Mixed-Race America. A History of Hidden Miscegenation

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Mixed-Race America. A History of Hidden Miscegenation

The race of Sally Hemings's and Thomas Jefferson's son, Eston Hemings,was indisputably "black" while he was a slave at Monticello. Years later, living in Ohio in 1850 as a free man, Eston was described by a census taker as "mulatto." A decade later, Eston and his wife had moved to Wisconsin where a census taker listed them as "white." What was the "truth" of Eston Hemings's race? To answer the question is to take a journey through America's mixed-race past.

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The first recorded interracial marriage in North American history took place between John Rolfe and Pocahontas in 1614. In colonial Jamestown, the first biracial Americans were the children of white-black, white-Indian, and black-Indian unions. By the time of the American Revolution, somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 people of “mixed” heritage resided in the colonies. During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson begged Americans to consider “let[ting] our settlements and [Indians’] meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people”. American patriot Patrick Henry even proposed that intermarriage between whites and Indians be encouraged through the use of tax incentives and cash stipends.

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Married to a successful physician and prominently ensconced in Harlem's vibrant society of the 1920s, Irene Redfield leads a charmed existence-until she is shaken out of it by a chance encounter with a childhood friend. Clare Kendry has been "passing for white," hiding her true identity from everyone, including her racist husband. Clare and her dangerous secret pose an increasingly powerful threat to Irene's security, forcing both women to confront the hazards of public and private deception. An important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen was the first African-American woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Her fictional portraits of women seeking their identities through a fog of racial confusion were informed by her own Danish-West Indian parentage, and Passing offers fascinating psychological insights into issues of race and gender.

(The book is available here: "Passing")

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Mixed-Race Couples in Early America

Excerpted from Forbidden Love by Gary B. Nash.

While most white Americans came to adopt the view that character and culture were literally carried in the genes and that the mixing of races led to polluted blood and impaired intellect, others refused to accept this racial ideology. Largely unnoticed by historians, these people formed families, raised mixed-race children, and strove for a decent place in their communities. For the most part, these Americans issued no tracts, passed no laws, and preached no sermons. Yet they made their ideas, values, and racial openness plain in the way they conducted their lives.

One such couple were William G. Allen and Mary King. Having graduated from Oneida Institute in New York, clerked in a prestigious Boston law firm, and become the first African-American appointed to a professorship at an American college, Allen might have thought he had proven his worth. While teaching at New York Central College in 1851, he became romantically involved with a white minister's daughter, Mary King, who was studying at that interracial school. Allen, the son of a Welsh immigrant father who had married a free mulatto woman, was very light-skinned. Yet to local townspeople, black was black. They threatened to mob Allen and King when it became known that they intended to marry. Driven out of his college position and nearly murdered, Allen arranged to marry his fiancée in New York City. In 1853, they went to England to escape white hostility and to pursue the abolitionist cause.

Even in the Deep South, some men and women challenged the color code. Nathan Sayre, a transplanted New Jerseyan who took up life in Sparta, Georgia, in the early 1830s, was such a person. Establishing himself as a lawyer and a shrewd real estate investor, he became a state's attorney, a member of the Georgia legislature, and a superior court judge. Though never marrying, he sired several children by one of his slave women and later took up life with Susan Hunt, who was herself a mixture of Cherokee, African, and white. For many years they lived together, raising three children in Pomegranate Hall, Sayre's stately mansion in Sparta. Among the volumes Sayre kept in his library was the book by an Englishman, Alexander Walker, titled Intermarriage; or, The Mode in Which and the Causes Why, Beauty, Health, and Intellect, Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease, and Insanity, from Others.It was a rare book for this era, for it argued against the common belief that racial "amalgamation" would inevitably produce degenerate and physically inferior children.

The children of Nathan Sayre and Susan Hunt--dark-haired, dark-eyed, and light-skinned--soon provided evidence that they were anything but inferior. For example, their middle child, known as Cherokee Mariah Lilly, married a white man in about 1853, and her eight children and many grandchildren figured prominently in southern education and reform movements. Among them were Adella Hunt Logan, a graduate of Atlanta University and a leader of the black women's club movement; Henry A. Hunt, Jr., also trained at Atlanta University and later a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "black cabinet''; and Tom Hunt, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute who moved west and served on the agriculture faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.

