Edward Heite (1937 - 2005)
Heite Consulting
Camden DE 19934
This paper reflects inquiries into the history of a local Native American remnant population often misnamed "moors" historically centered around the town of Cheswold (formerly Moortown) in Little Creek and Duck Creek hundreds of Kent County.
From the end of the seventeenth century, until the last decades of the nineteenth century, no Native Americans were legally recognized in Kent County.
Census, tax, and school records contain no record of any race other than black or white during that period. What happened to Kent County's original Indian population? Why were the local Indians invisible for more than 200 years? The history of "invisible" Indians, and the context in which they lived, is essential to an understanding of today's Kent County Indian population.
During the eighteenth century, a free person's race was seldom if ever reflected in the public records. Not until the end of that century do we find any regular system of designating free people according to their race. This official absence of references to race during the eighteenth century has complicated the historian's task of making a racial or cultural identification.
During the decades immediately after the American Revolution, the economic, legal, and social status of the Native American community was slipping from a largely undifferentiated white or "not black" to a status called "mulatto" that was indistinguishable in the public record from the status of free Negroes. Partly as a consequence of this change in designation, the people became poorer, less literate, and almost invisible.
Isolate Groups = Indians?
Racially ambiguous communities, sometimes collectively called isolates or tri-racial isolates, are found throughout the United States, but they are best known in the upper South. These groups frequently are self-defined and have maintained a separate identity for centuries.
As details have fallen together, it has become obvious that the isolate groups are, in fact, Native American remnant communities that have remained outside the official system of recognized tribes.
Removals
The concept of a tribe was fostered by the European colonizers, who needed a Native American organization to mirror their own national bodies. Without tribes, there could be no negotiations between sovereign nations. Thus the modern idea of an organized Indian nation is largely a creature of European society, rather than a natural development of native culture.
Almost immediately after the beginning of colonization, the European and Native communities recognized the need to keep space between themselves.
By about 1718, Southern Maryland Piscataway had established Conoy Town on the Susque-hanna in Pennsylvania, near the present Bainbridge as a refuge from the advancing frontier. To this location came other Piscataway from the present Washington metropolitan area, as well as other Maryland Indians. By 1742, there is mention of Nanticokes among them.
In the next year the Conoy and the Nanticoke moved to the mouth of the Juniata, following advice from the Iroquois with whom they had become associated. By 1753, the Nanticoke and Piscataway were a single people. During the Revolution, 120 Nanticoke and 30 Piscataway took refuge at Fort Niagara. Thereafter some went to Canada, while others left to join the Lenape on the trek that eventually took them to Oklahoma.
A native community remained here in Delaware, outside the organized tribal group that moved to the west. Those who stayed behind melted into the dominant culture, but they retained ties with the emigrants, sometimes for generations.
Some Delaware community members evidently retained connections with the emigrants. In 1892, a Philadelphia newspaper reported that a man of the Cheswold community born at Cheswold in 1811 had lived as a young man among the Lenape emigrant group in Indiana. He claimed to be a full-blooded Indian from the Nanticoke area of Sussex County, nearly forty years after Lydia Clark had testified under oath in court that none had survived except herself.
Most of the surviving Native Americans along the eastern seaboard live outside the "recognized" or "reservation" groups. More than a hundred identifiable tribal groups are not recognized by the Department of the Interior. Without government recognition, tribal groups have had little success in asserting their Indian identity. Ironically, the "non-reservation" Indians, descendants of "removed" tribes along the east coast, probably number more than 115,000.
Indians in the east are here because their ancestors consciously renounced their native culture. During the removal period, Indians who chose to retain their traditional way of life were packed off. Those who chose to stay in their home territories adopted European ways as quickly and completely as possible. Rather than live on tribal reservations, they acquired property in the European system, and became landowners indistinguishable on the record from their white neighbors.
