Read – Page 16 – Before We Were White

Speaking Chinese in the Wild West

1 October 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Chinese tradespeople in 19th century Arizona Territory

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was America’s first, and possibly only, federal law explicitly forbidding the immigration of a specific ethnic group.

Intended to remain in place for a period of ten years, many Americans might be unaware that this legislation, in one form or another, persisted until 1943!!

Even after this, the USA operated a “National Origins Formula“.

This is a term used to describe a whole range of laws and measures used from the 1920s up until the passage of The Civil Rights Act of the 1960s as a way of keeping America “white” and ostensibly “Christian”.

Here are some Chinese workers in Arizona Territory, as mentioned in our podcast episode “My Little Runaway“…

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #ChineseAmericans #WildWest

“Old Mix” American Surnames – “Cates”

25 September 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Cates and Fields families of Jefferson County, Tennessee, including Richard Baldwin Cates

When researching early American history, it is important to remember that many, many families whose ethnic and linguistic history was “non-Anglo”, almost reflexively seem to have referred to themselves in the plural or patrynomic form of their chosen surname.

Perhaps this was a reflection of differing cultural attitudes to names, family, and community?

This means that people who had assumed, adapted, or “borrowed” an English suranme (such as indigenous peoples, Métis, Africans, Jewish, Romani, Germans, et al) seem to have been more likely to add an “S” to surnames.

Aiken/Akins, Beaver (Bieber)/Beavers, Clower (Clauer)/Clowers, Elkin/Elkins, Field/Fields, Leffert/Lefferts, Mullin (Moulin)/Mullins, Salyer/Salyers, Spear (Speer) /Spears, Wood/Woods, and so on.

This can lead to some serious confusion. An example would be the surname “Cate“. There are people really named “Cate“, and there are people who took the name “Cate“, but then added the patrynomic “S”, becoming “Cates”

Still with us?

Then there is still another group – families who were enumerated or named in early documents according to the sound heard by English-speaking record takers.

For this example, consider the German surname “Götz” (also rendered “Goetz“).

To a native English speaker with only a rudimentary level of literacy, this surname sounds to all intents and purposes like “Cates“; and so was it often recorded, along with variations such as “Gates“.

And thus did many ethnically German people in Appalachia appear as “Anglos” in early documents.

Cate, Cates.

A surname used in America by people of multiple and mixed ethnicities.

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #appalachia #genealogy #cates

Mapping “Old Mix” Appalachia

17 September 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Map Showing Counties of Southern Appalachia with Substantial Multi-Ethnic Populations

There are innumerable multi-ethnic communities and population groups in the USA, many with their deepest roots pre-dating the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies.

Southern Appalachia had its own particular set of circumstances leading to the formation of multi-ethnic communities there. Origin stories for these groups have been put forth over many decades, and each story was based in specific beliefs, biases, needs, and assumptions – often with little real evidence.

Almost every explanation offered thus far suffers from over-simplification.

The most common of these over-simplified stories refers to Old Mix Appalachians as “tri-racial isolates”.

This belief in black, white, and red “races” is a direct result of America’s history of chattel slavery, in which all people were required to slot into a “privileged” or “unprivileged” caste or group.

But the rural, unenslaved poor who gathered in the Carolina backcountry and Piedmont just before and after the American Revolution were not all “white”, at least not in the racist sense of that word.

That is to say, the underclasses of the Appalachian frontier were not all of Central and Northern European origin. And even when they were of European origin, they were often drawn from “non-white” sections of the European population (Jewish and Romani peoples, for example).

As for the large number of non-Europeans entering North America, well, that is a complex and untold story.

Most might be forgiven for not realising that the navies and merchant shipping capabilities of Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, and the Ottoman Empire (including North African client states) far outstripped those of Britain until well into the 1700s.

In other words, every ship in every port in the Americas was likely to include people and crew from places as far-flung as Indonesia, Madagascar, India, or South America.

Consider this extract from “The Negro Law of South Carolina, 1740”

SEC. 4. The term negro is confined to slave Africans, (the ancient Berbers) and their descendants. It does not embrace the free inhabitants of Africa, such as the Egyptians, Moors, or the negro Asiatics, such as the Lascars.

Setting aside the august legislators’ lack of geographical knowledge (in that the Berbers and Moors were often one and the same people), notice the explicit reference to “Lascars“?

Who were these people requiring explicit mention in colonial era legislation?

EVEN THE BRITISH NAVY RELIED GREATLY UPON SAILORS FROM THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE WORLD.

It has been estimated that up to 80% of regular crewmen on British naval vessels during the 1700s WERE NOT EVEN FROM THE BRITISH ISLES. Which brings us to these “Lascars” – sailors and crew from India.

Did badly treated crew members regularly “jump ship” in ports, looking for a better life?

Did British colonial authorities facilitate immigration of South Asian Indians to its North American colonies?

Yes, and yes.

