Posted: Sun 30 Mar 2008 03:43 Post subject: 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.
Last edited by ArabianKnight on Sun 30 Mar 2008 03:45; edited 1 time in total
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....
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
Yet another of the African European lines to originate in South Carolina is that of the distaff side of George Galphin's dynasty. An Indian trader who made his outpost in Silver Bluffs, sometime during the first quarter of the 18th century, he rose to political prominence when he loaned Congress $20,000.00 towards equipping the fleet of John Paul Jones.
Interestingly, although Galphin's second wife was a quadroon, the illegitimate daughter of Moses Nunes, a wealthy Jewish merchant and Indian trader like himself, this particular African American line of his I am currently researching are, in fact, descended from an extra-marital relationship. A daughter he recognized as a result of this liaison was married to John Holmes, an Irishman who had worked with him in the fur trade.
Whether there were more children or not I have not yet discovered but a son of John Holmes recently pointed out to me was:
Dr. Thomas Galphin Holmes 1780-1852, who moved to Alabama where he practiced his profession for fifty-two years. As assistant surgeon, he served during both the Creek Indian War the War of 1812. In 1820, Dr. Holmes married Elizabeth, the daughter of George Weakley, one of the surveyors who assisted in laying out the states of Mississippi and Alabama. His children and grandchildren I have identified to date, were:
Mary Elizabeth, m. Henry Ausphrea Hand
Hillary Herbert b. 1882, president of the
Daphney State Normal School and State Senator
Origin Sibley, physician and member of
the Alabama State Legislature
Sibley, b. 1873, physician and member of
the Alabama State Legislature
George Washington is connected to this particular family of mixed race Bahamian heritage (read the story of the Fairfaxes and George Washington). Suspicions are that Anne Fairfax, Mount Vernon's first mistress and the wife of Lawrence Washington, the President's brother, was a woman of colour whose mother was born in the Bahamas. A number of George Washington's historians have pointed out that when Anne's brother, George William, visited his Fairfax aunts in England, he had been utterly humiliated by their curiosity over whether he would turn black at puberty. Since the Fairfaxes were a wealthy, titled English family whose members corresponded regularly with each other, there must have been some foundation for this assumption regarding George William's race. Indeed, from one of his father's letters I came across, I discovered that his Fairfax relatives, in point of fact, actually knew his mother, Sarah Walker, the daughter of the Chief Justice of the Bahamas, since she had resided with them in England while on a visit from the West Indies. It is all too obvious then that there must have been a substantial proportion of her ethnic heritage evident, if her in laws expected George William to inherit these African traits as well.
Besides their relationship to Mount Vernon, another historical point about this family is that because of their enormous wealth and their social position in the British Colonial government of the time, William, Sarah's husband, was the first person for whom George Washington ever worked. George William, their son, would, for the rest of his life, be counted as the president's closest friend.
Laurence Washington, like his brother George, did not father any children. However, Ann Fairfax's second marriage was to one of the Lees. With George Lee, Anne finally succeeded in leaving a line even if not a political or culturally dynamic one. From her sister, Sarah's marriage to Major John Carlyle, however, are descended some of the most politically influential families of the South.
Of all the Anglo Saxon sounding surnames that are markers of the country's early African American admixture, perhaps this family's is the most romantic in origin.
In 1653 Elizabeth Kay, a mulatto servant, sued the estate of the Virgina planter Col. John Motram for her freedom. William Greenstead, a 20 year old Englishman was her lawyer and they fell in love. She became the mother of his two infant sons and William Greenstead married her in 1655. Besides the benefits to be obtained from their father's professional status, records show that a relative in 1667 bequeathed the children, John and William, some five hundered acres of land and provisions for an education, enough to insure them a future solid footing.
Of John's children, six are readily identifiable from the documents extant and of William's, nine. From these are today descended just about anyone who can trace their Greenstead, Grinsted, or Grimsted ancestry back to before the middle of the last century in this country (see below).
Re: Elizabeth's Kay lawsuit petitioning for freedom
Elizabeth's father, Thomas Kay, a former member of the House of Burgesses, wanted to insure his daughter's protection and thus at the time of his death in 1636 he bound her over to a Humphrey Higginson for nine years as a legal means of doing so. (Higginson was her godfather and had, according to the records, "promised to use her as well as if she were his own Child.")