Because it was not prudent to proclaim Indian identity, remnants allowed themselves to be called "mulatto" or even "negro," but more often "colored." Until 1830, free nonwhite communities were tolerated or ignored in most localities by the dominant European culture.
The late John Witthoft suggested that, in the Penn colonies, native groups survived on the personal manors of the Proprietors, which were effectively baronial estates exempt from local political forces. There was a manor, called Frieth, on the upper reaches of Duck Creek, in Kent County, Delaware, immediately northwest of the area where the progenitors of the Cheswold community lived during the eighteenth century. This tantalizing clue deserves to be followed.
Definition of isolate groups
Racial definition is a relatively new phenomenon in American law. During the entire first half of European-American history, there was little or no incentive to legally define the precise racial origin of a person who was otherwise culturally indistinguishable from the European-American community. Before the American Revolution, only Virginia and North Carolina legally defined race in terms of ancestry.
A Virginia law of 1705 defined the child of an Indian as a mulatto, but it stated that the child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of a Negro would be a mulatto. For Indian/white unions, the taint of mulatto status would disappear when the issue of such a union married a white person. For Negro/white unions, the taint was effectively permanent. As long as the progeny of Indian/white unions mated among themselves, Virginia law would identify the offspring as mulatto, unless they lived on a reservation. Maryland had a similar definition, but it was not explicitly stated. This universally applied mulatto label caused the Indians to disappear officially from the Delmarva Peninsula.
The Maryland state historic preservation plan assumes that Native Americans ceased to exist in the colony at some time. A research questions in the plan is, "Why did indigenous Native American populations largely disappear from Maryland after European settlement began?" A recent state-sponsored study of "free blacks" in the Eastern Shore of Maryland included documented Indians, including the Puckham and the Cambridge families, among the black population, on the basis of their being described as "mulatto" in the public records, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points to their being Indians.
Public policy in Maryland and most of the southeastern states was essentially biracial. One was either white or nonwhite, which meant black.
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, racial definitions became more detailed and more important, as legal restrictions on non-whites became progressively more oppressive. Those who were defined as Negroes or mulattos found their civil rights eroded, while Indians were forced off their land and into the west. Racial definition became a matter of survival. After 1831, in response to the perceived threat of the Nat Turner rebellion, the slave states, including Delaware, passed restrictive laws forbidding mulattos and blacks to own arms, to congregate, or even to attend church, except under white supervision.
Legally many attempts at defining race are obsolete, because race no longer defines a person's access to voting, schooling, marriage partner, or public facilities. Released from the specter of legal repercussions, researchers can now ask questions that previously were taboo, sometimes even inside the community.
The first hurdle facing researchers is the issue of historical, legal, and documentary ambiguity. Racial isolate groups share a lack of documentary history, a legendary past that is impossible to verify, and a tradition of reticence about their true origins. All these problems will confront anyone studying the Kent County community.
The name "moor" is not particularly favored by the community it designates, since it denotes North African or Iberian origins for people who consider themselves Native Americans. Nonetheless, the name has existed for more than a century, and must be confronted historically.
The Cheswold Enclave
A separate identity for the Kent County community can be documented genealogically as early as the first half of the eighteenth century, when free persons were not customarily identified by race in the public record. Members of the group were marrying among themselves during the first identifiable generation around 1720. Separate group identity is implied by the genealogical facts, but not explicitly stated on the official record, during most of the eighteenth century.
Scharf's 1888 History of Delaware states that the group claimed that their community began about 1710, maintaining a separate society from the start. Historians have never definitively established the origins of the community, but the date 1710 is not without some justification.
Weslager traced the Hansor family to Aminidab, son of Aminidab and Rose Hansor, born in 1688. In 1716, a William Handsor owned land in Indian River Hundred, and was listed as white, or at least not black. The elder Aminidab Hansor is said to have been the illegitimate son of Mary Vincent, the English wife of John Okey of Mulatto Hall and a servant called Aminidab "Haw" of Nandua Creek, Virginia.
