Multi-ethnic American family with horse team and wagon

This is as good a day as any to re-iterate and to clarify the aim of this page/podcast.

There are many excellent Facebook groups and online resources dealing with the history and genealogy of various communities who are now commonly referred-to as “people of color” – whether of indigenous, African, or other ancestry, free and unfree.

Most of the members of these groups would consider themselves, their family, and much of their community as having been “people of color” throughout their time as participants in American history, right up to the present day.

Not everyone uses the term “person of color”. Some use a more specific ethnic self-descriptor like Choctaw or Gullah.  Most still use the old social divisions of “Black”, “Indian”, and “Asian”.  Still others prefer to describe themselves as “multi-racial”.

What all of the foregoing have in common, is a broad agreement that they are in some respect not part of the social category called “White”.

As someone who has lived mostly outside the “Indian”, “Black”, or “Asian” experience, it is not this writer’s place to comment on the choice of self-identity made by people whose shoes I have never walked in.

People will self-identify as whatever group they feel a part of.

This writer was born and reared among the community most usually called “White Evangelicals” by sociologists and commentators in the mainstream media.

All of these people tend to agree on the origins of these “White Evangelicals”.

This is because almost every Wikipedia page, and almost every mainstream American history source, offers the same background sketch for these people.

“The American frontier was settled by people of English, Scottish, Welsh, German, and Scandinavian ancestry, but most of all, it was settled by the Scots-Irish.”

And that’s that.  Colonisers, pioneers and settlers in North America were all northern and central European Christian “white folks”.

“Indians” were just an obstacle to “white” advancement, and any people of color were slaves.

Simple, right?  “Indians”, “Blacks”, and “Whites”.

Except that this entire story is a fabricated nonsense, with no basis in the actual historical record.

How does a start-up podcast created by some random person with a website and a Facebook page earn the right to be so dismissive of accepted history and received wisdom?

By going to the primary and secondary documentary sources, and reading.  And then reading some more.

Reading until their very social life is in danger of becoming like their obsession – history.

This website, this social media group, and this podcast, are about the multi-ethnic roots of those Americans – usually part of the underclasses and working classes – who are descended in varying degrees from “people of color”, but are now usually seen, categorised, or self-identifying as “White”.

Why on earth should this matter?

The 2016 USA presidential election has stoked old embers, and “whiteness” has become part of the public agenda in a way not seen for decades.

Those who believe in “whiteness” or indeed, “white supremacy”, are feeling emboldened, and they are back on the march.

Until this concept of American “whiteness” is seen as absurd, and demonstrated to be utterly ludicrous, there will be room for social divisions based on a ridiculous public belief in “race categories”.

Two people greatly admired by this writer died during the past couple of years – Brent Kennedy and James Nickens.

Both were deeply involved in challenging “received wisdom” about the nature of early American ethnicity.

James Nickens focussed primarily on the Virginia Indians, and the outrageous “scrubbing” of their continuing legacy from American history.

For his part, Brent Kennedy once published a list of surnames, intended to act as a research guide for “not-quite-white Appalachians” trying to understand their multi-ethnic roots.  Brent was largely responsible for bringing the so-called Melungeon people of southern Appalachia to wider attention.

Now that the two lights of Brent and James have been extinguished, it falls to all of us to carry the fire.

I am not qualified to continue the work of James Nickens, but do feel able to add to the work begun by Brent Kennedy.

Following over 15 years of research, I have compiled a database of over 250,000 Americans with roots in pre-1800s North America.

It is this database which informs and underpins much of the material found in my blogs and podcast episodes.

Starting today, with this post, I will begin to share my own list of surnames drawn from this database – surnames clearly associated with the multi-ethnic history of frontier America.

What sets these lists apart from the names found among other multi-ethnic communities, is that every surname on these lists represents a family now usually seen as “white”, even while having multiple ancestors who were clearly DOCUMENTED in some way as having been perceived as “non-white”.

These lists will eventually be greatly expanded, as we add appendix lists based upon the maiden names of spouses, partners, concubines, and consorts in households once explicitly enumerated as “black”, “mulatto”, “free person of color”, “Indian”, or “all other free”.

Today’s list includes surnames beginning with the letters “A” and “B“.

Anyone with information which would add to this list is welcome to comment and share.