How she wound up with the planter Col. Motram for another nineteen years is not too clear, but it appears that when Higginson decided to return to England, he gave her over to the Colonel. As this was done in violation of the agreement her father had made with Higginson, which stipulated that he take her to England should he go back, the court ruled in her favour stating that, "For theise Reasons wee conceive the said Elizabeth ought to be free and that her last Master should give her Corne and Cloathes and give her satisfaction for the time shee hath served longer then Shee ought to have done."
Greenstead Genealogy:
William Greenstead m. in 1655 Elizabeth Kay
John
Ann b. 1677
Thomas b. 1679
Jean b. 1680
John b. 1681
Rachell b. 1683
Elizabeth b. 1689
William
Adam b. 1684
Mary b. 1694
Susanna b. 1712
Hannah b. 1716
John b. 1718
George b. 1719
Jane b. 1722
Leah b. 1731
Martha b. 1733
Because he was elected mayor of Louisville KY in 1907, one of William and Elizabeth Greenstead's Kentucky descendants made it into the National Cyclopedia of Biographical History. From this entry we might be able to extrapulate some sense of the family's history.
This painting could be fairly important not only because the artist is nationally recognized but because of the ancestry of the sitter.
According to Paul Heinegg, author of "Free People of Color in North Carolina," this Thomas Johnson, a wealthy Maryland planter, was none other than the great grandson of Anthony Johnson, one of the earliest African Americans to settle Virginia. And it is this very Anthony Johnson who is a pivotal figure in the debate over the origins of slavery.
Anthony Johnson had acquired close to a thousand acres of land by the middle of the 17th century and was among the first generation of free blacks whose relative affluence have forced scholars of the Colonial south to revise their original views on the origins of American slavery and the fine line between this "peculiar" institution and indentured servitude.
What makes Anthony Johnson a central figure in the debate is an utterly bizarre and "politically incorrect" twist of fate. From evidence found in the earliest legal documents extant, it is Anthony Johnson who we now must recognize as the nation's first slaveholder. After all, the court battle he eventually won in 1655 to keep John Casor (Ceasar?) as his servant for life, identifies this unfortunate soul as the first slave in the recorded history of our country. Claiming that he had been imported as an indentured servant, Casor attempted to transfer what he argued was his remaining time of service to Robert Parker, a white, but Johnson insisted that "hee had ye Negro for his life".
The court ruled that "seriously consideringe and maturely weighing the premisses, doe fynde that the saide Mr. Robert Parker most unjustly keepeth the said Negro from Anthony Johnson his master....It is therefore the Judgement of the Court and ordered That the said John Casor Negro forthwith returne unto the service of the said master Anthony Johnson, And that mr. Robert Parker make payment of all charges in the suit."
Even though it is quite possible for a bi-racial person to favor only one of the parents, the reason for the totally European features of the portrait is obviously the proportion of his white to black ancestry. According to some historians, since both Anthony Johnson and his wife were possibly Hispanic, there might have already been some Caucasian admixture in either one or both of their genetic makeups. Indeed a son was officially described as "Richard Johnson Mollatto." Although Susanna, the wife of John, another son of theirs, is noted as black, it has also been documented that this John had also produced offspring with Hannah Leach, a white.
Heinegg suggests that the father of the sitter in the above Peale portrait, is John's son, Anthony, obviously named for his grandfather. However, because of how old he would have been at the time of his marriage, (between 45 and 50 in 1699), my personal suspicion is that he was, instead, John's grandson. Whatever the case, this particular Anthony's wife was white and if Heinegg has indeed skipped a generation, then his mother was also white since we do know that Elizabeth the wife of John's son, John Jr., was also white.
Besides the recurrence of the name Anthony, it should be pointed out here, as well, that this was the branch of the family that had migrated to Maryland by the end of 1665. Because there are no other Anthony Johnsons in the state records that would make sense, the following is my own take on the genealogical tree of the subject in the above portrait.