Major English ports such as Liverpool even had entire waterfront districts populated by workers and former sailors from India.

Do people ever mention these people from India when discussing the ethnogenesis of Southern Appalachia?

Nope.

And yet they WERE there, families such as the Williams and Weavers. We find women in Appalachia bearing names such as “Gantanaga” and “Aruna” among communities more traditionally identifying as part Native American.

But enough of all this, at least for now.

Please enjoy this map I have produced after many years of research, a map showing those counties of Southern Appalachia with substantial populations of people sharing “non-white” ancestry, based on documentary, DNA, and photographic evidence collected from over 270,000 people, and counting.

This map is not about “tri-racial” ancestry. This map is about ancestry from virtually everywhere.

US demographers, sociologists, economists, historians, and anthropologists have spent the better part of a century and a half “squinting at the natives” of Appalachia, never appreciating Appalachia’s profound complexity. Again, this is largely due to America’s constant need to view everything through the binary spectacle lenses of “race”.

“Before We Were White” hopes to contribute in some way to a revision and correction of “The Story of America”.

If you enjoy or share this map, please give our website, social media, and podcast a mention!

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #appalachia #melungeons

Love in a Hopeless Place

12 August 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Map of Predominating Sex – based on 1870 US Census Data

Here is another interesting map.

(Have I said that I like maps? I like maps.)

This 1870 map – based on US census data – is like 150-year-old social analytics. The darker the shaded area, the greater the disparity between the reported male and female populations of a given area.

It is interesting the questions which arise from what, on the face of it, seems just dry data.

Like why NW Pennsylvania had far fewer women than men at the time.

(Answer: The Pennsylvania oil rush)

Or why there were more women than men in Southern Appalachia and the Deep South.

(Answer: Probably the outfall of men lost during the Civil War, without the steady stream of replacement immigration such as that seen in the North)

No one would be surprised to note that areas along the western frontier were very much a man’s world.

Even more extraordinary (or disturbing) are the things we can infer from that fact, when we really think about it…

This boring old map is actually telling us that in 1870, many male Americans were:

1) Going without sex

2) Having sex with other men

3) Sharing women (including sex workers)

4) Taking partners from unenumerated population groups (such as slaves and indigenous women)

The girls in gingham dresses and sunbonnets were yet to arrive…

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #maps #HistoryOfSex #AmericanFrontier

Dressing-up as a Princess

7 August 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Daniel Keith with wife Amelia Hayes and children, Clay County, KY circa early 1900s

We all have things we hate.

I don’t mean things like “which way to hang toilet paper”.

Real hates. Because “hate” is, after all, a strong word. Or at least it should be, used to be.

We’ll leave aside war and violence for now. Those are pretty much universally acknowledged as things worthy of hatred.

Harming or belittling of children, the wanton abuse of animals – these things, too, should be universally agreed as things worth hating.

But it is the liminal things between naivety, thoughtlessness, selfishness, and wilful ignorance which often lead me to say “God, I hate that”.

Stuff like able-bodied people using the parking place reserved for the elderly or disabled people.

Stuff like half-drunk jet-skiers destroying the peace of a blue and remote mountain lake.

Fast food bags thrown out of a car window along a country road.

But then, if you suffer from “busy head” like me, with too many random thoughts jostling for space, you might get irritated or annoyed at less obvious things.

Anyone else here notice the way so many people tend to select a “preferred reality” at some point in their 20s or 30s, and then stick to that “reality”, whatever new information might cross their path over the subsequent years?

Whether religion, politics, or taste in music?

Why do the things we like, the beliefs we hold, often become fixed for good in our 20s?

Are we lacking in curiosity? Are we mentally lazy?

If you’re like me, always walking a tightrope between admiration for humans and borderline misanthropy, a frustration with this widespread human mental inertia can distill into anger.

And if we’re not careful, anger can metastasise into hate.

Hate is not good for a person, nor is it wise or saintly. But hey. A person can’t jump over their own shadow, can they?

*****

As a writer interested in the history of colonialist violence, I find myself confronting daily the immovable monoliths of a heavily abridged “official” American history, and a pop culture and national identity mediated through a corporate-owned mass media.

I see the fetishization of militarism, the ROTC and recruiting sergeants in high schools, and the constant, pervasive insistance that people in uniform are “protecting our freedom”.

These young men and women sent to the four corners of the world, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, are lauded in small town America, always greeted with a “thank you for your service”.

The USA spent roughly 20 years in Vietnam, and another 20+ in Afghanistan. Roughly nine years in Iraq. People remember these conflicts because of their relative recentness.

But a large section of Americans do not know, for example, why Iran hates their country. The 1950s, and the UK/USA-engineered overthrow of a sovereign, freely elected government in Iran, is largely forgotten or ignored.

“They hate our freedom” is one of the more inane reasons offered for the decades-long poor relations between the USA and Iran.

