“The State of Mississippi vs. Davis Knight” (1948): A Wolverine Theatrics Production!
by Vikki Bynum
I am delighted to announce that Playwright Marcus France and Producing Director Nathaniel Quinn have recreated the 1948 miscegenation trial of Davis Knight as a play! The following announcement recently appeared on the Facebook page of Wolverine Theatrics:
Stay tuned for “The State of Mississippi v Davis Knight” excavated by Victoria E. Bynum, processed and dramatized by Marcus France. Featuring the voice talents of: Jason Pasqua, Heath Howes, Justen Glover, Mason Quinn, Dan Muth, Sarah Forman, Aimee Woods, David Wygant, Kent Sugg, Elliot Clough, Phil Forman, Hugh Butterfield, Frances Leary, Lenny Scovel, David Harlan, Benjamin Gonzales, Alison Quaggin Harkin, and Chris Will. Sound Design by Kyle Harper, with original music by Scott Hurst.
Davis Knight, 1948. Portrait by Vikki Bynum, 2020
Davis Knight was the great-grandson of Civil War guerrilla Newt Knight, leader of the Civil War Free State of Jonesuprising against the treasonous Confederate States of America (CSA). As one of Newt, Serena, and Rachel Knight’s many mixed-race descendants, Davis was convicted by the Mississippi State Supreme Court of illegally marrying a white woman long after the deaths of his illustrious ancestors. You may read about his life after the trial HERE.
The first episode of “The State of Mississippi vs. Davis Knight” will appear via podcast on 11 January 2021. To access episode 1, click here. For an excerpt from Nathaniel’s interview with me, click here.
Late last year, I was contacted by Raymont Hawkins-Jones, a descendant of a family I’d written about many years earlier: the Andersons of Granville County, North Carolina. The Andersons were one of the many fascinating free families of color that I’ve studied over the years, and I enjoyed learning more about their history from Raymont. Back in pre-internet 1992, pretty much everything I knew about my subjects was what I’d learned from records held at the North Carolina State Archives. Today, social media has enabled me to meet many of their descendants and to access additional records posted on the internet. The same digital revolution that stimulated me to create this blog also allows me to revisit my early topics of research and bring their stories up to date! (1)
The Andersons and the families with whom they intermarried belonged to a community of people defined by society as non-white, but who rarely appeared as slaves in North Carolina’s state and court records. As I’ve noted in earlier Renegade South essays about the mixed heritage communities of Gloucester County, Virginia, and the “Winton Triangle” of North Carolina, the lives of free people of color reveal far more complicated histories of racial identity, class, and race relations than the broad images of “white freedom” and “black slavery” would suggest.
In fact, families such as the Andersons are central to understanding historical events that preceded and followed the institution of slavery, including colonization, the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the postwar rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the New South era of white supremacy.
The very existence of free people of color, especially those in the South, threatened the growing institution of slavery. Southern whites especially feared their influence on slaves as the United States moved toward a Civil War generated by national conflicts over slavery. Determined to prevent free people of color from exercising full rights of citizenship and mobility, lawmakers increasingly policed their behavior through oppressive laws and customs.In my first book, Unruly Women: the Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (1992), I published my findings on the Andersons and touched on the lives of free families bearing the names of Boon, Chavis, Curtis, Day, Fane, Haithcock, Kearsey, Mayo, Richardson, and Tyler. During the course of my research, I also become familiar with the Bass, Guy, Pettiford, and Taborn families of Granville County. With no diaries or first-hand accounts available to me from the families themselves, I focused on their court-house experiences and what they revealed about the lives of multi-ethnic free people governed by race and class-based laws in a slaveholding state.
Back in 1992, I knew next to nothing about these families’ heritage, and mostly referred to them as “free blacks.” Today, thanks to conversations with Raymont and after reading Kianga Lucas’s Native American Roots blog, I realize that the courts’ label of “free people of color” masked their extensive and varied Indian ancestry. The Bass family, for example, with whom the Andersons intermarried, originally descended from the Nansemond tribe of Virginia’s Powhatan Confederacy. Likewise, many of Granville County’s free people of color claim descent from various Indian tribes such as the Tuscarora of eastern North Carolina and the Pamunkey, Chickahominy, and Saponi of Virginia. Descendants of these tribes were among the earliest people of color to migrate to Granville County, where they settled in the vicinity of the town of Oxford and the townships of Fishing Creek, Kittrell, and Tally Ho. (2)
Map courtesy of Kianga Lucas.
Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1886 under the pseudonym David Dodge, Oscar W. Blacknall of Kittrell township gave an eye-witness description of his neighbors. Because of “exclusive intermarriage in their own class,” he wrote, they displayed a “considerable infusion of Indian blood” revealed by their
“long coarse, straight black hair and high cheekbones . . . joined with complexions whose duskiness disclaims white blood and with features clearly un-African.”
Sampson Anderson (1844-1906) with wife Jane Anderson (1852-1923) and son Robert F Anderson (1872-1914). Sampson was the son of Henry Anderson and Nancy Richardson. Jane was the daughter of Mark and Crecy Anderson. The family lived in Granville and Wake Counties and relocated to Washington, D.C. in their later years. Source: Ancestry, Username: rewinder11. Courtesy Kianga Lucas.
Lillian Anderson (1882-1932) daughter of Thomas Anderson and Sarah Tyler. Lillian was about four years old when Blacknall’s article appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Photo courtesy of Lawana Holland-Moore.
Because the Andersons were free during colonial times, I wondered whether they and their kinfolk had descended from indentured servants rather than slaves, or had perhaps been freed between 1740 and 1770, when European Enlightenment ideals generated criticism of slavery. That era not only provided the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution, but fueled debates about the morality of slavery, setting in motion the gradual abolition of slavery in the Northern colonies. The plantation South did not follow suit, but numerous Southern slaveholders nonetheless sought to save their souls by privately manumitting slaves.
Greed overcame white misgivings about slavery enough for framers of the U.S. Constitution (ratified in 1788) to grant protections to the institution. The matter was anything but settled, however. Antislavery sentiments never completely died out, and reemerged in the 19th century among various religious groups, notably Wesleyan Methodist farmers in North Carolina, and politically in the Free Soil and Abolitionist movements.
Although the 17th century Bass family of Virginia appears never to have suffered enslavement, the Andersons, who lived nearby, were held in bondage by John Fulcher, an English planter of Norfolk, Virginia, who eventually freed them. In 1712, decades before the era of the American Revolution, Fulcher manumitted fifteen slaves, thirteen of whom bore the surname Anderson, two the surname Richardson. He bestowed 640 acres of land as well as freedom on these slaves, eight of whom were still children.
I suspect that John Fulcher was kin to the Andersons. Not only were kinships common between masters and manumitted slaves, there is also the matter of Fulcher’s divorce from his wife, Ruth, some twenty years earlier. In 1691, Ruth Woodhouse Fulcher was granted a legal separation from her husband by Virginia’s Lt. Governor Francis Nicholson. Such separations were rarely granted to women in 17th century Virginia, particularly not under the terms granted by the Lt. Governor. Nicholson not only assigned legal guardianship of the couple’s son to Mrs. Fulcher, he also ordered Mr. Fulcher to pay her two thousand pounds of tobacco annually. (3)
These were unusual decisions in an ardently patriarchal society. Clearly, Lt. Gov. Nicholson was disturbed by whatever undisclosed charges Ruth Fulcher brought against her husband. Might she have accused her husband of sexually crossing the color line, of fathering children among his slaves? Were the slaves he manumitted in 1712 his own children, and did they include the mother(s) of those children? (4)
Whatever his reasons, John Fulcher’s freeing of his slaves fed fears of slave revolts among Virginians. The colony’s General Assembly responded by recommending passage of a law forbidding manumission, citing it as an incentive for slave revolts.
Exactly when and where the Andersons were first enslaved seems as uncertain as how they gained their surname. In the Southern colonies, where Indian wars, servitude, and slavery overlapped, they may originally have been Indian war captives whose descendants mixed with other Indians, African slaves, English colonizers, or white servants, creating mixed-heritage peoples with no fixed racial identity—except in the minds of white leaders who marked them as non-white under the heading of “free people of color.” The Bass and Anderson families’ lives intersected in 1699 when Edward Bass, a son of William Bass, Sr., purchased land from John Fulcher. After Fulcher freed the Andersons, the two families intermarried. In the first half of the eighteenth century, they migrated from Norfolk, Virginia, to Granville County, North Carolina. Once settled, Basses and Andersons married among other free families bearing names such as Chavis, Day, Goins, Harris, Hawley, Kersey, Pettiford, Mitchell, and others. These families, too, identified their roots as Native American. (5)
By the late eighteenth century, the names of free people of color appeared frequently in Granville court records and documents. George Anderson, whose will was probated in May 1771, left an estate that included at least seventy acres of land to heirs bearing the surnames of Anderson, Bass, Pettiford, Harris, and Smith. To Nathan Bass, he left a “plantation’ on which Bass already lived. To various other kinfolk, he left cattle, a mare, pewter plates, and a bed. Clearly, the founding families of this community had established solid yeoman-class roots. (6)
A revealing petition about the families’ status was also presented in 1771 to the North Carolina Assembly. Here we see Granville’s growing community of free people of color asking to be exempted by the state from paying taxes that were described as “highly derogatory of the Rights of Freeborn Subjects.” (7)
Colonial taxation laws had long discriminated against people of color, taxing not only free males over the age of twelve, but also females, on the assumption that all non-whites “worked the ground,” whether enslaved or not. In this era of emergent republican ideals, race-based economic discrimination against free people was condemned by the petitioners as unjust. Grouped among their names were those of free people from the area of Oxford and Fishing Creek: Gibea Chavis, Benjamin Bass, Lewis Anderson, Edward Bass, David Mitchell, and William Chavis. (8)
Criticisms of slavery and demands that free people of color be respected as citizens were soon quashed after the American Revolution. As the 19th century’s Cotton Kingdom emerged, Southern demand for slave labor increased. The one drop rule of race came to prevail. Whether free people of color were dark or light-skinned, and regardless of whether they had white or Indian ancestors, they were labeled “Negroes” or “Mulattoes”—meaning that they were fit for slavery and their freedom thus a threat to its stability. For that reason, Southern states passed laws further limiting slave manumission. At the same time, they passed stricter laws that further limited the mobility and rights of free people of color.
In response to their diminishing status, Granville County’s free families of color emphasized their Native American roots and often denied African ancestry altogether in hopes of distancing themselves from slavery. Local court records from the three decades before the Civil War, 1830-1860, reveal a fractious caste of people, one in which intra-family feuds and scuffles with whites generated court charges of affrays, assault & batteries and filings of peace warrants. Not surprisingly, white authorities seemed all too eager to police the neighborhoods of families who lived in the interstices of freedom and slavery. (9)
Social contact between people of color and whites ranged from affectionate to violent. People from various backgrounds traded goods, drank, gambled, fornicated—and occasionally tried to marry—across the lines of color and status. Tavern keepers were frequently targeted for running “disorderly houses” that included all manner of such interracial activities. Public affrays no doubt reflected internal tensions created by such activities.