Anthony Johnson m. Mary (hispanic blacks)
|
John Johnson m. Susan (black)
Hannah Leach (white)
|
John Johnson Jr. m. Elizabeth (white)
|
Anthony m. 1699 Catherine Smith (white)
|
Thomas Johnson
Needless to say, since Thomas Johnson wife was also white, his sons and daughters married into the local planter class of which they had already become important members.
Although the Timrods were nowhere as genealogically prolific or as politically important as were the Gibsons and the Pendarvises or, for that matter, any number of other originally mixed race families whose identities are only now coming to light, Henry Timrod did help define an element of the South which was, in some ways, even more influential.
What this Southern poet (1829-1867) did in finding for his world a romantic language with which to defend itself from the condemnation of the North, was to help create the myth of Southerness. He idealized gentility and in particular, Southern womanhood - a racially loaded symbol because of how many African American males were sacrificed to it after Reconstruction.
Interestingly, the issue of slavery is never raised in Timrod's literary output except for one reference. It is in his 1861 ode, "Ethnogenesis" that we can find the almost blasphemous couplet,
On one side, creeds that dare to teach
What Christ and Paul refrained to preach;
His rhapsodic rage against the North continues along these theological lines:
Codes built upon a broken pledge,
And charity that whets a poniard's edge;
Fair schemes that leave the neighboring poor
To starve and shiver at the schemer's door,
While in the world's most liberal ranks enrolled,
He turns some vast philanthropy to gold;
Religion, taking every mortal form
But that a pure and Christian faith makes warm,
Where not to vile fanatic passions urged,
Or not in vague philosophies submerged,
Repulsive with all Pharisaic leaven
And making laws to stay the laws of heaven!
Timrod penned impassioned and fervent war poems which stirred the South to action in the Civil War and it was for these that he won the accolade, "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy." He was invited to dedicate the cemetery for South Carolina's Civil War dead and his "Ode to Magnolia Cemetery" is the literary monument he wrote for the occasion.
It is with regards to Southern womanhood, however, that his place in Southern literature now has to be reconsidered. Scholars have long been aware that even though he inherited his poetic vein from his father, it was to his mother that he owed his deeply seated love of nature which so informed his work. His mother was Thryza Prince of whom his sister wrote "It was from her, more than his gifted father, that my brother derived that intense, passionate love of Nature which so distinguished him. Its sight and sound always afforded her extreme delight...a walk in the woods to her was food and drink, and the sight of a green field was joy inexpressible...I can remember her love for flowers and trees and for the stars; how she would call our attention to the glintings of sunshine through the leaves; to the afternoon's lights and shadows, as they slept quietly, side by side; and even to a streak of moonlight on the floor."
It was not only on her mind but on this "perfection of form and face" that Timrod modeled his ideal of a femininity which he succeeded in setting as a standard for the rest of the South.
According to Brent Holcomb, one of the foremost genealogical experts of the country, however, the poet's mother was a quadroon. An attempt in the late '30s was made to discredit the rumors about this African ancestry, but court records unequivocally show that at a trial of three men who, in a robbery, had assaulted his great-grandmother, Hannah Caesar, the court did not allow her to testify on the grounds that she was a woman of color, since the defendants were white.
In his criticism of the 1937 article Rupert Taylor published in "American Literature," Holcomb pointed out that even if Hannah Caesar who was Hanna Brown before her marriage was indeed white, as the author claimed, it did not in anyway disprove that her husband was black. The affidavits Taylor cites but which no longer exist, were referred to in a contemporary newspaper report. All that they allegedly claimed was that the mother and sisters of Hannah Brown had always been regarded as white. No mention, whatsoever, was made of her father. No mention was made to the color of Hannah Caesar's husband either, but that is explainable since it was only the question of her own race that had been at issue during the trial. However, since the article itself was an attempt to discredit this long standing rumor about Timrod's ancestry, Holcomb found Taylor's silence on this matter particularly telling since, as is quite clear from both the census and probate records, the only Caesars in South Carolina were black. Furthermore, since the attorney for the defendants would not have made such a declaration regarding Hannah Caesar unless as Taylor himself put it, "he had some ground, however slight...," we can assume that her husband was an African American.