William Hansor typifies the founding Cheswold generation. He patented Jolley's Neck, on Chance's Branch of St. Jones River, in 1737. When he died in 1768, he left effects that speak of a decidedly prosperous life, including a sword, a fiddle, shoemaker tools, and carpentry tools. His children and grandchildren intermarried with the same families that constitute the community today.
The other "core" families appear in the Kent County records at about the same time, about a generation after the same names appear in Sussex County documents. Where their origins can be traced, each original family can be identified as having family ties among the Indian River community in Sussex. Even there, less than a third of the community surnames appear in the court records before 1710.
When racial labels began to appear consistently in the public record, early in the nineteenth century, members of the community were haphazardly assigned such labels as "mulattos" or "free persons of color" and sometimes "Negroes." The same individual might be found with all three labels. In large part, racial designation depended upon wealth. A wealthy Indian might be described as white, while his dirt-poor cousin might be described as a Negro. If he could read and write, he was more likely to be described as white or mulatto. It is useful to consider these labels, remembering that they reflect the bias of the observer.
Although it today is taken to mean mixed black and white, the word "mulatto" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generally applied to anyone with dark skin who was not a Negro. In the West Indies, the term was applied to mixed black-Indian individuals. Another meaning was a person who was "half-Christian," born of a union between a Spaniard and a non-Christian. In one 1709 example, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, a person was described as both a mulatto and an Indian. Definitions in Delaware official documents were no more precise.
The Pennsylvania Assembly set terms of service for [white] indentured servants whose indentures could not be found. Those who came into the colony without papers were presumed to serve five years if they were between seventeen and twenty-two years old [later changed to sixteen and twenty-one] , or until the age of twenty-two if they were under seventeen. The law, which was at first disallowed by the Crown, would not apply to Africans. A taint of African blood would therefore significantly alter a servant's status. In this regard, "mulatto" status was legally independent of any African connection, as the case of Jacob Frederick illustrates.
In June, 1698, a "Molattoe Boy" named Jacob Frederick complained to the Sussex court that "hee Came Not of nigroe Parentage." Frederick argued that he had been bound as an apprentice for a term, and could not be held as a slave for life under Delaware law. He succeeded in his plea, but in 1704 he was again in court, sentenced to twenty lashes and six weeks of additional service to his mistress for beating John Morgan. Frederick was a witness in 1709 for the defense when Samuel Dickinson was accused of horse stealing.
The 1800 manuscript census is the oldest official extant documentation of an attempt (the 1790 census being lost) to define everyone in Delaware by race. Three categories of nonwhite people were identified: Indians not taxed, free colored persons, and slaves. In each hundred, the local census taker applied his own system. The census was tallied differently in each county, too. In Sussex County, the tally contains a list at the end of each hundred list titled "Free Negroes & Mulattos & C," while in Kent, the letter "N" was placed after certain names. If anyone was considered to be an Indian, he was not to be listed. The results were ambiguous and confusing to the point where the 1800 census serves only to cloud the issue.
The ambiguity is well illustrated by the cases of Elizabeth LaCount and Mary Durham. Mary, widow of Isaiah Durham, is listed in the 1800 census of Little Creek Hundred with the letter "N" after her name, with only free persons of color in her household. When she married John Sisco, also listed as "N" in the census, her surety on the administration of Isaiah's estate, a white man, demanded to be released from his bond because she had married a mulatto! Clearly Mary was perceived by a white neighbor as belonging to a "superior" racial group, above the mulatto Sisco, while in another record both are described as negroes. In the 1800 census, Isaiah's brother William Durham is listed as white, or at least not nonwhite. Moreover, they both were cousins of John Sisco. William Durham's sisters married members of the inter-related Sisco, Conselor, and LaCount families.