Illustration from frontispiece of Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women
Poor white and free women of color occasionally ran taverns as an alternative to working in the homes and fields of other (mostly white) people. When taverns added interracial prostitution to the menu of services, authorities labeled them “bawdy” as well as “disorderly” houses. White women Elvira and Sally Short, for example, were specifically cited for “procuring” “whores” who engaged in “dreadfully filthy and lewd offences” that included “men, women, free persons, and slaves” who gathered there day and night. (10)
But it was not prostitution per se that seemed to concern white authorities. The courts punished sexual relations between whites, free people of color, and slaves far more frequently than they punished the sale of sex among whites. By their very nature, taverns were assumed to encourage sexual activity among patrons; it followed, then, that owners who ignored boundaries of race and status were suspected of fostering sexual intimacy across those boundaries.
Free people of color were not to fraternize with either slaves or lower-class whites. In 1856, tavern-keeper Nancy Anderson was accused of violating laws that forbade such camaraderie. Specifically, the courts charged her with running a “disorderly” house in which whites, free people of color and slaves engaged together in “whoring, drinking, and gambling.” That she was not charged with running a “bawdy” house indicates that interracial mingling (including sexual intimacy), not prostitution, was the offense.
It was not whites who initiated the charges against Nancy Anderson. The three men who testified against her (one of them her kinsman, Ephraim Anderson) were free men of color. Although we know that ethnic differences, economic status, and who one associated with all contributed to conflicts among people of color, we don’t know the exact reasons that these men appeared to police social contact between a woman of their community and neighboring slaves. (11)
Among whites, mingling between the races ended in death for Tom Peace, a white man, who carried on a relationship with Tabby Chavous (Chavis), a free woman of color, for some ten years. The fact that Tom regularly treated Tabby with the respect reserved for white women infuriated his brother, Dickerson Peace, who brought fornication charges against the couple in 1844. Undaunted, Tom and Tabby continued to attend public gatherings together well into the 1850s. When they appeared together at a neighborhood barbecue in 1854, an enraged Dickerson attacked and killed his brother. (12)
The courts regularly sought to counter interracial relationships and, that failing, to control the lives and labor of mixed-race children born to such relationships. The long-term relationship between Susan Williford and Peter Curtis, discussed here and in Unruly Women, (pp. 88-93) demonstrated the stages of that control: first, the guilty party was charged with fornication. If the woman subsequently became pregnant, bastardy charges would follow. At some point, usually after the age of five, the bastard child, defined as an “orphan,” (i.e. lacking a legal father) would be apprenticed to a member of the community until age 21. By contract, these apprenticed children worked for their “masters” until adulthood, depriving them of their freedom and the affections of their parent(s). Their mothers, of course, were deprived of both their children’s affection and their labor—a crucial element of survival in the rural Old South. Her punishment by the courts also demonstrated the larger threat that personal as well as political alliances of class and race presented to slaveholding society.
In part, the courts’ forcible apprenticeship of illegitimate children—many of whom were impoverished whites—to more prosperous members of the community prevented them from becoming economic and social burdens for county governments. By 1830, however, the system clearly provided a handy way to deny freedom to an increasing population of free children of color, at the same time claiming their labor for the white community. (13)
Relatively prosperous free families of color such as the Andersons managed to escape the apprenticeship system. Marriage among free people of color within their own community, land ownership, and gainful employment defended them against this practice. A number of free families of color from Granville, including William Evans, Anderson Pettiford, Joseph Curtis, and Lucy Richardson, managed even to rescue the children of friends and family from the apprenticeship system by becoming apprenticeship masters themselves. These families gained custody of community children through the very system that would otherwise have bound the children out to whites. (14)
The free community of Granville’s Oxford area struggled for autonomy right up to the Civil War and beyond. Archibald “Baldy” Kersey, a propertied free man of color with multiple ties of kinship to its core families, had long engaged in illicit trade among slaves and white citizens. (15) Court records show him charged more than once with illegally possessing guns and with various thefts connected to illegal trading. During the Civil War, such trade networks among slaves, free blacks, and whites flourished, causing Sheriff William Philpott to describe Kersey to Governor Zebulon Vance as
“the worst rogue and seducer of slaves I have ever known. He has a range from here to the extremity of the state east, as he has been trading that way for years.” Furthermore, Philpott reported, Kersey had recently broken out of jail with the aid of two white men. (16)
Scene from movie The Free State of Jones, 2016. STX Entertainment.
Baldy Kersey’s resistance to authority took a political turn during the Civil War and Reconstruction. One can only imagine the formidable force that he and Newt Knight of Mississippi’s Free State of Jones would have presented the Confederacy had Kersey been part of a coalition of free people of color, slaves, and deserters fighting from the swamps of the Leaf River.
From the Daily Conservative, Oct. 7, 1864. Courtesy Kianga Lucas
In 1868, Kersey joined a coalition from the Tally Ho district of Granville County to fight against the Ku Klux Klan’s overthrow of Reconstruction. He and six men from the Curtis, Williford, Anderson, and Tyler families petitioned Governor William Holden in the name of “the Colored Race and laboring class of white people” for aid against “outrages” committed by the Ku Klux Klan in Granville County. (you may read those petitions and my analysis here.)
People of color were powerless without a full commitment from Northern leaders to hold back the tide of violence and white supremacy campaigns that derailed Reconstruction and ushered in segregation and second-class citizenship for people of color. The descendants of Granville’s free community of color, however, successfully resisted at least one method—the Grandfather Clause—devised by Southern white politicians to deny the vote to people of color.
During the late 19th century, poll taxes and literacy tests proved an effective means of disfranchisement, since many freed people were poor and illiterate. Even if one could read, literacy tests were designed to be failed. Some Southern politicians, however, objected to such laws because they also discriminated against poor white men (whose votes they needed). Enter the Grandfather Clause. In 1900, North Carolina’s state constitution echoed those of other Southern states by exempting voters from taking literacy tests and paying poll taxes if their grandfather had legally voted in or before the year 1867.
As intended, this blatant act of racial discrimination disfranchised men whose fathers had been slaves. In North Carolina, however, free men of color had legally voted until 1835, the year in which the state’s new constitution outlawed it. Thus, the grandfathers of many people of color had voted! Accordingly, in 1902, 1904, 1906, and 1908, some eighty descendants of the Anderson, Boon, Mayo, Tyler, Taborn, Pettiford, Kearsey, Howell, Day, and Chavis families successfully registered to vote during the South’s most violent era of racial disfranchisement and segregation. (17)
John Thomas Tyler (1862-1943), son of William Tyler Jr. and Sally Kersey. One of many Granville Co. citizens who registered to vote under the Grandfather Clause, he was the nephew of Baldy Kersey, who, like Wm. Tyler, protested KKK outrages during Reconstruction (see petitions). Photo courtesy of Kianga Lucas.
The mixing of peoples from three continents of the world in the North American colony of Virginia was an unintended result of an international Commercial Revolution that eventually reshaped the world. The Andersons and other ambiguously labeled “free people of color” carry the DNA of diverse peoples who variously lost lands, were wrenched from homelands, were reduced to chattel slavery, or who became rich from all of the above. Native peoples of early 17th century Virginia faced dispossession, enslavement, and slaughter by English entrepreneurs. Poor whites were uprooted from England as indentured servants to serve as menial laborers in America. By the second half of the century, these servants were replaced by African slaves, who represented a more stable economic investment for Virginia planters.
But colonization only begins to tell the history of America’s free people of color throughout the United States’ ongoing struggles over religious, racial, economic, and territorial hegemony. Their 19th century experiences are central also to understanding how conflicts over slavery led to the Civil War, how Reconstruction was thwarted by a violent and political corrupt counter-revolution that resulted in “redeemed” state governments committed to white supremacist doctrines.
By 1900, Southern literature and politics overflowed with the sentimental language of the South’s glorious Confederate “Lost Cause” version of the Civil War. The myth that states’ rights—not slavery—caused the war, leavened by “old timey” images of benevolent planters and contented slaves, provided a romantic origins tale for New South whites. As the 20th century opened, Southern leaders entertained the belief that racial segregation protected “pure” bloodlines while they placed the governance of society in “superior” white hands.
The battle against legalized segregation and disfranchisement on the basis of race brought a constitutional victory against racism in 1955, but America’s understanding of racial identity—what it is, what it means, and who decides it—remains a hot button issue of debate in the 21st century. As stated by historian Barbara Fields, “Racism is not the product of race. Racist actions produce the illusion of race.”
Louis Henry Horner, 1875-1927, great-grandson of Henry Anderson (1793-1849) and Nancy Richardson (1805-1866). Courtesy of Raymont Hawkins-Jones.
Armitta Magdeline Horner Wilson (b. about 1876), great-granddaughter of Henry Anderson and Nancy Richardson. Courtesy of Raymont Hawkins-Jones
Samuel Horner, (1887-1955), great-grandson of Henry Anderson and Nancy Richardson. Courtesy of Raymont Hawkins-Jones.
NOTES:
My work on communities of free people of color appears in Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (1992), and The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (2010).
The historical origins and racial identities of free people of color were far more complex than communicated by contemporary labels such as “black,” “Negro,” “Indian,” “Mustee” or “Mulatto” The Basses self-identified as Indian and English. In 1727, William Bass Sr. obtained court documentation swearing that he was of English and Indian heritage, with no admixture of African. In 1742, his son, William Bass Jr., did the same. According to family historian Kianga Lucas, the Andersons, likely of Indian, English, and African heritage, shared the Basses’ Nansemond Tribal connections. On the erasure of Native American ancestry by white authorities in the age of segregation, see Lucas, https://nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/tag/evans/page/2/
On Southern patriarchal law and its effects on divorce and charges of interracial sex as grounds for divorce, see Bynum Unruly Women, pp. 59-87.
Colonial Granville County marriage records include the names of many free people of color. Before 1800, the Bass name was most common, followed by Chavis, Anderson, Mitchell, Evans, Day, Pettiford, and Kersey. These families would remain the most visible of Granville’s free people of color before and during the Civil War Era. Published in Brent Holcomb, Marriages of Granville County, NC, 1753-1868 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc. 1981.)
George Anderson will reprinted in Thomas McAdory Owen, Granville County: Notes in Preparation for the History and Genealogy of. Montgomery. AL.