Other southern white men, including important political leaders, had few compunctions about establishing lasting relationships with black women. The southern social code required that these interracial liaisons, which amounted to parallel marriages, be conducted discreetly. Martin Van Buren's vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson, was a popular Kentucky politician whose devotion to Mary Chinn, his black mistress, and their two daughters caused him no particular difficulties in politics. Sam Houston's friend John Hemphill, who sat as the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1841 to 1858, lived with his slave Sabina for more than a decade and sent their two daughters to Wilberforce College, an abolitionist training ground in Ohio, for their education.

Giving comfort to those who resisted the growing doctrine of racial separation was a vision of America as a place where all peoples of whatever race would fuse together. In this minority view, such a fusion would not lead to "mongrelization" and degeneracy but would produce a more vigorous society. To be sure, even most abolitionist reformers were opposed to interracial mixing. Abhorring both slavery and African-Americans, many wanted freed slaves removed to Canada, to a separate territory in the vast West, or, ideally, to Africa. However, others in the antislavery crusade, like T.T., whom we met at the beginning of this chapter, had no qualms about racial mixing and upheld the ideal of a biracial democracy. William Lloyd Garrison, the trumpet of abolitionism and racial equality, predicted in 1831 that "the time is assuredly hastening . . . when distinctions of color will be as little consulted as the height and bulk of the body, when colored men shallbe found in our legislative halls and stand on perfect equality with whites." Garrison commented to a friend that soon black skin would "no longer be simply endurable, but popular."

In the early 1830s, "amalgamationists" attacked the law in Massachusetts that prohibited interracial marriage. Garrison argued that the 1786 law banning these mixed marriages was "an invasion of one of the inalienable rights of man, namely, 'the pursuit of happiness.'" To take away people's choice of marriage partner was "utterly absurd and preposterous," in his view. "Does a man derive or lose his right to choose his wife from his color?" he asked. "Why, then, let us have a law prohibiting tall people from marrying short ones.... Shall fat and lean persons be kept apart by penalties? Or shall we graduate love by feet and inches?" When antiamalgamationists charged that if Garrison and his like had their way, the country would be swept with black men seeking white wives, Garrison retorted that "the blacks are not so enamored of white skins, as some of our editors imagine. The courtship, the wooing, the embrace, and intermixture--in nine cases out of ten--will be proposed on the part of the whites, and not of the opposite color." David Ruggles, a fearless New York City black activist, agreed. He pointed out acidly that neither he nor "any colored man or woman of [his] acquaintance" was eagerly pursuing cross-race marriage. Expressing a much more modern notion that "black is beautiful," Ruggles maintained that "nothing is more disgusting than to see my race bleached to a pallid and sickly hue by the lust of those cruel and fastidious white men." He pleaded, "To attempt to obstruct the flow of the affections is ridiculous and cruel." Another reformer argued that "when a man and woman want to be married it is their business, not mine nor anybody else's.... So far from denouncing the marriage of blacks and whites, I would he glad if the banns [announcements] of a hundred thousand such marriages could be published next Sunday."

Massachusetts legislators were unmoved by such published arguments. But by the late 1830s, an avalanche of petitions from whites living in small towns all over the state changed their minds. After viewing ninety-two petitions containing 8,700 signatures in 1843, a large majority of legislators voted to remove the anti-intermarriage law. Although legislators in other northern states would not follow Massachusetts's lead, this was an important blow struck in the name of a person's unqualified right to choose a marriage partner, regardless of popular opinion. . .

