:
1620s
Carter, Cornish, Dale/Dial, Driggers, Gowen/Goins, Johnson, Longo,
Mongom/Mongon, Payne,
1630s
Cane, Davis, George, Hartman, Sisco, Tann, Wansey
1640s
Archer, Kersey, Mozingo, Webb
1650s
Cuttillo, Jacobs, James,
1660s
Beckett, Bell, Charity, Cumbo, Evans, Francis, Guy, Harris,
Jones,Landum/Landrum, Lovina/Leviner, Moore, Nickens, Powell, Shorter,
Tate, Warrick/Warwick
In colonial records of the above Africans there is found other documentation
that from 1620-1660 their nationality was mostly Angolan. Anthony
Johnson's grandson named his Maryland plantation "Angola". The
sister of Sebastian Cane was also named "Angola". Their Angolan
identity can also be found in a number of early place names in Virginia and
other original tidewater colonies. A
land deed cited by Heywood and Thornton shows reference to “Angola Neck” near
Rehoboth Beach in Delaware before 1680.
In Cumberland County, Virginia, an
“Angola Creek” was on the map before the 18th century. In North Carolina another Angola Creek is
the present site of a nature preserve.
Not all of the paternal surnames passed down to Melungeons came from Africans
in America. Some families such as
Banks, Bass, Berry, Chavis, Sweat, Davis, Hanser, Lang,
Lawrence, Fisher, Hammond, Lucas, and Matthews began with white male or female
ancestors who initially married Indians. However several branches of these
families intermarried with Angolans in America, often before 1700.
The original name of malungu used by early Kimbundu and
Kikongo-speaking Africans in Virginia, eventually extended to include all mixed
red, white and black family members associated with the Angolans in the
original southern colonies. The idea of malungu as "shipmates from a
common homeland" gradually came to mean"countrymen", "close
friends" and "relatives" in the mobile freeborn Melungeon
community. “Melungeon” would not have included chattel slaves who were
separated from the free black community by plantation bondage.
LATER 17TH CENTURY FAMILIES ASSOCIATED WITH FREE AFRICAN AMERICANS
1670s
Anderson, Atkins, Barton, Boarman, Bowser, Brown, Bunch, Bass, Butcher, Butler,
Carney, Case, Church, Combess, Combs, Consellor, Day, Farrell/Ferrell,
Fountain, Game,
Gibson/Gipson,
Gregory, Grimes, Grinnage,
Hobson, Howell,
Jeffries, Lee, Manuel, Morris, Mullakin, Nelson, Osborne, Pendarvis, Quander,
Redman, Reed, Rhoads, Rustin, Skipper, Sparrow, Stephens, Stinger, Swann,
Waters, Wilson.
1680s:
Artis, Booth, Britt, Brooks, Bryant, Burkett, Cambridge, Cassidy, Collins,
Copes, Cox, Dogan, Donathan, Forten/Fortune, Gwinn, Hilliard, Hubbard, Impey,
Ivey, Jackson, MacDonald, MacGee, Mahoney, Mallory, Okey, Oliver, Penny,
Plowman, Press/Priss, Price, Proctor, Robins, Salmons/Sammons, Shoecraft,
Walden, Walker, Wiggins, Wilkens, Williams
1690s:
Annis, Banneker, Bazmore, Beddo, Bond, Cannedy/Kennedy, Chambers, Conner,
Cuffee, Dawson, Durham, Ford, Gannon, Gates, Graham, Hall, Harrison, Hawkins,
Heath, Holt, Horner, Knight, Lansford, Lewis, Malavery, Nichols, Norman,
Oxendine, Plummer, Pratt, Prichard, Rawlinson, Ray, Ridley, Roberts, Russell,
Sample, Savoy, Shaw, Smith, Stewart, Taylor, Thompson, Toney, Turner, Weaver,
Welsh, Whistler, Willis, Young.
These black and mixed families appeared in the southern tidewater colonies when
evidence indicates that most free African-Americans were Angolan by birth.
ANGOLANS ELSEWHERE IN NORTH AMERICA
Additional evidence showing that most Africans coming into North America in the
early 1600s were Angola, can be found in records from the Dutch of New York of
the same period. The following lists of baptisms show several
African-Americans surnamed "Angola" in the Reformed Dutch Church of
New Amsterdam from 1639-1649. At one time Dutch farmers of New York's
Hudson River Valley were the largest importers of African slaves in North
America. Virginia and Maryland planters like Edmund Scarborough
purchased about forty Angolans in Dutch New York as Mbundu captives were also
being delivered to the southern colonies by English privateers preying on
Portuguese slavers out of Angola. While surnames of Africans were
frequently anglicized in the southern tidewater colonies, the names taken by
Dutch Africans often directly reflected their African heritage.
1639-1649 NEW YORK BAPTISMAL RECORDS OF ANGOLANS
(includes parents, witnesses)
1639-Susanna D'Angola
1640-Samuel Angola, Isabel D'Angola, Emanuel van Angola, Lucie Van Angola
1641-Susanna Van Angola, Jacom Anthoney Van Angola, Cleyn Anthony Van Angola
1642-Susanna Simons Van Angola, Andrie Van Angola, Isabel Van Angola, Maria Van
Angola, Emanuel Swager Van Angola, Andries Van Angola, Marie Van Angola
1643-Pallas-Negrinne Van Angola, Catharina Van Angola, Anthony Van Angola,
1644-Anthony Van Angola-Negers, Lucretie d'Angola-Negrinne
1645-Andries Van Angola, Mayken Van Angola
1646-Paulus Van Angola
1647-Marie Van Angola, Jan Van Angola-Neger
1648-Emanuel Angola
1649-Christyn Van Angola
New York Angolans and Virginia Angolans arrived in America by similar
transport in the 17th century; privateer Protestants exclusively robbing
Portuguese merchant slavers out of Luanda Angola.
THE EARLIEST MELUNGEON CLANS IN SOUTHERN COLONIES
The following are some of the first black, white, Indian and mixed families who
began intermarrying in the 1600s in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the
Carolinas to produce the people who became known as "Melungeons".
The African known as John Gowen of Virginia was born about 1615. Before
1775, his descendants had married into the black, white, Indian and mixed
families of Ailstock, Bass, Chavis, Corn, Cumbo, Dungill, Findley, Hill,
Jones,Locklear, Lucas, Matthews, Mason, Miner, Mills, Patterson, Pompey,
Stewart,Simmons, Singleton, Tyre, Webb and Wilson; many of whom can also be
traced to the 17th century.
Thomas Chivers/Chavis was born in 1630. Before 1775, his descendants had
married into the mixed families of Bass, Locklear, Singleton, Stewart, Cumbo,
Matthews, and Wilson as had descendants of John Gowen. In addition the
Chivers/Chavis group intermarried with Bird, Blair, Blythe, Brandon, Bunch,
Cannady, Carter, Cypress, Drew, Earl, Evans, Francis, Gibson, Gillet,Haithcock,
Harris, Hawley, Hull, Kersey, Lowry, Manly, Manning, Mitchell, McLin, Scott,
Silvey, Smith, Snelling, Silver, Sweat, Thaxton, Tyner, Thomerson, Taborn,
Valentine, Watts and Walden; many of whom were 17th century Africans in the
British-American colonies.
The family of Eleanor Evans born in 1660 shares the following names with the
Gowen and Chavis families: Bird, Brandon, Chavis, Dunghill, Harris, Kersey,
McLinn, Mitchell, Snelling, Scott, Stewart, Sweat, Taborn and Walden. In
addition, the Evans were early related to the families of Anderson, Boyd, Bee,
Blundon, Doyal, (Dial) Green, Hudnall, Hunt, Jeffries, Jones, Lantern,
Ledbetter, Penn, Pettiford, Redcross, Richardson, Rowe, Sorrell, Spriddle,
Tate, Thomas, Toney and Young.
The Gibson/Gipson family which descended from Elizabeth Chavis, born in 1672,
also shares with the 17th century Gowen, Chavis, and Evans families, the
surnames of Bass, Bunch, Chavis, Cumbo, and Sweat. They add
Driggers,Deas,
Collins and Ridley.
