Mixed Race Studies

Fading Roles of Fictive Kinship: Mixed-Blood Racial Isolation and United States Indian Policy in the Lower Missouri River Basin, 1790-1830

Kansas State University, Manhattan
2012
124 pages

Zachary Charles Isenhower

A THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS Department of History College of Arts and Sciences

On June 3, 1825, William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and eleven representatives of the “Kanzas” nation signed a treaty ceding their lands to the United States. The first to sign was “Nom-pa-wa-rah,” the overall Kansa leader, better known as White Plume. His participation illustrated the racial chasm that had opened between Native- and Anglo- American worlds. The treaty was designed to ease pressures of proximity in Missouri and relocate multiple nations West of the Mississippi, where they believed they would finally be beyond the American lust for land.

White Plume knew different. Through experience with U.S. Indian policy, he understood that land cessions only restarted a cycle of events culminating in more land cessions. His identity as a mixed-blood, by virtue of the Indian-white ancestry of many of his family, opened opportunities for that experience. Thus, he attempted in 1825 to use U.S. laws and relationships with officials such as William Clark to protect the future of the Kansa. The treaty was a cession of land to satisfy conflicts, but also a guarantee of reserved land, and significantly, of a “halfbreed” tract for mixed-blood members of the Kansa Nation.

Mixed-blood go-betweens stood for a final few moments astride a widening chasm between Anglo-American and native worlds. It was a space that less than a century before offered numerous opportunities for mixed-blood people to thrive as intermediaries, brokers, traders, and diplomats. They appeared, albeit subtly, in interactions wherever white and Native worlds overlapped. As American Indians lost their economic viability and eventually their land, that overlap disappeared. White Plume’s negotiation of a reserve for his descendants is telling of a group left without a place. In bridging the two worlds, mixed-bloods became a group that by the mid-nineteenth century was defined as “other” by Anglo-American and Indians alike. This study is the first to track these evolving racial constructs and roles over both time and place. Previous studies have examined mixed-blood roles, but their identity is portrayed as static. This study contends that their roles changed with the proximity and viability of full-blood communities with which white officials had to negotiate.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Chapter 1 – A Supporting Cast: Mixed-Blood Indians in the Historical Narrative of the Frontier
  • Introduction
  • A Frontier From Each Side
  • Negotiated Social Norms
  • An Evolution of Perception
• Chapter 2 – Thriving In-Between: Mixed-Blood Indians Before 1790
  • Nous sommes touts Sauvages: White and Indian in the “Middle Ground”
  • Domino Theory: Trade, Allies, and Foreign Policy
  • “Probably Thou Are Not a Chief:” The United States Enters as a Frontier Power
• Chapter 3 – Racialization and Reduced Leverage: Perceptions and Realities of the Frontier in the Jeffersonian Vision
  • Fathers and Brothers: Mixed-Blood Indians and the Genesis of Assimilationist Policy
  • Hospitable Savages
• Chapter 4 – A Chasm Opens: Land Cession and the Loss of Place After the Fur Trade
  • “Ardent Spirits:” Decline of the Fur Trade, Adaptation, and the Deterioration of “Full-Blood” Communities
  • “The Bad Feeling That Now Exists:” Land Cession and a Perception of Betrayal
  • Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Rocky Point’s African American Past:  A Forgotten History Remembered through Historical Archaeology at the Betsey Prince Site

Long Island History Journal
Volume 22, Issue 1 (Winter 2011)
60 paragraphs

Allison Manfra McGovern
Department of Anthropology
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

North Country Road in the wilderness of Rocky Point, that was occupied during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As many as eight free people of color lived in the house at one point, and other free black households were established nearby. In this article, multiple lines of evidence are used to reconstruct the history and composition of the African American settlement at Rocky Point and the lifeways expressed at the Betsey Prince site. This analysis, which depends on an understanding of the socio-historical context of the site, emphasizes social interactions, labor, domestic activities, identity construction, and the fate of the community.

