Free Persons of Color [Virginia, 1790]

And so another day flies away on Photoshop.

This is an unusually short piece, because creating the map to go with it was not the 2 hour job I had envisaged.

I prepared this map as a handy visual aid for showing how much of the population of post-Revolutionary War Virginia was considered “non-white”.

Note that these percentages DO NOT include people enslaved at the time.

Many Americans will trip over themselves trying to prove they are descended from a Mayflower passenger, or descended from some 17-year-old German immigrant kid who got swept up in a war caused by wealthy elites (250 years on, this once hungry, hapless kid is now commemorated as a “Patriot”).

Yet in our brave new “anti-woke”, anti-DEI Christo-Fascist Conservative Nationalist Technocracy, the thousands upon thousands of brown, mixed-ethnic people who fled racist laws in Virginia and headed for the mountains of Appalachia to attempt to build a better life (often at the cost of Indigenous peoples) will be rarely mentioned, and very rarely claimed with the same pride by their modern “white” MAGA descendants.

Mainly because this history has been buried.

Southern Appalachians are now almost ALL the descendants of the “Scots-Irish”, apparently.

Except that many, many are not, however often they repeat it.

The conservative Protestant Loyalists of Northern Ireland LOVE to claim various powerful American figures as their kindred.

And after J. D. Vance fairly shouted it from the rooftops that he was a “Scots-Irish hillbilly”, of course the DUP and others in Ulster set furiously to work on J. D.’s family tree.

They went hard at it for a year.

And guess what?  As written by your humble author over 5 years ago, J. D. Vance is indeed about as “Scots-Irish” as an enchilada.

Mr. Vance needs to lay-off his fevered White Supremacist imaginings, and look at some real history.

He’ll find more ancestors among the mixed-ethnic brown underclasses seen on this map than among the Sons of Ulster.

Heads of Families, Virginia [1790] showing percent of FPC