The American family of the Portuguese-Angolan named Emmanuel Driggers,
[Rodriggus] born in 1620, also has several families in common with the Gowen,
Chavis, Evans and Gibson clans: namely Carter, Collins, Sweat, Gibson and
Mitchell. In addition, the Driggers intermarried with Beckett, Beavens,
Bingham, Bruinton, Copes, Fernando, Francisco, George, Gussal, Harman,
Hodgeskin, Jeffrey, Johnson, King, Kelly, Lindsey, Landrum, Liverpool, Moore,
Payne, Reed and Sample.
From Margarett Cornish, born about 1610, comes the Cornish family with ties to
Gowen and Sweat in addition to Shaw and Thorn.
With the Cumbo family dating back to 1644, we have links to Gibson, Gowen,
Jeffries, Matthews, Newsom, Wilson and Young in addition to Hammond, Maskill,
Potter and Skipper.
The Bass family originates in 1638 America and shares several connections from
an early period with Gowen, Chavis, Evans, Cornish, Driggers, Cumbo and Gibson
which are: Anderson, Byrd, Bunch, Cannady, Day, Mitchell, Pettiford,
Richardson, Snelling, Valentine and Walden. In addition, they are related
to the mixed families of Farmer, Hall, Lovina, Nickens, Perkins, Pone, Price,
Roe and Roberts.
If given the space, we could present complex scores of Melungeon surnames
beginning in the 1600s of colonial America. These interlaced kinships
show Melungeon society was distinctly identifiable in colonial America at least
100 years before the American Revolution. The Melungeon community began before
1700. While the origin of the name
“Melungeon” may be debated, there is no evidence to deny that the Melungeon
community existed, if not by that name, long before it appeared in Tennessee at
the end of the 18th century.
For example: The Banks family originated in 1665 colonial America and is found
in the related families of Adam, Brown, Day, Howell, Isaacs, Johnson, Lynch,
Martin, Walden, Wilson, Valentine and several other Melungeon surnames.
The Archer family begins in 1647 America and married into the families of
Archie, Bass, Bunch, Heathcock, Manly, Murray, Milton, Newsom, Roberts and
Weaver.
The Bunch clan traces back to 1675 colonial America and developed kinship with
Bass, Chavis, Chavers, Collins, Gibson, Griffin, Hammons, Pritchard and
Summerlin.
The Beckett family of 1655 ties to Bibbins, Beavens, Collins, Driggers,
Drighouse, Liverpool, Mongon, Morris, Moses, Nutt, Stevens and Thompson.
The family of Carter begins in 1620 America with the related families of: Best,
Blizzard, Braveboy, Bush, Cane, Copes, Dove, Driggus, Fernando, Fenner, Godett,
George, Harmon, Howard, Jacobs, Jones, Kelly, Lowery, Moore, Norwood, Nicken,
Perkins, Rawlinson, and Spellman.
Mixed red, white, and black Melungeons can be found in Virginia and Maryland
within one and two generations of the first Mbundu-Angolan appearance in
Jamestown in 1619. The general Melungeon community is more than 350 years old
in North America.
Most of these families are related through descent or marriage to the 17th
century Angolans in Virginia. They began building the Melungeon community more
than a century before it appeared in Tennessee.
ANGOLANS AND 17TH CENTURY CUSTOM IN VIRGINIA
The two most important social distinctions in early colonial Virginia were
Class and Religion. In 1616, John Rolfe brought his newly baptized Algonquian Indian
bride Pocahontas to England. Receiving them at court, King James and his
courtiers were appalled that Rolfe, an English commoner, had presumed to marry
a princess. In the eyes of Europe, Pocahontas, who was baptized “Rebecca” in
1614, was Rolfe's social superior and the marriage of a princess to an untitled
husband was offensive and inappropriate. That Pocahontas was red and
Rolfe was white was irrelevant. There was nothing in English literature
or thought in the early part of the 17th century putting forth the notion of
"white" as a class distinction.
The equality of free whites and free blacks in Virginia in the 1600s can be
documented in several areas of colonial life important in the development of
the Melungeon community.
1. Free African-Americans could purchase land,
livestock and other property.
2. Free African-Americans could own servants of
either sex and of any skin color.
3. The law did not forbid mixed black
and white marriage until late in the 17th
century and even then mixed marriages
commonly continued into the 19th
century in
the South.
4. Free baptized African-Americans were
allowed to give testimony in court.
The most famous Melungeon ancestor in the colonies was the Mbundu Angolan who
took the name Anthony Johnson. His Portuguese name, "Antonio"
was shared by a number of other early Virginia African-Americans and because of
this, there is confusion over which "Antonio" was actually Anthony
Johnson. J. Douglas Deal makes a sound argument in "Race and Class
in Colonial Virginia" that Anthony Johnson was the Antonio or Anthony of
Warrosquoke who married a black woman named Mary. He was a passenger on
the "James" from England to Virginia in 1622. Another Antonio
who lived in Kecoughtan, married a black woman named "Isabelle" and
had the first recorded African-American infant, William.
But lost in the controversy over which Antonio became Anthony Johnson, is
evidence that BOTH of the two Anthonys were among the Angolans taken from the
Portuguese slaver "Sao Joao Bautista" in 1619. If Anthony
Johnson was simply a black Englishman, why did his grandson later name his
plantation "Angola"?
The full civil liberties enjoyed by the 17th century Mbundu Angolan
ancestors of the Melungeons were reflected in the lives of Anthony Johnson and
his family. They owned a thousand acres on Pungoteague Creek. Anthony was
the master of white European servants of both sexes. By 1651, the abstract of his deed read,
“Anthony Johnson, 250
acres, Northampton County, 24 July 1651…at great Nawattock Creek, by two small
branches issuing out of the mayne Creek. Transfer of persons: Tho. Bemrose,
Peter Bughby, Antho. Cripps, Jno Gesorroro, Richard Johnson” (his white
servants).
When a fire destroyed
the Johnson plantation in 1652, he appealed to the court and received relief
from paying taxes. In 1655 Anthony sold his Virginia farm and moved his
family to Somerset County, Maryland. He brought with him a mare, 18 sheep
and 14 head of cattle. In 1666 Johnson leased 300 acres in Wimico Hundred
and the farm was called "Tonies Vinyard: (from "Anthony") for
200 years after.
John Johnson, son of Anthony, owned 550 acres in Virginia and he was master of
about a dozen black and white, male and female servants listed as:
“John Edward, Wm.
Routh, Tho. Yowell, Fra. Maland, William Price, John Owen, Dorthy Riley,
Richard Hemstead, Law, Barnes, Row, Rith, and Mary Johnson.”
On several occasions,
Johnson testified in court cases. He
served as a witness in a number of land transactions. A white man, Edward
Surman appointed John as guardian of his children in his will, proved in a
Maryland court in 1676. According to genealogist Paul Heinegg,
John Johnson was called a "Free Nigroe", aged 80 years "poor and
past his labour" when the Sussex County court agreed to maintain him for
life on public funds.
John Johnson had a son, John Jr. born about 1650 who bought about 50 acres for
a farm in Maryland, which he called "Angola". This John Jr., a
"free negro", married a white 17 year-old English girl, Elizabeth
Lowe in Sussex County, Delaware on March 13, 1680.
Anthony had another son; Richard Johnson called "a negro" who married
a white woman named Susan. Their son Richard was described as a
"mulatto".
A great-grandson of the old Ndongo African was Cuff Johnson, head of a Beaufort
County, North Carolina household numbering two "free" blacks and one
white woman in 1800.
In colonial America these examples were repeated many times in numerous
Melungeon families designated as "free people of color". They
were landowners of Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland and Delaware.
ONE MBUNDU FAMILY'S 400 YEAR AMERICAN HISTORY
The mixed Melungeon
descendants of the African who became known as John Gowen (Geaween) b. 1615, can
be traced generation to generation through five centuries in America. Gowen was the earliest African-American
documented in the southern British-American colonies as free. He and his sons filed a number of legal
cases in court from 1641-1700. Descendants
of John Gowen and his wife Margaret Cornish were among the earliest original
Angolan-American families to be recorded as "white". The following
list shows 14 generations of one branch of the Gowen family, (variously spelled
Goins, Goings, Gowing, Goyne, Guynes, Guines etc.) from 1615-2000.