For white Protestants, who dominated politics, business, and cultural affairs in the mid-nineteenth century, America was a redeemer nation chosen by God to reform the entire world. This sense of mission was as old as the first Puritan settlers in New England, who saw their outpost of Christianity as a saving remnant of corrupted Protestantism and a beacon in the wilderness. Two centuries later, in the decades before the Civil War, Americans were still trying to perfect their society. This perfectionist thrust, however, took many forms. In an age of reform, some pursued a vision of a purely white America in which Indians would become extinct and from which Africans would be returned to their homelands, while new European immigrants--mostly English, Irish, and German--left behind their old ways and adapted to the white American republic. In this godly mission, there was no room for cultural or racial mixing with lesser stocks. Sanctioned by science and medicine, endorsed by powerful politicians, and fortified by popular culture, the hostility to racial intermingling had eclipsed the ideal of a mestizo America as the United States began to unravel over the issue of slavery.

For those who still clung to the ideal of a new mixed-race America, the message of the white purists was bone-chilling. Out of the spotlight and out of favor with the majority, they did their best to build pockets of mixed-race life and conduct themselves as honorably as their situations permitted. Sometimes this required leaving America altogether. In other cases it meant a lifetime of anguish and an uncertain future for their children....

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Mixed-Race Communities

Excerpted from Forbidden Love by Gary B. Nash.

While couples such as Albert and Lucy Parsons, Tye and Charles Schulze, and Frederick and Helen Douglass kept aflame the torch of a mixed-race America, entire groups lived in mixed-race communities. Learning to mingle peacefully began in the late teenage years of a small number of young Americans who attended colleges specifically founded as interracial institutions. The most notable of them were Oberlin College in Ohio and Oneida Institute in New York, both established by radical abolitionists in the 1830s.

Neither school began experiments in interracial living without a fight. In 1835, when he heard that brand-new Oberlin was to be integrated, New England's financial agent warned that "to place black and white together on precisely the same standing will not most certainly be endured," and he predicted that Oberlin "will be blown sky high" if "the darkies begin to come in in any considerable number, unless they are completely separated . . . so as to veto the notion of amalgamation." But generations of Oberlin students, including one of Frederick Douglass's daughters, learned that prejudice dissolved when people studied together, ate together, lived together, and learned together.

At Oneida Institute, the same was true. One white student (for whom Grinnell College was later named) described the student body he found when he entered Oneida: "a motley company of emancipators' boys from Cuba; mulattoes; a Spanish student; an Indian named Kunkapot; black men who had served as sailors, or as city hackmen, also the purest Africans escaped from slavery; sons of American radicals, Bible students scanning Hebrew verse with ease, in the place of Latin odes; enthusiasts, plowboys and printers." Oneida produced many of the African-American leaders of the nineteenth century and fulfilled the dream of its founder, Beriah Green, who wrote that "the red sons of the Western forest, the sable sons of the sunny South have here found a home together, and . . . have lived in peace and love with their pale-faced and blue-eyed brethren."

Farther west, mixed-race communities defied the notion that racial amalgamation would be America's downfall. In the 1880s, when the traveler William Barrows passed through the old beaver-trapping country in Montana and Wyoming, he found towns inhabited almost entirely by people who were thoroughly mixed--French, Indian, English, and Spanish. Impressed by the "color blindness" of these northern Rockies people, Barrows hoped that "we are building a nation, not only in a new world, and under a new system of government, but with a new people.... We are no longer English; that expresses but one of our polygenous ingredients. We are Americans." If Barrows had traveled in the Southwest, especially in New Mexico, he would have found similar communities predominately populated by people of Mexican-lndian descent. To this day, the New Mexico highlands are dotted with towns inhabited mainly by Indian-Mexican families, celebrated in such novels as John Nichols's The Milagro Beanfield War (1974).

The Sikh immigrants to California in the early twentieth century tell a story of a new combination of previously unacquainted people. When new laws in 1882 excluded Chinese immigrants and in 1907 banned Japanese as well, California's cotton, fruit, and vegetable growers turned to Korea, the Philippines, and South Asia for labor. Among these immigrants were nearly 7,000 Sikhs from the Punjab. Arriving as single men, the Punjabis were socially stranded. They could not bring Sikh women with them, and California's 1901 law prohibited marriage between a white person and a"Negro, Mulatto, or Mongolian." But by the end of World War I, the Sikhs were finding that California's county clerks would issue marriage licenses to people of different races as long as their skin color seemed reasonably close. It was this looseness in the application of the law that soon led to marriages between Punjabi men and Mexican women. "Cotton was the crop that brought most [mixed] couples together," says the historian who has studied this type of interraciality. The Mexican Revolution of 1911 propelled Mexicans across the border into U.S. cotton fields from Texas to California, and there the women found Punjabi, Korean, and Filipino partners.