In point of fact, the inadmissibility of Hannah Caesar's testimony was cited as precedence in another trial a few days later when an attempt was made to disqualify a witness on the grounds that she too was a woman of mixed race. As further proof and perhaps, most conclusively, Brent Holcomb points out that in the 1790 census, Hannah's daughter, Sarah Faesch, the grandmother of Henry Timrod, is not only denoted as "free" but is listed in the column reserved for free people of color, as well. Considering the date of Rupert Taylor's publication, it should not be surprising that in trying to allay the continual "gossip" about the poet's having been an "octoroon", he upbraids the "type of mind which, unfortunately, seems born to believe evil or which, obsessed with the idea of miscegenation, leaps eagerly to seize upon any hint of tainted blood in anyone who has achieved prominence."
Coincidentally, one of the writers who helped to memorialize Timrod was none other than the late 19th century South Carolina archivist, Salley, who played such an important role in the creation of southern historiography and who, himself, was a Pendarvis descendant - another Southern mixed race family. As an authority on the genealogical sources of the State's founding families, there can be no doubt that Salley was fully aware not only of his own African heritage but of Henry Timrod's as well.
In 1901, a monument surmounted by a bronze bust of the poet Henry Timrod was dedicated in Charleston, SC. But perhaps the greatest honour paid to him by his fellow patriots was in 1911, when the General Assembly passed a resolution instituting the verses of his poem, "Carolina," as the lyrics of the official state anthem.
Besides the racial irony exposed by the genealogical facts that have just surfaced, it should not be too difficult to argue from the opening stanza included here that despite Lee's surrender, the Confederacy still thumbs its collective nose at the Union anytime this piece by Henry Timrod is sung.
The despot treads thy sacred sands,
Thy pines give shelter to his bands,
Thy sons stand by with idle hands, Carolina!
He breathes at ease thy airs of balm,
He scorns the lances of thy palm;
Oh! who shall break thy craven calm,
Carolina!
Thy ancient fame is growing dim,
A spot is on thy garment's rim;
Give to the winds thy battle hymn,
Carolina!
Because of their elegant attire and the upper class setting in which they are so formally posed, the early 19th century miniature portrait of these two young men of color is a rather remarkable one. What makes it even more so is the presence of the third youth, who is white. For despite our racial history, it is quite clear that neither of the two companions he is portrayed with should be mistaken as his social inferior.
Clues to the possible identity of the sitters in this miniature measuring 4" across, can be found in the biography of Paul Cuffe. In the early part of the 19th century, Captain Paul Cuffe was easily the most famous man of color in the U.S. He had returned to Westport, Massachusetts in 1812, after an exploratory visit to the newly-created settlement of Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa. Cuffe's trip had been of great interest to the Abolitionist movement both in the U.S. and Britain. There were expectations that Cuffe, a shipping magnate, could help anti-slavery activists realize the dream of a refuge for former slaves from the racism that seemed to be rising exponentially with the growing success of the Abolitionists' campaign.
Biographical sketches and newspaper accounts of the welcome Cuffe received on a side trip to England were not only picked up by the American press but since they were carried verbatim, probably exposed the U.S. public to a far more liberal treatment and description of a black subject than it had ever read before. The high point of all this attention came when Massachusetts state representatives arranged a meeting for Cuffe with President Madison, thus making Cuffe the first black to be officially entertained in the White House.
As a result of such extensive coverage and the controversy Cuffe provoked in Congress a year later trying to get a bill passed to support his African resettlement cause, he came to be seen as something of an authority on African American affairs and was approached for his advice on any number of related issues. One such request was found among Paul Cuffe's correspondence and it is of special interest to us for it pertains to the above portrait miniature.
In a letter dated May 1, 1814, Cuffe writes that advice had been asked of him:
"...Concerning 2 boys of Colour from 10 to 11 years of age. From information they are Mollato Children of fortune. The gentleman that rote me rote from Anapolis Maryland and states that from predejues of oppression he wished to have them the 2 boys removed into the northern States and placed in the Care of a pious Character to be educated Suitable to enjoy the improvements of their fortunes...The Gentleman that rote me inquires to be informed whether any eligible situation could be procured in a public seminary where they could be properly attended to. Also the expense of boarding teaching clothing and the whole cost of their education..."
