ANGOLANS AND 17TH CENTURY
CUSTOMS IN VIRGINIA
The two most important social distinctions in early
colonial Virginia were
Class and Religion. In 1616 John Rolfe brought
his newly-baptised Algonquian
Indian bride Pocahontas to England.
Receiving them at court, King James and
his courtiers were appalled
that Rolfe, an English commoner, had presumed to
marry a princess. In
the eyes of Europe, Pocahontas was Rolfe's social
superior and the marriage
of a princess to an untitled husband was offensive
and inappropriate.
That Pocahontas was red and Rolfe was white was
irrelevant.
There was nothing in English literature or thought in the 17th
century
which entertained the notion of "white" as a class distinction.
The equality of whites and many blacks in 17th century Virginia can be
documented in several areas of colonial life which were important in the
developement of later mixed-race communities such as those of the
Melungeons.
1. African-Americans could own property.
2.
African-Americans could own servants of any skin color.
3. There
were no laws for most of the 17h century against interracial
marriages.
4. Baptised African-Americans were allowed to give testimony in court.
The most famous African-American in the colonies was Anthony Johnson.
His
Portuguese name, "Antonio" was shared by a number of other early
Virginia
African-Americans and because of this there is a confusion over
which
"Antonio" was actually Anthony Johnson. J. Douglas Deal makes a
pretty good
argument in "Race and Class in Colonial Virginia" that Anthony
Johnson was
the Antonio or Anthony of Warrosquoke who married a black woman
named Mary.
This Antonio was a passenger on the "James" from Enland
or Bermuda to
Virginia in 1622. Another Antonio who lived in
Kecoughtan, married a black
woman named "Isabelle" and had the first
recorded African-American infant,
William.
But lost in the
controversy over which Antonio was which, is the evidence
that BOTH of the
two likely were among the Angolans taken from the Sao Joao
Bautista in 1619.
If Anthony Johnson was simply a black Englishman, then why
did his
grandson later name his plantation "Angola"? Maj. Jope says one of
two
named Antonio was sent to England to give testimony at hearings on the
Bautista case about 1620-21. That Antonio of Kecoughtan who returned
to
Virginia in 1622 on the "James" was likely Anthony Johnson.
The
lives of many African-Americans in the colonies were reflected in the
lives
of Anthony Johnson and his family. They owned a thousand acres on the
Pungoteague Creek. Anthony was the master of black and white, male and
female servants and at least one black slave. When his slave, John
Casor,
ran away to a white planter, Johnson sued in court and the
slave was
returned. When a fire destroyed the Johnson plantation in
1652, he appealed
to the court and received relief from paying taxes.
In 1655 Anthony sold his
Virginia farm and moved his family to
Somerset County, Maryland. He brought
with him a mare, 18 sheep and 14
head of cattle. In 1666 Johnson leased 300
acres in Wimico Hundred and
the farm was called "Tonies Vinyard: (from
"Anthony") for 200 years after.
John Johnson, a son of Anthony, also owned land in Northampton County.
Married to Susanna, John was jailed once in 1664 for begetting a
child by
Hannah Leach, a white woman. On several occasions he
testified in court
cases and he witnessed for a number of land transactions.
A white man,
Edward Surman appointed John as guardian of his children
in his will, proved
in a Maryland court in 1676. According to
genealogist Paul Heinegg in the
book "Free African-Americans in
Virginia and North Carolina", John Johnson
was called a "Free Nigroe",
aged 80 years "poor and past his labour" when the
Sussex County court agreed
to maintain him for life on public funds.
John Johnson had a son, John
Jr. born about 1650 who bought about 50 acres in
Maryland which he called
"Angola". John Jr. "free negro", married a 17
year-old English girl,
Elizabeth Lowe in Sussex County, Delaware on March 13,
1680.
Anthony
had another son, Richard Johnson called "a negro" who married a white
woman
named Susan. Their son Richard was called a "mulatto".
A
great-grandson of the old Ndongo African was Cuff Johnson, head of a
Beaufort County, North Carolina household which number two "free" blacks and
one white woman in 1800.