Between 1913 and 1948 (the latter date marks the overturning of California's law prohibiting racial intermarriage), 80 percent of the East Indian men in California married Mexican women. To this day, several thousand of the children and grandchildren of these Punjabi-Hispanic marriages can be found in every Imperial and San Joaquin valley town. Many of the families can still be found under the name of Singh--the most common Sikh surname--but most have Hispanic first names. The Sikh immigrants built temples all over California's agricultural valleys where the families of Jesus Singh or Alejandro Singh worshiped and married. Finding loopholes in the ruling system of racial division and classification, those who picked the fruit and vegetables served on dinner tables all over the country brought new life to the old dream of a mestizo America.

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The Real American Love Story
Why America is a lot less white than it looks.

By Brent Staples
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 5, 1999, at 12:28 AM PT

The PBS broadcast last month of An American Love Story--a 10-hour film about an interracial family--spawned a great deal of chatter to the effect that mixed-race couplings were the wave of the future. In fact, they are the wave of the past. Interracial marriages accounted for only 2.2 percent of all marriages in the Current Population Survey of 1992, a gain of only two-tenths of a percent over 1980, and the number of mixed couplings actually decreased slightly in 1991. The census pattern suggests that slightly more interracial couples will fall into each other's arms in the coming years but that there will be nothing resembling a dramatic acceleration of marriage across the color line.

But America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew. Americans have grudgingly accepted the fact that sex between masters and slaves such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was frequent, leading to a many-hued race of people who do not look African at all, even though they call themselves "African-American." Outside of recent African immigrants to the United States, there are virtually no black Americans of purely African descent, which is to say no black people who lack white ancestry, left in this country.

Four centuries of race mixing have had a similar impact on Americans who define themselves as white. Convincing estimates show that by 1950 about one in five white Americans had some African ancestry. This inheritance most often arrived at the bedroom door in the form of a fair-skinned black person who had slipped over the color line to live as white. Put another way, most Americans with African blood in their veins think of themselves as white and conduct themselves as such--and check "white" when they fill out census forms.

How did so much "black" blood get into so many "white" people? Consider the story behind the 1967 case of Loving vs. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court overturned laws in 17 states that forbade black people and white people to marry. Richard Loving was white and Mildred Jeter was black. In 1958, weeks after the two were married, the Caroline County sheriff dragged them from their marriage bed and jailed them for the crime of being married. The Lovings were then exiled from Virginia under pain of imprisonment. In banishing the couple from the Old Dominion, the Caroline County judge said from the bench: "Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix."

This statement would have been ludicrous anyplace but was especially laughable in Caroline County--and in the Lovings' hometown of Central Point, which had been an epicenter of race mixing for at least 200 years. There were many such centers in the South. In cities such as Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans, for example, white families and their fair-skinned black relatives lived so close together that they bumped into each other on the street. Mixed-race people were initially treated as a "new people" who existed in the space between white and black and deserved a status not quite as high as whites but higher than that of black people in general. This special status began to dry up just before the Civil War and evaporated when slavery ended and free blacks competed with whites for jobs and political power. White Southerners became obsessed with drawing an impossible line that would preserve white "racial purity"--another way of referring to white political dominance. The "one-drop rule" defined as black anyone who had any black ancestry at all, even if that ancestry was invisible to the naked eye or in the genealogical record. Those who fell on the black side of the law often lost the rights to vote, to hold high-status jobs, and to defend their persons and property in the courts.

The revocation of special mulatto rights accelerated the practice of passing for white. Central Point was locally known as the "passing capital of the world." Passing for white was so common there that a section of Central Point had actually been named "Passing.'' Some Central Pointers lived as negroes at home but crossed the line to seize white privileges just an hour or two away in Richmond, Va. Local children were often taken for white during excursions to nearby towns, where they shopped in stores that did not serve blacks and were admitted to the "white only" sections of movie houses.