William L. Saunders, The North Carolina Colonial Records (Raleigh: Josephus Daniels, 1890)
In September, 1668, Virginia passed the first colonial taxation statute that specifically targeted free people of color, including women, on the basis that all people of color were agricultural laborers: “WHEREAS some doubts, have arisen whether negro women set free were still to be accompted tithable according to a former act, It is declared by this grand assembly that negro women, though permitted to enjoy their ffreedome yet ought not in all respects to be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English, and are still lyable to payment of taxes.” Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, vol. 2, p. 267. Petition signer Lewis Anderson is likely the same man who left a will in 1814 that named the following free people of color as heirs: Isaac Anderson, Abel Anderson, Augustine Anderson, Wright Anderson, Zachariah Anderson, Thomas Anderson, John Anderson, Darling Bass, Sarah Anderson (from Owen, Granville County Notes, vol. 2)
Criminal Action Papers, Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves and Free People of Color, and Miscellaneous Records of Slaves and Free People of Color, Granville County, NC State Archives. Discussed in Bynum, Unruly Women, pp. 78-82
State v. Nancy Anderson, County Court, May 1856, Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NC State Archives.
State v. Dickerson Peace, March 1854, Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NC State Archives.
In 1826, the state legislature passed a law that empowered county courts to apprentice any child of a person of color who did not have “honest industrious occupation.” This meant that even married couples of color might lose custody of their children if the court deemed it advisable. Between 1830 and 1860, Granville County’s free children of color were bound out in far greater numbers than were white children.
Apprenticeship records, Granville County, NC State Archives;Bynum, Unruly Women, pp. 99-103.
According to Kianga Lucas, the Kersey family arrived in Granville County in the early 1800s. Their tribal origins, she notes, are with the Algonquian speaking Weyanoke tribe who later intermarried with the Iroquois speaking Nottoway and Tuscarora tribes.
Hell and High Water, Richard Grant’s article about runaway slaves or “maroons” of the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, appeared last month in Smithsonian Magazine (Sept., 2016). Dedicated to African American culture and history, the story revolves around the research of historical archaeologist Dan Sayers, and his passion for uncovering the secrets of these lost populations.
The 1888 painting below depicts Maroons taking refuge in the Dismal Swamp before the Civil War. In addition to swamps, many fled to creeks and desolate river bottoms throughout the South. Mountainous areas were not as attractive as places of refuge due to bounties offered to Native American tribes in those regions for the capture, dead or alive, of those who escaped.
Slaves in the Great Dismal
The swamp, Dan tells his interviewer, “teems with water moccasins and rattlesnakes and the mosquitoes are so thick they can blur the outlines of a person standing 12 feet away.” His description of “toiling through sucking ooze, with submerged roots and branches grabbing at your ankles” is testimony to the determination and endurance of anyone daring to enter.
My primary interest in this subject stems from my own ancestral research, and the discovery of a certain strand of my racial identity. Although I am white, early Federal Census records indicate that my 5th Great Grandfather, James Shoemake, and members of his household were listed under the category of “All Other Free Persons.” The households of his sons Sampson, Solomon, and James were likewise listed.
What exactly does the phrase “All Other Free Persons” mean? Were those so labeled free from indentured servitude as well as from the shackles of slavery? They were certainly not “free” to do as they pleased. One would assume that in the South of the late 1700s and early 1800s they were of African descent. Was the label applied by a census taker and based on the appearance of an individual, or were individuals asked “are you Indian; are you Negro?” But then, in this era of removal or annihilation of native peoples and enslavement of Africans, would someone posed with that question answer truthfully? Perhaps they were so well known in the community that their status and race were already known.
What about the terms “Mulatto” and “Mustee”? A Mulatto is defined as a person of mixed white and black ancestry, originally, as having one white and one black parent. A Mustee is the offspring of a white person and a quadroon (one quarter black) or octoroon (one eighth black). But can we depend on the knowledge of those who applied the terms? I’ve seen both labels—and, later, “Melungeon”—used in conjunction with my ancestors. The signatures, or marks, of James and his sons are on a 1794 petition, part of which reads as follows: “The Petition of the people of colour of the state aforesaid who are under the act entitled an Act for imposing a pole tax on all free Negroes, Mustees, and Mulatoes.” The petition in Georgetown, now Marion County, South Carolina, which was initiated to cease the discriminatory taxation of “free Negroes”, contains the names of Bolton, Shoemake, Gibson, Oxendine, and others.
Seventy-five years later, in Hamilton County, Tennessee, the testimony in a trial known as the “Melungeon Case”, which involved the descendants of Solomon Bolton and the grandchildren of Spencer Bolton (named in the above petition), stated that the Boltons, Shoemakes, Perkinses, etc.,“were called Melungeons and known to be Portuguese or Spaniards,” further complicating the possibilities of their ethnic background. The term Melungeon is thought to have first appeared in print in the 19th century, and used in Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina to describe certain groups thought to be comprised of European, Native American, and African ancestry.
And then we have the Maroons. Sampson and Solomon Shoemake had documented land holdings between Cat Fish and Gum Swamps along the Pee Dee River in Northeast South Carolina in the late 1700s. James Shoemake and his wife Mary appear on a list of “Black” taxables” in the Fishing Creek District of Granville County, North Carolina, in 1762. In Alexander Gregg’s History of the Old Cheraws, he describes how “a man named Thompson, from the Poke Swamp settlement, on the westside of the river, as he jumped the fence, found a large and powerful mulatto, Shoemake by name, pressing closely upon him, with his rifle aimed and in the act of firing.”
Happily for Thompson, the rifle miss-fired and before it could be adjusted he made his escape. Twenty years later, Thompson learned that Shoemake had gone to Camden, caught him, and inflicted “severe punishment”. This story emerged between 1776 and 1783 during Tory and Whig confrontations in the Cheraws, an area in early Northeast South Carolina. Shoemake, the “powerful Mulatto”, and also a noted Tory, is thought to be James Shoemake. Were James and his sons Maroons? Were they of Portuguese, Native American, or African descent—or perhaps all three?
Throughout history, various terms were used to define the ethnicity of people labeled as “free persons of color.” Can such terms, used not merely to identify one’s race but to determine one’s rights and mobility in society, help researchers to determine their own racial identity?
After having my DNA tested through Ancestry.com, the ethnicity report showed the following distribution: Great Britain 29%, Eastern Europe 22%, Scandinavia 20%, Ireland 13%, Iberian Peninsula and Italy/Greece both 5%, and Western Europe 4%. I linked my connection to Great Britain and Ireland through my family surnames of Boyce, McScrews, Landrum, Pitts, Holliman, Sumrall, Hutto and Walters. My maternal grandparents were of Prussian and German descent, so the Eastern Europe was easily understood.
But Scandinavia—I had no idea where that came in. This is where the black and white of DNA became gray.
The Vikings invaded and occupied the British Isles and Northern Europe for hundreds of years. The Moors of Northern Africa did likewise in Southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. The influence of Italy and Greece extended as far west as France, Spain and Portugal, northward to the British Isles and Northern Europe, and South into Africa. And Western Europe was conquered over the years by Celts, Romans, and Germanic tribes. Ancestry estimates that approximately 60% of DNA from native people of Great Britain actually comes from this region, that of the Iberian Peninsula 51%, and Western Europe 48%.
Any African DNA is apparently at this point too minor to register, though further testing might reveal its presence.
I’ve been researching my ancestry for over 30 years. Based on early findings, I was convinced that my family descended from Jean de la Chaumette (pronounced Shumate), a French Huguenot, expelled from France in the mid-1600s during the purge of the Huguenots. After settling in London the Huguenots were banished by Charles II and given transportation out of the country. They disembarked on the island of Martinique, considered a “dumping ground” for Huguenots, where Chaumette established a plantation, and lost his first wife to disease. Leaving his eldest son Antoine to tend to the plantation, he immigrated to America with the remainder of his family and settled in Elk Run, Virginia, ironically only a few short miles from where I was raised in Manassas. Both are located in what is now Prince William County. There has been extensive research done on the descendants of Jean de la Chaumette. Though researchers and historians are aware of and acknowledge the Shoemakes in Northeastern South Carolina, they have been unable to link them to Jean de la Chaumette. I’m not as convinced of the connection now, though somewhere between the “All Other Free Persons” of the James Shoemake household and Jean de la Chaumette there may well be a story.
The 1800 census shows Solomon and Sampson Shoemake, brothers, living side by side in Liberty County, Marion District, South Carolina. Both are labeled “All Other Free Persons.” That designation disappeared from the Sampson Shoemake family in 1810, when they were labeled “Free White Persons” by the federal census enumerator, and on subsequent census records as well. In the Darlington District of South Carolina, however, Sampson’s brother, Solomon, and his family remained “Free Colored Persons” on the 1820 and 1830 census. In 1840 and 1860, the Darlington County enumerators designated their households variously as “free colored,” “Mulatto,” and “white.”
How can one brother be defined as free white and another free colored? With such inconsistencies, and knowing the social and political significance of racial labels in a society based on slavery, one must question the knowledge and motives of those who applied them.* Though highly significant socially and politically, biologically such terms can be meaningless, as revealed in this era of DNA.
In the final analysis, relying on historically-based racial labels, terms, and designations makes it easy to get hung up on our racial identity, and much harder to pin it down. True passion lies in discovering our ancestors—and their stories—and placing them in their historical and social context, of which racial designations supply an intriguing part of the picture.
While perusing the Internet, I recently discovered the following 2012 essay by Daniele Watts, whose name I recognized as the actor who played the slave Coco in the movie Django Unchained. I was intrigued to learn that Daniele is a direct descendant of Civil War guerrilla Newt Knight and Rachel Knight (the former slave of Newt’s grandfather) through their daughter, Augusta Ann. I was equally intrigued by the manner in which she used this discovery to delve emotionally deeper into her role as a young slave in the Old South. Daniele graciously consented to my request to publish her essay here on Renegade South.
Vikki Bynum, Moderator
Bringing My Family’s History into Focus through the Lens of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
By Daniele Watts | December 25, 2012
It was a hot, rainy New Orleans night . . . the kind of humid where you can feel the history hanging in the air, spirits occasionally wafting in through the windows—or they would have if I had windows that could open. I was on the 7th floor of the crew hotel, and though my quarters lacked the lavish balconies of the A-list talent, I was thrilled to have the chance to spend my days acting opposite Oscar-nominated heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio—the first icon to ever grace the walls of my childhood bedroom. We were steeping ourselves in the Old South: his character to play was Calvin Candie—the heir to a large cotton plantation—and mine was Coco, his doting servant, kept like a pet in a cupcake-like French-maid outfit.