Ask these people in uniform about The Barbary Wars. The annexation of Mexican territory in 1848. The occupation of Haiti in 1915. The 1899 Moro War in the Philippines.

All of this and more is the reason that no substantive analysis- and enquiry-based history is taught in American primary and secondary schools.

Foundational myths are far more powerful than facts at binding people into a shared identity, collectively willing to sanction and support government policy.

*****

On a more local or micro level, distilled frustration also wells up and overflows whenever this writer sees the terms “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” used to describe someone’s remote ancestor of indigenous American ethnicity.

Such terminology is intended to disguise certain truths, in order to place a romantic gloss on older, darker aspects of American history.

Using the words “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” suggests some bygone age of intercultural amity, in which a woman of equal social standing was “courted” by a “white” outsider to her community – see the various incarnations of the Captain Smith and Pocahontas myth.

These words are meant to imply a 1950s-style of courtship, in which a love-besotted man approaches the family or tribe of said “maiden”, seeking her hand in marriage from her father, who is of course always a “Chief”.

The words “maiden” or “princess” are also intended to elevate the woman in question – a way to skate over the fact that, for most of American history, indigenous peoples were in fact treated much the same way as African-Americans.

Indigenous peoples were enslaved. They were sold. They were rounded-up in concentration camps and marched at gunpoint to dry and dusty places hundreds of miles from their rightful homelands.

And of course, they were killed in wars and slaughtered during massacres.

Their children were removed and placed into industrial schools, where they were abused physically and sexually, or beaten for speaking their native tongues.

And in a patriarchal society, no one was farther down the social ladder than indigenous women/women of color.

In the violent rough and tumble of Manifest Destiny, “non-white” women were often seen as little more than a labor resource, or a sexual commodity.

Almost everyone accepts that the disease, warfare, and land grabbing of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s saw the deaths of innumerable indigenous men.

What almost no one ever mentions is the countless number of indigenous women and children left to fend for themselves in the wake of these communal disasters, or the sheer number of children removed from their communities and sent to Indian boarding schools to be “assimilated” by force into “white” culture.

Not all indigenous women ended-up on reservations – perhaps not even the majority. Many were forced into a life of back-breaking manual labor or menial drudgery as farm hands or washerwomen. Some were forced into prostitution. The “luckier” ones might become wife or “consort” to a frontier trapper, miner, or settler, enduring a hard life of endless childbearing, cooking, sewing, washing, spinning, weaving, cleaning, etc.

This writer has in fact read first-hand accounts in which men were quite open about bringing their Indian consorts (yes, that’s plural) west, making them walk alongside an ox-wagon for days, their feet tied with rope to the woman ahead or behind them…

This is not ancient history, lost in the mists of time. Much of the foregoing (such as the Indian Boarding Schools) was still occurring in my own lifetime, and very much during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents.

*****

Everything was not horror. Some inter-ethnic pairings and marriages were based on mutually agreed trade-offs, even affection.

Many indigenous women came to be held in high regard by their wider communities, often because of their expertise and skills in pottery-making, basketry, herbal medicine and midwifery.

Anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America has one of these women in their family tree somewhere.

Modern DNA testing will rarely show it, because the DNA of one or two indigenous women during the late 1700s or early 1800s will usually have been “shuffled-out” by now.

But these woman WERE there, they were real, and they were almost never an “Indian princess”.

Please note that the use of this photo is for showing a typical Old Mix American family. It is NOT intended to imply any particular family’s direct link to the issues discussed in the above blog post.

Revisiting the Other 9/11

21 July 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Mountain Meadows Massacre – 19th century print, edited

The human imagination, while boundless, also seems to prefer a world with boundaries.

Religious fanatics are “over there”. Massacres are perpetrated by external enemies.

Wild-West pioneers were “white”, Indians were “red”, and slaves were “black” – right? Boundaries.

The investigation of history, and American ethnic history in particular, requires us to accept that such a drawing of clear boundaries is in fact impossible.

*****

9/11. Two worlds collide. On one side, citizens of the USA. On the other, an oppressed group claiming to represent a purer form of religion, answerable only to God and His Prophet.

By the end of this day, the lives of many, many innocent men, women and children will be cut brutally short.

September 11. The year? 1857.

In early September that year, multiple wagon trains reached Mountain Meadows in Mormon-controlled Utah Territory, carrying non-Mormon settlers on an arduous trek from Arkansas to Southern California.

Ten years earlier, in 1847, Brigham Young had begun leading the religious followers of New York native Joseph Smith from Illinois to Utah, along with their slaves.

Joseph Smith himself had been shot dead alongside his brother Hyrum while serving as mayor of a Mormon-majority town in Illinois in 1844. An angry mob had forced their way into the jail where the Smith brothers and others awaited trial after declaring martial law and ordering the destruction of a local printing works which had published a newspaper critical of Smith and the Mormon religious “project”.