1. John Gowen I (originally "Geaween" and sometimes wrongly
translated "Graweere") was born about 1615. By 1640, Gowen,
described as a "Negro", was the former servant of William Evans of
Virginia. John Gowen, a hog farmer, became a free man in the first
generation of the British colonization of North America. He had a son by
his African-American wife, Margaret Cornish, about 1635. Shortly after
John Gowen’s wife Margaret had a child by a white man named Sweat In 1641,
Gowen purchased the freedom of his son Michael (originally "Mihill")
from Lt. Robert Sheppard, master of Margaret Cornish. Gowen, Sweat, and Cornish were all names found among Melungeons.
2. Michael Gowen, son of John Gowen was born about 1635 in Virginia.
He was indentured to Captain Christopher Stafford of Martin's Hundred,
Virginia. While a servant in the household of Stafford's sister, Amy
Barnhouse, Michael had a son by his first wife, Amy's Negro servant Prossa. Michael named the child William. In
1657, Michael was released from indenture and took his son William with him to
old James City County, Virginia. However, his wife Prossa remained indentured
to Amy Barnhouse. The freeman Michael Gowen remarried a white woman by
whom he had several children described in court records as "mulatto",
including...
3. Thomas Gowen, born 1660 in old James City County, son of Michael
Gowen, son of John Gowen. Thomas was referred to in court records as a
free "mulatto". Thomas Gowen raised racehorses in Westmoreland
County. The descendants of the Thomas Gowen branch of the Gowen family
were never explicitly referred to as "Negro". Thomas had at
least two sons including:
4. William Gowing or Gowen I, born about 1680, son of Thomas Gowen, son
of Michael Gowen, son of John Gowen. William married Katherine, a white
woman and they lived in Stafford County. William, a freeman, owned two slaves
and over two hundred acres of land in Stafford County. William Gowen had a son
named:
5. John Gowen II, born 1702, son of William Gowen, son of Thomas Gowen,
son of Michael Gowen, son of the African-American John Gowen I. John
Gowen II married Mary Keife, a white woman, and they lived in Lunenburg County,
Virginia. Among the children of John and Mary Gowen was:
6. William Gowen II, born 1725 in Lunenburg County, Virginia, son of John
Gowen II, son of William Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of Michael Gowen,
son of John Gowen I. William II was recorded as a white taxable. He
lived in Lunenburg County Virginia, and Orange County North Carolina. He
too married a white woman and among their children was:
7. James Gowen or Goyne, born 1755 in Lunenburg County, son of William
Gowen
II, son of John Gowen II, son of William Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of
Michael Gowen, son of John Gowen I. This 7th generation son of the
"negro" John Gowen, of old James City was recorded as
"white". James fought in the
American Revolution
and afterwards moved from South Carolina to Louisiana and Mississippi. He
and his wife Mary had several children including:
8. John Goyne (aka Guynes) III, born 1776 in the Camden District of South
Carolina, son of James Goyne, son of William Gowen II, son of John Gowen II,
son of William Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of Michael Gowen, son of John
Gowen I. John Guynes married Matilda Hall and they moved to Copiah
County, Mississippi where they owned several hundred acres and about a dozen
slaves. Many of his sons and grandsons achieved prestige in mainstream
white America including a state lawmaker, a circuit judge,
several army officers
etc. Among the children of John and Matilda Guynes was:
9. Harmon Runnels Guynes, born in Mississippi in 1820, son of John Guynes
III, son of James Goyne, son of William Gowen II, son of John Gowen II, son of
William Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of Michael Gowen, son of John Gowen
I. Harmon Guynes married Emily Whittington of Mississippi and moved to
Texas about 1850. Harmon and Emily Guynes had several children including
a
daughter named:
10. Nancy Guynes, born 1863 in Goliad County, Texas, daughter of Harmon
Guynes, son of John Guynes III, son of James Goyne, son of William Gowen II,
son of John Gowen II, son of William Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of Michael Gowen, son of John Gowen I. No
hint of African blood can be found in the records at this stage, only family
stories that Nancy was "Indian". The Guynes-Hashaw family
cemetary on the
Walker/Trinity County
line in Texas is marked by the state as an "Indian cemetery".
In 1880 Nancy Guynes married William "Dude" Hashaw in Trinity
County, Texas and had several children including,
11. Thomas Hashaw, born 1881 in Trinity County, Texas, son of Dude and
Nancy Guynes Hashaw, daughter of Harmon Guynes, son of John Guynes III, son of
James Goyne, son of William Gowen II, son of John Gowen II, son of William
Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of Michael Gowen, son of John Gowen I. Thomas
Hashaw was said to be part Choctaw Indian.
He married Margaret Aden about 1900 and they had three sons
including,
12. Woodrow Hashaw, born about 1905 in Dodge, Texas, son of Thomas
Hashaw,
son of Nancy Guynes Hashaw, daughter of Harmon Guynes, son of John Guynes III,
son of James Goyne, son of William Gowen II, son of John Gowen II, son of
William Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of Michael Gowen, son of John Gowen
I. Woodrow Hashaw married Zelma Jordan and they had two sons including
13. Carl Hashaw, born in Dodge, Texas in 1936, the son of Woodrow Hashaw,
son of Thomas Hashaw, son of Nancy Guynes Hashaw, daughter of John Guynes III,
son of James Goyne, son of William Gowen II, son of John Gowen II, son of
William Gowen I, son of Thomas Gowen, son of Michael Gowen, son of John
Gowen I. Carl Hashaw is the father of this writer. By 1960, only
undocumented rumors of "Indian" blood persisted in this branch
of the family long after the Angolan-African who became known as John Gowen
first appeared in Virginia nearly 400 years earlier.
MALUNGU: Part 5
ETHNIC INTERMARRIAGE IN COLONIAL AMERICA
Mixed descendants of the first African-Americans entered all walks of life.
Many are world famous. Among the offspring of colonial-era Angolan Americans;
the mother of Abraham Lincoln Nancy Hanks, Tom Hanks, Benjamin Chavis, Ava
Gardner, Elvis Presley, Heather Locklear, Rich Mullins and comedian Steve
Martin from Waco, Texas.
Many of the patriarchal surnames of these 17th century Angolan-Americans
survive today because, more often than not, Angolan men married white women of
English, Irish and Scottish ancestry. White men also married Angolan
women but their families are harder to trace.
In Virginia and other colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even into
the 19th century, white women showed no repugnance to Africans of equal status.
Lerone Bennett Jr. in "Before the Mayflower" quotes Edward
Long, an early colonial witness who observed that,
"The lower class
of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons to brutal
to mention."
Genealogist Paul Heinegg found many early mixed marriages in colonial Virginia,
between free African-Americans and white Europeans. -Cases he gives:
"Francis Payne was married to a white woman named Amy by September 1656
when he gave her a mare by deed of jointure. [DW 1655-68, fol.19].
"Francis Skiper was married to Ann, an African American woman, before
February 1667 when they sold land in Norfolk County." [W&D E:1666-75;
Orders 1666-75,73]
"Elizabeth Kay, a "Mulatto" woman whose father had been free,
successfully sued for her freedom in Northumberland County in 1690, and married
her white attorney, William Greensted". [WMQ, 3rd ser, XXX, 467-74]
Sometimes white planters promoted mixed marriages of African men and white
women for economic reasons; hoping to reap the servitude of the offspring as
legal chattel. Bennett cites a famous case involving an indentured
servant girl named "Irish Nell" who was brought to Maryland by Lord
Baltimore.
Upon sailing back to
England, Baltimore sold Nell to a planter who encouraged her to marry a black
man named Butler. The planter desired the mixed offspring of the marriage for
chattel slavery. Returning to America, Baltimore was appalled and moved to
enact a law forbidding such practices in 1681. It began with the words:
"Forasmuch as divers
free-born English or white women, sometimes by the instigation, procurement or
connivance of their masters, mistresses, or dames, and always to the
satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires, and to the disgrace not
only of the English, but also of many other Christian nations, do intermarry
with Negroes and slaves, by which means, divers inconveniences, controversies,
and suits may arise, touching the issue of children of such freeborn women
aforesaid; for the prevention whereof for the future, Be it enacted: That if
the marriage of any woman servant with any slave shall take place by the
procurement or permission of the master, such woman and her issue shall be
free."
This new law did not outlaw mixed marriages. It
attempted to discourage mixed marriages in which children of British subjects
might be regarded as chattel property. Baltimore was more concerned about
stopping an attempt to circumvent the Magna Carta. His law slowed the
rate of legal marriages between white and black servants in Maryland, but it
also caused an unforeseen problem according to Bennett. While legal
intermarriages dropped, the births of mixed children to single females rose.