Having learned the rewards of whiteness early, these children grew up, moved away, and continued the charade. Those who entered the armed forces, which were segregated until 1948, were often classified as white and attached to all-white units. This made for dicey moments when brown-skinned classmates from Central Point turned up in all-black units. Some of these former classmates kept the secret, but a few exposed the passers as frauds. Neither Britain nor France had laws that forbade interracial marriage, and people in those countries had no clue what the Yanks were going on about when they argued over who was really white or really black. To the French and the British, race was defined by what you looked like: If you looked white, well then, you were.

Back in Caroline County, soldiers who were passing were sure to travel home alone to prevent their white buddies from knowing who and what they were. The passers from Passing married white spouses, moved into white jobs, took up residence in white neighborhoods. When the couples returned to Central Point to visit, the town went along with the masquerade. Families ditched brown-skinned friends and relatives, and children stayed out of school to avoid being seen on the colored bus headed to the colored school. Principals and teachers stuck to the script. One of them told Ebony magazine in 1967 that blacks in Central Point had "infiltrated the white race more than any other group of Negroes. When a student plays hooky from school for a week and says an in-law is visiting the family, we understand. The kids just can't afford to catch the Negro school bus without giving away the racial identity."

This infiltration was common not just in Virginia but all over the United States. The most interesting document listed in the amicus briefs for Loving vs. Virginia is a statistical study called "African Ancestry of the White American Population" by Robert Stuckert, a sociologist and anthropologist from Ohio State University. Stuckert's statistical models are tough going, but eye-opening for what they show. Simply put, he examined census and fertility data to arrive at estimates of how many white Americans had African blood lines and how many fair-skinned blacks had crossed over the line to live as white. Stuckert's tables show that during the 1940s alone, roughly 15,550 fair-skinned blacks per year slipped across the color line--about 155,500 for the decade. Stuckert estimates that by 1950 about 21 percent of the whites--or about 28 million of the 135 million persons classified as "white" in the census--had black ancestry within the last four generations. He predicted that the proportion would only grow in the coming decades. The belief that one's ancestors are "racially uniform" is a basic American fiction, Stuckert wrote, but a fiction nonetheless.

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The Blurred Racial Lines of Famous Families

England's Queen Charlotte


With features as conspicuously Negroid as they were reputed to be by her contemporaries, it is no wonder that the black community, both in the U.S. and throughout the British Commonwealth, have rallied around pictures of Queen Charlotte for generations. They have pointed out the physiological traits that so obviously identify the ethnic strain of the young woman who, at first glance, looks almost anomalous, portrayed as she usually is, in the sumptuous splendour of her coronation robes.
Queen Charlotte, wife of the English King George III (1738-1820), was directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. The riddle of Queen Charlotte's African ancestry was solved as a result of an earlier investigation into the black magi featured in 15th century Flemish paintings. Two art historians had suggested that the black magi must have been portraits of actual contemporary people (since the artist, without seeing them, would not have been aware of the subtleties in colouring and facial bone structure of quadroons or octoroons which these figures invariably represented) Enough evidence was accumulated to propose that the models for the black magi were, in all probability, members of the Portuguese de Sousa family. (Several de Sousas had in fact traveled to the Netherlands when their cousin, the Princess Isabella went there to marry the Grand Duke, Philip the Good of Burgundy in the year 1429.)
Six different lines can be traced from English Queen Charlotte back to Margarita de Castro y Sousa, in a gene pool which because of royal inbreeding was already minuscule, thus explaining the Queen's unmistakable African appearance.


Queen Charlotte's Portrait:

The Negroid characteristics of the Queen's portraits certainly had political significance since artists of that period were expected to play down, soften or even obliterate undesirable features in a subjects's face. Sir Allan Ramsay was the artist responsible for the majority of the paintings of the Queen and his representations of her were the most decidedly African of all her portraits. Ramsey was an anti-slavery intellectual of his day. He also married the niece of Lord Mansfield, the English judge whose 1772 decision was the first in a series of rulings that finally ended slavery in the British Empire. It should be noted too that by the time Sir Ramsay was commissioned to do his first portrait of the Queen, he was already , by marriage, uncle to Dido Elizabeth Lindsay, the black grand niece of Lord Mansfield. Thus, from just a cursory look at the social awareness and political activism at that level of English society, it would be surprising if the Queen's negroid physiogomy was of no significance to the Abolitionist movement.