Archaeologists from the New York State Museum uncovered the foundation remains of a small house along North Country Road in Rocky Point, New York, in 1991. The house was occupied during parts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then left abandoned in the wilderness for roughly 150 years. The site was rediscovered during a cultural resources survey, performed by archaeologists for the New York State Department of Transportation, in advance of proposed highway improvements to New York State Route 25A. The small archaeological site, which consisted of a house foundation measuring 11 x 13 feet and associated archaeological deposits, was identified as the home of Betsey Prince through census data and deeds for adjacent properties.

Betsey Prince was listed as the head of a household in the 1820 Federal census. Her household was one of four comprised entirely of free people of color and located on North Country Road in Rocky Point in the early nineteenth century. The household was documented as early as 1790 (and was likely inhabited even earlier), but the occupants were variously identified as Prince, Prince Jessup, Rice Jessup, Betty Jessup, Betty or Betsey Prince, and Elizabeth Jessup in Federal census data, deeds, a tax document, and a probate inventory. In addition to the variety of names, the inhabitants and neighbors of the Betsey Prince site were racially identified with variance, as “colored,” “negro,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “mustey.” For the sake of consistency, they will be referred to here as free black people.

The archaeological site was determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places because it could provide information about people who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that we know little about – free black people. The site was excavated by archaeologists because impending plans to widen New York State Route 25A would destroy it. The artifacts (stored at the New York State Museum) provide evidence of the everyday lives of the people who lived at the Betsey Prince site. Archival research aided in connecting names and identities with the site. Together, these resources provide the basis for a narrative of lifeways for a group that was marginal to history, but integral to the functioning of a rural, early American economy.

A prolonged abolition of slavery was facilitated throughout New York State by the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799. Although the promise of freedom was made, many people of color remained legally enslaved in New York until 1827. During this time, many small and large white households held enslaved Africans, and some such households were listed near the free black settlement at Rocky Point. The presence of the free black settlement would have been conspicuous among the predominantly white communities of rural Long Island. However, they were part of a diverse non-white population, which included captive Africans and Indians, and people of color who were both recently freed and born free (on Long Island, or elsewhere and relocated to Long Island from various places, including New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the Caribbean).

How black people negotiated their identities at this time is certainly difficult to understand. The variety of racial categories mentioned above suggests a lack of consistency in how people were both perceived and classified. The inconsistencies in names may point to the biases of census takers, tax assessors, and government clerks, or may be indicative of individual representation. Perhaps different names were given under different circumstances. It is therefore important to consider the role people of color played in constructing their own identities in early America, as it was not uncommon for black people to change their names more than once.

This socio-historical context is essential for interpreting the data from the Betsey Prince archaeological site. Working within a framework that recognizes racism, segregation, the complexities of identity formation, and the struggle for civil liberties will produce insight into the active lives of the site’s occupants. As such, the documents and archaeological evidence from the Betsey Prince site offer a unique opportunity to investigate identity construction through social interactions, labor, domestic activities, and gender…

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Canada’s famous first black doctor

National Review of Medicine
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Volume 1, Number 4 (2004-02-28)

Marvin Ross

Born in Toronto in 1837, Dr Anderson Abbott was a close friend of Abe Lincoln but refused to serve in the US Colored Troops

Not only was Anderson Ruffin Abbott the first black man to graduate from medical school in Canada (University of Toronto, 1861), he is described in a US history textbook as “probably the most famous British North American-born surgeon to serve coloured soldiers during the Civil War.” He was also a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, whose widow presented him with the shawl Lincoln wore to his first inauguration.

Dr Abbott’s father, Wilson, was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1801 to free parents but he eventually moved to Canada in 1835 to escape prejudice in the US. Wilson prospered in Toronto where he became an influential real estate dealer and city alderman. Anderson, who was born in 1837, studied medicine at the University of Toronto and graduated in 1861. While working as an intern, or medical licentiate as it was then known, in 1863 he petitioned President Lincoln to be allowed to join the Union Army.