The legislative act raised the birthrates of illegitimate mulatto children who
eventually became a public burden. Three times in ten years Maryland, lawmakers
attempted to slow the growing number of mixed unions and the children from
them.
Virginia, Massachusetts, North and South Carolina and Delaware also passed laws
against intermarriage by lengthening the terms of servitude for white women who
married African-American men, or who bore mulatto children. Bennett
cites cases of ministers who performed mixed marriages being levied fines.
In 1725 John Cotton was indicted for marrying a "Molatto Man to a
White woman". In North Carolina, the Reverend John Blacknall was
fined fifty pounds in 1726 for joining in matrimony Matthew Thomas Spencer and
a mulatto woman named Martha Paule. [Saunders, Colonial Records]
Vigilante groups tried to enforce the laws and churches were called to thunder
against black and white marriages, but it did not work. Case after case can be
found as intermarriage and unsanctioned unions continued to openly flaunt the
law. Groups strongly protested the new restrictions prohibiting mixed
marriages according to Bennett.
"On May 11, 1699, George Ivie and others sent a petition to the Council of
Virginia asking for the repeal of the Act of the Assembly against English
peoples marrying with Negroes, Indians or mulattoes. Of equal or perhaps
even more pointed political concern was the action of whites who simply defied
the laws. Shortly after the enactment of Virginia's ban on intermarriage,
Ann Wall was convicted of "keeping company with a Negro under pretense of
marriage." The Elizabeth County court sold Ann Wall for five years
and bound out her two mulatto children for thirty-one years. And "it
is further ordered" the court said, "that if ye said Ann Wall after
she is free from her said master doe at any time presume to come into this
county, she shall be banished to ye Island of Barbadoes."
In 1692, the case of Bridgett, a white servant who bore a mulatto child by a
black man went all the way to the grand jury in Henrico County, Virginia. In
addition, in Pennsylvania, legislators outlawed mixed marriages only to repeal
the ban during the years of the American Revolution. Bennett quotes
Thomas Branagan who visited Philadelphia in 1805 and observed:
"There are many, very many blacks who...begin to feel themselves
consequential...will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives,
and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low
circumstances...I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and
deluded through the arts of seduction by Negroes in one year in Philadelphia,
than for eight years I was visiting [West Indies and the Southern
states]...There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black
men in this city and there are thousands of black children by them at
present."
During the rise of laws banning mixed marriage, newspapers carried notices of
black and white servants running away together. From the southern
journal, "American Weekly Mercury" of August 11, 1720:
"Runaway in April last from Richard Tilghman, of Queen Anne County in
Maryland, a mulatto slave, named Richard Molson, of middle stature, about forty
years old and has had the small pox, he is in company with a white woman...who
is supposed now goes for his wife."
And in the "Pennsylvania Gazette" of June 1, 1746:
"Runaway from the subscriber the second of last month, at the town of
Potomac, Frederick County, Maryland, a mulatto servant named Isaac Cromwell,
runaway at the same time, an English servant woman named Ann Greene."
Legislation banning mixed marriages was largely ignored. Heinegg
observes,
"Despite the efforts of the legislature, white servant women continued to
bear children by African American fathers through the late 17th century and
well into the 18th century. From these genealogies, it appears that they
were the primary source of the increase in the free African American population
for this period...Since so many free African-Americans were light-skinned; many
observers assume that they were the offspring of white slave owners who took
advantage of their female slaves. Only one of more than 280 families in
this history was proven to descend from a white slave owner".
These mixed marriages were by no means the practice of the servant class only.
Bennett mentions Lemuel Haynes, the son of a white woman and an African.
Lemuel was the first black to pastor a white New England church,
and he married Elizabeth Babbitt, a white woman. The grandmother of
astronomer-mathematician Benjamin Banneker was Molly Welsh, an English woman.
The "founding fathers" were also involved in mixed relationships.
Benjamin Franklin was said to frequently associate with black women.
Thomas Jefferson took Sally Hemings for his mistress according to Bennett and
Jefferson's romance with Sally became the subject of a tavern ditty to the tune
of Yankee Doodle.
"Of all the damsels on the green,
...on mountains or in valley,
A lass so luscious ne'er was seen,
...As Monticellian Sally."
Bennett also quotes reports that Patrick Henry fathered a black son named
Melancthon. Alexander Hamilton was not only born with mixed blood in the West
Indies, but he also fathered two sons by a black woman and one of his sons
married into a white family, according to Maurice R. Davie of Yale University.
Kentucky's famous Daniel Boone was the grandfather of the mulatto, William
Wells Brown. The ninth vice-president of the United States was another
Kentuckian, Richard Johnson, whose black mistress was Julia Chinn.
Bennett says, "The couple had two daughters and Johnson married them
off with style to white men."
Far into the period of chattel slavery, whites and Africans persistently
intermarried. Bennett shows a census as late as 1830 in Nansemond,
Virginia reflecting the number of white women continuing to marry black men
more than a hundred and fifty years after the first law restricted such
marriages.
1830 NANSEMOND VIRGINIA CENSUS
Jacob of Rega and white wife, Syphe of Matthews and white wife, Jacob Branch
and white wife, Ely of Copeland and white wife,
Tom of Copeland and white wife, Will of Butler and white wife, Davy of Sawyer
and white wife, Stephen of Newby and white wife, Amarian Reed and white wife
The free, light-skinned, mixed children of black and white inter-marriage made
up the many ethnically-diverse isolated communities in Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Louisiana. Among those
groups were the Melungeons.
With the growing success of the American colonies, small family farms, which
had relied on indentured servants usually released after 7 years, became huge
plantations exploiting life-long chattel slaves. Whites and many of the
earlier freed Angolan blacks were legally protected from permanent slavery.
However, many other Africans arriving on slave ships by the 1670s were entering
a system with no exits. In time, the lowest class of colonial society became
exclusively made up of black chattel slaves where it had once been black and
white indentured servants. Class distinction became race distinction in
the 18th century and eventually America viewed free Angolans and their mixed
children with the same disdain by which she saw black slaves. These free
"non-whites” retreated into isolated enclaves like the Melungeon
communities. Heinegg writes,
"...as more and more slaves replaced white servants, the Legislature
passed a series of laws which designated slavery as the appropriate condition
for African-Americans.
1. In 1670 the Virginia Assembly forbade free African-Americans and
Indians from owning white servants. [Hening, Statutes at Large, II:280]
2. In 1691, the Assembly prohibited the manumission of slaves unless they
were transported out of the colony. It also prohibited black and white
intermarriages and ordered the illegitimate mixed-race children of white women
to be bound out for 30 years. [Hening, Statutes at Large, III:86-87]
3. In 1705 the Assembly passed a law which all but eliminated the ability
of slaves to earn their freedom by ordering that the farm stock of slaves
"shall be seized and sold by the church-wardens of the parish wherein such
horses, cattle or hogs shall be, and the profit thereof applied to the use of
the poor of said parish." [Hening, Statutes at Large, III:459-60]
Like a slowly drawn net, new legislation over time cut off every avenue to
liberty for newly arrived Africans. The free people of color who lived
separate from African slaves were gradually isolated as the rules of colonial
society changed: they were not chattel property like the new blacks, but they were
also "not white".
THE FIRST WOMEN OF MELUNGIA
In 1807 in Kentucky, John Levy Going attempted to marry a white woman in
Livingston County and was denied by the Justice because of his rumored
"Negro" blood. The Marion, Kentucky library has an article
which records, "They went away but a few days after, they returned for
marriage. The woman swore that she had "Negro" blood in her,
which she did. Just before they started, the man cut a vein and she drank
some of his blood. She had his blood in her."
Refused the protection of sanctioned marriage by the end of the 1600s, black
and white couples were hauled into court on morals-related charges. In
such cases the man sometimes disappeared, leaving the woman holding the child
alone. Often the woman would refuse to name the father. Faced with
the prospect of a single-parent child dependant upon the welfare of the county,
the colonial legislators imposed severe penalties upon mother and child hoping
to send a message. Fatherless mulattos were often indentured for up to 30
years, and the mother usually had additional years added to her original term
of indenture.
In other cases, the man might finally get his freedom with the opportunity to
move away and purchase new frontier land. However, his wife might still
be bound for several years. The man often took his freeborn children and
abandoned his indentured wife. These were the realities facing the early
ancestors of Melungeons.