The "Gentleman that rote" Capt. Cuffe was none other than John Francis Mercer, former governor of Maryland. However, whether from a need to protect the privacy of two such vulnerable minors or the honor of their rather influential white family, no mention of who they were appears in the subsequent letters. It is only from relevant documents extant in the State Archives of Maryland that we are able to piece together the identity of these two young men.
Considering the particularities of this situation, the records that should first be consulted are those of the Orphan's Court. However, because guardians are not listed in the index to those volumes dealing with the early 19th century Maryland, this task could have proved extremely daunting. Gratefully, it is an abstract in Helen Cotterall's "Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery" that allows us to circumvent this problem. Although the date of the pertinent case, "Le Grand vs. Darnall" is January 1829, the opening paragraph reads,
"Bennet Darnall...1810...executed his last will...and thereby devised to his son [Nicholas], the appellee, several tracts of land in fee, one of which was called Portland Manor...The mother of Nicholas Darnall was the slave of the testator, and Nicholas was born the slave of his father, and was between ten and eleven years old...at the death of the testator..."
According to the abstract, the death of Bennet Darnall occurred in 1814. This date matches with that of Capt. Cuffe's correspondence relating to the two boys. Moreover the identity of the second son appears in the following paragraph:
"Four respectable witnesses of the neighborhood...all agree in their testimony, that Nicholas was well grown, healthy and intelligent, and of good bodily and mental capacity: that he and his brother Henry could readily have found employment, either as house servant boys, or on a farm, or as apprentices...The testator devised to each of them real and personal estate to a considerable amount..."
In the summary of this case which is essentially about a slave's right to inherit, two names appear that confirm that Nicholas and Henry Darnall are the young men in whose lives Capt. Cuffe had become involved. Not only is former Governor Mercer one of the"four respectable witnesses," but mention is also made of a Benjamin Tucker of Philadelphia. It is in a letter of Cuffe's to Mercer dated "7 mo 6th 1814" that we first hear of him.
"...I was glad that thee fell in with Benj. Tucker. He is one who I trust the Verry utmost Confidence may be placed in. I am truly Glade the Little Boys have Been placed in thy Care. I believe thay are as well placed at Present as thay Can be. I beg to be excused if I should take the liberty at times to Enquire of Benjamin Tucker after the Boys wellfar..."
In another letter, some eight months later Cuffe explains who he is.
"...The 2 boys are at school 7 miles out of Philadelphia and information can be obtained concerning the boys by inquiring of Benjamin Tucker School master Phila..."
The fact that so much effort had been expended to secure an education for these boys must have left a rather chilling impression on Paul Cuffe. They had inherited an estate that must have been appreciably larger than the one Cuffe himself had acquired, but neither their wealth or their descent from one of the most influential families of Maryland was a guarantee that the rights and benefits which their father had gone to such precautions to secure for them would be respected. In his letter to Captain Cuffe, Governor Mercer had in fact stated that
"...in consequence of the deep rooted and indomitable prejudices of the our country, their situation here is surrounded with embarrassment and their wealth accompanied by their color is a constant source of the most malevolent jealousy, amongst the decay and profligate of both complexions."
Considering the social prominence of the Darnall family to which these "Molatto children of fortune" belonged, the possibility that they are two of the sitters in the miniature above is an intriguing one. The miniature appeared as an advertisement for the firm of Earle Vandecar in the January 1997 issue of the Magazine Antiques. Since neither an inscription or a provenance accompanies the piece, our only opportunity for making such an attribution will have to rely solely on deduction. The key to this little puzzle therefore, must not only be a plausible identity for the white child in the portrait, but an appropriate reason for his inclusion, as well. A work on the "Darnall, Darnell Family" by Harry Clyde Smith published in 1979 could prove helpful. Besides duly listing Nicholas, Henry and two other illegitimate sons Bennet Darnall sired, the author attempts to include the property divisions that are made in each generation. According to Smith, it appears that along with Nicholas and Henry, a third member of the Darnall family also had special claims to a portion of the Darnall estate known as Portland Manor and which had devolved to Bennett by right of succession. From the dates available, we know that he was about five or six years older than Nicholas. Smith's note that what he had been bequeathed was only for"a part" and used "as a summer home" might be a clue since the Le Grand vs. Darnall case of 1829 had been instigated by Nicholas to specifically test his rights to Portland Manor. As sketchy as it is, Smith's work does not explain why a great nephew had inherited a portion of Bennett Darnall's personal property even if comparatively smaller than what he left his sons.