A

Abernathy (also Abernethy; Scottish)
Adams
Adkins (also Atkins)
Adkinson
Agee
Agnew
Ahl
Aiken (also Aken, Akins, et al)
Aldridge (sometimes interchangeable with “Eldridge” or “Aldrich”)
Allen
Alley
Allred
Amyx (unclear whether French Occitan patrynomic of “Amic”, or German patrynomic of “Amick” – possibly both if of Alsatian provenance)
Anderson (also “Annison”; often interchangeable with “Henderson”)
Archer (also Archerd)
Armentrout (likely from from German “Ermentraudt”)
Arnold
Arter (Arthur)
Artrip
Asbury (often “Asberry” in Appalachia)
Asher
Ashworth
Aston
Austin (rendered sometimes “Alston”)
Auxier (often rendered “Oxshire” or “Oxsheer”)
Ayres (also Ayers)

B

Bacon
Baker
Bailey
Baines
Baldridge
Bales
Bare (usually from German “Baer” or “Behr”)
Barnett
Barnhouse
Barrett
Bass (sometimes rendered “Bays”)
Bateman
Bates
Baxter
Bean (sometimes a foreshortened form of “MacBean”)
Beatty (sometimes rendered as “Baty” or “Beatie”)
Beeson
Belcher
Belk
Bell
Bench (sometimes given as “Benge”)
Benge (sometimes given as “Bench”, and sometimes misrendered as “Bunch”)
Bentley
Bettis
Bible(s)
Biggerstaff (also “Bickerstaff”)
Bilbrey (sometimes “Bilbury” or “Bilberry”)
Birchfield
Bishop
Black
Blackwell
Blair
Blanton
Blaylock
Bledsoe
Blevins (possibly Anglicised patrynomic of Welsh “ap Blethyn”)
Blewitt
Blissard (also “Blizzard”)
Blythe
Boatman
Boggs
Bolling (also Boldin, Baldwin, Bowlin, Bowlen, Bowling, Bouldin, Bolin, Bolen – could “Bowline” be original source of this name?)
Bolton (possible original name source of many “Boldin” and “Bolen” families)
Bone (possibly from German “Bohn”)
Boone
Boston
Bouldin (also Boldin, Baldwin, Bowlin, Bowlen, Bowling, Bolling, Bolin, Bolen, perhaps “Bolton”)
Bourne (see also “Burn”, “Burns”, et al)
Bowers (sometimes Anglicised patrynomic of German “Bauer”)
Bowles (also “Boles”)
Bowman (sometimes from German “Baumann”)
Boyd
Boyer
Bradley
Brady
Brandon
Branham (also rendered as “Branum”, “Brannum”)
Brantley
Brashear (from French “Brassieur”, and in rare cases a corruption of “Bradshire”)
Brenner
Brent
Brewer (often an Anglicised translation of German “Brauer”)
Brizendine
Broadwell
Brock
Brooks
Brown (often from German “Braun”)
Browning
Bruce
Bryant
Buchanan
Bullock
Bunch
Bundy
Burch (also “Birch”)
Burchett
Burke
Burnett
Burris
Burton
Bush
Butler
Butterworth
Buttrick
Buxton
Byrd (sometimes “Bird” in Appalachia)

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #genealogy #names #EthnicHistory

Elizabeth “Betts” Goodman, often called “Melungeon”

Much of my interest in the hidden multi-ethnic past of America stems from a strange discovery made many years ago.

While doing research on my first “official” genealogy, I began to notice an unfamiliar word being applied to ancestors on both sides of my family tree.

“Melungeon”.

This came as a major surprise. While I was certain that our family was not wholly European – based mainly upon the very dark complexion of my maternal grandfather – we had always been told that his appearance was due to his Cherokee ancestry.

A great deal of my earliest genealogical investigations were centered on a fruitless search for these Cherokee ancestors.

So when numerous online sources used the word “Melungeon” to describe some of my dark-hued family, I was all ears.

By the early to mid 1800s, the word Melungeon was already being used in parts of southern Appalachia as a socio-racial slur aimed at non-enslaved mountain people who were “not quite white”, “not quite black”, and lived somewhat on the periphery of “respectable society”.

These people called Melungeons tended to be found in the more remote “hills and hollers” of Virginia, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and East Tennessee.

By the late 1800s, these people were considered enough of an ethnic curiosity that outsiders began to speculate on their origins, even conducting informal field visits and penning pseudo-anthropological articles purporting to explain Melungeon history.