Lord Mansfield's black grand niece, for example, Ms. Lindsay, was the subject of at least two formal full sized portraits. Obviously prompted by or meant to appeal to abolitionist sympathies, they depicted the celebrated friendship between herself and her white cousin, Elizabeth Murray, another member of the Mansfield family. One of the artists was none other than Zoffany, the court painter to the royal family, for whom the Queen had sat on a number of occasions.
It is perhaps because of this fairly obvious case of propagandistic portraiture that makes one suspect that Queen Charlotte's coronation picture, copies of which were sent out to the colonies, signified a specific stance on slavery held, at least, by that circle of the English intelligencia to which Allan Ramsay, the painter belonged.
For the initial work into Queen Charlotte's genealogy, a debt of gratitude is owed the History Department of McGill University. It was the director of the Burney Project (Fanny Burney, the prolific 19th century British diarist, had been secretary to the Queen), Dr. Joyce Hemlow, who obtained from Olwen Hedly, the most recent biographer of the Queen Charlotte (1975), at least half a dozen quotes by her contemporaries regarding her negroid features. Because of its "scientific" source, the most valuable of Dr. Hedley's references would, probably, be the one published in the autobiography of the Queen's personal physician, Baron Stockmar, where he described her as having "...a true mulatto face."
Perhaps the most literary of these allusions to her African appearance, however, can be found in the poem penned to her on the occasion of her wedding to George III and the Coronation celebration that immediately followed.

Descended from the warlike Vandal race,
She still preserves that title in her face.
Tho' shone their triumphs o'er Numidia's plain,
And and Alusian fields their name retain;
They but subdued the southern world with arms,
She conquers still with her triumphant charms,
O! born for rule, - to whose victorious brow
The greatest monarch of the north must bow.

Finally, it should be noted that the Royal Household itself, at the time of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, referred to both her Asian and African bloodlines in an apologia it published defending her position as head of the Commonwealth.




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Black

Precisely because the name of this family is such an obvious example of one that originated in the ethnic description of its founder, the Blacks of Maine could prove of interest, as well.

Black Will was an emancipated slave with as little social influence as Emanuel Drigger had in Virginia. However, a few late 17th century records mention Black Will and give us some idea of how his progeny so quickly blended into the larger white population.

Despite its sexually scandalous nature, the involvement of Black Will in the case of Alice Mayhew, the local whore, must undoubtedly have provided the little town of Kittery a certain degree of comic relief. On the strength of her accusation the court had ruled against another man for being the father of her yet unborn child. A few months later that same man was finally vindicated when, much to the embarrasment of the court, Alice gave birth to a brown skinned baby boy. Since there was no one for miles around who could possibly have fit the bill, it was Black Will who instead had to bare his back at the whipping post a few days later to atone in the prescribed way for the sin of fornication.

Whether or not a whipping was the price he paid for each of his successive children is not too clear but historians have pointed out that two other white women also bore him offspring and that no marriage records exist for either. Unlike his father, however, we do know that William Black Jr. was legally married. Having been summoned to answer the court's charges of fornication, enough witnesses turned up to testify to the domestic nature of his relationship to the woman he was co-habiting with that the court itself arranged to wed them. Although the initial cause for the case concerning William Jr. might well have been a legal approbation against miscegenation, it could just as easily be interpreted as still yet another example of a son following in the footsteps of his father's sexual mores.

Despite the colour of the women that both Black Will and his son would take under their roofs, any supposition that they were consciously attempting to whiten their offspring would be ludicrous. Given the negligible number of Africans living in this particular part of the world at this particular time in history, the possibility of finding a female, much less a compatible one, would have presented a major problem. The fact too, that Black Will stood surety for Anthony Freeman, the only other emancipated slave in the neighbourhood, even providing him the land with which to build his house, is sufficient enough evidence to prove that the seriousness of the situation in which the early African American community found itself was not lost on him.