Elizabeth LaCount is listed without the "N" after her name in the Duck Creek census, but with only free persons of color in her household. Samuel LaCount appears as white in the Mispillion Hundred census of 1800. Thomas LaCount married Letitia Durham, sister of the allegedly not nonwhite William, in 1789.
The progenitors of the community appeared in the Kent County records without racial identification, generally literate and financially well off, early in the eighteenth century. Within the next few generations, their descendants declined in wealth and status. Perhaps most significant was the decline in literacy among the community. Male literacy was a powerful indicator of a household's economic prospects. In those days before free public education, literacy was a commodity that required disposable income and access to schools. A poor family in the backwoods, unable to reach or afford access to private schools, had few prospects of improvement.
When Delaware began offering free public education in 1829, it was reserved for the white population. Benjamin Tharp was engaged to set up the districts, and his field notes have survived at the Delaware Archives. Tharp counted the white households and allocated them to districts for tax and school attendance purposes. No black households were counted, and neither were the Native families. Creation of a public school system resulted in a white monopoly, while private schools were dissolved or absorbed. Private academies in Dover, Camden, Newark, Middletown and other towns became public schools with a strict color line. Private education, in which nonwhites might have found a place, shriveled away as free public education matured.
After the Civil War, Delaware reluctantly instituted free public education for nonwhites on the biracial model, which excluded the possibility of a third racial school system. A few "moor" or "Indian" schools eventually were established within the state system, but only at the elementary level. Some went without education rather than attend segregated schools; others moved away to less segregated states, or sent their children to schools in unsegregated jurisdictions.
Relationships Among Groups
"Isolate" groups have not been isolated from one another. Circumstantial and anecdotal evidence points to a long interrelationship among the various groups over centuries. Some migrations can be traced in the genealogical record, connecting Native American communities across the Delmarva Peninsula and beyond.
As the stigma of "inferior" racial status has waned, and concurrently Indian ethnic pride has increased, there has been considerable genealogical work directed toward identifying the Native American remnant groups. Most recently, tenuous claims to tribal status have been advanced by groups hoping to cash in on federal laws permitting reservation gambling casinos. The gaming phenomenon has not touched Delaware, but native self-awareness flourishes on its own.
Sussex County Nanticoke
One such self-defined group is today's Sussex County Nanticoke organization.
Even though the original Nanticoke tribe of Sussex County is said to have emigrated to Pennsylvania and eventually to Canada, a remnant group claims to be a branch that is still in place on Nanticoke ancestral ground. These people are historically and genealogically identical to the Kent County remnant around Cheswold who choose to call themselves Lenape.
The Nanticoke during the seventeenth century were a powerful tribe, who received tribute from communities as far afield as Northampton County, Virginia. In times of unrest, they appear to have been a magnet for refugees and malcontents of all races from other parts of Delmarva.
Maryland colonial authorities established reservations in the present western Sussex County, Delaware, and nearby Dorchester County, Maryland. Nanticoke and Choptank people complained that these reservations did not actually protect them against encroachment from land seekers and wandering livestock. Eventually the friction became too great; seasonal subsistence migrations were not compatible with the more sedentary European ideas of land ownership and subsistence.
Faced with further restrictions on their traditional subsistence activities, many of the Nanticokes decided to move north to the Pennsylvania and New York frontier. Eventually a Nanticoke remnant settled among the Six Nations in Canada, where they remain.
Frank Speck, an anthropologist who studied the Nanticoke in Delaware and Canada, concluded that in 1748, when the Nanticoke emigrated, they left behind some of their people in Delaware. He identified the Sussex County remnant as an authentic Nanticoke community, even though their documented connection with today's Canadian Nanticoke tribe is tenuous. Only one family name is found both among the remnant groups in Delaware and the emigrant community.
In April 1762, Maryland officials reported that about 120 Indians still lived on reservations. These people, almost certainly Nanticokes, reportedly lived in good relations with their European-American neighbors, and no longer traded with other Indians. Soon they would be completely forgotten by government officials.