Before the restrictions against mixed unions in America, there were many
legitimate black and white marriages sanctioned by the church. Paul
Heinegg cites the 1681 case of Elizabeth Shorter who married a "negro
man" named Little Robin in nuptials administered by Nicholas Geulick, a
priest. They had three mulatto daughters in St. Mary's County.
Slowly however, colonial society turned on the mixed unions it had previously
allowed. After 1720 in Northampton County, Virginia, Tamar Smith had to serve
half a year in prison and pay a ten-pound fine to marry Major Hitchens, a black
man. Paul Heinegg in his book “Free
African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and
Delaware has found numerous similar incidents below.
On August 16, 1705, a "mulatto" named John Bunch and a white woman
named Sarah Slayden, appealed to the Council of Virginia to permit them to be
married after such a request had been denied by the Blisland Parish minister.
The Council countered that the "intent of the Law (was) to prevent Negroes
and White Persons intermarrying".
The matriarch of the Welch family was Mary. In 1728 in Maryland, she
testified that she had born a mulatto child. Her original term of
servitude to Thomas Harwood was lengthened by seven years and her two-month old
son Henry was bound to Harwood for 31 years.
Mary Wise, the servant of a man named Wells admitted in 1732 to having a
mulatto child in Prince George County. The court sold her nine week-old
daughter Becky into 31 years servitude for 1,500 pounds of tobacco.
In Delaware, Mary Plowman was charged in 1704 of giving birth to a child by a
"Negro" named Frank. The court gave her 21 lashes and an additional
term of servitude to her master. Her mulatto daughter Rose was bound
until the age of twenty-one.
In Kent County, Delaware, 17 year old Eleanor Price admitted to
"Fornication with a Negro Man named Peter" in 1703. She received
twenty-one lashes and an extended period of 18 months servitude. Her daughter
was bound to the children of her master until the age of twenty-one.
In Accomack County, Virginia in 1721, Ann Shepherd, a "Christian white
woman" was presented for having an illegitimate child. Pressured to
name the father, she first indicted one "Indian Edmund", but later
admitted the father was a mulatto, Henry Jackson. Ann was sold for a five-year
term.
In Virginia in 1716, Elizabeth Bartlett was ordered to pay 1,200 pounds of
tobacco to her mistress Mary Bailey, for eloping with the mistress' Negro
servant James.
Sarah Dawson was a white servant girl who endured twenty-one lashes in Virginia
in 1784 for having three illegitimate children by her master's
servant Peter Beckett whom she later married.
In Lancaster County in 1703, Elizabeth Bell ran away from her master and was
lashed twenty times at the county whipping post. A year later she was
indentured to another master during which time she had a child by a black man.
Five years were added to her sentence.
The case of Alice Bryan is also cited by Heinegg. Alice confessed to
bearing a "bastard Molattoe Child" by a "Negro man Called
Jack." Thirty-nine lashes and an extra two years indenture was the
sentence of the court. Her mulatto son Peter was bound out for 31 years
and her daughter Elizabeth was enslaved for 18 years.
AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The presence of mixed African and white blood in Melungeons was troublesome as early as the first known appearance of the name "Melungeon". The word was used in the September 26th, 1813 minutes of the Stony Creek church of Virginia. Sister Susanna Kitchen brought a complaint to the church against Sister Susanna "Sookie" Stallard over accusations of "harboring them Melungins." Stony Creek previously had a membership, which included whites, free Negroes, slaves and Melungeons. Melungeons were among the earliest members when the church was established. But over time theirs was the only group forced out. Melungeon surnames identical to those found on the Stony Creek church membership roll, are traceable to free African-Americans back in the 17th and early 18th century. It is evident that by 1813, twelve years after the church was founded, an effort had been made by white members to expel their Melungeon brothers and sisters. In an article for the 1999 Appalachian Journal, C.S. Everett wrote:
“Apparently, many individuals of typical Melungeon surname entered the newly organized Stony Creek Church near Fort Blackmore in the Clinch River Valley of what is now Scott County, Virginia, between December 1801 and March 1804. Even before the end of their migration to Stony Creek, Melungeons were being dismissed and excommunicated from the church by request (letter) or otherwise. In November of 1802, Henry Gibson was excommunicated, Tiny Collins and Thomas Gibson were placed under censure, and David Gibson was cited to appear before the church in the next meeting. Most of the Melungeon church members continued to receive censures, excommunication, or letters of dismissal for the next several years, and most relocated to Blackwater or Mulberry. The community called Blackwater is located on Blackwater Creek (near Newman Ridge), which runs through northeastern Hancock (then Hawkins) County, Tennessee, and southeastern Lee County, Virginia (where Stone Mountain rises). The Mulberry Gap area of Hancock (Hawkins) County lies on Blackwater Creek near Powell Mountain, just southwest of what later became known as the “Vardy” community, a Melungeon settlement on Newman Ridge just opposite Indian Ridge. Documentation demonstrates that at this time, 1802-1804, Melungeon men had acquired relatively substantial land holdings in these very locations through the usual Anglo-American legal channels.
In the summer of 1808, a new pastor was named at Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church.Between that time and the winter of 1810, the only possible Melungeons mentioned in church minutes were Jessee Bolin, John Gibson, and Elisha Sexton. From November 1811 to March 27, 1813 there is no mention of anybody with the Melungeon surnames in Stony Creek minutes. In April though, a roster listing “the whole” of the congregation included three Gibsons, one Gipsons, and two Sextons. Thereafter, only two entries mention a “Brother Sexton”, the Gibsons and Gipson having disappeared. A few months later, in October of 1813, Sister Susanna Kitchen went before the church and “complained… against Susanna Stallard for saying she harbored “them Melungins”. From the context “them Melungins” were most likely among the former congregation members who moved down into Blackwater and Mulberry at Newman Ridge.”
Everett points out that the name “Melungeon” never appeared in church records until after the Melungeons were gone. This implies the name was considered derogatory at the time. Why were Melungeons expelled from the church while free and slave Negroes remained? Why did whites fear and loathe Melungeons? Why were not free Negroes and slave Negroes forced out of the Stony Creek church along with the mixed Melungeons if indeed Negro ethnicity was at the heart of the church expulsions? By 1813 the Southern states had forced African-Americans into the basement of the class structure. And yet Stony Creek welcomed African-Americans into the fold as long as they were not Melungeons.
Melungeon ancestors of the 17th century had enjoyed social equality with whites. In the 19th century Melungeons were shunned. The name “Melungeon” was denied by the mixed people it described. The single event more than any other stoking white fear of Melungeons at the end of the 18th century, was brought about by the very government many Melungeons had fought for in the American Revolution. In 1790 in the first U.S. federal census, George Washington required marshals to determine the ethnicity of American citizens. His purpose was not primarily to bring ill upon Melungeons. Washington wanted to know how many white males were available for military service. Those with African ancestry; free or slave, were not considered for military service. The new American republic required everyone to truthfully answer all questions under the penalty of law, including the question of one’s ethnicity. Federal marshals were paid a bonus if they found any falsehood in the census. The dreaded labels of “Negro, mulatto or free colored” threatened many successful, affluent, near-white Melungeons because of the stigma of “black” among many southern whites. The “colored” label on Melungeons was authorized in official government documents in 1790. One hundred and forty years later the state of Virginia used the ethnic information required by the 1800-1840 federal census to identify mixed descendants in its efforts to shield the “white race” from miscegenation. In lobbying for the “Montague Bill”, Virginia State registrar Walter Plecker said of the 1800-1840 census that,
“…this information is of special value in tracing the racial descent of families”. [Plecker, Jan. 7, 1928]
In the younger states outside the original tidewater colonies, people were unfamiliar with Melungeons. Though both are in the South, there are two centuries separating Virginia society and the society of Georgia. For example: William Goyens was born in North Carolina in 1794 to a "free Negro" father and a white mother. In 1821, he came to Texas and became a prosperous businessman in Nacogdoches. In 1832, Goyen proposed marriage to a white woman named Polly Sibley. Her brothers came from Georgia to block the marriage, but gave their blessing when they heard that William Goyens was not African, but "Melungeon.” If Sibley’s brother had come from Virginia they would not have dropped their objections. Virginians in 1832 had been familiar with Melungeons and their ancestors for more than a century. Georgia however still had unsettled frontiers. Anna Going Friedman, a researcher with the Gowen Research Foundation found that:
“The state of Georgia was a point of destination for free persons of color from Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The laws of Georgia were not greatly discriminatory and land was abundant at reasonable prices. The names of the families who signed Petition 164 from the Camden District of South Carolina can also be found in the early counties of Georgia. By 1810 the black population of Georgia had outgrown the white population. More laws were enacted to restrict the rights of slaves and free persons of color. By 1818 all FPC had to register twice a year and this register was published in local papers. The exodus of FPC from Georgia to Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Louisiana commenced. Louisiana had the most generous and lenient attitude to FPC than any other state. However the scenario seen in the Eastern Seaboard states of the ratio of more black than white appeared in Louisiana and cause fear in the white population. Subsequently laws of suppression began to appear against blacks and FPC”.