The answer to this question might perhaps, be found in the name of the legatee. Christened Richard Bennett Darnall, it would not be unreasonable for us to presume that he was named for his great uncle - who, in turn, had been named for his mother's grandfather, Governor Bennett of Virginia. What we might tentatively conjecture, therefore, is that Bennett was Richard Bennett's godfather and that his title to Portland Manor had been a baptismal present. True, Richard Bennett's younger sibling, Henry, also carried Bennett as a second name but he was probably named in honor of Bennett's brother, Henry Bennett. As Bennett was the only member of the Darnall family to be given this surname for his first, the name, Richard, would, in all likelihood, have been understood, as well, since that was the name of the Virginia Governor they obviously hoped posterity would remember as yet another historically important ancestor of theirs.
Interestingly, Smith relates that Richard Bennett's eldest brother, Archibald, severed all communications with his family and even left Maryland because of a major disagreement. Since Portland Manor would have devolved to him had not Bennett bequeathed this rather impressive estate to his illegitimate sons, it would not be unreasonable for us to guess that the cause of so serious a break between Archibald and his kin was the Darnalls' decision to honor Bennett's will.
If these assumptions are correct, we then have a third sitter whose appearance in this miniature fits our requirements - on still another level. For even though a first cousin once removed from Nicholas and Henry Darnall, Richard Bennett Darnall was also a son of Bennett's - a spiritual one. Those depicted in this group portrait, therefore, are the three heirs of Bennett Darnall, the inheritors of Portland Manor, the once proud possession of the Darnall dynasty in Maryland.
The Darnall Family
Philip Darnall was the first of the family to immigrate to this country; he was born in 1604. A relative and the secretary to George Calvert who would later be created first Lord Baltimore, Philp became one of the wealthiest men in Maryland. Before his arrival in the Americas, however, Philip Darnall had accompanied George Calvert on an extended diplomatic mission to France where they were both converted to Roman Catholicism. His son, Col. Henry Darnall, 1645-1711, acted as Proprietory's Agent to the second Lord Baltimore and served as his Deputy Governor. Harry Clyde Smith comments that
"Henry Darnall was both affluent and influential. He owned much land and many slaves. At his death, he bequeathed some thirty thousand acres of land...A devout Roman Catholic, he sent his sons to Jesuit schools in Europe - one of the inciting factors in the "Protestant Revolution," following which Henry maintained secret quarters in his home, with all equipment necessary for observing the rites of his religion."
Through his daughter, Mary, Henry Darnall was the great grandfather of Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Through his grand-daughter, Eleanor, he was also the great-grand father of John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore and the first Roman Catholic bishop of the country. Considering his importance to the history of the nation, another such relationship that cannot be overlooked because of its racial irony is that of the Darnalls to Roger Brook Taney, the supreme court justice who handed down the infamous Dredd-Scott decision. Not only did Henry Darnall and his son Philip marry Brooke women but so did the Judge's father, his great, grand father and his great, great, grand father. Besides being cousins several times over to the Chief Justice, Bennett's mulatto sons even had a Brooke as an uncle.
All odds are that neither Nicholas or Henry Darnall left any descendants. The elder of the brothers spent the rest of his life in Philadelphia never married, perhaps too confused by issues of class and racial identity to do so. In the 1850 census, for instance, he is living next door to one of the richest white men in the Bristol district of Philadelphia - residing with a young family of Irish immigrants - and the only person of color in the vicinity. And because the only mention of Henry in the Le Grand vs. Darnall case is in reference to his legal status at the time of his father's death in 1814, we are left with the impression that he was dead by 1829.
It is quite possible, however, that a sister of theirs did marry. Although Smith identifies her as the grand-daughter of Nicholas Lowe Darnell, a brother of Bennett's, the International Genealogical Index for North America lists Henrietta Maria as the daughter of Bennett Darnall and Susan. And it is this Susan who is the slave mother of Nicholas and Henry.