He became one of only eight black surgeons serving, which brought him to the president’s attention and led to their friendship. Dr Abbott, however, refused to serve in the United States Colored Troops—a segregated unit. Instead, he opted to work as a contract surgeon. He explained why in a 1907 letter, writing that he felt equal to operating on any man and that having been born in a land where all men are free, he was not going to submit to government-endorsed segregation. His heroic act had a negative side effect, though: because of his refusal to serve in the segregated regiment, his widow was denied a Civil War Widow’s Pension…

…His son, Wilson R. Abbott, also became a doctor and practised as a lung and heart surgeon in Chicago. But unlike his father, he wasn’t relegated to a segregated black hospital—not because the laws had changed, but because he worked at a white hospital by passing. Anderson Abbott had married a woman from St Catharines, Ontario who was of mixed racial background. His son, Wilson, married a white woman and they and their descendents began to live as whites. Ms Slaney only learned that she was part black in 1975 at age 24 when she was approached by the Ontario Black History Society to ask about her great-great grandfather. No one had ever told her that half her family was black and, as she pointed out that at the time, “I didn’t even know any black people.” Her story and that of her black ancestor is the subject of her book Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line.

Read the entire article here.

Black & White: Search for roots uncovers forgotten family secret

National Post
Toronto, Canada
2012-02-17

Sarah Boesveld, General Assignment Writer

About 20 years ago, David Dossett watched his grandfather politely shut down a woman who called to say she was a relative and that their family had come to Canada from Jamaica and that they were black. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Mr. Dossett said to his granddad, businessman John B. Sampson, who seemed amused by this idea. Their family — Mr. Dossett’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side — had come to Canada from Scotland in 1907 and settled in Toronto. No one disputed that. But while doing some casual family tree sleuthing online a few years ago, Mr. Dossett, an IT manager and father of four, stumbled upon a tree that looked a lot like his. As it turns out, it belonged to the woman who called his grandfather that day — Jenny Sampson from Illinois. And so began Mr. Dossett’s “obsessive” hunt for a family’s past that had remained a secret for over 100 years. In the end, he discovered his family is not Protestant and Scottish, but Jamaican and Jewish. Not everyone is pleased about the discovery — much of which was broadcast last week on an episode of The Generations Project on Brigham Young University TV. Mr. Dossett spoke with the Post’s Sarah Boesveld from his hometown of Kingston, Ont.:

Q Jenny Sampson had been doing research independently before you began to question your family’s roots and identity. What had she found?

A When I was looking at her family tree, it was describing my family, it was describing me. And the tree said the family was Jewish, that they lived on an estate in Jamaica called Gaza. The name “Gaza” sounds very Jewish, so I’m thinking “Wow.” I contacted the person whose name was on the website — it ended up being her husband — and Jenny emailed back, explained the whole thing — that her family had come to Toronto in 1907, that they came as mulatto Hebrews. When it really sank into me that this was true I started thinking “What are the odds that my family is from Jamaica?” The odds turned out to be pretty good…

…Q Why do you think your family kept their heritage a secret even years after they immigrated?

A Deep down inside I think people [in my family] are concerned about having Jewish or black heritage. My mother’s cousin was concerned her father, my great-uncle the decorated war hero [and top-ranked army official] Franklin Augustus Sampson, would be looked down on if it was revealed our family lied about their heritage. But what are they going to do? Yank medals away from people? He’s dead. My grandfather lied about his heritage because he said he was born in Toronto, not Jamaica. A lot of people lied when they enlisted in WWI, lied about their age, lied about their ethnicity. One of my cousins found out many years ago through a blood test that there was either Asian or African blood in her system. When she took the blood test, she went into grandfather’s office, she threw it down on his desk in front of him and said “Explain this.”

Q How did your mother react?

A She doesn’t believe it. She says we’re from Scotland, but doesn’t provide details. She’s going through stages of dementia, but even without that she wouldn’t believe it. Jenny told me her mother is no longer speaking to her. If this had happened maybe 20 years earlier, I could have been a little concerned about it too.

Q Did you feel betrayed at all that your family kept this from you?

A Initially I was, but then I became aware of why this was done. I think what I find most discouraging is the way people were treated when they came to the country, if they weren’t from this white background. We have a past we don’t like to talk about. It’s too bad that Canada wasn’t as open a country as it could have been…

…Q You say there are likely thousands of other families out there who may actually be of black heritage despite their families’ white complexions.