There is always a dollar to be had where there is a “mystery”, and a veritable industry grew from people’s efforts to supply the final word on the question “who are the Melungeons?”.

For the past 150 years, these mountain people have been variously described as Portuguese, “Black Dutch”, Blackfeet Indians, Gypsies, Turks, free African-Americans, and even Phoenicians.

During the latter half of the 20th century, anthropologists tended to congregate around the view that Melungeons must be “tri-racial isolates”, meaning that they are supposed to be the descendants of an early intermingling of African-Americans, indigenous Americans, and “white” Europeans.

Highly-selective DNA projects were commissioned (by genetic genealogists, NOT scientists or trained historians), and these “studies” received national and international attention as they announced their claimed “proof” of Melungeon origins.

But the anthropologists and genetic genealogists alike have been hobbled by what I call “The American Problem”.  That problem is a fundamental belief in “race”.

Trying to solve the “mystery of the Melungeons” in terms of America’s mostly binary race system is like describing Tex-Mex cuisine or country-western music as “bi-racial” or “tri-racial”.

Is “Mexican rice” a combination of only Spanish European, indigenous Mexican, and African cooking traditions?  The answer is “sort of”, but only if we ignore that the Spanish borrowed many of their cooking traditions from Moorish Spain, and the Moors themselves had learned rice cultivation and cookery from other Africans – and from the Arabs who had brought it from Persia to North Africa.  Oh.  And let’s not forget the even earlier introduction of rice to America by the Portuguese, who had learned how to cultivate and cook it from both Africans and people from their trading colonies on the Bay of Bengal (modern Bangladesh).

Country-western music is commonly seen as an African and European musical intermingling.  And once more, this is only partly true.  Country-western music would seem unthinkable today without the sound of steel and western guitar.  Yet steel guitar is a recent import from the Hawaiian Islands.  Western guitar borrows heavily from Spanish guitar, which in turn finds its traditions in the Gypsy, Jewish, and Moorish communities of Spain.

These analogies are imperfect, but they serve to illustrate that matters of ethnicity are fluid and complex.  Just as food and music are never just “black” or “white” traditions, people themselves are never just “black” or “white”, and complex ethnic communities are never simply “bi-racial” or “tri-racial isolates”.

*****

It is said that the first known use of the term “Melungeon” was in 1813. The word “Melungins” is claimed to have appeared in the minutes of a Primitive Baptist church then located in Scott County, Virginia.  Two female church members were in apparent dispute, with one accusing the other of “harboring them Melungins”.

Because the original pages of these church minutes are missing, and we are forced to rely on a series of transcriptions, this earliest “record” is contested by some.

What is beyond dispute is that the term Melungeon began to be used openly in print between the 1840s and 1880s – almost always to disparagingly refer to mostly impoverished rural dwellers of mixed ethnicity from Virginia and Tennessee who had had the audacity to become involved in local and state politics.  This period also coincided with new voter suppression legislation being directed at poor “whites” and free people of color.

For reasons too numerous to outline here, this writer is inclined to accept the record transcribed from the Stony Creek Baptist Church minutes.

1813 is “modern” in terms of English.  “Harboring” meant pretty much exactly what it means today – to offer a place of protection or shelter.  There are other meanings, but the context of “harboring Melungeons” is pretty self-evident.

A woman is accused of giving shelter/protection to a group of people presumably considered persona non grata among a church congregation and community.

Who needs harboring, normally?  Runaway slaves and indentured servants, criminals, or deserters from war.

We can probably eliminate the first category (runaway slaves), because we know what people called runaway slaves.

We can also discount the second possibility, because there is no reason to call thieves, rustlers, or murderers “Melungeons”, unless of course they were a very specific kind of thief, rustler, or murderer.  There is in fact a Romani word for wine-seller which sounds similar to “Melungeon”, but this seems a bit of a stretch, at least to this writer.

Which brings us to number three – deserters from war.  In 1813, the young USA was once more embroiled in war with the UK, only 30 years after the end of the American Revolution.

Every war in history had its share of deserters, and with wars in colonial America being waged on the edge of a mountainous wilderness, desertion was especially common.

As regards the American Revolution in particular, most American schoolchildren are encouraged to imagine their “patriot” ancestors as militias comprised of “white” yeoman farmers.  The truth, as always, is much more complicated.