Attempts to regain recognition as Indians suffered a serious setback in 1855, when Levin Sockum sold powder and shot to his son-in-law Isaac Harmon. Sockum was charged with violating a law that forbade supplying firearms to Negroes and mulattos. Harmon and Sockum both denied any Negro ancestry.
The charges may have been politically motivated, since the two men were the wealthiest members of their community, and among the largest landowners in Indian River Hundred. They eventually came to own the area now occupied by the core of the Nanticoke community.
A relative of the two men, Lydia Clark, claimed to be the last full-blooded Nanticoke. She testified that Harmon's ancestor was an enslaved African who had married his white mistress. The half-breed offspring of this union, Lydia Clark testified, had intermarried with some of the remaining Nanticoke. As a result of her testimony, the "moor" and "Nanticoke" communities were subjected to all the restrictions imposed on blacks until the end of segregation.
Judge George Purnell Fisher, who as a young man prosecuted Harman and Sockum, wrote an article titled "The So-Called Moors of Delaware," for a newspaper in 1895, which was reprinted by the Public Archives Commission, of which his granddaughter was chairman, in 1929. This article supported the Lydia Clark testimony of a tri-racial origin, even though Fisher declared from his own observation that Harmon was "a young man, apparently about five and twenty years of age, of perfect Caucasian features, dark chestnut brown hair, rosy cheeks and hazel eyes; and by odds the handsomest man in the court room, and yet he was alleged to be a mulatto."
Judge Fisher described Noke Norwood, an old man who had lived north of Lewes during the third decade of the nineteenth century, as "a dark copper-colored man, about six feet and a half in height, of splendid proportions, perfectly straight black hair (though at least 75 years old), black eyes and high cheek bones." This "Noke" Norwood may have been Noble Norwood, who is listed in the 1800 census of Indian River Hundred as having three "colored" persons in his household.
Northampton County, Virginia
Racial segregation and legal nuances of race played a major role in the history of minority populations in Northampton County, Virginia.
Virginia law, beginning in 1705, defined a person's racial status in terms of African admixture. After 1873, Virginia law defined anyone with Negro blood as "colored," and declared that Indian status could not be extended to colored persons. As late as 1975, any taint of Negro blood was enough to classify a person as "colored," except Indians living on the Pamunkey and Mattaponi reservations, who could have as much admixture as one Negro great-grandparent.
Northampton is the southerly of the two Virginia counties on the Eastern Shore. Its racial history is complicated, but has been painted in broad characterizations. Early in the nineteenth century, politicians were circulating claims that the Indian blood had dissolved into the black population. This argument was politically necessary in order to force the dissolution of the local Indian reservation, but it has been repeated uncritically by historians for two centuries.
Ralph Whitelaw, the historian of land in the Eastern Shore counties, concludes for example, that "Today, their blood remains only as a mixture with that of the Negro race." This statement still is repeated by historical researchers as a cultural and racial epitaph for the Indians of the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
During the seventeenth century, there were families identified as Negro whose backgrounds and surnames appear to indicate Iberian cultural, if not racial, origins. Among these "Negro" families were people named Rodriggus (Driggus or Drighouse), Ferdinando, and Francisco (Sisco), as well as such non-Iberian names as Payne and Harman. The possibly Portuguese surnames have been interpreted to indicate a Dutch connection, since the Dutch were contending with the Portuguese in Brazil and Angola.
All three races lived intimately together, both inside and outside of wedlock, during the seventeenth century in Virginia's Eastern Shore. White servant women not infrequently married or bore children by fellow servants of other races during the seventeenth century.
In 1640 a group of Indians on the Eastern Shore of Virginia were given a 650-acre reservation by the colonial government as a reservation.