Evidence indicates that discrimination against blacks, and
mixed black subgroups followed a few decades behind the expanding western
frontier. The Melungeons could settle
in newly opened southern states and territories for a few decades before anyone
came along asking about their ancestry in the 19th century. Texas, on the farthest western frontier was,
as to be expected, last in enacting discriminatory laws against blacks and
mixed black groups like Melungeons. In fact the name Melungeon was practically
unknown in Louisiana and Texas. The new
southern states of the 19th century knew very little about
Melungeons and therefore knew little about their mixed Negro ancestry until
late in the ballgame.
However, the original southern tidewater colonies in the
East; Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas knew otherwise. Virginia
grandfathers from the colonial era could remember the Negro ancestors of the
Melungeons even though the issue of black and white marriage had never
scandalized them as it did their grandchildren. For the Stony Creek church by
1813, the possibility of marriages of white members with Melungeon members
presented cause for alarm. There was
gossip of white couples giving birth to dark-skinned babies. To marry someone
with a vague pedigree was to court possible expulsion from white society and
the Melungeons were the proverbial dark horses. One popular definition of Melungeon in fiction today actually
means “of uncertain ancestry”. But more
than any other reason the white church members of Stony Creek feared
Melungeons, was the federal census and its requirement for ethnic descriptions
in 1800.. Marshals with the U S
government determined that known Melungeons were to be classed as Negro,
Mulatto or Other Free Persons of color. The label varied from county to county
depending on how much political clout mixed groups wielded. Federal marshals
after all, were elected. But in those areas where they lacked a large enough
presence, government policy, especially in the South, denied citizenship to
non-whites. Many white people in
mainstream American society wanted to keep their sons and daughters isolated
from otherwise light-skinned Melungeons who had, by then, a visibly diminishing
yet still rumored Negro ancestry. The
opportunities offered American citizens such as an education in white schools,
the right to vote and to govern, the right to avoid unjust taxation, the right
to bear arms and other freedoms, were denied to those with African, Indian or
mixed ancestry. In addition, by this
time, 130 years after the first anti-black law, white America, especially in the South, had developed an acute
case of social prejudice against African-Americans.
From time to time, the Clinch River Melungeons would return to visit Stony
Creek, a 40-mile trip that required a one-night stopover. Certain members
came under suspicion from other white church members for "harboring them
Melungins" overnight. It is
interesting that both surnames Stallard and Kitchen can be found at a later
time intermarried with Melungeons.
In the Stony Creek case, the presence of African blood in Melungeons raised
tensions because Melungeons were otherwise white. Free or slave, Negroes were
welcome to worship with whites at the Stony Creek church. Lighter skinned Melungeons were chased off.
Other events occurred at about the same time to move Melungeons from the original colonies to the new frontiers of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Louisiana. The French Revolution had begun with the storming of the Bastille in 1789. In Haiti, free mulattos struck for freedom in 1791 in Port-Au-Prince and a bitter revolution followed. Later that year France renounced slavery and began announcing the end of chattel bondage through all of its Caribbean territories. The news quickly reached African slaves in the new United States. Not generally realized is the extent to which the upheaval in Haiti had stunned and alarmed southern whites in the United States who were holding a sizable African population in bondage. Indeed the Haitian revolution inspired black slaves along with some free Negroes and working class whites in North America, to plan an overthrow of slavery in the South. The attempted 1800 coup in Virginia was called the Gabriel Conspiracy.
Gabriel was born a slave in 1776 on the Prosser tobacco plantation in Henrico County, Virginia. Trained to be a blacksmith, he stood 6’2” and possessed charismatic leadership qualities. He secretly began to enlist not only slaves but also free Africans and poor whites for a planned insurrection. Inspired by the recent revolution in St. Domingue, Gabriel styled his banner “death or Liberty” after the Haitian battle cry. His plan called for the capture of the Capitol Square in Richmond Virginia. Recruiters went into areas in which Melungeons are known to have lived in 1800; in Petersburg, Norfolk, and Albermarle and in Caroline, Henrico and Louisa counties. Gabriel had also planned for one of his men to “go to the nation of Indians called Catawbas to persuade them to join the Negroes to fight the white people.” Some Melungeons had intermarried with Catawbas. William H. Blevins remembered stories that old Ned Sizemore came from the Catawba River on the Catawba Reservation. Members of the Gibson family had apparently also joined the Catawba Indians in Macon County, North Carolina. Gabriel’s conspiracy became the largest planned slave revolt in the early history of the United States.. However on the scheduled day, August 30, 1800 a terrible thunderstorm washed out the roads and flooded the creeks. The gathered army dispersed with plans to attack the next day. But two slaves told their white masters and Governor James Madison was alerted. The chief conspirators, including Gabriel and his brothers were rounded up, brought to trial and 27 were hanged. The trials dragged on for months after the August 1800 coup attempt. Suspected participants captured outside of Richmond were tried in other counties and many were hung. Two slaves escaped with the help of free blacks outside the Hanover County prison. The magistrates of Norfolk County, home of the Melungeon Bass clan, questioned slaves and working class whites, seeking other conspirators. However no one would offer evidence and those arrested were released. Four free blacks were arrested in Petersburg, Virginia but authorities were again frustrated by the lack of witnesses. Slaves offered to testify against free blacks, but such testimony of slave against free was not admissible in the courts of Virginia. Many suspected blacks, when no evidence could be found against them, were deported from Virginia. Within a year of Gabriel’s conspiracy, several Melungeons were leaving Virginia for the frontier.
In the aftermath of the Gabriel Conspiracy of 1800 white Virginia and the rest of the slave-holding South remained in a constant state of fear and suspicion lasting well past the slave rebellion of Nat Turner 30 years later. Legislation banned free colored people from entering certain states. Runaway slaves were known to seek out family members in free black and mixed communities for refuge. Melungeons had the unique ability because of their dual ethnicity to pass between the communities of black slaves and free whites. In view of white paranoia after the Gabriel Conspiracy, there is little doubt the mixed Melungeons were viewed with suspicion by their white neighbors. Whites in Virginia, Carolina and other southern slave states were haunted by vivid accounts of the vengeful slaughter in Haiti of white French families. The wildfire of abolition was sweeping through the lower Americas, the Caribbean and western Europe in the beginning of the 19th century.
Melungeons were driven out of the Stony Creek church not only because of their dual white and black ancestry, but also because they were free. After the census of 1790 and 1800 forced the ethnic identification of Melungeons as “Negro” or “mulatto”, whites began to question what the mixed Melungeons would do, or with whom they would side in the event of their greatest fear; a mass slave rebellion in the South. The era between the American Revolution and the American Civil War defined white America’s negative view of the name “Melungeon” in the older Southern colonies-turned-states. Melungeons were not known as well or feared as much in newer southern states where the institution of chattel slavery was more recent. One must point not only to the federal census beginning in 1790 and 1800, but also the continuing threat of slave rebellions to understand the ill treatment of free mixed black Melungeons in the white South. Melungeons were often viewed as sympathetic to escaped black slaves and not only because of blood ties: they themselves, though free, daily lived under the danger of being illegally kidnapped into slavery.