Yeoman farmers were among the soldiers least likely to “stay the distance” over an eight year conflict – they had a lot to lose in leaving their farms and families unprotected and unprovided-for.  So the Continental Army’s enlisted ranks were filled with immigrants “straight off the boat”, and with men and boys from the poor backcountry underclasses hoping for cash or land bounty rewards in exchange for their service.  Many will be surprised to learn that these backcountry militias were often augmented by mercenaries and soldiers from other countries – especially France, without whom the Americans would have almost certainly lost their Revolutionary War.

So when we think about deserters from this particular conflict, we should bear all of the forgoing in mind…

*****

Which brings us neatly to the hundreds of free Creole Haitians and others from Martinique and Guadaloupe who served at the Siege of Savannah – aka the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue.

After the Siege of Savannah, many of these Haitian free persons of color were brought north for the Siege of Charleston, where they fought in a brigade alongside militias raised from rural Virginia, and alongside Spanish soldiers.

The Americans of course lost the Siege of Charleston.  Presumably the surviving Virginians who were not captured made their way home.  History is almost silent on the fate of many of these Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, but we do know that the French elites pretty much reneged on the promises made to these men, with at least some shipped to Grenada after the fall of Charleston.

History is also largely silent on the fate of many “Black Loyalists”- escaped slaves who had gone over to the British side to fight, in hopes of gaining their freedom.

It is almost impossible to believe that, faced with military defeat and broken promises, that at least a good few of these men (most likely carrying arms) did not desert.  It would have made sense for them to join, or at least follow, their fellow brigade members north to Virginia.

This is where it gets tricky.  As the war began to swing in favor of the Americans, one cannot imagine a more difficult situation for all free people of color.

It seems doubtful that many “white” Americans would have been able or willing to discriminate between actual free African Americans, “Black Loyalists” on the run, and erstwhile Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue.

And even if the Chasseurs could have made clear that they had fought FOR the Americans, they would have still been seen – at least by some – as deserters.

In an odd twist to the plot, less than 10 years after the end of the Revolutionary War, a wealthy French mining magnate named Tubeuf arrived in the region around Scott County, Virginia, hoping to lay claim to thousands of acres of wilderness land already inhabited by multi-ethnic mountain people, a place where people were already handling snakes in their churches over 200 years ago.

If any Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue or their children were living along the Clinch River, we can imagine what they whispered to their neighbors regarding French elites.

While it is entirely plausible that Tubeuf himself coined the term “Melange” in reference to the “mixed” people inhabiting the mountains he was hoping to mine/exploit, it seems unlikely that local people who were at best suspicious, and probably outright hostile to his grand designs, would embrace his French language in the space of only a year or two.

Tubeuf would in fact be found murdered soon after…

So.  We have a number of free people of color lying-low in the remote mountain regions of Virginia shortly after the American Revolution, and with the outbreak of the War of 1812, they are certainly a group of men likely in need of “harboring”.

It is clear that this argument relies on much speculation, even if the dates, locations, and events align perfectly.

But still.  If the word “Melungeon” truly came into first use between say, 1780 and 1810, then it seems at least interesting that the Haitian Creole word for “mixed” is “Melanje”.

Of course, French proper also has the word “melange”, but the word for “mixed” when referring to people of mixed ethnicity is more usually “mixte” or “métis”.

*****

None of the forgoing is intended to suggest that Melungeons are all descended from Haitian Revolutionary War soldiers.  This is simply one origin theory for a term which over time came to be applied to “non-white-looking” mountain folks in general, just like the words “cracker” and “redneck” once referred to specific groups of people, before becoming more generalised terms.

Years of research following my first encounter with the word “Melungeon” has revealed an unimaginably rich ethnic tapestry in early American history, and many of the families once called “Melungeon” as a slur are far more than “tri-racial isolates”, and they are most certainly not a mysterious “lost tribe”.  There is no “Melungeon Gene”, whatever the online snake oil DNA test salespeople might try to claim.

These southern Appalachians carry heritage from five continents, with ancestors from Minorca, India, Wales, Sephardic Jews, Finland, West Africa, England, the Azores, France, Madagascar, Romani Gypsies, Poland, Armenia, Ireland, Portugal, Indonesia, Germany, the Caribbean, Scotland, Brazil, and of course from many indigenous tribes such as the Shawnee, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Nansemond, Lenape, Catawba, Tuscarora, Mi’kmaq, and others.

In other words, southern Appalachia and Melungeons represent the real face of early American history, before white supremacy forced multi-ethnicity into the shadowlands.