A In the late 1800s there was a mass exodus of Jews from Jamaica. The perception was that they were becoming too powerful, so laws were passed to limit what they could own and how much they could acquire. I bet there are a lot of people out there that aren’t searching because they just don’t know. Maybe they just assume they’re from Scotland. Other than myself going to Queen’s University, no one in my family has a kilt, I don’t like bagpipes, I don’t eat oatmeal, I don’t like haggis. Nothing about me would indicate I’m Scottish except for my appearance — I have reddish hair because my grandfather married an Irish woman. They were very pale and I burn quite easily…

Read the entire article here.

Science of desire: Race and representations of the Haitian revolution in the Atlantic world, 1790-1865

University of Notre Dame
July 2008
489 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3436234
ISBN: 9781124353197

Marlene Leydy Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation reads representations of the Haitian Revolution with and against the popular historical understanding of the events as the result of the influence of enlightenment philosophy or the Declaration of the Rights of Man on Toussaint L’Ouverture; or what I have called a “literacy narrative.” This understanding is most visible in texts such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and reproduces the idea that Toussaint read Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1772) and thus became aware that slavery was contrary to nature and was inspired to lead the revolt. Instead, I show how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of the Revolution were most often mediated through the discourse of scientific debates about racial miscegenation–an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century obsession with what happens when white people produce children with black people–making the Revolution the result of the desire for vengeance on the part of miscegenated figures, whose fathers refused to recognize or defend them, rather than a desire for the ideals of liberty and equality; or what I have called the “mulatto vengeance narrative.”

Chapter one examines the figure of the “tropical temptress” in the anonymously published epistolary romance La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803). Chapter two takes a look at “evil/degenerate mulattoes” in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855) and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826). In chapter three I analyze the trope of the “tragic mulatto/a” in French abolitionist Alphonse de Lamartine’s verse drama Toussaint L’Ouverture (1850); the Louisiana born Victor Séjour’s short story, “The Mulatto” (1837); and Haitian author Eméric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859). Chapters four and five look at the image of the “inspired mulatto” in French novelist Alexandre Dumas’s adventure novel, Georges (1843); black American writer William Wells Brown’s abolitionist speech turned pamphlet, “St. Domingo; its Revolutions and its Patriots” (1854); and the Haitian poet and dramatist Pierre Faubert’s play, Ogé; ou le préjugé de couleur (1841; 1856). By insisting on a discourse of science as a way to understand these representations, I show how these texts contributed to the pervasive after-life of the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, on the one hand, but also created an entire vocabulary of desire with respect to miscegenation, revolution, and slavery, on the other.

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  • Part 1: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 2: Literacy Narratives and the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 3: Notes on Terminology
• Chapter 1: Tropical Temptresses: Desire and Repulsion in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue
  • Part 1: The Color of Virtue
  • Part 2: Colonialism and Despotism
  • Part 3: Desire and Abolition
• Chapter 2: Black Son, White Father: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”
  • Part 1: Victor Hugo’s Parricide
  • Part 2: Melville’s “Usher of the Golden-Rod”
• Chapter 3: Between the Family and the Nation: Parricide and the Tragic Mulatto/a in 19th-century Fictions of the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 1: Séjour’s Oedipal Curse
  • Part 2: Toussaint’s Children
  • Part 3: Bergeaud’s Romantic Vision
• Chapter 4: The “Inspired Mulatto:” Enlightenment and Color Prejudice in the African Diaspoa
  • Part 1: Alexandre Dumas and the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 2: Economics and Civilization
  • Part 3: The “Never-to-be-forgiven course of the mulattoes”
• Chapter 5: “Let Us Be Humane After the Victory:” Pierre Faubert’s New Humanism
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Nharas and Morenas Horras: A Luso-African Model for the Social History of the Spanish Caribbean, c. 1570-1640

Journal of Early Modern History
Volume 14, Issue 1 (2010)
pages 119-150
DOI: 10.1163/138537810X12632734397061

David Wheat, Assistant Professor of History
Michigan State University

Drawing on little-used archival materials held in Seville’s Archive of the Indies and ecclesiastical records from the Cathedral of Havana, this article argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain’s colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.