In colonial America these examples were
repeated many times in numerous black
families designated as "free people of
color". They were land owners of
Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland and
Delaware.. Heinegg cites John Harris,
"negro" who was free in 1668
when he bought 50 acres in York County.
Emanuell Cambow, another
negro, received 50 acres in James City County on
April 18th, 1667.
It is possible through government records to follow families from the
17th
century to the 18th century as one generation referred to as "Negro",
faded
with the rise of the next generation referred to as "free people
of color",
who eventually yielded to the next generation called "mulatto"
until a
century later the descendants of the original Angolans were
described as
"white" on the census.
Mixed-race descendants of these
first African-Americans entered all walks of
life. Many are world famous.
Among those believed to be the offspring of
colonial-era Angolan
Americans; the mother of Abraham Lincoln, the outlaw Sam
Bass, Tom Hanks,
Ava Gardner, Elvis Presley and comedian Steve Martin from
Waco, Texas.
INTERMARRIAGE IN COLONIAL BRITISH-AMERICA
Many of the surnames
of these 17th century Angolan-Americans survive today
because, more often
than not, Angolan men married women of English, Irish and
Scottish ancestry.
White men married black women but not as frequently. The
un-even
ratio of black men to black women caused the imbalance. Had there
been
more black women, there would have been less intermarriage. African
men were most often selected to endure the harsh Middle Passage to the
Americas where the need was for hard labor. African women, some with
child,
suffered higher mortality rates on the terrible voyage.
In Virginia and other colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even into
the 19th century, white women showed no repugnance to Africans of equal
status. Lerone Bennett Jr. in "Before the Mayflower" quotes Edward
Long, a
contemporary witness who observed that, "...the lower class of women
in
England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons to brutal to
mention."
Genealogist Paul Heinegg found many early mixed-race marriages
in colonial
Virginia, of free African-Americans and European women.
Cases he gives:
"Francis Payne was married to a white woman
named Amy by September 1656 when
he gave her a mare by deed of jointure. [DW
1655-68, fol.19].
"Francis Skiper was married to Ann, an African
American woman, before
February 1667 when they sold land in Norfolk County."
[W&D E:1666-75; Orders
1666-75,73]
"Peter Beckett, a "Negro"
slave taxable from 1671 to 1677 in Northampton
County, Virginia, married
Elizabeth Kettle, a white woman servant of John
Tilney". [Orders 1664-74,
fol.114; 1674-79, 75, 191; Orders 1683-89, 68, 246;
OW 1689-98, 190-1]
"Hester Tate, an English woman servant in Westmoreland County had
several
children by her husband James Tate, "a Negro slave to Mr. Patrick
Spence,"
before 1690." [Orders 1690-98, 40-41]
"Elizabeth Kay, a
"Mulatto" woman whose father had been free, successfully
sued for her
freedom in Northumberland County in 1690, and married her white
attorney,
William Greensted". [WMQ, 3rd ser, XXX, 467-74]
Sometimes white planters
promoted interracial marriages of African men and
white women for economic
reasons; hoping to reap the servitude of the
offspring as legal chattel.
Bennett cites a famous case involving an
indentured servant girl
named "Irish Nell" who was brought to Maryland by
Lord Baltimore.
Returning to England, Baltimore sold Nell to a planter who
encouraged
her to marry a black man named Butler. Baltimore was appalled and
move
to enact a law forbidding such practices in 1681. It began with the
words:
"Forasmuch as divers free-born English or white women,
sometimes by the
instigation, procurement or connivance of their masters,
mistresses, or
dames, and always to the satisfaction of their lascivious and
lustful
desires, and to the disgrace not only of the English, but also of
many other
Christian nations, do intermarry with Negroes and slaves, by
which means,
divers inconveniences, controversies, and suits may arise,
touching the issue
of children of such freeborn women aforesaid; for the
prevention whereof for
the future, Be it enacted: That if the marriage of
any woman servant with any
slave shall take place by the procurement or
permission of the master, such
woman and her issue shall be free."