The Gingaskin tribe of Indians dwindled and became destitute. Their neighbors considered them a nuisance, and charged that they had become mixed with the local black population. Trustees were appointed to protect them, and finally in 1786 the tribe petitioned the Virginia legislature for relief against encroachments. In 1792, the Virginia General Assembly ordered the Indian town land to be divided among surviving members of the tribe. This was finally accomplished in 1813, after a second law was passed. The 690-acre tract was divided into 27 lots that were allocated to the surviving tribal members, among whom were people named Drighouse and Francis, which may be corruptions of Driggus and Francisco.
A few allotments were sold immediately, but by 1830, half the reservation remained in the hands of the tribal members. That year, the Nat Turner rebellion occurred in Southampton County, and the remaining Gingaskin sold their land.
Over the years, Indian and mulatto families from the Eastern Shore of Virginia migrated northward. Recent scholarship indicates that these migrants included families named Harman, Johnson, Driggus, Carter, Okey, Hansor, Francisco, and George, that were found among the Nanticoke and Kent County groups. When the genealogies of these families are examined, however, the picture is never so simple.
Some Maryland Indian Families
Recent historians, obsessed with the popularity of black history as a subject and a funding source, have mistakenly assumed that every mulatto mentioned in the public record was a person of African descent, even though the mass of evidence leads to another conclusion. For example, there were the Puckhams.
The Puckham family of Worcester and Somerset Counties, Maryland, is one of the few that can be identified with a documented seventeenth-century Maryland Native American ancestor. The Cambridge family is almost as clearly documented, and probably could be verified with a small amount of research.
There may be dozens of families in the lower Eastern Shore counties whose Indian origins have been hidden uncritically behind the mulatto label by historians who were looking for free blacks and not Indians.
John Puckham, an Indian, was baptized in 1682 and married Jone Johnson shortly thereafter. The name Puckham may be an anglicized version of the name of his village, in northern Somerset County. Because Joan Johnson was a mulatto, the Puckhams have been classified by subsequent historians as "Free Blacks."
Their sons, John and Richard, aged 13 and 10, were bound as apprentices in 1699. During the eighteenth century, Puckhams appear on the public records in Stepney Parish of Somerset County. Abraham Puckham was called a "planter" in 1723 and was married to a transported white felon named Honor Norgate. This was not the family's only white liaison; at least two Puckham females had illegitimate children by white men in Somerset County. It can be determined from the tax rolls that Richard Puckham's wife was either white or mulatto, and not black.
Even though their only documented non-white liaison was the mulatto Joan Johnson, the eighteenth-century Puckhams have been grouped by historians among the free blacks, possibly because later members of the family were classified as blacks or mulattos. Matthew Puckham, called a carpenter, sold his Maryland farm in 1771.
Matthew may have moved to Kent County and joined the Native American remnant. One Matthew Pucherm, called a "free negro," appears in the St. Jones Hundred tax records in 1782, while Matthew and Richard Puckham were listed in Broadkill Hundred without racial designation. An Ellinor Puckham witnessed John Durham's will in 1788.
In 1748, a free mulatto named William Cambridge Hunt, later known as William Cambridge, patented land that had been part of the Askibinakansen Indian town near the present settlement of Taylor Gate in Worcester County. The Indian town tract had been occupied during the same decade, and may have still contained some Indian remnants; another patentee on the town lands was Samuel Collick, also identified as a "mulatto".
Because of the "mulatto" label, Cambridge and Collick have been described as blacks by historians, in spite of the fact that they appear to have been Indians claiming their shares of a dissolved reservation.
The Cambridge family sold their Worcester County farm in 1801. The name Cambridge appears early in the nineteenth century in the Cheswold community. Even though Thomas Davidson included the Cambridge and Puckham families in his study of "blacks" on the lower Eastern Shore, the circumstances recited in his study indicate a probable Indian origin for both families, with white intermixture.
The name Driggus, associated with people of color throughout Delmarva, provides an example of the confusion in the records. A Driggus family is reported as white, or at least not nonwhite, in the 1800 census for Murderkill Hundred, Kent County, Delaware. Davidson lists the Driggus family of the lower Maryland shore as blacks, but the same name, spelled Drighouse, was a major component of the Northampton Indian tribe when the reservation was distributed in 1812.