City’s black founding father

Decator Daily
Decatur, Alabama
2010-04-19

Deangelo McDaniel, Staff Writer

Minister, historian reconstructing life of ex-slave who became successful farmer

First in a two-part series

The Rev. Wylheme Ragland would like to spend one day with Robert Murphy.

So would local historian Peggy Allen Towns.

“Just one day,” Ragland said emphatically. “Just one day.”

Murphy, who died June 8, 1918, is one of Decatur’s black founding fathers, Towns and Ragland proclaim.

The former slave is buried in the Cowan section of Decatur City Cemetery and so are many of the secrets that would reveal the River City’s pre-Civil War and Reconstruction history.

Ragland, a United Methodist pastor at the church where Murphy was a trustee, and Towns are determined to reconstruct his life.

Doing so, they say, would fill significant gaps in Decatur’s history and dispel myths about the role of blacks and what happened here in 1864…

…But to understand and appreciate Murphy’s journey you have to go back to Virginia in 1795 when Mary, a slave, was born to the Kimble family.

Mary was his mother.

Traveling from Virginia through North Carolina, she arrived in the Tennessee Valley with the Kimble clan before 1820.

The slave-owning family purchased land in Trinity that extended to the Tennessee River.

In 1831, Murphy was born to Mary and his mother’s owner.

The Kimble family intermarried with the Murphys, who also owned a plantation on the Tennessee River. At some point before the Civil War, Mary and her son became the property of James Murphy

“Where was your home before and during the Civil War?” a government lawyer asked Murphy in 1906.

“About six miles from Decatur,” Murphy answered. “I belonged to James Murphy.”

As was the case for some mulatto (mixed-race) slaves, Murphy had extraordinary privileges for a slave, especially in 1864 when the Union Army fortified Decatur. He told the government he was able to travel between Decatur and Athens where his wife, Harriett, lived.

“My master did not care where I went so long as I did not go to be a soldier,” Murphy said in 1906…

Read the entire article here.

Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-making in Colonial India

African and Asian Studies
Volume 8, Issue 3 (2009)
pages 268-287
DOI: 10.1163/156921009X458118

Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Assistant Professor of English
Miranda House, University College for Women, University of Delhi

Scholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of Eurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one’s identity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. I focus on two Eurasian women entertainers in the colonial cities of Benares and Calcutta who chose to forget their mixed-race past to fashion successful careers using new identities as tawa’if singers and actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, I shall argue, was possible within the wider context of emergent colonial modernities in colonial India. By choosing micro-level case histories of these celebrity entertainers, I want to argue for including popular culture as an arena of identity-making within histories of migration and gender. To engage with popular culture, I shall extend our perception of historical ‘archive’ to include a varied set of materials such as biographical anecdotes, discographies, songbooks, and address the fields of poetry, music and history. Through this project I hope to rethink ideas of gender, culture and agency within wider debates of migration and identity-making.

Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Gender & History
Volume 15, Issue 3, November 2003
pages 487–506
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00317.x

Rhonda Frederick, Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies Program
Boston College

Mary Seacole’s autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author’s Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth-century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole’s book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically-located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica’s Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole’s rhetorical manoeuvres.

Read or purchase the article here.

Author Explores Racial Mixing In New Historical Novel

VPR News
Vermont Public Radio
2012-03-14

Neal Charnoff, Reporter; Local Host
All Things Considered

We last heard from writer Lisa Alther in 2007, when she spoke with VPR’s Neal Charnoff about her memoir, Kinfolks.

Alther has returned to fiction in a big way with her epic historical novel, Washed In The Blood.

The book is a three-part multi-generational novel that combines romance with a study of Appalachian culture and racial mixing in the south.

Lisa Alther, who shares time between Vermont and her native Tennessee has written seven books.

Listen to the interview (00:07:33) here or download it here.