This new law did not outlaw interracial marriage. It attempted to
discourage
marriages in which children of British-born citizens might be
owned as
chattel property. Baltimore was more concerned about stopping
an attempt to
circumvent the Magna Carta. This law slowed the rate of
legal marriages
between white and black servants in Maryland, but it also
caused an
unforeseen problem according to Bennett. While legal
intermarriages dropped,
the births of mixed children to single females rose.
The legislative act
raised the birthrates of illegitimate mulatto children
who eventually became
a public burden. Three times in ten years
Maryland lawmakers attempted to
slow the growing number of mixed unions and
the children from them.
Virginia, Massachusetts, North and South
Carolina and Delaware also passed
laws against intermarriage by lengthening
the terms of servitude for white
women who married African-American men, or
who had mulatto children. Bennett
shows where ministers who officiated
interracial marriages were levied fines.
In 1725 John Cotton was
indicted for marrying a "Molatto Man to a White
woman". In North
Carolina, the Reverend John Blacknall was fined fifty
pounds in 1726 for
joining in matrimony Matthew Thomas Spencer and a mulatto
woman named Martha
Paule. [Saunders, Colonial Records] Vigilante groups
tried to enforce
the laws, churches were called to thunder against black and
white marriages,
but it didn't work.
Bennett names case after case as intermarriage and
unsanctioned couplings
continued to openly flaunt the laws. Groups
publicly protested the new
restrictions against intermarriage.
"On
May 11, 1699, George Ivie and others sent a petition to the Council of
Virginia asking for the repeal of the Act of the Assembly against English
peoples marrying with Negroes, Indians or mulattoes. Of equal or
perhaps
even more pointed political concern was the action of whites who
simply
defied the laws. Shortly after the enactment of Virginia's ban
on
intermarriage, Ann Wall was convicted of "keeping company with a Negro
under
pretense of marriage." The Elizabeth County court sold Ann Wall
for five
years and bound out her two mulatto children for thirty-one years.
And "it
is further ordered" the court said, "that if ye said Ann Wall
after she is
free from her said master doe at any time presume to come into
this county,
she shall be banished to ye Island of Barbadoes."
In
1692, the case of Bridgett, a white servant who bore a mulatto child by a
black man went all the way to the grand jury in Henrico County, Virginia.
In
Pennsylvania, legislators outlawed interracial marriages only to
repeal the
ban during the years of the American Revolution. Bennett
quotes Thomas
Branagan who visited Philadelphia in 1805 and observed:
"There are many, very many blacks who...begin to feel themselves
consequential... will not be satisfied unless they get white women for
wives,
and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low
circumstances...I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to,
and deluded through the arts of seduction by Negroes in one year in
Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting [West Indies and the
Southern states]...There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated
by black men in this city and there are thousands of black children by them
at present."
During the rise of laws against intermarriage,
newspapers carried notices of
black and white servants running away
together. From the Southern journal,
"American Weekly Mercury" of
August 11, 1720:
"Runaway in April last from Richard Tilghman, of Queen
Anne County in
Maryland, a mulatto slave, named Richard Molson, of middle
stature, about
forty years old and has had the small pox, he is in company
with a white
woman...who is supposed now goes for his wife."
And in
the Northern "Pennsylvania Gazette" of June 1, 1746:
"Runaway from the
subscriber the second of last month, at the town of
Potomac, Frederick
County, Maryland, a mulatto servant named Isaac Cromwell,
runaway at the
same time, an English servant woman named Ann Greene."
The legislation
banning interracial marriages failed. Heinegg observes,
"Despite
the efforts of the legislature, white servant women continued to
bear
children by African American fathers through the late 17th century and
well
into the 18th century. From these genealogies, it appears that they
were the primary source of the increase in the free African American
population for this period...Since so many free African-Americans were
light-skinned, many observers assume that they were the offspring of white
slave owners who took advantage of their female slaves. Only one of
more
than 280 families in this history was proven to descend from a white
slave
owner".