Daniele Watts as “Coco” in the film Django Unchained.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, and Daniele Watts, scene from Django Unchained
I’ve always loved the research that goes into creating characters who lived in the past. My father led the way, enchanting the wide-eyed little girl version of me with awe inspiring stories of his growing up poor in Los Angeles, with nine brothers and sisters, sniffing glue and stealing bikes to survive the 1960s Watts Riots. Staying true to the overachiever I’d been reared to be, my Jamaican mother’s words echoing in my ears, “black people in this country have to work twice as hard to get what white people get,” and backed by a sincere desire to contribute both to my acclaimed scene partners and our much lauded director, Quentin Tarantino, I found myself researching my family genealogy on that lightning-filled night in New Orleans. My surroundings were transformed by my imagination and the excitement of the historical moment from a modest hotel room into a mystical excavation site!
I was following a lead my father had admonished a few months prior. Something about our families’ connection to a white man—a Mississippi legend—Newton Knight; “It’s important for you to know about this stuff—it goes way the heck deeper than you think!” He was enthusiastic as usual when it came to telling me stories, but at the moment, the grown-up version of Daniele was oh-too-gleefully distracted by the sugarcoated frivolities flashing on the Christmas-saturated television screen to pay attention.
Now in New Orleans, wishing I had listened, I was searching voraciously for any information that would give me something interesting to talk about on set the next day. I began Googling my supposed distant relative, Newton Knight. Expecting a tedious hunt for a mundane historical figure, my jaw began to drop as I immediately found pages upon pages of Google hits—for a man to whom I soon became very anxious to see how closely I was related.
Captain Knight is described as having pale blue eyes fixed in an “eagle-like gaze”, with long white hair that hung around his shoulders. A backwoodsman, a Mississippian, who in 1862 “walked off in disgust” from his Confederate army unit, and came home to form a band of renegades that, like “swamp-foxes,” defied capture. He is mythologized as a figure, sanguine as Robin Hood, who fought to keep Jones County Mississippi free from the oppression of the Confederate troops—or what he called “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” In Knight, I found a white man who was anti-slavery, freed his black lover, Rachel, and formed a collaboration with her that forever changed the face of Jones County history. She helped with supplies and food, and may have played a pivotal role in his band’s ability to evade Confederate troops in the dark swamps of Mississippi’s Piney Woods. And when it came time for them to die, he left instructions for her to be buried next to him—at a time when it was illegal for blacks and whites to be buried in the same cemetery. I found that I was related to a controversial figure who honored his mixed race children, and unlike for children of most “tragic mulattoes” of the time, gave them his last name— Knight—providing for them “as though they were white”. Numerous books and articles have been written—including a major motion picture adaptation, Tap Roots, directed by George Marshall, former President of the Screen Directors Guild—honoring his legacy. (Research Courtesy of Free State of Jones, by Victoria Bynum; Introduction to Tap Roots, by James H Street; and the Desoto Times Tribune, book review by Bill Minor).
In my hotel room that night, this man took the form of a spirit flying in the face of all my unchallenged subconscious assumptions that if I had any ‘white in me,’ it must be because one of my grandmothers was raped by an ‘evil plantation master’ hundreds of years ago. This white man was actually showing up on my computer screen as a hero; a caretaker who set up his black lover with a house of her own, and unlike many white men of the time who were keeping “open secrets,” he did not hide their relationship—despite the discomforting ripples this created for local residents both black and white. How is it, that in all these years, I never knew that I was the descendant of two verifiable legends? Up until that point I had just assumed I was the descendant of slaves, not exactly something to brag about! I experienced a strange moment of awakening that night when I began to realize we are all the product of a fascinating and complex legacy.
In an effort to make the myth more real for myself, I imagined my own grandfather, who was always calling me “little miss star,” looking up to this white man, his mother’s father, and calling him “Grandpa”. Indeed! This legendary figure was actually my great-great-grandfather! What magical synchronicity, and a testament to the transformational power of the arts that I experienced this life changing revelation because of my love for movies—which are nothing more than a grand exercise in make-believe! The call to artistic expression was prompting me to use my imagination and intelligence to understand myself, and where I come from, more deeply. That understanding allowed me to express myself as Coco, a slave girl who feels something close to love because of the attention she receives from a charming, ruthlessly violent, white man. I wondered how my grandmother Rachel must have felt to be cared for by one of the most powerful white men in all of Mississippi.
Family of Augusta Ann Knight Watts, daughter of Newt Knight and Rachel Knight. At bottom right is Curtis Watts, grandfather of Daniele Watts, holding Daniele’s father, Marvin Watts.
Now that I’d found such a juicy connection to real history, it became even more exciting to understand Django Unchained as it relates to the America we live in today. I looked at the evolution of black Americans, from the more community-focused ancestors in Africa, to the combative conditioning reflected in the words of the “Willie Lynch letter: Making of a Slave.”* I considered the subsequent black-on-black conflict caused by the creation of the “Uncle Tom” archetype—or someone like the character Samuel Jackson plays—a black person benefiting over other black people because of their relationship with “the white man.” My own grandmother Rachel, and the fictional character of Coco, are not far from that archetype. I reflected on my own life, and the somewhat uncomfortable knowledge that I have been treated more graciously, because of an easier assimilation into so called ‘whiteness,’ than black folk who have not had it as easy. The words of Calvin Candie and his assessment of “the exceptional nigger” began to ring hauntingly in my head. It feels a bit disgusting to even admit this, but it is cathartic to know there is now an international piece of cinema that examines these ideas without getting trapped in the ‘poor me,’ victim version of the story. This knowledge helps me to have faith in the possibility that black folk and white folk can come together to release these limiting beliefs, and even laugh at ourselves a little in the process. When I listen to the resounding theme evident throughout Django Unchained, I am inspired by human beings who continued to pursue love even as they walked the dirty road of survival.
Newt Knight
These ideas initially energized me and I was eager to share an inspiring story of the love between my grandfather and grandmother—two heroes who, against all odds, found love in the midst of oppression. But as I dug deeper, I realized there was also a dark side to my grandparent’s legend. Some accounts say that Newton was an imposing figure who would kill people just because he didn’t like them. Other accounts say that he ran his home in a harem-like fashion, having sexual relationships with his own daughter, George Ann**; and his white wife, Serena. And as for Serena, wasn’t she publicly degraded by her husband’s relationships with other lovers? Was my great-grandfather an emancipator, a chauvinist, a lover of black women, or nothing more than a rapist? And was my great-grandmother a progressive abolitionist who looked past Newt’s whiteness, and saw a compassionate human being, or was she merely taking advantage of the attention she was receiving from “the white man?” The more research I did, the muddier the story became.
Would it be shortsighted for me to describe my grandfather as a hero when his legacy is a bit questionable? And if it’s possible that I am a descendant of a morally ambiguous past, then isn’t it also probable that we all are—not just the oversimplified hero stories we’ve been digesting of the honorable founding fathers or the struggling, god fearing slaves? Though these may seem like obvious questions, I find it interesting that most films about this era of American history tend to gloss over the more gritty and revealing possibilities—but not Django!
The films drops us off on the dark side of American capitalism, and casts one of the most charming movie stars in the world as the source of our oppression. Even though Mr. DiCaprio is on the record as saying he didn’t identify with his character, I believe that his performance speaks to the role that the ancient Shaman played in restoring balance to a community in need of healing. He channels and exorcises dark spirits, from such an authentic place, that we can see a part of ourselves even in that darkness. During the three weeks I spent with Dicaprio, as Calvin Candie and Coco, his character became a window for me to understand why people do the ‘unimaginable’. There was always a gleam of humor behind his eyes—a genuine feeling that he was present to the experience. The love and attention that he brought to the role shone a light for me on the power of storytelling.
His performance calls out to a country that is afraid to look closely at its shadow—or the darkest parts of our history. Through close attention, I was able to trace the evolution of this shadow, and try to understand the root of the unbalance. Now instead of Calvin Candie’s slaves, mint juleps, and cotton plantations; we have credit cards, cable tv, and The Tea Party. Instead of distracting myself with material pacifiers, I was faced with the challenge of being present—Tarantino didn’t allow for the distraction of cell phones on set—which forced me to look deeper, and experience a life-opening realization as a result. I began to see that I have the choice of dismissing America’s history as morally incomprehensible—and thus our current state, and certain factions of white and black America, a bizarre and shameful continuation of that—or I can use my empathy and sense of humor to accept ‘the other,’ and understand more fully why these unbalanced dynamics continue to exist.
There is a West African word that keeps coming to mind when I think about the movie; “Sankofa”—which essentially means that one must go through the past to move forward. In this context, I appreciate the clarity that I’ve gained from my subsequent research. My curiosity took me beyond slavery to rediscover a young America that rebelled against its parent country, and in trying to prove its independence from Great Britain, developed its identity through material wealth—the verifiable bragging rights of success. I can recognize how the institution of slavery was born of this materialistic competition, and why the slaves to this society have developed self-concepts based on their own pursuit or denial of material independence. The psychological conditioning of American slave times has set off a chain of events pushing an entire country, both black and white, into a competitive modality.
When I finally attended the cast and crew screening, after months of these ideas marinating in my subconscious, it was thrilling to experience a film that activates history on so many levels! It was also the most brilliant artistic reflection of American violence that I had ever seen in a film; evoking fascinating shades of grey, or ethical ambiguity, which is often sidestepped when movies are pandering, and easy to swallow. The film takes us through the volcanic emotional arch of what happens to a ‘dream deferred.’ And in the carefully placed juxtaposition of hard hitting rap music against scenes of retribution, the film draws parallels to how the dark side of the America dream has found a voice in the ‘any means necessary’ mentality of urban gangs and today’s power hungry hip-hop. I found myself enraptured by Django for the same reasons that I was attracted to my father’s stories of the Watts riots; instead of encouraging an impulse to do something violent, it gave me a deep feeling of release—even celebration—to have my feelings acknowledged through a masterful story.
As uncomfortable as this journey has been at times, I now see the value of tracing through these unexamined parts of my heritage. The violent acts that America has perpetrated against black people, and people of all colors, will continue to show up as self-imposed mental slavery unless we dig deep and unchain ourselves. It’s been exactly a year since my father first told me about our connection to Newton Knight. And now rather than dismissing history with ignorant assumptions—which inevitably left me as the victim of an ‘evil’ past, I have gained wisdom through this process of activating my empathy for America’s history. I believe that when we accept this country’s messy tale, and find a way to accept our part in that mess, rather than judge ‘them’—‘the other,’ we are one step closer to being free of the hold this history of hate and oppression may have on us. Now, I feel empowered by the understanding that I have a choice of what story I want to tell myself.
More than anything, I am releasing the part of myself that has to choose a side. I’m finding myself learning from other cultures—of the ancient Chinese symbol for unity, the yin-yang; of the Indian goddess Siva, who represents the balance of creation and destruction—and finding hope in these beautiful metaphors for the light and dark extremes of human nature which alchemize to create our experience of life! Life happens, its complex and mysterious, and those contradictions find their way into our family histories. It takes brave artists, like Quentin Tarantino, and challenging works of art like Django Unchained to help us see this in ourselves … so we can use that clarity to create a new history, together . . . one that we can all feel proud of.