“A SMALL REMOVED FROM SLAVERY”
Frequently, the states of the original Southern colonies enacted legislation not only preventing mixed families from coming in, but also to forcibly eject those already settled. They did this through a variety of acts targeting those families associated with mixed groups like the Melungeon community. Anna Going Friedman researched one such example. When the Revolutionary War ended, the colonies found they were saddled with huge foreign debts accrued from the war. In March of 1789, South Carolina passed an ordinance aiming to kill two birds with one stone. All free people of color in South Carolina were ordered to pay additionally two bits on the dollar head tax effective February 1791. The legislature added two dollars per head for all above 16 years of age as of December 21, 1792. The message was clear: slaves stay, but free Negroes and free mixed groups leave, even those who had fought in the Revolution. Several Melungeons from the Sumter and Camden districts filed Petition 164 in protest. The petition argued that:
“…Before the War, and till very lately, your Petitioners were Freeholders or Tradesmen, paid a tax only for their Lands, trades and other Taxable property in common with others the Free White Citizens of the State, Poll Tax for any of their children while under their jurisdiction.
That in March 1789, an Ordinance was passed Intitled an Ordinance for Funding and ultimately discharging the Foreign debt of this State, wherein it was Ordained that a Tax of one fourth of a Dollar per head per Annum be imposed upon all Negroes, Mustizoes and Mulattoes: the same to commence in February 1791, and from thence continue for the span of Ten years.”
“…That your Petitioners are generally a Poor needy People; have frequently large Families to Maintain; and find it exceeding difficult and distressing to support the same and answer the large demands of the Publick; which appears to them considerably more than Double what was formerly Exacted from them; In consequence of which they conceive their Situation in life but a small removed from Slavery; that they are likely to suffer continued incoveniences and disadvantages; and in the end to be reduced to poverty and want itself.”
The petition bore the Melungeon surnames of Morris, Going, Coal, (Cole) Bird, Portee, Anderson, and Jones, 17 in all, as well as prominent white supporters from Fairfield County. The legislative response to the petition was drawn out and the effect was that almost all of the petitioners had moved out of South Carolina into western Kentucky within three years. By 1797 many of these families were settling on the Wabash River in the territory now made up of present-day Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and part of Minnesota.
In the book “Contributions in Black and Red”, Jacqueline Cortez wrote,
“Some of the earliest settlements in Indiana Territory were founded by Negro men and women. Thomas Coles of Lyle Station, Indiana was a prominent farmer. The residents of Pink Staff and Ft. Allison Illinois can trace their ancestors as far back as 1800. They emigrated from Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee. Most of these residents are a mixture of Negro, Indian and Caucasian.”
These mixed Melungeon trailblazers; Allison, Morris, Anderson, and Tan built Ft. Allison and served as scouts in the War of 1812.
MELUNGEONS IN LOUISIANA AND TEXAS
After the American Revolution, U.S. land purchases and Indian conquests quickened the pace of the white, free black and free mixed migration into Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and the Northwest Territory. The U.S. Congress passed and President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, forcibly escorting Eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi. There is evidence that descendants of the original 17th century Angolans were on both sides of the removal of Southeastern Indian tribes to the West. For example the Cherokee lists show the presence of many with the Melungeon surname “Goins”, indicating the presence of free Angolan descendants who had intermarried with that nation. The Cherokee resisted relocation more than the other Indian nations, and a federal army had to be called up to march them at gunpoint to reserves in Indian Territory. On the other-hand, the Goins surname also appears among those moving into the eastern lands vacated by these Indians. Guynes (Goins), and Finleys can be found settling in Scott and Leake counties in Mississippi not long after 1830.
About the time of the forced Indian exile, the Trail of Tears, there occurred another slave insurrection, one that was inspired by the earlier Gabriel Rebellion. The Nat Turner uprising in August 1831 had a major impact on the history and movement of Melungeons. In 1831 Billy Artis, a free man of color, along with slave preacher Nat Turner, organized and led a widespread slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia. Nearly 60 whites were slain before the insurrection was checked. Billy Artis was a descendant of several of the 17th century Mbundu Angolan families of early Virginia. The Artis name can be found intermarried with numerous Melungeon families. According to genealogist Paul Heinegg, Easter (Hester) Artis, born 1687, was among the slaves freed in the 1712 will of John Fulcher of Norfolk County, Virginia. She was described in court papers as a “free Negroe woman living in Virga”. She had a son, Robin Artis, by another freed slave, Robin Richards. The Artis family had kindred connections to many Melungeon surnames including Brown, Gibson, Johnson, Powell, and Stewart. Billy Artis committed suicide rather than surrender to the white posse tracking him down. Another Nat Turner ally was Barry Newsome, a descendant of Moses Newsome, (white) who had married a free black woman named Judah, early in the 18th century. The Newsomes also had Melungeon kinfolk including Cumbo, Goins, Stewart, and Byrd.
Angry vigilantes decapitated forty innocent Negroes and also executed 120 others in the wake of the Nat Turner insurrection. Many hundreds of free persons of color were forced into exile during the ensuing reign of terror. C.S. Everett, in “Melungeon History and Myth” writes:
“…in the wake of the Nat Turner slave insurrection, Virginia passed a law in 1831 threatening to enslave free mulattos if they did not leave the state. Following events in Virginia, in 1834 the state of Tennessee disfranchised all free individuals classified as “Negro,” “mulatto,” “Indian,” or “mustee”- free persons of color who had exercised suffrage and other rights as citizens for over three decades. North Carolina followed suit with similar legislation in 1835…Perhaps the devastating Dred Scott decision of 1857-arguably a case decided in the Southern interest of extending the institution of slavery- had an important impact. Although Dred Scott was an enslaved African American, Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion endangered ALL free persons of color. In essence the Supreme Court issued a strong statement about who could and could not exercise rights as citizens. “Black” was strictly equated with non-citizenship and, by implication, anyone so classified (“free person of color,” “mulatto,” or “Indian”) could potentially be enslaved. Shortly thereafter a bill was introduced to the Tennessee legislature proposing “expulsion from the state of free persons of color.”
The result white hostility in the wake of the Nat Turner insurrection and later the Dred Scott decision pushed many of the Melungeons further out into the expanding frontier of the United States.
Among the early settlers of Texas were the Melungeon families of Ashworth and Goins, (Guynes, Goyens etc). The Ashworths had traveled to Louisiana from South Carolina in 1799, about the same time other South Carolinian Melungeons were bound for the Northwest Territory. The Ashworths, recorded as “free blacks”, owned land and slaves in Jefferson County when Texas was fighting Mexico for independence. In 19th century Texas, the mixed Ashworth clan married white males and females. Aaron Ashworth was the wealthiest man in Jefferson County. Texas for the most part accepted these intermarriages without a fuss. In 1840 the Republic of Texas, fearing a Nat Turner-inspired slave insurrection, enacted legislation ordering all free blacks and mulattos to leave the country or face slavery. It was well known that runaway slaves fled to free blacks and mixed communities. White neighbors protested and petitioned the Texas Congress to exempt the Ashworths. Texas passed the Ashworth Act before the end of the year, allowing free blacks living in Texas during the War for Independence to remain.
The Ashworth Act resulted from an act passed in February 1840 exiling free blacks from the Republic of Texas and stopping the immigration of any other free blacks. This earlier act had repealed a previous law allowing free blacks settling in the Republic of Texas prior to the Texas Declaration of Independence. Three petitions were presented in December 1840 requesting exemptions for Abner, Wiliiam, David, Aaron Ashworth, and William Goyens, early Melungeon immigrants into Texas. Goyens, originally from the Carolinas, was a free African-American descendant of old John Geaween ca. 1640 Virginia. William Goyens had served at the personal request of Sam Houston to persuade east Texas Indians to remain neutral during the Texas struggle for independence from Mexico. Elisha Thomas, a brother-in-law of the Ashworths who had served in the army immediately after the battle of San Jacinto, was named in a third petition. Another Melungeon, James Richardson, an oyster vendor in Brazoria County who, at the age of sixty, had served in the garrison at Velasco in the revolution, was named in another petition seeking relief from the original act. In the Handbook of Texas Online it says of the first petition:
“The petition was signed by 71 citizens. It claimed that William and Abner had been residents for six years and stated that they had contributed generously to the Texan cause during the revolution. It argued that the law of February 5, 1840 would “operate grievously” if enforced against them…In all three cases the petitions were signed by prominent (white) officials in Jefferson County (Texas)”.
The first petition passed the legislature and on December 12, 1840, was signed by Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar.