Bailey's Island at the southernmost end of the Harpswell Peninsula is today a tourist attraction and the historically acknowledged geographical center from which at least half the Blacks or Blakes of Main spread out to other parts of the country.

From the various histories of this family I have been able to track this far, the most politically prominent will, more than likely, turn out to be William Sweat Black. Although he never achieved the presidency - a prospect he must have once seriously entertained, to judge from his career - this distant descendant of Black Will did succeed in serving a term as 35th Governor of the State of New York.

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Cheswell



Another Northern family, but one whose history reflects yet another set of sociological experiences and expectations, the Cheswells should prove an equally fascinating study of racial crossing. Furthermore, like those of Pendarvis and Drigger, the name Cheswell, despite its Anglo Saxon etymology, is nevertheless fairly conclusive proof that those who bear it are of African American extraction no matter what their ancestors' appearance to the contrary have been for the last two centuries.

Indeed, the very first Cheswell whom we can identify was the "negro" Richard, who is mentioned in a late 17th century New Hampshire record. What little we know of him is more than compensated for by the legacy his son, Hopestill, has left behind him. A master housewright of the Portsmouth area, two of the still remaining buildings he erected are today prized treasures of our national heritage. One, the John Paul Jones House has for years served as the office for the Hew Hampshire Historical Society while the other, the Samuel Langdon House, was moved to Sturbridge Village where, as one of this museum's central exhibits, it provides a superb example of the construction technology in which the northeast took justifiable pride during the 18th century.

Either because of the financial base he soon began to accumulate from his profession or his rather ambitious personality, Hopestill Cheswell must obviously have proved himself enough of a marriage prospect to overcome whatever reservations his neighbours might have harboured against him because of his colour. Unlike William Black Jr., his contemporary a few miles north of him in Maine, Hopestill was legally married and, to a young woman from a fairly respectable white family in the area. Furthermore, as Erik Tuveson, the author of a still unpublished paper on the first three generations of this family pointed out, blacks, as long their numbers remained comparatively small in relation to the white majority, were more apt to be perceived and treated as individuals. That Hopestill was fully aware of the potential prejudice his ethnic background might have inspired is related by an early New Hampshire historian. According to one of the few reminiscences recorded by a resident of Portsmouth who had actually known him, the owner of the house Hopestill had just framed invited his friends to the tavern to help him celebrate the occasion. What the anecdote so disconcertingly pointed out was the fact that Hopestill had not risked an embarrasing situation by assuming himself to be one of the intended guests. It was not until his client personally reached out to include him that he was able to drop his guard and join in the festivities.

Whether through his father's financial resources or, perhaps, even his own, Wentworth Cheswell, Hopestill's son, acquired a formal education. In 1763, when Lieutenant Governor Willam Dummer founded his Academy, this 16 year-old was one of the youths enrolled. Since most males during this particular period of history would have been wage earners by this age, it is quite possible that the younger Cheswell helped his parents defray the cost of his room and board at Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts. As Tuveson has pointed out, Wenworth Cheswell's education was "an unusual privilege for a country boy at the time. Few people of the colonial era were formally educated, mostly due to cost and lack of inexpensive public schooling. Education of any formal sort in colonial New England carried a significant degree of elite social status."

Whatever it was, the price was right. For in a state marked by "a deficiency of persons qualified for the various departments in government, there are few who know how public business ought to be conducted."

With both his wisdom and wit shaped and sharpened for him by a school master who had graduated from Harvard a few years before, Wentworth Cheswell's rise to social prominence and political power was pretty much assured.

From 1768, when he was elected constable until his death in 1817, this man of colour held a succession of town or local government positions. Besides serving as assessor, town auditor and coroner, he was also voted a selectman. From his appointment in 1805 onwards, Wentworth Cheswell would exercise the authority of Rockingham County's Justice of the Peace.