Moderator’s Notes:
*On the historical inaccuracy of the “Willie Lynch Letter,” see the African Holocaustwebsite—vb.
**Newt Knight was surely no saint, but neither was he the father of George Ann Knight, by whom he had several children, as is sometimes rumored. George Ann was born in Georgia to 14-year-old Rachel at least a year before her purchase by Newt’s grandfather, Jackie Knight—vb.
KKK costumes in N.C., 1870. Engraving by US Marshall JG Hester. NY Public Library.
By Victoria Bynum
Some time ago, I posted an essay about the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorization of Orange County, North Carolina, in the years following the Civil War. Recently, I recovered from my files evidence of the Klan’s rampages through neighboring Granville County as well.
The following petitions, sent in 1868 and 1869 to North Carolina’s Republican governor, William W. Holden, include the names of numerous Granville County men of color who were free from slavery long before the Civil War. Silas L. Curtis, Terral Curtis, Cuffee Mayo, William Tyler, and A. B. Kerzy lived in the Tally Ho township of Granville County. Having grown up before the war, they were forbidden by law to learn to read or write; thus, most of the men were semi-literate or illiterate. Silas Curtis, who wrote both the petitions, was an exception. The signatures of Cuffee Mayo (elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives in 1868) and William Solomon indicate their literacy as well.
The 1868 petitioners belonged to a local branch of the Republican Union Leagues (also called Loyal Leagues) which were under assault by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, determined to turn back Reconstruction, drive Republicans from power, and reassert dominance over African Americans, functioned as a terrorist arm of the pro-Confederate southern wing of the Democratic Party.
The petition is blunt in describing the violence wreaked upon the community, and includes details of the sexual humiliation of a woman of color and the attempted murder of another. The petitioners are adamant in declaring their rights and their need for state assistance. In signing or allowing their names to be placed on such a petition, they risked great personal danger. A note at the bottom asks its deliverer to hand the petition directly to Governor Holden to prevent the “Rebels” from destroying it.
I recognize many of the men’s names from the extensive research I conducted in county records while writing my first book, Unruly Women. In that book, I discussed A. B. Kerzy (Archibald Kearsey), at some length for his participation in underground trading during the war; others are mentioned as well. Although I also briefly mentioned the petitions, they are published below in their entirety.
In transcribing the letters, I have added paragraph breaks and used common punctuation and grammar, but endeavored to spell words exactly as they appear on the originals. (The originals of both petitions are contained in the Governors’ Papers, W.W. Holden, N.C. Department of Archives and History)
Oct 11, 1868
Our Governor–Dear Sir:
I take the privilige of writing to you on this occasion for this reason, not because we are scared out, but in the first place, you are our State Executive. And when we are having outrages comitted among us, you are our only refuge to which we have to flee for advice and protection.
Therefor I take the privilige to inform you of some outrages comitted amoung us. And it is not only now and then—it is geting to be a genrel thing. On Saturday night last, the Ku Klux were raging in Oxford and Tally Ho. They first formed themselves in line in front of the Colored School Room, thinking the Leagues men were at lodge in there. And failing to find them, went off to other places and don the same, tho as it happen the leagues had adjoined [adjourned] before they came out and they watched them.
And they now say they intend to brake up the Leagues before the Election. Col. Aimey, in a speech on Friday last at Oxford, [said] that if we would stop the Leagues he would stop the KuKlux. And if not, he could not do nothing with them.
On Thursday night last they went to a Colored man’s house and got him out and Beet him cruley, beet his wife and cut her dress open and tied her to a tree—then told them if ever they told it, or told who it was, they would kill them. They then went to another one’s house and comence to tarring the top of his house off and some of them at the door. I broke in [and] got hold of his wife—he got out of the way—and got her out and she got loose and ran and they shot her in the back and by the side of the face and she now lies in a low state of helth. And a few nights ago they went to another colored man’s house and treated him the same.
I will now give you the colored mens names: Ned Mallory, Parson Jones, and Pressley Herndon. Those white men was John C. Hugen, William Stem, John Wheeler, John Day, William Boles, Hay Stem, and one by the name Bishop, Jack Boothe, Flay[?] Moor, Sam Boothe, Henry Hasken, Flucher [Fletcher?] Moor, Tom Jones, Wm. Jones, and others—that are comiting these outrages. And I have not told near all they have and are doing.
We appeal to you—for some protection in some way. Such men oght to be stoped in their outrages.
Sir, I hope to hear from you soon. We don’t want a malissia [militia] here among us. But God in heaven knows we must have something—otherwise we will have to give up Gen. Grant and take Seymour.* And if I have to do that I am going to take me a rope and go to the woods. Your obedent Servant,
The second petition, 1869, protests Tally Ho’s township election, claiming that Democrats deliberately miscounted votes in order to claim victory for their own candidate.
This petition, also written by Silas Curtis, contains similar but fewer names and appears to have been written in much greater haste. One of the appended names, “Lunchford Wiliford” (Lunsford Williford), caught my eye immediately. Lunsford was the son of Susan Williford, a poor white woman who appears prominently in chapter four of Unruly Women. Antebellum North Carolina laws against interracial marriage forbade Susan to marry Peter Curtis, who, like Silas L. Curtis, belonged to one of Granville County’s most prominent free families of color. Susan had several children by Peter Curtis, though it’s not clear whether Curtis also fathered Lunsford. Nevertheless, Lunsford became part of the Curtis family when he married Harriet Curtis, the daughter of Peter’s sister, Nancy Curtis.
Note that this petition proclaims an alliance between “the colored race and the labering class of white people,” reflective of kinship ties that created vibrant communities of mixed-race people in North Carolina.
–vb
August 11, 1869
Your Exencilence Governor W.W. Holden,
Dear Sir, We the Republicans of Granville County most respetifully protest against the township election of Tally Ho in consequence of the way it was conducted. And do earnestly believe that it oght to be remoddled, and a fair and square election given.
We most recollect that the Democrats will—and do—do all and everything they can to get in power. And they think if they can fool the Republicans, as they have already done at Tally Ho and other places, and get in power in the townships. By that means, after awhile, they can get the county offices and from that to the state’s offices and United states offices. And then they can nullify the republican form of government and place the colored race, and labering class of white people, in the same position—only wors—as they were before.
And please your honor, Sir, if you cannot grant us a re-election—which we honestly believe that we oght to have—what must we do in such a case? And we can also prove by a colored man, a responsible one—that the Democrat candidate told him that they had beet them. And if the Republicans had had as meny more as they did have, we would have beet them. And as it was, they only beet [by] about thirty.
What must we do? Must we put up with sunch [such], when we know there are frode [fraud?]. Know we will die first.
Recollect that dividing into townships all of the counties makes a consitable difference—among the colored people—egnorent as they are.
And meny and numbers are dissatisfied at the Election except [if] it had bin don fair, and we appeal to our Superior—our Surpream, for refuge.
Throughout my years of researching my family from Gloucester County and the Tidewater Area of Virginia, I have noted that several families, including my own, were listed as “free Negroes” or “mulattoes” prior to 1800. This discovery ignited my interest; I wanted to know more about these families and how they fit into a society in which most people of African descent were slaves and where those of European descent dominated. I wondered if these free people of color had any rights, if they owned property or had the freedom to move about without being harassed. Since my focus was on the years prior to 1800, I also wondered how they felt about the Revolutionary War. Which side did they support? Which side promised a better future for them?
Families with the names ALLMOND/ALLMAN, BLUFORD, DRIVER, FREEMAN, GOWEN/ GOING, HEARN, KING, LEMON, MEGGS, MONOGGIN, and MORRIS are identified in various documents as living free from slavery. “Free” did not necessarily mean, however, that they were as free as those of full European ancestry. These “free” people did not have slave masters, but they did have limitations place upon them and hardships that would not be understood by my generation.
The above families of color, as well as others not cited in this essay, contributed to America by serving in wars, participating in religious movements, and working in many trades. At the same time, they strove for greater freedom of access to education, property ownership, and social equality. Too often, these pioneers are forgotten in the history books; rarely are they recognized for their work in shaping the counties in which they lived. When I drive through Gloucester, to my knowledge there is no physical memorial that bears witness to their service in the Revolutionary War, or their contributions to their communities. I can find all types of negative propaganda concerning “free Negroes,” such as recommendations for their forced removal from the county, or punishment for not paying taxes. My hope is that someday the leaders of these communities will recognize free families of color and teach generations to come about their positive contributions.
Society and Labels
Societies are often divided into historical eras. I am particularly interested in the colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum periods of the United States, and how “free people of color” fared during each of them. My research has taken me to different states and localities, where I have noticed varying attitudes displayed by white officials toward people of color. For example, Virginia law prohibited interracial marriages, yet I found such marriages listed in some court records. I also noticed how inconsistently people in power recorded a person’s skin color or race. In some cases, the description was diligent and descriptive; in others, it was not. For example, members of the DRIVER family were described in some records as “white” and in others as “mulatto” or “colored”. I found these records interesting and disturbing at the same time, and therefore decided to explore these subjects and share my observations about them.
Samuel “Squire” Driver, 1815-1872, and Sarah “Sally” Driver (maiden name unknown), 1815-1872
As I browsed through various historical documents, I noticed that court clerks paid close attention to describing the person(s) being listed. By law, in 1705, a mulatto was a person deemed to have one-eighth or more African blood. By 1866, one-quarter African blood meant one was “colored,” whereas one-quarter Indian blood meant one was Indian.
In some records, persons defined as “mulatto” were further defined by their shade of complexion. A mulatto might be described as “Yellow/Yellowish,” “Tawney,” “Light”, or “Brown/Dark Mulatto,”—the list goes on. When I first saw the term “Tawney,” I had to research its meaning. After consulting FreeDictionary.Com, I concluded that this complexion color included several shades of brown ranging from light to brownish orange.
The mulatto MEGGS Family of Middlesex and Gloucester County was described as “Yellow” and “Tawney” in various records. For example, “free negro” James Meggs, born around 1752, was listed as a “yellow” tithable in Middlesex County in 1787, and as a “mulatto” tithable in 1788.
For genealogical information on the Meggs household, see Heinegg, Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware at http://freeafricanamericans.com/Mason_Month.htm
It was also customary for a clerk to state a person’s status of birth when it occurred outside of marriage. Terms like “illegitimate” and “bastard” where often used. At first I could not understand why such births occurred so frequently in the Bible Belt, but I soon learned that slaves were prohibited by law from marrying, and that interracial marriages became illegal in Virginia in 1691. Thus, free people of color could legally marry only one another.
Although the law stated that an interracial couple would be banished from the Dominion forever, I did not find evidence of this happening. In 1792 another law was enacted stating that
he or she shall be committed to prison for six months and pay $30.00 for use of the parish. The penalty for a minister marrying Negroes and whites is set at $250 for every such marriage.