All probably were descended from Emanuel Driggus (Rodriguez). He and his first wife, Frances, came into the Virginia colony as bondservants. She died before attaining her freedom and he was free in 1660. His second wife, Elizabeth, was white. Emanuel's pedigree is unknown, but he may have come from a Portuguese or Spanish colony through Dutch traders.
His grandson, Azaricum, died a well-off slave-owning planter in 1738. The name became Drighouse in some areas, including the Indian reservation, and Driggus in other areas. All members of the family, including the ones who lived on the reservation, were called mulattos or negroes in Virginia and Maryland. One can only imagine why the Delaware census canvasser thought they were white.
Historical Questions
Native American remnant groups exist in all parts of the Middle Atlantic, but their historical records are nearly invisible. Historians have tended to uncritically accept old racial labels, so that the history of these people has been masked. Some writers, notably Deal and Davidson, have swept the study of local Native Americans into black history, continuing a long tradition.
There is, clearly, a need for in-depth revisionist histories of the Native American remnants. A few steps have been taken along this path, by genealogists, by tribal organizations, and by a few academic historians whose points of view are neither afrocentric nor eurocentric.
In a PM, a site member asked, "Do you know/think that these 'Mulattoes' are really 'Amerindians' as the author is saying?"
I do not think that the author is saying that. Two points are woth discussing: (1) Are they "really Amerindians? and (2) Were they called "mulattos".
To put the Moors and Nanticokes in context, about 95 percent of the aboriginal population of the New World perished within three generations of Columbus's arrival. The demographic collapse was due to diseases to which Europeans, Asians. and Africans were resistant but which were lethal to Amerinds. The diseases included even apparently trivial childhood ones like measles or chickenpox. Europeans, Africans, and Asians were immune carriers because they descended from the survivors of successive waves of plagues that swept the Old World after the New World became genetically isolated by the melting of the ice about 16 kya.
During the three centuries after Columbus, native populations in North America were replenished by tens of thousands of Europeans and Africans who fled forced-labor plantations and joined Indian tribes. Some of their descendants continue to self-identify as Native Americans today. And so, speaking genetically, if by "really Native American" you mean people of overwhelmingly Native American DNA, with only traces of Euro and Afro markers, then "real" Native Americans, in this strictly genetic sense, do not exist in North America and have not existed for nearly five centuries.
Regarding terminology: Yes, "mulatto" was used as a generic term for "mixed ancestry" until Jacksonian times.
Regarding ideology: As the article points out, although the color line had been dichotmous in the north and upper south since the late 17th century, there were many people of "triracial" mixed ancestry. Most of them self-identified as Native Americans, and many adhered to Native American customs (language, religion, tribal membership, etc.)
The Moors and Nanticokes are interesting because over the past few decades they have split into two competing groups. One group self-identifies as Native Americans, as do the Lumbees, Seminoles, Ramapo Mountain people and indeed most triracial communites today. The second group is the interesting one because, although they recognize and respect their mixed heritage, they self-identify as a branch of the African-American community. To my knowledge, the only other triracial group that self-identifies as A-As are the Dominickers of Florida.
Nevertheless, it is important to understand that, although some triracial groups self-identify as Indians (like the Lumbees), some as A-As (like a branch of the Moors and Nanticokes), and some as Whites (like the Melungeons), many scholars are coming to the conclusion that of all these communites are closely linked in a genealogical sense.
Interestingly, the article mentions several variants of the surname "Drigger." The "Drigger" surname, like "Goins," is so common among triracial communities that it is usually seen as definitive for genealogy from one of these groups. During the harsh terrorism of the Jim Crow era, there was a phrase common in South Carolina about the Brass Ankles (a triracial group who were seen by Whites as "white-looking Negroes"). It went like this: "Not all niggers are Driggers, but all Driggers are niggers."