I suppose it should serve as a comment on the national mythology that what Wentworth Cheswell is most remembered for in New Hampshire history was not what he had been able to achieve as a person of colour. (And who knows, perhaps the element of race had never been that important to those who knew him. Especially, as Tuveson argues, being only a quarter African, he was almost as white as they were.) Instead, Wentworth Cheswell is honored as a Revolutionary hero rather closely modeled on the figure of Paul Revere. As the town messenger on the Committee of Safety during the Revolution, he too, had made an all-night ride back from Boston to warn his community of the impending British invasion.



Because genealogies of the Cheswells, like those on the Gibsons, the Driggers, the Pendarvises and the Blacks, make no mention or allusions to their African origins, these publications provide us with examples of the "passing" process. No mention is made of his first immigrant ancestor. A Who's Who of the 1920s, for instance, described the founder of the Cheswell Cotton Mills in South Carolina as the descendant of the American Revolutionary Patriot, Wentworth Cheswell.

It should be noted that Wentworth Cheswell also was the subject of a national accolade which he had received during a Congessional debate in 1820 over the Missouri Compromise. In his address opposing the legislation that prevented mulattos from attaining Missouri citizenship, Senator Morril of New Hampshire stated that "In New Hampshire there was a man by the name of Cheswell, who, with his family, were respectable in point of abilities, property and character. He held some of the first offices in the town in which he resided, was appointed justice of the peace for the county, and was perfectly competent to perform with ability all the duties of his various offices in the most prompt, accurate and acceptable manner. But this family are forbidden to enter and live in Missouri."

Besides those who are readily identifiable by this name today, branches of the following old New England families can also claim Wentworth Cheswell Esq. as an ancestor:

Perkins
Hanniford
Chase
Smart
Bennett
Gillingham
Forsaith
Hastings
George
Flanders
Rice
Chesley
Mathes
Watson
Burly
Nason
Pomroy
Stedman
Frisbee
Tufts (3rd cousin to the university founder)

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Newell

In the family history section of what still is the only history published on the town of Scituate, Masachussetts (and written by Deane in 1831), the entry referring to this name reads:

James Newell:
an African slave of Mary White, 1690.
Mary White had a farm in the Conihassett, one mile west of Merritt's brook , and she had the singular fancy to marry her slave. Tradition speaks of him as a respectable man. Their children, Joshua , James, Hezekiah, and four daughters, born from 1691 to 1706. James Jr. married Abigail Nichols 1739, and left sons James, Levi, Joshua and Daniel, born from 1740 to 1752. They have descendants in Scituate.

Besides the male lines carrying the name, the vital records for Scituate, up until the year1850, provides a partial list of those who married Newell women. They are:

Joshua Comset in 1775
Theophilus Cotherell, 1806
George Harlow, 1827
John W. Lindell, 1829
Noah C. Ellms, 1832
Capt. George B. Dennett, 1837 Portsmouth, Maine

(Only just discovered today, 6/14/94, that the home of Oliver Dennett was a station on the Underground Railway. Was particularly intrigued by this bit of info since it, quite possibly, could confirm my suspicion that one reason for so many of the Boston Brahmins' participation in the Abolitionist movemnt might have been genealogical - either their own or their friends or relatives descent from Abraham Pearce. Interestingly, it was in something written by none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe that I came across this fact.)

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Battis

Like the Newells, the Battis is another family whose African origins and genealogy were openly acknowledged by the historian of a local New England town.

In his two volume work on Canterbury, New Hampshire, published in 1912, James Lyford described how Sampson Battis (b.1750) won his freedom for the action he saw during the Revolutionary War. Colonel Moore, his master, not only released Battis but awarded him 100 acres of land. Because of his numerous progeny, the locality was for a while known as "New Guinea".

From Chandler Potter's "Military History of Hew Hampshire" we learn that Battis achieved the rank of Major when he was given command of a battalion by Governor Gilman in 1800. This probably makes him the first African American to be put in charge of a white troop and to be officially awarded this particular military title; a fact historians have not yet flagged.

Other families in this particular area of New Hampshire who, by 1912 could claim descent from Sampson Battis were the following:

Robinson
Hilliard
Hoyt
Haskell
Moody
Jones
Davis
Hickey
Wiggins
Blanchard
Bland
Morrill
Paul
Dowes
O'Leary