Many such laws seem to have been ignored, however, in Gloucester County. During the late 1700’s, Susanna DRIVER (Caucasian) gave birth to a mulatto bastard child. Susanna is cited several times in the vestry books in regard to her mulatto children. It appears that she was white and her spouse was of African ancestry. Prior to her husband’s death she gave birth to another child, but no reference to race was indicated in the vestry books.
The oldest free family of color that I have been able to identify in Gloucester County is the GOWEN/GOWINGS/GOINGS family. They were the children of Michael GOWEN, born about 1635, who was the “negro” servant of Christopher STAFFORD. STAFFORD gave him his freedom on January 18, 1654, in York County, Virginia, after four years of service. This is a fascinating family that is well documented by Paul Heinegg in his book, Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, at http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/Virginia_NC.htm. Throughout this article, I draw heavily on Heinegg’s research, and I encourage you to visit this site to learn more about the genealogical history of the above families.
The ALLMOND/ALLMAN/ALMAN family is another unique family that I have encountered during my research. Orally, I was once told that they were Native American. The oldest members of the family that I was able to identify were Sally, Jenny, Edward, James (born about 1769), and Zachariah (born about 1775). Most records identify this family as mulatto, but they have also been described as descended from the Pamunkey Tribe of King William County, VA.
I also noticed during my research that some people of color, both slave and free, challenged their legal status in the courts. The BLUFORT/BLUEFOOT family matriarch, free woman Sarah BLUFORT, did so when she complained to the Lancaster County, VA, court that she had been sold by MatthewGreen to Rawleigh Hazard. Court records described Sarah as having been “bound” (apprenticed) to Matthew Green until the age of thirty-one. Green had sold her apprenticeship to Mr. Hazard, much as one might sell a slave. The court seems to have allowed the sale, but forbade Hazard from removing Sarah from the county, which was forbidden by law in regard to apprentices. (Heinegg, http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/Beverly_Brogdon.htm)
The American Revolution
Years ago, I took a cruise to Nova Scotia, Canada. We had several tour options as we docked and departed the ship. I chose the option of visiting the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia (BCCNS). During this visit, I learned about “Black Loyalists,” (people of color who remained loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution) who were issued “certificates of freedom” after the Americans won the war and the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. People identified as black were given the option to relocate to Nova Scotia, the West Indies, Quebec, England, Germany and Belgium. According to the BCCNS web site, an estimated 5,000 people of African descent chose to relocate.
Over 3,000 loyalists were recorded in Canada’s Book of Negroes, including Joseph Elliott, 30, former property of John Elliott of Gloucester County, and George Glocester, a 15-year-old boy who also escaped slavery. Three women from Gloucester County, all described by the derogatory term “stout wench,” commonly applied to slave women, were also relocated and freed: Polly Carey, 26, formerly the property of Humphrey Gwin, Elizabeth White, 25, formerly the property of John Perrin; and Sukey Smith, 25, formerly the property of Major Smith.
As I learned this history for the first time in my life, I had to ask the question, “Why did these blacks choose the British side of the war?” Although slavery was on the wane in Canada, it was still legal there until the 1830s. According to our tour guide, social conditions were no better for blacks than in the United States. So why would they choose the British side? The short answer is FREEDOM. In November of 1775, five months after the battle of Bunker Hill, the British offered American slaves their freedom if they would support the British. They did not make this offer because they wanted to end slavery; the British Empire itself did not abolish slavery until 1833. The British offer of freedom to American slaves was a tactical move designed to disrupt the economy of its slaveholding colonies.
If the British enticed slaves to join their cause by offering the prospect of freedom, why did other people of African descent fight for the American colonies? At first, the Continental army did not want to enlist people of color. Eventually, however, blacks comprised an estimated 5% of Americans who fought at Bunker Hill. In January, 1776, President George Washington allowed the enlistment of free blacks who had prior military experience. In 1777, in desperation, the Continental army allowed both free blacks and slaves to enlist. In need of manpower, the colonists promised slaves their freedom in exchange for service. Those who fought on the Patriot side, then, also fought for African American FREEDOM.
Free people of color from Gloucester County, Virginia, served the Revolutionary cause on land and sea. Gloucester County is a peninsula that touches the Chesapeake Bay, and many free men already made their living from the water. Some became navy seaman, while others served on land.
The DRIVER, HEARN, and MONOGGIN families appear in various Revolutionary records. These men are American heroes. They fought in battles, and then had to fight for their pensions and other benefits long after the war was over. An example was Ephraim HEARN, a weaver who served in the Revolutionary War. Born about 1745, in 1829 Ephraim lived with his wife, Molly, and his three children, Peter, Jane, and Betsy, in Gloucester County. That year, he successfully petitioned to collect his pension from the government. As the court clerk noted on 12 August 1829:
I, Arthur S. Davies, clerk of the court of Gloucester county do hereby certify that it appears to the satisfaction of the court that the said Ephraim Hearn did serve in the Revolutionary War as stated in the preceding declaration against the common enemy for the term therein stated under one engagement on the continental establishment.
Religion, particularly Christianity, was the glue that sustained the African American community throughout its early struggles in America. I remember traveling with my grandfather from Philadelphia to Gloucester County to attend the family church’s “Homecoming” celebrations or week-long revivals. My grandfather, a Baptist preacher, would sometimes be invited to preach at a local church. During those summer visits, I observed the strong convictions my relatives held about worship and fellowship. The only time my grandmother threatened me with the switch was when I announced that I wasn’t going to church one night. My older brother obtained the switch for her and I am still mad at him for that. Seriously, I discovered over the years that faith has played a major role in the life of African Americans in this country. Today, faith is what guides me daily in my life.
The noted black historian, Carter G. Woodson, Ph.D, recognized this in Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830, where he wrote that,
Negroes were not easily stirred by the doctrines of the Quakers and Presbyterians, but they flocked into the folds of the Methodists and Baptists, who won them by successfully socializing the Gospel, by popularizing the appeal with emotional preaching designed to move the illiterate to repentance.
Dr. Woodson also noted that “William Lemmon was called by a white congregation to serve at the Pettsworth or Gloucester church in Virginia.” Lemon was described by white and black contemporaries as a “lively and affecting” preacher.
Members of the LEMON family (variously spelled Lemmon, Lemmond or LeMond) have been documented as “free” since the birth of Ambrose Lemon around 1725. William Lemon, born about 1845 in Gloucester County, was the brother or son of Ambrose. Today, this family still maintains a strong presence in Gloucester County. According to oral tradition, there was an area in Gloucester known as LEMON Town. The LEMON family has a rich tradition in religion, education and business.
Land was difficult to obtain during this time by poor people of any color. I can only imagine the obstacles that stood in the way of free people of color. Those who managed to do so were extraordinary to say the least.
Being considered “free” during a time when slavery was the norm did not always mean independence. Owning land gave these free people of color some independence. In his book, The Honey-pod Tree, the famous black Gloucester County lawyer Thomas Calhoun Walker, born into slavery, dedicated a chapter to his quest to educate blacks about owning land. T. C. Walker founded a company, “The Gloucester Land and Brick Company” solely to create opportunities for blacks to own land. He traveled from church to church and school to school to discuss the benefits of owning land and a home. As Walker wrote:
The most effective inducement to buying a piece of land, I found, was to continue to stress the Emancipation argument: to tell the Negroes that they could never be really free until they owned their own homes. Finally, after that conviction got well established, and the people were really awake to a sense of their duties to themselves and their families, we just let the company die. Its purpose had been accomplished.
In 1944, historian Charles Purdue noted Thomas Calhoun Walker’s efforts in his book, The Negro in Virginia:
A consistent campaign for home and land ownership has been waged among the State’s rural Negroes for the past half century by Thomas C. Walker of Gloucester County, lawyer and former advisor to the Work Projects Administration of Virginia. The success of his efforts is testified by the fact that, in Gloucester County, 881 of its 995 Negro families own their homes. Of the 574 farms operated by Negroes in the county, 494 are owned by Negroes themselves. In no county in the state, or in the Nation, is there a higher ratio of Negro farm ownership. (Virginia Writers Project, 1944, p. 365)
When I first noticed that numerous people of color owned land in the late 18th and early 19th century, I wondered how it was possible. I still don’t have the answer to this question, but I do admire those who were able to acquire land during this time. The FREEMAN family clearly saw a future for their family by owning land in 1787. The “List of the Land Tax within the District of Richard Gregory Commissioner of Gloucester County the year 1787” noted that James FREEMAN owned 34 acres. This land seems to have remained in the FREEMAN family throughout the next generation. As I researched this family, it was hard to discern their race. Some records identify this family as white, while others identity them as mulattoes.
The DRIVER, LEMON and MORRIS families are also recorded as land owners as far back as the 1782 Tax Records for Gloucester County, VA. The MORRIS family is well documented here on Renegade South by Victoria Bynum’s “Free People of Color” in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County.” My paternal great grandmother, Margaret MORRIS Driver was the daughter of Elijah MORRIS, who owned a great deal of land. As of today, this land is still in my family. Thank you Great Grand (2X) for this gift; I know you worked very hard to maintain our land.
Margaret Morris Driver, daughter of Elijah Morris, wife of John Driver.
Children of Margaret Ann Morris and John Driver
Professional Trades
During my years of my research, I found many free people of color who worked as skilled artisans, including as carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, and shoemakers. Some excelled in their professions: the DRIVER Brothers made quality furniture. My ancestors, Sam DRIVER and Robert DRIVER, were blacksmiths. Matthew T. DRIVER (see photo below), one of the earliest instructors at Tuskegee University, taught wheelwrighting. The majority of black male heads of households in Gloucester County were listed as farmers, oysterman and farm laborers, but they all knew how use their hands in one way or another. The occupations listed for women of color included spinners, weavers, cake sellers, and one seamstress.
Matthew T. Driver
As a child I spent many summers with my uncle Bill DRIVER in Connecticut. By day he was a tool maker and in his free time he dabbled in art and wood. One summer I helped him build a coffee table. As a person largely confined to a desk managing technology projects, I admire those who are gifted in working with their hands; they must feel a great sense of accomplishment. The founder of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T Washington, believed that blacks should not only pursue and education, but should also know a trade—words of wisdom for all times.
For more on the lives of free families of color, see “Free People of Colour in Gloucester County, Virginia,” by Edwin B. Washington, Jr., and L. Roane Hunt. The article can be obtained from the Gloucester Genealogical Society of Virginia at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~vaggsv/index.htm.