At the time that Brigham Young (a loyal lieutenant of Joseph Smith) and his “Latter Day Saints” entered the Great Salt Lake Basin, Utah was still part of Alta California, an old Spanish province which had come under Mexican governance following the Mexican struggle for independence from Spain – a long-running conflict which had ended with victory for the Mexicans back in the 1820s.

Many of these Mormons had fought in the Mexican-American War (which was still ongoing in 1847), and chose to see land in Old California as legitimate “spoils of war”, where they might plant a new “Zion”.

By the time the Baker-Fancher wagon train passed through Utah ten years later in 1857, the local Mormon populace was in a state of heightened, vigilant paranoia following two decades of violent persecution back east, and the recent thundering “Reformation” led by their theocratic leader Brigham Young.

A doctrine of “blood atonement” for moral laxity was being regularly preached in Mormon churches, a doctrine in which the wages of sin would now be death…

Almost all representatives of the US Federal government, including judges and US marshals, were fleeing Utah at the time, in immediate fear for their lives and safety.

President James Buchanan responded by ordering an army expedition to the Utah Territory, in order to crush what he deemed to be a full-scale rebellion against US hegemony in the lands annexed from Mexico in 1848.

Adding gunpowder to the mix were the rumors circulating among the Mormon community that a wagon train heading their way included men implicated in the murder of a Mormon back in Arkansas.

This was the volatile cauldron awaiting the Baker-Fancher settlers from Arkansas…

Sunday, the 6th of September, was a day of overwrought public oratory at Mormon services around Utah. In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young chose the occasion to declare that the Almighty himself

“recognized Utah as a free and independent people, no longer bound by the laws of the United States”.

In Cedar City, meanwhile, another member of the Mormon hierarchy, Isaac Haight, told those gathered at the morning service that he was

“…prepared to feed to the Gentiles the same bread they fed to us. God being my helper, I will give the last ounce of strength and if need be, my last drop of blood in defence of Zion.”

That same Sunday evening, the Fancher party and others crossed over the rim of the Great Basin and encamped at the place called Mountain Meadows…

The next morning’s quiet peace at the meadows was shattered by gunfire. A child who survived the attack later recalled:

“Our party was just sitting down to a breakfast of quail and cottontail rabbits when a shot rang out from a nearby gully, and one of the children toppled over, hit by a bullet.”

The shots came from forty to fifty Mormons disguised as Indians, along with some of their Paiute allies and trading partners in the Indian slave trade.

The well-armed emigrants returned fire, and the ensuing gun battle developed into a drawn-out siege.

After five days, the Mormons approached the encircled wagons under a white kerchief of truce. The thirsty and desperate Arkansas families were marched away under guard toward Cedar City, with an agreement that no one would be harmed, provided the party agreed to give up its stock, wagons, arms and stores, and remove themselves from Utah immediately.

Less than a mile down the road, a signal was given, and over 120 unarmed men, women and children as young as four years of age were shot, stabbed, and beaten to death as they ran screaming, trying to escape.

Without the dignity of proper burial, the half-eaten and naked corpses of women and children were visible to passers along this road for months after the event…

Just 17 children, all under the age of seven, survived the bloody massacre, to be taken in by local families for a couple of years, until finally reunited with family back home in Arkansas.

Only after two decades, and much legal horse-trading, did one solitary man eventually stand trial for his part in the outrage.

John Lee was duly executed by firing squad.

*****

Many, many of the Arkansans murdered in Utah came from Johnson and Carroll Counties in Arkansas, at the southern end of the Ozark Mountains. Many had only been there for one or two generations, and many had roots in Eastern Tennessee.

And a great many of them were far removed from the cinematic images of doughty, “white Anglo-Saxon” pioneers in covered wagons of Hollywood fame.

How do we know this?

I myself might have never heard the dark tale related above, but for my own connections to the multi-ethnic Bunch families of Appalachia – people sometimes referred to as Melungeons.

One of the victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre was a 22 year old girl named Armilda Miller Tackett. Armilda was the niece of one Samuel Thompson Allred, the husband of Anna Bunch, who is in turn a cousin of mine, and President Barack Obama‘s fourth great-grandmother.

Needless to say, my son was faced with looks of sceptical incredulity as a young boy when he told his Irish language teacher here in Ireland that Barack Obama was his 8th cousin…

In an intriguing footnote to history, Mr. Obama came under some heated and howling criticism during his presidency for daring to mention the Christian extremism of the Crusades 1000 years ago in the same breath as Islamist extremism.

But he need not have reached so far back for his analogy – the Christian extremism above took place within the memory of my own great-great-grandmother, on US soil.

“But they were Mormons, that doesn’t count! It’s a sect. Most mainstream Christians didn’t do such things.”

Today’s Muslim extremists are mostly Wahhabists. It’s a sect. Most mainstream Muslims do not do such things, either…

Perspective is a helluva thing.

