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 18^th 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, 19^th 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 17^th 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 19^th and 20^th 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 17^th 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 17^th 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 17^th and early 18^th centuries in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.

2.       The vast majority of 17^th and early 18^th century blacks arriving in British North America were from the Kimbundu-speaking area of Angola, Africa’s Malange district.

3.       Mbundu Angolans in 17^th and early 18^th century America called themselves “malungu,” meaning “those who came in ships from a common homeland”.

4.       The general migrations of the original 17^th century mixed Negro families and their descendants coincide where these 40-odd mixed groups eventually settled.  In the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, descendants of the original Angolan-Americans migrated from Virginia into North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware. In the late 18^th and early 19^th 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 17^th and early 18^th 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 18^th 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 17^th century Virginia arrived from Africa via Spanish and Portuguese settlements in Central and South America. But new evidence disputes this. Most black 17^th 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 19^th 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 28^th 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.”

 

20^TH 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.” 

 

20^TH 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  (20^th) 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 17^th century.  These visible features of 17^th century ancestors of the Melungeons were identical to the features of 19^th century Melungeons.  Since the observable characteristics remained the same, the 17^th 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 17^th 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 17^th century. Stony Creek church records near the Virginia-Tennessee border in 1813 show the name "Melungeon" first appeared in Virginia.  By the 19^th 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 17^th 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 18^th century African-American in the South can be traced back to the Angolan Virginians of the 17^th 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 17^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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 17^th 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 16^th 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 18^th century Melungeons.  But English custom frowned on the practice of Christians enslaving other Christians in the early 17^th 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 17^th 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