CONCLUSION
My research has been very educational for me and I hope the same for you. As you can see, I am not a professional writer and I only publish articles to share information with family and others. As I conduct my research, I get a tiny glimpse into the past and I am encouraged by ancestors who have done remarkable things when the odds were against them. This gives me perspective for any situation that I may come across in life. I can only read about and imagine the hardships my ancestors incurred during their lives. When I think about complaining, I go and do some research to get over what ails me.
There are many good sources for research, but take some time to read all the references that I have provided. These dedicated researchers and writers have so much to share with you.
Here’s another region of the South with a fascinating history of mixed-race ancestry. I discovered the Chowan Discovery Group after Steven Riley, creator and moderator of Mixed Race Studies, introduced me via email to the Group’s Executive Director, Marvin T. Jones. The “Winton Triangle,” located in Hertford County, North Carolina, encompasses the three towns of Winton, Cofield, and Ahoskie. Here, people maintain a distinctive identity rooted in Native American, European, and African ancestry.
According to Marvin Jones, the Triangle traces its origins to before the 1584 arrival of the English to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Chowanoke (Choanoac) Indian settlements were prominent along the Chowan River. After the English invasion, diseases (to which Native Americans lacked immunity) and territorial disputes decimated and disrupted the Chowanoke settlements of present-day Hertford County.*
During the early 1600s, England continued its relentless effort to gain a stronghold in North American, successfully planting settlements on the James River in Virginia. Again, disease and war displaced native populations. Indians traveling down the Meherrin River eventually settled in the Chowanokes’ previous home of Hertford County, North Carolina. In the century that followed, interactions between these Native Americans and English and African immigrants would produce the mixed-ancestry people of today’s Winton Triangle.
The mixed-race people of the Winton Triangle did not live far from those of Gloucester County, Virginia, the subject of an earlier essay on this blog. In both these regions, outward migration by Europeans, funded by Crowns and merchants in search of new lands, precious metals, and cash crops, brought a collision of continents, especially those of Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Within each, there were winners and losers. Those with wealth and power benefited from expanding empires. Others, such as England’s “sturdy beggars,” were forced into indentured servitude, or, like Africa’s captured villagers, into slavery. Many Native Americans were also forced into various systems of bondage.
In the Winton Triangle, however, as in Gloucester County, a number of people designated non-white escaped slavery. Legally defined as “free people of color,” people of mixed ancestry (particularly before the American Revolution) often maintained “interdependent relations” with local whites, which enabled them to buy land and to learn marketable skills. Equally important, they founded schools and churches and built communities of mutual support that endured the centuries.*
The Winton Triangle and Gloucester County share similar characteristics, yet each region has its own unique history. Their common features, however, speak to the social and economic forces that shaped the Atlantic coastal history and eventually enabled England to lay claim to its Thirteen Original Colonies. Often overlooked in the panoramic history of empire and bondage in the Americas are the new peoples who emerged, and the mechanisms by which they survived, even prospered, by building tightly-knit communities amid eras of slavery, segregation, and white supremacist laws and customs imposed by the dominant society.
During the Civil War, Sgt. Parker D. Robbins fought for the Union with the 2nd Cavalry of U.S. Colored Troops. Photo courtesy Benj. Gary Robbins and Marvin T. Jones
Elf and Annie Jones Family, circa 1914. Photo courtesy of Alice Jones Nickens and Marvin T. Jones
The history of the Winton Triangle is too long and too complex to do it justice in a short essay such as this. Luckily, Marvin Jones and the Chowan Discovery Group’s Directors, Laverne Jones and Dr. Harold Mitchell (all of whom were born and raised in the Triangle), are dedicated to collecting, preserving, and presenting materials relevant to that history. They hope to coordinate their efforts with other individuals, community leaders, organizations, and institutions that share like interests. Check their organization out at Chowan Discovery Group!
*See Marvin T. Jones, “The Leading Edge of Edges: The Triracial People of the Winton Triangle,” in Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line, edited by Scott Withrow (2010): 181-209.
Note: On October 25, 2014, the Chowan Discovery Group was awarded the following Award of Excellence from the North Carolina Society of Historians, Etc. :
Congratulations to Exec. Director Marvin T. Jones and all those who have contributed to this fine project!
Some time ago, in response to my 10 November 2011 post, “Free People of Color in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County,” (which I encourage you to read or reread) I received a long email message from Nathan Crowell, who traces his own mixed-heritage ancestry back to Gloucester County. Nathan shared not only his family research with me, but also certain insights that he gained over the years from listening to his ancestors—particularly his grandmother: insights into what it meant to be a “free person of color” in a slaveholding society, what it meant to be defined as “black” when one’s skin was fair. His remarks remind us that life in the Old South was far more complex than most of us realize, and that “race” was an imposed category of human existence that had no rational biological basis, but had very real legal, social, and psychological consequences that shaped the experiences and consciousness of all members of society.
With Nathan’s permission, I have created the following post from his remarks.
Vikki Bynum Moderator
Nathan Crowell on Racial Identity: Gloucester County, Virginia, revisited
My grandmother was raised in Gloucester County, Virginia, by the family of her mother. Her mother died when my grandmother was six months old. I always have been interested in her family history, and as well that of my other grandparents. So I have slowly and steadfastly attempted to learn what I can. I have traced the families of most of my grandparents back to the early 1600’s, where I found a combination of black ancestors, white ancestors, and so forth. In the process, I have learned an immense amount. I’ve seen that before the Civil War, people were incredibly mobile; they moved across counties, e.g., from Gloucester up to Campbell, and they moved across states, e.g., from Virginia to Ohio. I am from New York, and my visions of the South result from my grandparents’ narratives and my summer vacations “down home.” The South has always seemed to be static, and perpetually unchanged. The mobility of my ancestors however, clearly demonstrates that that perception is indeed erroneous.
Still, I had been taught long ago that Virginia was a major exporter of slaves to other states. While many of these slaves undoubtedly were bred just to be sold South, I understand now that there were actually thousands of slaves in Virginia at any one time; and many of the exported slaves were simply surplus from farms that had become increasingly unproductive. It was nothing more pernicious than that.
As well, I’ve come to realize that slavery was a lot more complex than I had believed. In the North, the experience is portrayed in black and white—defenseless slaves at the mercy of brutal masters. And even if that worldview is tempered, by literature from the period for example, it is still hard to internalize anything but the degradation and brutality of slavery. However, at the same time there was an intense interconnectedness among slaves, their masters, and everyone else living in the South. As a case in point, I have white relatives whose sole emotional relationship was with a slave; the uncle of one of my great, great-grandmothers, Ned Hockaday, never married a white woman, but had a good number of children with one of his slaves. I have white relatives who had black children right alongside white ones. One of my great, great, great-grandfathers, William Hockaday, had a black son who he named Thomas, and as well, he had a white son, whom he also named Thomas. And then there are my free black ancestors, who were neighbors and possibly tenant farmers who rented land from their white ancestors. Effectively, they were living near, even with, their white cousins.
Perhaps most importantly, I’ve gained a much better understanding of who my grandmother was, and that has been very gratifying. My grandmother was very colorstruck, and growing up, I always found it to be unpleasantly odd. Again, I grew up in New York City, and in the seventies, with the emphasis on black pride and galvanizing the black community, there was no space for perceptions of superiority based on relative skin tone. As well, my grandmother was very dark, and it seemed that she took after her father, John Hamilton Boulden, who was pretty dark himself. My other grandmother, and my grandfather too, were, on the other hand, very fair–red hair, freckles, the works. And they never made any mention about skin color differences and certainly, they never seemed to attach any relative importance to lighter skin. So it was really strange to hear my grandmother go on about fair skin, good grades of hair, and so forth. I just wrote her views off as a legacy of slavery, illustrative of the sense of shame and inferiority that blacks took away from the slave experience. And given her age, it did seem logical to do so. I see now that my grandmother’s views were a legacy of her family’s distinctive struggles as well as a byproduct of race-based slavery. I see that free blacks were just a sliver of the black community, with hundreds of them juxtaposed against thousands and thousands of slaves. And I can only imagine the intense pressure they faced in trying to distinguish themselves from those slaves, and thereby preserve their freedom, and any of the rights and privileges that it entailed. It would only make sense for them to fixate on skin color, hair texture, pedigree, and just about anything else that would help them stand apart. Thus, I think that the color prejudice that she learned was less about pride in white ancestors and disdain for African ancestors, and more an integral part of a hard-fought attempt at self-preservation.
Nathan Crowell
Note from Moderator:In the following indictment from a North Carolina court, in which a free woman of color is charged with illegally attempting to marry an enslaved man, we see one example of how the lives of free people of color were circumscribed by law:
“Always the Gentleman”: Senator Blanche K. Bruce and Newt Knight’s Relief Bill of 1880
By Ed Payne
It’s unlikely that United States Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi ever met Newt Knight, the man on whose behalf he submitted a bill of relief in February of 1880. Bruce only settled within the Magnolia State in 1869 and his Delta political base in Bolivar County was a world removed from the heavily forested Piney Woods of south Mississippi where Newt Knight lived. A state Republican probably prevailed upon the senator to perform this favor. Still, the 1880 relief bill is emblematic of a unique point in American history when an African-American U.S. Senator born in slavery and representing a Deep South state could put forth a claim on behalf of a white man who led local opposition to Confederate authority.
Largely forgotten today, Blanche Bruce left the Senate in 1881 as the only African-American to serve a full six-year term. He retained this distinction until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts completed his first term in 1973 (Note 1).
Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi. (Library of Congress)
Bruce was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia in 1841. His mother, Polly, worked as a domestic slave in the household of Pettus Perkinson and his wife, Rebecca Bruce Perkinson. Previously, Polly had been owned by Rebecca’s father, Lemuel Bruce. In addition to having two children with his wife, Lemuel produced five children with Polly. Since Lemuel Bruce died in 1836, it is has been assumed that Pettus Perkinson was the father of Blanche and several of his siblings. Throughout his public career, commentators noted that Bruce’s appearance suggested a lineage that was at least three-quarters white.
Blanche Bruce grew up in a twilight world between slave and slave-owner. He and his half-brother Henry Clay Bruce later recollected childhoods mostly removed from the harsh realities of life for field slaves. Before their white mistress Rebecca’s early death, she and Pettus had one child together, a son named William. Blanche, only a year younger than his white half-brother, served as William’s playmate and received instruction from the same tutor. Following his wife’s death, Pettus Perkinson moved his household to Missouri, back to Virginia, then to Mississippi before finally re-settling in northern Missouri. Blanche remained with William until the latter enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861. Only then did he make his way to Lawrence, Kansas, and thereby gain emancipation. He became a school teacher, but after narrowly escaping the bloody raid on Lawrence led by Confederate renegade William Quantrill, moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established that state’s first school for African-American students.