“David and Abner Ashworth became the only free blacks to immigrate susbsequent to the Delcaration of Independence who were given congressional sanction to remain in Texas.” -Nolan Thompson
In 1857, immediately after the Dred Scott decision removed their citizenship and left them vulnerable to slavery, a large Melungeon wagon train left the Carolinas and Georgia. Alfred Franklin Mayo led the party. During the trek to Louisiana, the wagon train eventually grew to over 100 mixed families. Their names were the names of the Angolans of 17th century Virginia. The wagon train halted near Valentine in central Louisiana. Shortly before dispersing, all of the men and all of the boys older than twelve went alone into the woods. Because of the ethnic persecution they had endured back east, the men made a pact to conceal their past and never divulge their origins. The name “Melungeon” was to be forgotten among them. Some of the families settled in Louisiana and others moved on into Texas.
The mixed Melungeons, (known in Louisiana as Redbones) had to fight to remain in Texas and Louisiana. A number of feuds and shoot-outs erupted between whites and Redbones and many were killed. White hostility forced Melungeons to band together in their own towns and communities. Westport, Louisiana was the earliest Redbone settlement. As their Mbundu ancestors had in the slave prison in Luanda, and on the Portuguese slave ships, so their descendants looked to their numbers to survive. A famous war erupted when white vigilantes stormed Westport. The Redbones won but many were slain. The surnames on the tombstones matched the surnames of the 17th century Angolans who had settled in Virginia. The children of the survivors live in Westport today.
The mixed descendants of the 17th century Mbundu Angolans contributed much to the history and lore of the West. Daniel William Cloud fought and died at the Alamo with Crockett and Bowie. Besieged by a superior Mexican army, Commander William B. Travis informed the Texian defenders that no reinforcements would be coming to their aid. According to legend Travis drew a line in the dust with his sword and invited anyone willing to meet doom at the Alamo to cross. Daniel Cloud was the second man over the line. The famous Yellow Rose of Texas was Emily D. West, the lovely mulatto woman entertaining Mexican general Santa Ana moments before the famous “Remember the Alamo” charge at San Jacinto. The infamous Texas gunfighter-outlaw Sam Bass was Melungeon descendant. Matthew Doyal (Dial) was with Jim Bowie in the Indian battle of San Saba. The great Plum Creek Indian fight saw the participation of Archibald Gibson, James Bird and Joseph Wood, all from early Melungeon families. During the American Civil War many Texas and Louisiana Melungeons sent their sons to fight for the Confederacy as the Melungeon sons of Indiana and Ohio fought for the North.
CONCLUSION:
There are two significantly different periods of Melungeon history in America. The first era dates from 1619 to about 1790 when Melungeons at best enjoyed equal status with whites and at least avoided radical persecution. The second era began about 1790 and continues today. In this latter era Melungeons suffered extreme racial prejudice leading them to deny African ancestry or at best regard it with ambivalence. Modern descendants of Melungeons generally embrace a “Portuguese” ancestry or descent from a “Cherokee princess,” unaware that both were euphemisms for Negro descent.
Discrimination of one group over another was always based on religion, sectarianism, and politics in the known history of the world. When the Virginia legislature ruled in 1670 that people of Negro and Indian ancestry, regardless of their religion or politics, were not entitled to the same rights as those held by whites, a new bigotry appeared in the world; a discrimination based on skin color. These American policies along with Darwinian racial, social, and scientific theories eventually led to the worst Holocaust of history. The relics of these forces remain active today as one ethnic seeks to control the population of a weaker ethnic it deems “undesirable.”
The Mbundu Americans who had enjoyed equal status with whites from 1619-1670 were left isolated in a fifth class; not white, not black, not Indian, not non-Christian. This isolation formed the only purely North American ethnic group in which some 40 similar mixed subgroups are included. Called “mongrels” by their European, Asian and African racial parents, a new breed was born: the American breed. Scholars have for the most part studiously avoided the Melungeons as has most of America. In doing so America has ignored the noblest characters in her own unique history; people who under the immense pressures of a domineering society steadfastly refused to hate.
PART 6: MELUNGEONS IN
THE 20th Century.
A. ROSEWOOD FLORIDA
B. MELUNGEONS AND THE NAZIS
Biography: Tim Hashaw is an investigative reporter
living in Houston, Texas. Letters may
be addressed to:
Tim Hashaw
1937 Huge Oaks,
Houston, Texas
77055
Email:
[email protected]
MALUNGU:
Sources
"MALUNGU: THE AFRICAN ORIGIN OF AMERICAN
MELUNGEONS"
by: Tim Hashaw
Sources cited by this writer and other authors quoted in this article
1. T.H. Breen, Stephen Innes, "Myne Owne
Ground"
2. Lerone Bennett Jr., "Before the Mayflower"
3. Wesley Frank Craven, "Dissolution of the
Virginia
Company"
4. John Thornton, "The African Experience of
the "20.and Odd Negroes" Arriving in Virginia
in 1619, WMQ
Vol LV, No.3, 1998
5. Engel Sluiter, "New Light on the "20. And
Odd Negroes" Arriving in Virginia in 1619"
WMQ Vol LIV,
No 2, 1997
6. Hugh Fred Jope, "The Flying Dutchman"
1993
7. Susan Myra Kingsbury, "The Records of the
Virginia
Company of London"
8. Paul Heinegg, "Free African-Americans of
Virginia and
North Carolina"
9. Virginia Chronicle: "Flying Dutchman" March
1821
10. Wagner, "Der Fliegende Hollander" Kobbe's
Opera Book
11. Linda Heywood, professor, Howard
University
12. Carroll Goyne: Gowen Manuscript
researcher
13. Brent N. Kennedy and Robyn Vaughn
Kennedy, "The Melungeons:
Resurrection of a Proud People"
14. Arlee Gowen: Gowen Manuscript researcher
15. Wesley Frank Craven, "White, Red and
Black, the 17th Century Virginia"
16. William Broadus Cridlin, "A History of
Colonial Virgina: The First Permanent
Colony in
America"
17. Johnie Blair Deen, "Trinity County
Kinsearching" Groveton News
18. Hugh Fred Jope, "Before the Mayflower"
1993
19. John Rolfe, "Ferrar Papers"
20. Original Herald's Visitation Order of 1620:
Jope of
Merefield
21. Peter Wilson Coldham, "English
Adventurers
and Immigrants"
22. Hansel Voorhees "Flemish Archives of
Classical
Music" 1872
23. Heinrich Heine, "Memoirs of Herr Von
Schnabelwopsky"
24. Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries: "Sir
Francis Drake and Captain James Erisey" pg
255 ff
25. Nederland Scheepvaartmuseum, Maritiem
Museum
26. Timothy Wilson, "Flags at Sea"
27. Warwick V. Brewster
28. Garrett Mattingly, "The Defeat of the
Spanish
Armada"
29. Robin Milne Tyte, "Armada! The Planning of
the Battle
and After"
30. Robert Whiting, "The Enterprise of England"
31. Ernie Bradford, "The Wind Commands Me"\
32. Bryce Walker, "The ARmada"
33. A.E.W. Mason, "The Life of Francis Drake"
34. Jack Beeching, "Richard Hakluyt, "Voyages
and
Discoveries"
35. J.L. Braber, "Geschiendenis JOPPE"
36. Rijksarchief in Zeeland
37. Raymond Evans, "The Graysville
Melungeons"
38. Pollitzer and Brown, 1969: 388-400
39. Pollitzer, 1972: 719-734
40. Gilbert, 1946: 438-477
41. Robert Slene, "Malunga, ngoma vem!"
42. J. Douglas Deal, "Race and Class in
Colonial
Virginia"
43. Saunders, Colonial Records
44. American Weekly Mercury, August 11, 1720
45. Pennsylvania Gazette, June 1, 1746
46. North Carolina Gazette, Apreil 10th, 1778
47. Hening, Statutes at Large
48. Sherrie Browne, Guynes researcher
49. Capt. John Smith, "General History of
Virginia"
50. C.S. Everett “Melungeon History and Myth”, Appalachian Journal 1999
51. Philip Reilly “The Virginia Racial Integrity Act Revisited”, American Journal of Medical Genetics 1983
52. Texas Handbook Online “Ashworth Act” Nolan Thompson
53. Webster Crawford, “Redbones in the Neutral Strip” Dogwood Press.
54. Thirteen Days to Glory, Lon Tinkle
55. Researcher Anna Going Friedman,
56. South Carolina Records “Journals of the House of Representatives 1792-1794” Editor, Michael E Stevens