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #mormons #MountainMeadowsMassacre #UtahHistory #MormonHistory

They Worked the Mines

25 February 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Sometimes a flawlessly written song gets a flawless performance.

Patty Loveless, a Kentucky girl, has tinkered with the lyrics a little bit in her cover version – the original songwriter’s words are somewhat more immediately personal and autobiographical.

First released in 1997 by singer-songwriter Darrell Scott (who is also a sublimely gifted and much-in-demand session musician), the song deals with the despair and hope of people born in Southern Appalachia – particularly Harlan County, Kentucky – during the past century, when a community largely self-reliant for generations was inexorably forced into a newly emerging economy controlled by land and coal barons.

When people hear songs as hauntingly evocative as this, it is almost natural, and certainly the norm, to perceive such music as a continuation of old mountain traditions, and to view these traditions in terms of the “received understanding” of their roots and heritage.

The commonly received understanding of mountain and “Old-Timey” music is that this music arrived in Southern Appalachia with a group called the “Scots-Irish“.

This perception is essentialist, simplistic, and in many regards just plain wrong.

The music carried into the Appalachian frontier during the late 1700s was the combined result of a hodge-podge of traditions, the first and foremost being the “broadside ballads” of the 1600s and 1700s. Broadside ballads were the pop charts of their day – lyrics printed on large posters hung in taverns and inns, with well-known “airs” or tunes recommended to accompany them.

These lyrical ballads were not especially Irish – in fact the most popular broadsides tended to originate in Scotland and Northern England. It is probably most correct to view this music simply as the pop music of the entire British Isles during the 1600s and 1700s.

As to the instrumentation and playing styles of the tunes which accompanied these ballads, just about everything got thrown into the mix. Donegal style fiddle, Cherokee and Shawnee beats and percussion, African banjo, Scandinavian-derived dulcimer – as well as musical styles brought by Jewish and Romani peoples.

That’s right. There were even Jews and Gypsies in early Appalachia.

Awareness of this historical ethnic complexity is important, because there are clear socio-historical reasons for so many Appalachian people choosing to claim a “Scots-Irish” identity – even when this identity is largely exaggerated, or even demonstrably spurious…

After the American Revolution, all things English had fallen into disfavor.

This is why “Charlestown” in South Carolina is now known as “Charleston”, or places once called “Middlesborough” became “Middlesboro”. This had nothing to do with American illiteracy. It was a conscious attempt to distance and differentiate the new nation from its recent past and English identity.

The archetypal back-country or frontier American in post-Revolution times wanted to be seen as being both “white” and Protestant, but not English. So “Scots-Irish” became the ideal identity for the pioneers, settlers, squatters, and colonisers on the edge of the newborn USA.

There were certainly plenty of Northern Irish “Scots” in 1700s Pennsylvania who DID take the long gray trail south into Virginia and the Carolinas, eventually fetching-up in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

BUT NOT NEARLY SO MANY AS WE HAVE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE.

For every “Scots-Irish” settler, there were at least two English-descended people. And three Germans. And Welsh. Scots and Swedes. New Amsterdam Dutch. And of course the Finns (the ones who actually invented the log cabin).

But perhaps most of all, were the myriad “people of color” forged in the barbarous years of the 1600s in Virginia and the Carolinas. The “brown people” of Portuguese, South Asian, Jewish, Romani, Malagasi, Shawnee, Creek, Choctaw, Saponi, Cherokee, Catawba, Gullah, Tuscarora, Angolan, Senegalese, Moorish, Turkish, Spanish, Minorcan, Seminole, and other descent.

The people who can only be discerned when we look past the essentialist tale of a “Scots-Irish” Appalachia.

I usually try to avoid writing about living people. But I doubt that someone as thoughtful and gifted as Darrell Scott will mind it being pointed-out that many of the people who once sweated blood in Harlan County, Kentucky – Scotts, Hensleys, Blantons, Brocks, Heltons, Halls, Osbornes, among others – are the inheritors of a complicated and incredible history, far richer and surprising than most can even imagine.

The singer in the video here, the peerless Patty Loveless, is herself a descendant of similarly multi-ethnic mountain people like the Bollings, Moores, and Sizemores.

Country music is not just a “white thing”, hard as some try to make it so.

But I reckon Mr. Scott, Ms. Loveless, and a lot of other mountain folks already know this.

*****

You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive

Darrell Scott

In the deep, dark hills of eastern Kentucky
That’s the place where I trace my bloodline
And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone
“You will never leave Harlan alive”

Well my grandad’s dad walked down Catron’s Mountain
And he asked Tillie Helton to be his bride
He said, “Won’t you walk with me out of the mouth of this holler
Or we’ll never leave Harlan alive”

[Chorus]

No one ever knew there was coal in them mountains
‘Till a man from the northeast arrived
Waving hundred dollar bills, he said “I’ll pay you for your minerals”
But he never left Harlan alive

Well Granny, she sold out cheap and they moved out west of Pineville
To a farm where Big Richland River winds
And I’ll bet they danced them a jig, and they laughed and sang a new song
“Who said we’d never leave Harlan alive?”