After the Civil War, Blanche Bruce worked for a period as a porter on a steamboat plying the upper Mississippi River before resuming his education at Oberlin College in Ohio. His scant finances did not permit him to obtain a degree and he left after a year. But he began to hear of opportunities opening up for ambitious, educated African-Americans in the Deep South. Changes achieved during Congressional Reconstruction included enfranchising freedmen, thereby causing a dramatic shift in the political equation. Bruce arrived in Mississippi in February, 1869, with little more than the clothes on his back.
Blanche Bruce entered a Mississippi which had experienced a decade of warfare and social turmoil. In the antebellum period the state’s economy centered on cotton and the slave-labor deemed necessary to produce it. By 1860 slaves comprised 55.2% of the state population of 791,305, a percentage only exceeded by South Carolina (57.2%). Slave ownership resided in the hands of 30,943 persons, but kinship and economic ties produced a much larger circle of those dependent upon the Peculiar Institution. Nevertheless, as elsewhere in the South, there were regions of sparse slave ownership, usually hilly lands not conducive to plantation agriculture. Mississippi had two such areas: the northeast corner of the state and the Piney Woods.
Following close on the heels of South Carolina, Mississippi seceded from the Union in 1861 and began mobilizing for war. A minority of citizens retained loyalty to the Union, but soon found it prudent to keep such views to themselves. Thousands of young men joined military companies which formed in the spring and summer of 1861. Those less infected with martial ardor and with families dependent on their labor, rather than that of slaves, often did not enlist until confronted with passage of the Confederacy’s first Conscription Act in April of 1862.
By summer of 1863, Union troops had penetrated the interior of the state and on July 4, after a 47 day siege, captured Vicksburg and gained control of the Mississippi River. A number of Confederate soldiers who lacked an economic stake in slavery decided they had done their duty and returned to their small farms. In desperate need of manpower, Confederate troops made periodic attempts to round up these deserters and compel them back into service. In some cases they were met with armed resistance. Newt Knight’s compensation claim stemmed from such circumstances.
The war ended in April 1865, having devastated the state’s economy and resulted in the death of approximately 25,000 of its men. But political leaders conceded little beyond military defeat. That fall legislators, unnerved by a majority population of newly free slaves and heedless of Northern opinion, passed the South’s first Black Codes. These codes sought to retain many of the legal and social restraints of slavery. They and other evidence of Southern intransigence galvanized Northern voters, who increased Republican strength in the Congressional elections of 1866. Congress subsequently imposed Military Reconstruction across the South.
General Adelbert Ames, a native of Maine, was appointed provision governor of Mississippi. He implemented the Congressional mandates to remove ex-Confederates from offices and to assemble a convention to draft a new state constitution—one which repealed the Black Codes and enfranchised freedmen. Ames assumed leadership of the state’s radical Republican faction. However, his uncompromising policies generated growing animosity among moderate Republicans led by former slave-owner turned scalawag James L. Alcorn.
Bruce arrived amid this political maelstrom and quickly came to the attention of Alcorn, then campaigning for governor. True to rumors that led him to the state, Bruce found quick entrée into Republican politics. Alcorn won the governorship and supported Bruce in obtaining the post of Sergeant-at-Arms in the Mississippi legislature. The legislature elected Ames as U.S. Senator, with moderate Republicans no doubt delighted to see him relocated to Washington, D.C. (Until 1913 U.S. Senators were chosen by state legislatures rather than by popular vote.)
Governor Alcorn next named Bruce as tax assessor for Bolivar County, in the fertile Mississippi Delta. Since tax assessors received a 7% commission, it promised to be a lucrative post. African-Americans composed 80% of the county’s population, while land ownership remained concentrated in the hands of white planters. The planters resented Republican efforts to shift more of the tax burden onto their shoulders. Inserted into this volatile environment, Bruce proved to be honest, industrious, and a model of tact. So much so that within a short time several white planters came forward to post the $15,000 bond necessary for Bruce to run for the combined office of county Sheriff and Tax Collector. Bruce won the election and also received an appointment as county superintendent of education. In the latter role he achieved notable improvements in the Bolivar County school system and managed to convince key planters that a labor force with at least rudimentary education would be more productive.
Over the course of a few short years Bruce proved himself to be what many white Southerners emphatically insisted could not exist: an energetic, educated, and efficient African-American public official. Historian William C. Harris noted:
“In view of the political and racial hostilities of the postwar South and the continuation of the white-dominated plantation economy in the Delta, [Bruce’s] success in allaying local planter fears was a remarkable achievement.”
Planter confidence in Bruce further increased when, in 1874, his growing prosperity enabled him to purchase 640 acres of land and establish his own plantation operation.
The careful efforts of Bruce to maintain cordial relations with both the moderate and radical factions of his party ended during the 1874 gubernatorial race. In November 1871 James Alcorn resigned his post of governor to serve as a U.S. Senator alongside his nemesis Adelbert Ames. The two men returned to Mississippi in early 1873 to battle for political dominance in the governor’s race. The Alcorn moderates sought a biracial constituency, whereas the Ames radicals felt they could win by solely appealing to the state’s black majority—a constituency who had grown suspicious of the moderates’ intensions. With both candidates offering serious enticements to garner Bruce’s support, he was forced into a decision. He sided with the Ames faction.
As Bruce had correctly deduced, overwhelming support from African-American voters, combined with sullen non-participation by many whites, allowed Ames to defeat Alcorn. Bruce had made his ambitions known and in February of 1874 claimed his reward when the Republican dominated legislature elected him as U.S. Senator. His term did not commence until thirteen months later in March of 1875.
Bruce hardly had time to savor his victory before his power-base within the state began to crumble. Sensing that Northern commitment to Reconstruction was waning, Mississippi Democrats made an all-out push for power during the summer of 1875, combining appeals for white racial solidarity with a well-organized campaign of voter intimidation. A mere eight months after Bruce took his seat in the Senate, the November 1875 elections effectively ended Republican control at the county and statewide level. Faced with a bill of impeachment, Governor Adelbert Ames negotiated his resignation from office in March of 1876 and left the state.
Senator Bruce sought to reverse the tide by supporting a Congressional investigation of the 1875 Mississippi elections and protesting the removal of federal troops at a time of increasing racial violence in the state. But these efforts yielded no concrete results. Turning his attention to more productive avenues, Bruce consistently supported claims for pensions and bounties due African-American soldiers and their families for Union service. He aided his region through membership on the Committee on the Improvement of the Mississippi River and its Tributaries. In 1879 he spoke out against the Chinese Exclusion Bill, noting his “large confidence in the strength and assimilative powers of our institutions.” Ever the voice of conciliation, he formed a mutually cordial relationship with L.Q.C. Lamar—the man who had drafted the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession and was elected junior Senator by the now Democrat-controlled state legislature in 1877.
Given his support of Civil War claims on behalf of African-Americans veterans, his Republican Party affiliation, and perhaps also his lame duck status, Senator Bruce seemed a logical choice to introduce the Newt Knight claim in 1880. Not being a member of the Committee on Claims, however, he could do little more.
Blanche Bruce had a mixed reputation among African-Americans during and after his senatorial term. His mild manner and amiable disposition did not compare favorably with the strident oratory of his contemporary Frederick Douglass. After his marriage in 1878 to Josephine Wilson, a light-skinned African-American socialite, the black press charged that Bruce seemed more interested in advancing into white high society than addressing the plight of African-Americans in the South. William C. Harris noted:
“Ever the harmonizer, Bruce refused to admit, what the black masses and their local leaders knew, that the Reconstruction dream of black assimilation into white American society had died with the collapse of Reconstruction in the South and the abandonment of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution.”
Facing the loss of his political base in Mississippi, Bruce cultivated Republican Party connections in Washington, D.C. After his senatorial term ended in 1881, he gained a presidential appointment as Register of the Treasury. Bruce noted with delight and satisfaction that his signature now appeared on U.S. paper currency. He later opened a law practice and lectured widely on racial matters. During two Republican administrations Bruce served as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, the position he held when he died of diabetes on 17 March 1898.
Blanche K. Bruce, Frederick Douglass, and Hiram R. Revels, “Heroes of the Colored Race,” 1881 lithography (Library of Congress)
A eulogy published in The Colored American delineated the ambiguous legacy Bruce left within the African-American community:
“His strong point as a politician lay in the fact that he was a consummate strategist, one who made politics the study of his life, and who applied all the arts known to practical politics to compass his ends . . . . He was the personification of courtesy and courtliness, and his well known tact in emergencies saved him from many embarrassments. These qualities endeared him to white men, particularly those who believe that the Negro has a place and should keep it. Mr. Bruce was not an aggressive leader. He believed rather in moral suasion and the arts of diplomacy… (Frederick) Douglass and (John M.) Langston were his superiors in intellect and scholarship, but he was a better politician than either…”
The Deep South where he first rose to power had embraced the policies of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement of African-Americans. Nevertheless, the Raymond, Mississippi, Hinds County Gazette felt the obligation to note Bruce’s passing and describe him as “always the gentleman, graceful, polished, self-assured and never humble.”
Note 1: Two notable African-American contemporaries of Blanche K. Bruce were Hiram R. Revels and John Roy Lynch. Hiram R. Revels completed the unexpired senatorial term of Jefferson Davis and John Roy Lynch was elected to three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Against Southern Reconstruction stereotypes, all three were conceded even by hostile contemporaries as highly capable. After John Roy Lynch presided as Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1872, it was a white Democrat who moved for the adoption of a resolution in his honor. The Jackson, Mississippi Clarion observed, “His bearing in office has been so proper, and his ruling in such marked contrast to the partisan conduct of the ignoble whites of his party… that the conservatives cheerfully joined in the testimonial.” Lynch later authored The Facts of Reconstruction. [Clarion quote from James Wilford Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi (New York: MacMillan, 1901), 296.]
Sources:
The most thorough scholarly assessment of the life of Blanche K. Bruce is Sadie Daniel St. Clair, “The National Career of Blanche Kelso Bruce” (PhD diss., New York University, 1947). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertation Express. (AAT 0000938).
Other academic studies include William C. Harris, “Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi: Conservative Assimilationist,” in Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Howard N. Rabinowitz (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 3-38; Melvin I. Urofsky, “Blanche K. Bruce: United States Senator, 1875-1881,” Journal of Mississippi History, Vol 29, No 2 (May, 1967), 118-141; Kenneth Eugene Mann, “Blanche Kelso Bruce: United States Senator without a constituency,” Journal of Mississippi History, Vol 38, No 2 (May, 1976), 183-198.
A recent popular account of the life of Blanche K. Bruce, his wife, and their descendants is Lawrence Otis Graham, The Senator and the Socialite (New York: Harper, 2006).
NOTE: For the third installment of this story, click here
I am delighted to announce that Playwright Marcus France and Producing Director Nathaniel Quinn have recreated the 1948 miscegenation trial of Davis Knight as a play! The following announcement recently appeared on the Facebook page of Wolverine Theatrics:
Renegade South 