Just one more tantalizing point.  The Virginian militiamen at Charleston were drawn largely from around Amelia County, just down the road from Louisa County – the origin of old historical Melungeons like “Spanish Peggy Gibson“.

What a delightful coincidence, as the Virginians and Haitians had fought alongside a regiment of Spaniards at the Siege of Charleston…

© Brian Halpin, June 2021

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #melungeons #appalachia

Iva Bernice “Blanche” Caldwell Barrow [top], actress Estelle Parsons as Blanche Barrow [bottom]

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were ripped to death in a hail of automatic rifle and shotgun fire on a dusty road in Louisiana in May of 1934.

Their bloody end was befitting the wider American sense of mythic justice still common today – “live by the sword, die by the sword“, or “an eye for an eye“.

In this distinctly Calvinist Protestant reality, every human being makes a choice to do good or evil.  Wicked thoughts germinate in the minds of the ungodly, until springing one day, fully-formed, into wicked actions.

Believing that evil deeds are SOLELY the product of individual decisions allows an unjust or unequal society to wash its hands of any responsibility or stake in the deeper root causes of drug abuse, social dysfunction, violence, and crime.

American “road gangsters” like Bonnie and Clyde were not born bad.

Few human beings ever are.

But an ugly story of the grinding, crushing poverty of a lonely, fatherless girl during The Great Depression (first married at 15), or of a young boy brutalised and raped while in the US prison system, is hard to leverage into a story arc which will fill cinema seats.

The American entertainment industry never sleeps, and never lets a sleeping dog lie.  The glamorisation of lives lived in the fast lane is a Big Dollar.

So three decades after their deaths, Hollywood gave us Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde.

This sort of glossy retake on history was not new.  After all, one of the earliest cinema hits back in 1915, “Birth of a Nation“, was a three hour recruiting advertisement for the Klan, managing to magically transform racist vigilante thugs into heroes.

So again, nothing really new.

But the story of people like Bonnie and Clyde provides an extra twist.  You see, once the American pop culture machine decides to rehabilitate or glamorise a story, something else often begins to happen.

People in the story begin to turn whiter.

This phenomenon has existed for decades in The Western film genre – with its morality tales of courage ALWAYS starring taciturn “white guys”.

Serious historians of course know that the majority of cowboys were Mexican, Native American, and African-American.  But for most of the 20th century, this minor detail didn’t matter.  The point of The Western was to function as little more than a stage on which to hang propaganda and justification for the largest land grab seen since the age of Alexander the Great.

Ethnic cleansing and land appropriation are events too large to be hidden, so the very meaning of these actions must be altered.

In a collective act of supreme gaslighting, greed, racism, theft and murder were somehow transformed into “heroism”.

The years between the end of the Indian Wars and the beginning of the Great Depression (1890-1929) saw much of white male society casting around for new causes on which to hang their sense of purpose, importance, superiority, and dominance.

These were the peak years of the eugenics movement, peak years for Klan membership.

America has a particularly deep history of overlap between its military and police forces, and many pitiless veterans of the Indian Wars, Spanish-America War, and Klan members became lawmen, turning their skill-set against America’s domestic underclasses.

But if post-western, post-Indian Wars lawmen are to be seen as “heroes”, if they are going to send large numbers of men to spray fusillades of bullets into the “bad guys”, then those “bad guys” need to be worthy, cunning, dangerous, “equal” adversaries – not desperate, messed-up young kids.

I was thinking about all this while preparing a new podcast episode, and wondering why Clyde Barrow’s sister-in-law, Blanche Barrow, was played in Arthur Penn‘s 1967 film by a medium-built, 40-year-old, blonde, Anglo-Swedish actress from Massachusetts named Estelle Parsons (who is, in fairness, a fine actress and still going strong at 95).

You see, the real-life partner of Buck Barrow was neither blonde, medium built, nor of Anglo-Scandinavian ancestry.

Iva Bernice “Blanche” Caldwell was a black-haired, multi-ethnic girl from Oklahoma who never weighed over 100 lbs in her life.

Perhaps even more to the point, she was born to a 15-year-old mother married to a 39-year-old man, and was only a teenager herself when she hooked-up with Buck Barrow.  The day that Bonnie and Clyde were shot down, Blanche was still only 22-years-old.

It’s not easy to glamorise or garner empathy for skinny, part-Indigenous kids from Oklahoma who get involved in crime.