But the times, they got hard and tobacco wasn’t selling
And old Granddad knew what he’d do to survive
Well he went and dug for Harlan coal and sent the money back to Granny
But he never left Harlan alive

[Chorus]

Where the sun comes up about ten in the morning
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you’re drinking
And you spend your life just thinking how to get away
And the sun comes up about ten in the morning
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you’re drinking
Spend your life diggin’ coal from the bottom of your grave

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #appalachia #CoalMining

Before We Were White: Naming Names, The Slaveholders, Part 1

23 February 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Slave Cabin on Samuel Brashear farm, Tennessee

We are currently living through hyper-tribalistic times.

I will go out on a limb, and say I do not expect certain tribes to follow this blog, ever – however much I wish they would.

Yet no tribe is immune from what might be called “the allure of truthiness”.

Whether leftist, conservative, liberal, red, blue, green, religious, secular, or neo-fascist, many now pick a “side”, and then buy wholesale into the entire package of dogma or orthodoxy associated with that tribe.

When our own gang says something which aligns with our ethos, and sounds like it SHOULD be true, we tend to take that information on board without too much scrutiny.

Example: “Most people accused of witchcraft through the ages were herbalists and midwives who were viewed with suspicion and hostility by The Patriarchy.”

It would be hard to find anyone familiar with second-wave feminism who does not accept the foregoing statement as a matter of orthodoxy. It just sounds like a “truth”.

Except it is not. When we carefully sift the historical evidence (court transcripts, etc.) we find a very different picture. People, especially in rural areas, did NOT tend to get rid of valued members of their communities.

Indeed, herbalism and midwifery were two skills which often transcended “racial” boundaries in early colonial and frontier-era America. In Appalachia, “granny witches” and midwives were very often women of color or indigenous women of relatively secure social standing.

*****

On the subject of slavery in America, it is extremely interesting how both ends of the political spectrum come to a mutual agreement on some things, for entirely different ideological reasons.

Almost all “white” people tend to agree that slavery was part of “elite” society.

Those on the left will point to the Confederacy’s mobilisation of the white underclasses in order to protect the interests of elite slaveholders.

Those on the right will continue to claim the Civil War was about “states’ rights” in the face of northern aggression, not slavery. After all, slaves were only held by a minority of the population, right?

This commonly held view, that slavery was solely part of southern plantation society, à la Gone With the Wind, is utterly wrong.

Once cotton replaced sugar cane and tobacco as the primary slavery-enabled cash crop, it is true that the largest INDIVIDUAL slaveholders in America were found in the Deep South.

But slavery ran its insidious tendrils through every layer of society.

In regions where agricultural land was unsuited to plantation-style cash crops, individuals might have held fewer slaves per farm or business, but they still utilised the labor of the enslaved in a myriad of ways – building, carpentry, blacksmithing, cattle herding and droving, roadworks, milling, cooking, spinning, etc.

And when an Appalachian slaveholder, for example, found himself hard-up for cash, slaves were simply rented-out, as one might hire-out a threshing rig.

After years of sifting through records, it has become clear to this writer that slavery was not the province of elites only. Slavery was far more widespread and extensive, even in so-called “poorer regions”, than most people have ever imagined.

I have decided to regularly post the surnames of slaveholders with particular links to so-called “poorer regions”.

Perhaps 90% of the people represented by these surnames were the holders of less than 10 enslaved people – and usually holding less than 5 people in bondage.

The sharp-eyed will compare these slaveholder surnames with the surnames of “people of color whose descendants are now white” which I’ve already begun posting.

The sharp-eyed might then be tempted to jump to certain conclusions.

Don’t.

This story gets waaay more interesting before it gets finished…

Abernathy (from Scottish “Abernethy”)
Abshire (some lines apparently a corruption of German “Hübscher”; see also “Hipsher”)
Acker
Acklen
Acree
Adams
Adcock
Adkins (also Atkins)
Agee
Agnew
Aiken (also “Aken”, “Akins”, et al)
Aikman
Akers
Alcorn
Aldridge (sometimes interchangeable with “Eldridge” or “Aldrich”)
Alexander
Allen
Allred
Almond (see also “Allman”, et al)
Alsop
Amburgey
Amos
Anderson (also “Annison”; often interchangeable with “Henderson”)
Angel
Ankrom
Anno (“Anneau”?, “Agneau”?)
Armstrong
Arnett
Arnold
Arrington
Artrip
Asher
Ashworth
Askew
Aston
Austin (rendered sometimes “Alston”)