In anther message he also says that 17th century Black Slaveowner Anthony Johnson was Portugease and that his plantation ''Angola'' was hint at his Iberian origins not African. (He saying that Angola is a portugease name)
In anther message he also says that 17th century Black Slaveowner Anthony Johnson was Portugease and that his plantation ''Angola'' was hint at his Iberian origins not African. (He saying that Angola is a portugease name)
That is true. All of the African-American colonists who disembarked from the New Amsterdam-bound Dutch ship and became indentured servants in 1619 Jamestown were culturally Portuguese or Spanish (Portugal was part of Spain at the time). Genetically they were Africans. According to contemporary records, they had dark skin tone, tightly curled hair, broad features, etc. Come to think of it, there were many people in Portugal at the time, especially in the Algarve region, who were of sub-saharan ancestry and phenotype. (Their descendants genetically assimilated into the general population over the next two centuries.)
I guess one needs to distinguish culture from genes. Culturally, both Angola and Portugal in 1619 were Portuguese (politically Spanish). Genetically, both Portugal and Angola were inhabited by people of Euro, Afro, and mixed ancestry. But the admixture was mostly Euro in Portugal (or Spain, depending on how you look at it) and mostly Afro in Angola.
Offtopic: When did Portugal break away from Spain?
Due to a dynastic crisis in Portugal, Spain took over the rule of previously independent Portugal in 1580. Due to a dynastic crisis in Spain, the Portuguese re-established their independence in 1668. (That is one of the problems with monarchy as a system of government--too many dynastic crises.)
In anther message he also says that 17th century Black Slaveowner Anthony Johnson was Portugease and that his plantation ''Angola'' was hint at his Iberian origins not African. (He saying that Angola is a portugease name)
That is true. All of the African-American colonists who disembarked from the New Amsterdam-bound Dutch ship and became indentured servants in 1619 Jamestown were culturally Portuguese or Spanish (Portugal was part of Spain at the time). Genetically they were Africans. According to contemporary records, they had dark skin tone, tightly curled hair, broad features, etc. Come to think of it, there were many people in Portugal at the time, especially in the Algarve region, who were of sub-saharan ancestry and phenotype. (Their descendants genetically assimilated into the general population over the next two centuries.)
I guess one needs to distinguish culture from genes. Culturally, both Angola and Portugal in 1619 were Portuguese (politically Spanish). Genetically, both Portugal and Angola were inhabited by people of Euro, Afro, and mixed ancestry. But the admixture was mostly Euro in Portugal (or Spain, depending on how you look at it) and mostly Afro in Angola.
Can you stear me in the direction to were those records maybe located?
If you dont have them already.
Can you steer me in the direction to were those records maybe located? If you dont have them already.
What you want is T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, "Myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University, 1980). Its footnotes and bibliography are all primary sources. Other good sources are: Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 1994) or Lerone Bennett Jr., The Shaping of Black America (Chicago: Johnson, 1975), but the Breen and Innes study is the most specific about the early A-A colonists. Your local library should be able to get a copy via interlibrary loan. Alternatively, Amazon has used copies for $6-$9.
Now that I think of it, the William and Mary Quarterly had an article on the Dutch ship and its passengers a few years ago. Let me look in my files. If I can find it, I might even be able to post a PDF that you can download. I shall let you know tomorrow if I find it.
Now that I think of it, the William and Mary Quarterly had an article on the Dutch ship and its passengers a few years ago. Let me look in my files. If I can find it, I might even be able to post a PDF that you can download. I shall let you know tomorrow if I find it.
Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 131 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Fri 24 Jul 2009 23:04 Post subject: Outstand material worthy of book publication
The Weslater book on Nanticokes/Moors is excellent but several decades old. The Heites' articles put the Delaware racially ambiguous communities in context of the same phenomenon across the upper South.
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