Stories of the American social system failing impoverished, multi-ethnic “brown” kids just wouldn’t be “Hollywood” enough.

And besides, poor “brown kids” and poor “white kids” making common cause against “The Man” is A VERY BAD LOOK.

Modern Hollywood is beginning to improve in terms of reflecting the real multi-ethnic face of America.

But when things go historical, all hope for an accurate reflection of the past can be cast aside.

It seems there is nothing which cannot be appropriated, sugar-coated, scrubbed, “white-ified” and turned into money.

Not even peoples’ real identities, real stories, and real ethnicities are safe.

©Brian Halpin

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #BonnieAndClyde #BlancheBarrow #whitewashing

“Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.”

Mark Twain

The family tree of virtually every American family descended from “non-elites” is riven with mysteries, questions, dead ends, and dubious claims of lineage.

By “non-elite”, we mean people with little access to the levers of power – levers which include noble ancestry, inherited wealth, presumed “whiteness”, good societal connections, access to higher education, etc.

The new President of the USA, Joe Biden, was born Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

Even a casual observer would notice the unusual middle name, and anyone with a basic knowledge of European languages would guess the name to be of French origin.

And they would be right.

President Biden is well-known for his pride in his family’s Irish Catholic roots – roots which are, as with so many Americans, plentiful indeed.

His “Robinette” roots, on the other hand, derive from an apparently French Huguenot (Protestant) family who fled France for London during the early to mid-1600s, where they soon came into contact with members of the English Protestant Quaker faith.

In about 1682, these Huguenot-Quaker Robinettes followed many others of their faith to William Penn‘s new colony in America – Pennsylvania.

If we are subscribers to the mythological version of American history (recently in the news due to the Trump administration’s release of the faux historical “1776 Report”), then the Biden family origin story finishes right there, in classic American style.  The “melting-pot” merges decent Protestants “escaping religious persecution” with later Irish Catholics escaping famine and British colonial rule in Ireland.

So far, so virtuous, so white.

This is where a curiously American phenomenon comes into play, a thing this writer has learned through many years of research.

Some branches of immigrant families remain true to certain moral convictions, while some branches become seduced by the promise of wealth – easily increased wealth.  The American institution of color-based chattel slavery made it possible for just one skilled man to multiply his wealth exponentially through the purchase of a slave or two.

Imagine being a skilled blacksmith, with a working farm, in 1750s Pennsylvania, Maryland or Virginia.  Do you choose to pay the wages of two farmhands and two forge assistants for 30 years?  Or do you choose to “buy” two “negroes”, who will labor in your forge, cook dinner, hoe your garden, and clean your house, while “producing” multiple unpaid farm and forgehands for many years to come?

I have seen and read the ads placed in London newspapers from the time.  Ads promising cheap land, and a life of comparative ease for those with cash for “starter slaves”.

Some (and I repeat “some”), Robinettes lost their footing on their faith, and chose wealth and greed instead.

They joined the ranks of what heartland Americans like to call “East Coast elites”.

*****

I only know all of this because my own family is descended from altogether different stock.  “Non-elite” stock.

“Sparks”, or “Old Mix Americans“.

I call my people “sparks”, as in the sparks thrown from an iron-shod wagon wheel, or sparks blown from a chimney, only catching fire somewhere far distant.

In this case, the sparks landed in Southern Appalachia, where many “Robinettes” can be be found among my own people.

The nature of 18th and early 19th century records makes it virtually impossible to track a clear line from 1800s Tennessee and Kentucky back to 1600s New England, unless one is lucky enough to find land titles, wills and other such documentation.

But here’s the bottom line.  Many Appalachian Robinettes are deeply intermarried with other mountain families who are without doubt “multi-ethnic” – people referred to in some circles as “Melungeons“.

It is hard to know whether these people descend from Indians, “free people of color” and others who “borrowed” their surname from Quakers (who were on the whole very decent toward “non-whites”), or whether they are simply the mixed descendants of slaveholders and the enslaved.  The answer is probably a mix of all of these possibilities.

But one thing is certain.  Their trajectory in American history followed a very different path to that of the Bidens and Robinettes of New England.

Following this long history of disadvantage among multi-ethnic families, many of these “sparks off the elite wheel” are left clinging to little more than faith and a hard-won membership card in the safer community of “whiteness”.