Bacon
Bailey
Baines
Baker
Bales
Ball
Ballance (perhaps a softened plosive variation of “Palance”?)
Banks
Bankston
Bare (usually from German “Baer” or “Behr”)
Barker
Barnes
Barrier
Barron
Barrow
Bass
Bates
Batson
Baugh (see also “Bach”, and in Appalachia, “Back”)
Bays
Bazemore
Beall
Bean (sometimes a foreshortened form of “MacBean”)
Beasley
Beatty (sometimes rendered as “Baty” or “Beatie”)
Beavers (often an Anglicised patrynomic of German “Bieber”)
Beaves
Beck
Beckwith
Begley
Belcher
Belk
Bell
Belt
Benge (sometimes given as “Bench”, and sometimes misrendered as “Bunch”)
Bentley
Beverly
Biggers
Biggerstaff (variation of English “Bickerstaff”)
Billingsley
Bilyeu
Bingham
Birchfield
Birdsong (perhaps Anglicisation of “Vogelsang”?)
Bishop
Black
Blackmon (sometimes also “Blackman”)
Blagrove (often a corruption of “Blackgrove”; also “Blagrave”)
Blair
Blakemore
Blankenship
Blanton
Blaylock
Bledsoe
Blessing
Blevins (possibly Anglicised patrynomic of Welsh “ap Blethyn”)
Blewitt (also “Blewett”)
Blissard (also “Blizzard”)
Boatwright
Bobo (origin unclear, perhaps from French “Barbeau”)
Bolling (also Boldin, Baldwin, Bowlin, Bowlen, Bowling, Bouldin, Bolin, Bolen – could “Bowline” be original source of this name?)
Bond
Bondurant
Boone
Borum
Bostick
Boswell (rarely given as “Bazel”)
Bouldin (also Boldin, Baldwin, Bowlin, Bowlen, Bowling, Bolling, Bolin, Bolen, perhaps “Bolton”)
Bourne
Bowen
Bower(s) (sometimes patrynomic of German “Bauer”)
Bowman
Boyd
Bradley
Bradshaw
Branham (often rendered “Branum” in Southern Appalachia)
Brantley
Brashear(s) (from French “Brassieur”, and in rare cases a corruption of “Bradshire”)
Bratcher (apparently at times a corruption of “Bradshire”, “Bradshaw”, and “Brashear”)
Brawley
Brazeale
Breeden (also “Breeding”)
Brent
Brewer (sometimes Anglicised version of German “Brauer”)
Brittain (also “Britton”)
Brizendine
Broaddus
Brock
Brockman
Brooks
Brown (often from German “Braun”)
Broyles (patrynomic of German “Breule”)
Bryan
Bryant
Buckaloo (misrendering of Anglo-Scottish “Buccleugh”)
Buffalo
Buis (usually of French or Dutch origin))
Bullard
Bumpas (French)
Bunch
Bundren (perhaps a corruption of “Bondurant” sometimes)
Bundy
Burdine
Burleson
Burnett
Burnham
Burris
Burt
Bushong (perhaps from French “Bouchon”, probably sometimes via circuitous route from “Beauchamps” through German Alsatian variant)
Bussell
Butcher (often an Anglicisation of German “Metzger”)
Butler
Butterworth
Byars (sometimes “Byers”)
Bybee
Bynum
Byrum

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #appalachia #slavery #slaveholders

Before We Were White: Naming Names, Part 1

23 February 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

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.

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)

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

Malagasy Mountain Folks?

13 October 2021/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Contemporary Photo of Young Malagasy Woman

It is simple human nature to see what we are expecting to see. Atheists or Buddhists do not tend to see the face of Jesus in the patterns on burnt toast – we are all conditioned by the culture around us.

This tendency carries-over into our understanding of American history. We see what our education prepares us to see. We have been told so often that early Americans were “white”, “black”, or “Indian”, that like Cinderella’s stepsisters, we try to squeeze everything into a proverbial glass slipper. When the “tri-racial” slipper doesn’t fit, we try to force the issue.

A case in point…

With the advent of inexpensive autosomal DNA testing, many, many Old Mix Americans with deep roots in pre-Revolution British America have discovered small percentages of Southeast Asian and Oceanian in their DNA results.

Some Southern Appalachians who self-identify as being the descendants of Melungeons (a group recently discussed in this blog) often have a higher amount of these SE Asian and Oceanian admixtures than Native American in their DNA test results. And yet many still disregard these clues, or try to squeeze them into the “glass moccasin” of Native American ancestry.

Is it possible there were other “olive-skinned” peoples in colonial America? People with Southeast Asian and Oceanian DNA?

Yes. The Malagasy of Madagascar.

*****

Without going into exhausting detail, Madagascar is one of the largest islands in the world, lying about 250 miles off the southeast coast of Africa. Madagascar was only settled by humans during the past 1,500 to 2,500 years, by people from the Sunda Islands of Malaysia – almost 4,400 miles to the northeast, in a feat of long distance exploration only rivalled by later Polynesians.