Susan, the Mother of Nicholas and Henry
From a couple of other cases cited by Helen Cotterall, it might be possible to reconstruct a genealogy for Susan, as well, even if not as long as the Darnall's. With the recurrence of the name, Susan, as a clue, it is not inconceivable that she could prove to be a descendant of Ann Joice who had come to Maryland in about 1680 with Lord Baltimore. Because Baltimore had brought her from Barbados via England, her family later attempted to use the Mansfield decision of 1772, to claim their freedom from the Darnalls. As Joice's children and grand children are all referred to as 'mulattos,' we should not be surprised if they were not actually a part of the 'extended' Darnall family. This could explain how, even though in the final analysis it was a futile one, they were able to mount such a sophisticated defense for themselves in court. Interestingly enough, Bennett had succeeded to Portland Manor after two older brothers had died and who like himself had never married but left legacies to support children they had both fathered with slave women on their estate.
According to both Smith and the IGI entry, Henrietta Maria Darnall married John Meeks in 1810. The Meeks social standing in Anne Arundel County during this particular period in time has yet to be determined. But according to a surveyor's report in Vol. 33, 1938 of the Maryland Historical Magazine, they had been the proprietors of a thousand-acre estate by the name of Chichister in 1700. If we accept the IGI data concerning Herietta Maria, it would suggest that despite laws of inheritance favoring male heirs, Bennett Darnall had succeeded in providing for his daughter in the traditional manner - a suitable marriage. It would, of course, also raise the question as to whether the size of his slave daughter's dowry had, in any way, been influential in persuading John Meeks to marry her. On the other hand, it would also make for an interesting example of the subtleties of gender politics. For unlike the Gibsons or the Pendarvises of SC (discussed elsewhere on this web site) whose color had not prevented their men from becoming leaders of the political establishment just a couple of generations earlier, the social prospects for the Darnall boys by this particular time in American history were next to nil.
Besides the dramatic increase in free blacks after the Revolution, what undoubtedly contributed to the antagonism towards his two young wards - which Governor Mercer found so appalling - was the hysteria brought on by the War of 1812. Many blacks had sided with the enemy during the country's struggle for its independence from Britain. Assaults against people of color became so prevalent that mounted troops had to be detailed by the mayor to protect them from the white mobs in Baltimore.
The Painter
It would be a mistake to attribute this little miniature portrait to the African American artist, Joshua Johnson of Baltimore, despite the understandable temptation to do so. Besides receiving commissions from a number of families related to the Darnalls, Johnson also was asked to do a portrait of Daniel Coker, the leader of the African Institute which had been established in Baltimore by none other than Captain Paul Cuffe. But even though one could easily point to certain stylistic similarities between examples of Johnson's work and the miniature, there are a number of idiosyncrasies in his technique that identify him which are not evident here. Perhaps, the most critical of which is how he rendered eyes. As his biographers, Carolyn Weekly and Styles Colwill put it,
"...we observe some evidence of a peculiar slant of the upper eyelids of Johnson's sitters...The manner in which the sitters' eyes are drawn...is in fact, one of the most telling characteristics of his work."
From the way in which this particular feature is handled in the portrayal of Richard Bennett Darnall, the only one of the three boys who faces the viewer, it is fairly obvious that this is not a piece by Joshua Johnson. The identity of the miniaturist will have to be sought from among such contemporaries of his as Dominic Boudet and Lewis Pease who also worked in Maryland. Like Johnson's rendering of eyes, perhaps one clue will be the artist's treatment of mouths or, more accurately, teeth. Remarkably different from the invariably rigid, tight lipped formality with which sitters were posed at the time, the artist has not only depicted Richard Bennett's mouth in a relaxed smile revealing three of his upper front teeth but as what must have been regarded as something of a feat at the time, considering the scale of the piece, he or she has clearly but very realistically delineated the separation between each tooth, as well.
From whatever the denominational viewpoint, whether the Catholicism of the Darnalls or, though less defiant, the quiet but persistent Quaker faith of Capt. Cuffe and so many of the associates he called on to help Governor Mercer place his mulatto wards, it is not inconceivable that the sentiment expressed in the miniature was meant to be interpreted as religiously abolitionist and a didactic one at that. Not only from two disparate lines of the family, but even more importantly - of two different races - the three young men portrayed are, through the sacrament of Baptism, nothing less than brothers in Christ
Anthony and Abraham van Salee were the ancestors of the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Humphrey Bogart.