These interracial marriages and interminglings were by
no means the sole
practice of the lower servant classes only. Bennett
mentions Lemuel Haynes,
the son of a white woman and an African.
Lemuel was the first black to
preach to a white New England church,
and he married Elizabeth Babbitt, a
white woman. The grandmother of
astronomer-mathmatician Benjamin Banneker was
Molly Welsh, an English woman.
The "founding fathers" were also involved in interracial relationships.
Benjamin Franklin was known to frequently associate with black women.
Thomas
Jefferson took Sally Hemings for his mistress and produced several
children.
Jefferson's romance with Sally was the subject of a tavern
ditty to the tune
of Yankee Doodle according to Bennett.
"Of all the
damsels on the green,
...on mountains or in valley,
A lass so luscious
ne'er was seen,
...As Monticellian Sally."
Bennett also quotes
reports that Patrick Henry fathered a black son named
Melancthon.
Alexander Hamilton was not only born with mixed blood in the
West
Indies, but he also fathered two mixed race sons by a black woman and
one of
his sons married into a white family, according to Maurice R. Davie of
Yale
University.
Kentucky's Daniel Boone was the grandfather of William Wells
Brown. The
ninth vice-president of the United States was another
Kentuckian, Richard
Johnson, whose black mistress was Julia Chinn.
Bennett says, "The couple had
two daughters and Johnson married them
off with style to white men."
Far into the period of chattel slavery,
whites and Africans persistently
intermarried. Bennett shows a census
as late as 1830 in Nansemond, Virginia
reflecting the number of white women
continuing to marry black men more than
a hundred and fifty years after the
first law restricting such intermarriages.
1830 VIRGINIA
Jacob of
Rega, and white wife
Syphe of Matthews, and white wife
Jacob Branch, and
white wife
Ely of Copeland, and white wife
Tom of Copeland, and white
wife
Will of Butler, and white wife
Davy of Sawyer, and white wife
Stephen of Newby, and white wife
Amarian Reed, and white wife
The free, light-skinned, mixed-race children of intermarriage made
up the
many ethnically diverse isolated communities in Virginia, North
Carolina,
South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Louisiana.
Among those groups
were the Melungeons.
With the growing
success of the American colonies, small family farms, which
had relied on
indentured servants usually released after 7 years, became huge
plantations
demanding life-long chattel slaves. Whites, and many earlier
Angolan
blacks, though bound as temporary indentured servants, were protected
from
permanent slavery. But Africans arriving on slave ships by the 1670s
were entering a system with no exits. In time, the lowest class
of colonial
society became exclusively black chattel slaves where it had
once been black
and white indentured servants. Class distinction
became race distinction and
eventually America viewed free Angolans
and their free mixed children with
the same disdain by which she saw black
slaves. These free "non-whites"
retreated into communities like the
Melungeons. Heinegg writes,
"...as more and more slaves replaced white
servants, the Legislature passed a
series of laws which designated slavery
as the appropriate condition for
African-Americans.
1. In 1670
the Virginia Assembly forbade free African-Americans and Indians
from owning
white servants. [Hening, Statutes at Large, II:280]
2. In 1691 the
Assembly prohibited the manumission of slaves unless they
were transported
out of the colony. It also prohibited black and white
intermarriages
and ordered the illegitimate mixed-race children of white
women to be bound
out for 30 years. [Hening, Statutes at Large, III:86-87]
3. In
1705 the Assembly passed a law which all but eliminated the ability of
slaves to earn their freedom by ordering that the farm stock of slaves
"shall
be seized and sold by the church-wardens of the parish wherein such
horses,
cattle or hogs shall be, and the profit thereof applied to the use
of the
poor of said parish." [Hening, Statutes at Large, III:459-60]
Like a slowly drawn net, new legislation over time cut off every avenue
to
liberty for newly arrived Africans. The free people of color who
lived apart
from African slaves were gradually isolated as the rules of
colonial society
changed: they were not chattel property like the new
blacks, but they were
also not white.