These Oceanian peoples were later added-to by subsequent waves of immigration which included Arab traders in the 10th century, Bantu peoples from the African continent a century after the first Arabs, with people from Southern India near Sri Lanka finally arriving perhaps another hundred years after the Bantu.

This cultural melting-pot was left to simmer and bubble away for three or four centuries, until the age of European exploration, with the Kingdom of Portugal establishing a presence in the early 1500s.

As ever with European colonisation, the Portuguese presence was not benign. Almost immediately, Malagasy people were made into a tradeable commodity, transported as slaves to every corner of the Portuguese Empire, from the Bay of Bengal to Brazil and the Caribbean.

But the Portuguese did not confine their international trade to places under Portuguese control.

Not when the American English had money to spend…

*****

“From 1719 to 1725 more than 1,000 Malagasy slaves arrived to the Commonwealth of Virginia through the ports of Rappahannock and York rivers.

The Prince Eugene of Bristol came into York River district of Virginia on May 18, 1719 carrying 340 Malagasy; the Mercury of London arrived at the district of Rappahannock River on May 17, 1720 with 466 Malagasy; and were followed by the Rebecca Snow, the Gascoigne Galley, the Henrietta, and the Coker Snow.

The Prince Eugene, Rebecca Snow, and Gascoigne Galley apparently made directly from Madagascar for Virginia, where the Prince Eugene had sold her licensed cargo in 1719.

The Henrietta stopped in Pernambuco, Brazil before continuing to Barbados and Virginia.

Three of the Madagascar vessels arrived in Virginia over a period of only six weeks, entering at York River as follows:

The Gascoigne Galley with 133 slaves, on May 15, 1721;
the Prince Eugene (on a second trip) with 103 slaves in June, and
the Henrietta with 130 slaves later that month.

Platt states that the total number of Malagasy brought into Virginia between 1719 and 1721, comes to 1, 231 when the 340 slaves brought on the Prince Eugene‘s previous voyage and the 466 brought by the Mercury in 1720 are counted in.” [Platt, 1969]

*****

Is it possible that the straight black-haired Malagasy of colonial-era America sometimes chose to refer to themselves as “Portuguese”, in reference to the empire which held dominion over their homeland?

If so, the Malagasy would not be the first group to do so. This researcher has viewed innumerable primary sources in which Sephardic Jews, Angolans, Angolan Lançados (slave traders of mixed Portuguese-African heritage), Brazilians, South Asians from Goa, and Iberian Ciganos (Portuguese Gypsies) have all chosen to self-identify as “Portuguese” at various times in the past.

Amazingly, some African-American folklore still preserves memories of their familial descent from “Molly Gaskie” people.

It has also been written that northern Georgia and Alabama were home to people known as “Madagaska Creeks“.

Of course, there is also the old self-descriptor used by the so-called Melungeons of Southern Appalachia. “Porty-ghee“.

Overly self-confident American anthropologists with too little foundation in history have tended to dismiss the historical claims of Portuguese ancestry or heritage made by rural multi-ethnic communities, asserting that these self-identities were simply an attempt to deflect from African ancestry in a world hostile to “blackness”. To a certain extent this was no doubt true. But this says far more about the traditional American Protestant problem with the nuances of complex identities. People can hold simultaneous identities based on their religion, ethnic group, citizenship, etc.

If a Malagasy, Romani, or Jew in the 1600s was asked “What are you?”, they certainly didn’t reach first for a “racial” or “color” identity. Race and color were an Anglo-American construct, a way of categorising and assigning people into three simple groups: free, unfree, or “savages”. A part Portuguese, part African, part Arab person with parents from Madagascar was hardly going to identify in their frontier community as “black”. Calling themselves “Portuguese” was less a deflection, than a choice to put forward that part of their self-identity least likely to bring them and their family to harm.

As regards the multi-ethnic communities of the Appalachian mountains, only more research will tell to which group(s) of Portuguese many were referring.

One of the “core” or archetypal surnames associated with the Melungeons is the surname “Goins“, first appearing in early 1600s Virginia. Most researchers have tried to squeeze this name into being a variation of the Irish surname “Gowan”, even though almost every variation of the name – Gowen, Goen, Going, etc. – appears to be an attempt to render a long “O” sound. The Irish name “Gowan” is pronounced with an “ow” sound, as in “Ouch!”, coming from the Gaelic surname for “smith” or “blacksmith” – “gabha”. This is where we get the surname “McGowan“, meaning “son of the smith”.

Various branches of this family can be found scattered from Appalachia to Louisiana and Texas, and family members have returned DNA results showing a range of origins including both West African and Romani.

Neither ethnic background is incompatible with a simultaneous claim of Portuguese heritage.

And perhaps most odd of all, is the fact that – as far as this writer is aware – no one has ever put forward a possible connection to any similar Portuguese surname.

Like “Goiense“?

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #appalachia #madagascar #malagasy