Of course none of us can pick our family, whether we are born in a trailer park or with a silver spoon in our mouths.  And while the sins of our forefathers most certainly have repercussions which echo down to the present day, we can excuse ourselves from fault – but only if we choose to recognise the repercussions of historical wickedness, and if we make a personal choice to evolve intellectually, morally, and socially.

I have no idea whether Mr. Biden is aware of all this.  His words, his cabinet picks, his service under Barack Obama, point to a man who has at least some sense of social justice.

What really matters, is that people learn to appreciate and understand that our stories are intertwined and bound-up in ways we can scarcely imagine.

Image: A young Joe Biden

Barbara Hensley, late 19th century

There is a meme seen on social media, showing a large deer in the middle of a road enclosed by woods.

Under the photo are the words “The deer is not crossing the road. A road is crossing his forest.”

I often come back to this idea when considering American history.

What we are reading, seeing, believing, remembering, and forgetting depends entirely on whose eyes through which we are viewing things.

When history is only a list of powerful men, then the first word we think of is “president” when we hear the names Washington or Lincoln.

It is human nature to be lazy when assigning names, labels, and meanings to things…and people.

*****

By becoming the first president of the USA, Washington became an icon, a symbol upon which people hung all of their ideas about the meaning of the word “president”.

And that’s it.  “George Washington” = “First President”.

Yet anyone who knew him during the 57 years before he became a head of state in 1789 would have known a completely different man to the “symbol” created by 230 years of projection and myth-making.

Standing in the shoes of someone who knew the pre-presidency Washington, we see first and foremost a cartographer, surveyor, and land speculator.

Put in the bluntest possible terms, from the time of his service to the crown in the 1750s French and Indian War, Washington saw soldiery, surveying, and map-making as a way to acquire “title” to vast tracts of land.

Whether fighting for or against the British, his eye remained firmly fixed on the main prize – access to land.

And more land.

When the British and French reached peace terms after the 1750s, the British issued a proclamation stating that Cherokee and other tribal lands to the west were to remain unsettled and unmolested by American colonists.  This was not so much a reflection of British benevolence, but an attempt to leave native territories as a form of buffer between lands claimed by Britain, France, and Spain.

This was a cause for some alarm in the mind of our overly-acquisitive Mr. Washington, who had already hatched clear plans for the Indian country.

In a letter to a fellow surveyor in 1767, Washington was explicit when he wrote:

“…I can never look upon the Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians. It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying those lands. Any person who neglects hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them will never regain it. If you will be at the trouble of seeking out the lands, I will take upon me the part of securing them, as soon as there is a possibility of doing it and will, moreover, be at all the cost and charges surveying and patenting the same . . . . By this time it be easy for you to discover that my plan is to secure a good deal of land. You will consequently come in for a handsome quantity.”

Seen in this light, the motivations for elites such as George Washington taking-up arms against the British Crown become rather more complex.

*****

When Washington assumed office in 1789, the non-indigenous population of Kentucky stood at around 72,000 squatters, settlers, and colonisers.

By the time he died 10 years later, Kentucky’s population had swelled to over 221,000.

To encourage settlement, land speculators promised a pre-surveyed “empty land” of natural riches. Kentucky was characterised as a rarely-visited “neutral hunting ground”, uninhabited by indigenous peoples.

This was all a lie, of course.

Cherokee.  Chickasaw.  Delaware.  Mosopelea.  Shawnee.  Wyandot.  Yuchi.  French.  French Métis.

All of these people were already present in Kentucky, and the land speculators knew it full well.

They would leave it to the settlers to defend this land sold “with title”.

*****

The myth persists to this day in the minds of many Americans that the Indians of Kentucky were only itinerant hunters, and that they either “sold their rights”, or eventually “moved-on” from “white” encroachment.

In fact, many, many indigenous people remained, reduced to an impoverished underclass in their own homeland as their communities fragmented under pressure.

Indigenous American women were particularly vulnerable, with many becoming widowed “consorts” to incoming settlers, due to extreme poverty and the scarcity of “white” women during those earliest frontier days.

All of this would have been largely forgotten, except for a few things: the digital revolution, affordable DNA testing, folklore, and a few ragged surviving photographs.

So now, when we read an obituary notice from a newspaper published in 1909, mentioning the passing of old “Mrs. Barrett” – born “Barbara Hensley” in 1830 – it is possible and necessary to consider that some women were not quite who we presume them to have been.

#beforewewerewhite #oldmixamericans #georgewashington #landspeculation #indigenousamericans