They were among the earliest arrivals to 17th century New Amsterdam. In a number of documents dating back to this period, they are both described as "mulatto". From what scholars have been able to piece together about their background, they appear to have been the sons of a Dutch seafarer by the name of Jan Jansen who had "turned Turk" and become an admiral in the Moroccan navy. With the Port of Salee as the base from which it harried European shipping, references to the fleet he commanded are salted away in the old English sea shanties that are still sung about the Salee Rovers. The mother of his two sons was probably a concubine he had while trading in this part of the world before his conversion to Islam.
As a result of the anti-social behaviour of his white wife, Anthony van Salee was induced to leave the city precincts of lower Manhattan and move across the river, thus becoming the first settler of Brooklyn. Since Coney Island abutted his property, it was, until sometime in the last century, also referred to as "Turk's Island"; the word, "Turk", being a designation of his which the records used interchangeably with, "mulatto". According to the documentation that people like Professor Leo Hershkowitz of Queens University have sifted through, it would seem that Anthony van Salee never converted to Christianity. His Koran, in fact, was in a descendant's possession until about fifty years ago when, ignorant of its relevance to his family's history, he offered it for sale at auction.
The Van Salee history also includes a more contemporary black collateral branch in the U.S. Anthony's brother Abraham fathered an illegitimate son with an unknown black woman. The son became the progenitor of this side of the family. Although having to face constraints that their "white" cousins could at best only imagine, two of these van Salees nevertheless left their mark in the annals of African American history.
Dr. John van Salee De Grasse, born in 1825, was the first of his race to be formally educated as a doctor. A member of the Medical Society of Massachusetts, he also served as surgeon to the celebrated 54th Regiment during the Civil War. His sister, Serena, married George Downing who was not only an enormously successful black restauranteur both in New York City and in Newport, RI, but a man who used his wealth and connections with the East Coast's most powerful white families to effect social change for his people. Because of his organization and his own contribution to the purchase of Truro Park in Newport, one of the streets bordering it still bears his name. Interestingly enough, this genealogy was done as part of an ongoing study of the Ramopo in Tappan, NY, one of those red, white and black groups sociologists and ethnographers are now working on and which in academese are referred to as "tri racial isolates". It is because of what advantages their Indian heritage (no matter how discernably negroid they were) legally and officially provided them that the opportunity for "passing" in these groups was not only a more ambiguous political or moral decision but, comparatively, a more easily documentable one as well.
Considering how important a role John Hammond of Columbia Records played in the establishment of the black music industry, it would certainly be worth exploring the possible influence his van Salee ancestry might have had on his career. Back then, there would have been no option possible for publicly declaring himself black according to the "one drop" racial code that was the law in most states until the Johnson administration. With a Vanderbilt for a mother, his iconographical value to the white majority was so important that had he dared to tamper with it, the KKK or some such group would most probably have made him pay the ultimate price for having desecrated his and the prestige of his relatives who had, after all, fairly well succeeded in making themselves the equivalent of this country's royal family. Hammond died a few years ago but since his son, following in his father's footsteps, has become a recognized exponent of R&B his could prove to be a very important interview for us.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis
Either Professor Hershkowitz, or Tim Beard, former head of the Genealogical Department of the New York Public Library related this incident regarding van Salee genealogy. At the time the Kennedy administration began implementing its civil rights agenda, the New York Genealogical and Historical Society approached Mrs. Kennedy hoping to discuss the opportunity her African ancestry, through the Van Salees, could have in possibly assisting her husband to realize his social goals regarding race relations. Mrs. Kennedy insisted on referring to the van Salees as 'Jewish,' and the New York Genealogical Society did not push the subject further.
Humphry Bogart and Ruth Gordon in a scene from the 1927 film "Saturday's Children." He is a Van Salee descendent and she is a Pendarvis descendent. A few years later, another descendant attempted to pass off the racial description of the van Salles in the official records as nothing more than malicious humor.
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