Mixed Race Studies

Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work In the Arts, Ahumanities and Social Theories
Number 31 (2000)
98 paragraphs

Stephanie Athey, Associate Professor of English
Lasell College, Newton, Massachusetts

Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells

 This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism—black and white—in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the base of feminist work.

A central tenet of twentieth-century feminisms, the concept of female sovereignty–women’s economic, political, sexual and reproductive autonomy–was first defined, debated and justified through eugenic and imperialist discourse at the turn of the last century. Black and white feminist discourse of the period made the politically enfranchised, legally protected body both the goal and token of full citizenship. However, within the frameworks white women elaborated, the economic, political, sexual, and reproductive autonomy of black and white women were set fundamentally at odds.

… Even when the organized societies of the American eugenics movement came to focus exclusively on “better breeding” as the only lasting means of race improvement, many black and white women’s organizations retained euthenic projects of regenerative reform well into the twentieth century, promoting the eugenic benefits of social hygiene, temperance reform, training in domestic science, and the like. The eugenic interests of both Frances Willard and Victoria Woodhull, for instance, combine race-driven reproductive agendas with other regenerative environmental reforms.

Black men and club women shared these interests as well. African American artists and intellectuals promoted black race purity as a means of conserving “our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals.” In the face of white racial theories, these race conservationists promoted the positive value of blackness. Black nationalists like DuBois, T. Thomas Fortune, Alexander Crummell, stressed different dangers related to race mixing, ranging from loss of black culture and consciousness to a biological “loss of vitality” or “vitiation of race characteristics and tendencies.” Other prominent African Americans supported a eugenics of race mixing or “amalgamation” as a means of genetic improvement. Proponents like Charles Chesnutt or Pauline Hopkins imagined a new American line that blended the strengths of a multiracial heritage but ultimately “conform[ed] closely to the white type.” All these groups reinforced color-based distinctions, and like white eugenists, these African Americans also measured racial fitness in terms of bourgeois class and gender conventions.

Kevin Gaines has argued that though the elite male voice of race conservation publicly defended elite black women against accusations of unchastity, they also frequently reinforced white racist slander, presuming lower-class and rural women’s complicity in systemic sexual abuse. Certainly, racist and sexist theories of black female degeneracy were powerfully resisted by black women’s groups. Yet white supremacist hereditarian and nativist premises were absorbed by black women’s organizations as well. For instance, leaders of the African American, Boston-based Women’s Era Club fought against lynching and racial segregation while maintaining elitist and nativist positions on working class culture and “foreigners,” and an attendant interest in “social hygiene.” As black women refashioned the white codes of bourgeois womanhood into black feminist resistance, their “politics of respectability” was fused to a civilizationist uplift ideology; this for some made it compatible with eugenic discourses of degeneracy. For instance, Nannie Burroughs weighs euthenic against eugenic strategies in her discussion of black poverty in Washington. While the “student of euthenics,” she says, “believes that the shortest cut to health is by creating a clean environment… to do a work that will abide we must first “get the alley’ out of the seventeen thousand Negroes.”…

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A Transnational Temperance Discourse? William Wells Brown, Creole Civilization, and Temperate Manners

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (2011)
Article 16
27 pages

Carole Lynn Stewart, Assistant Professor of English
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

In the nineteenth century, temperance movements provided the occasion for a transnational discourse. These conversations possessed an intensity throughout Britain and the United States. In America temperance often became associated with strongly nationalistic Euro-American forms of identity and internal purity. Nonetheless, African American reformers and abolitionists bound themselves to temperance ideals in forming civil societies that would heal persons and provide communal modes of democratic freedom in the aftermath and recovery from chattel slavery. This paper explores the possibilities of temperance as a transnational discourse by considering its meaning in the life and work of the African American author and activist, William Wells Brown. Brown expressed a “creole civilization” that employed the stylistics of the trickster as a unique mode of restraint that revealed a peculiar power of passivity that was able to claim efficacy over one’s life and community. This meaning of temperance diverges from and dovetails with certain European meanings of civilization that were being forged in the nineteenth century. Brown was in conversation with temperance reformers in America, Britain, and Europe. He imagined the possible meaning of temperance in African, Egyptian, Christian, and Islamic civilizations. He speculated upon the possibility of temperance as a defining characteristic of a transnational civilization and culture that would provide spaces for the expression of democratic freedom. Brown reimagined temperance as a form of corporeal restraint that offered a direct and sacred relation to the land, space, people that appeared in between an ethnic nationalist ethos and the European imperialistic civilization.

And when the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both those revolutionaries, that shall have ended in that victory.

—Abraham Lincoln, “An Address Delivered before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society”

In the mid‐nineteenth century, temperance movements throughout Britain and the United States strove for universalist and international goals of individual sovereignty, restraint, and enlightened freedom. As with many international movements of civil societies emerging from the formation of modern states, they expressed themselves in strongly nationalistic forms of identity. American temperance movements often assumed many of the middle‐class, domestic, and individualistic values associated with the Protestant work ethic and its inner‐worldly asceticism. Temperance in general became prominent in the United States in the period that corresponded with the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, though examples of temperance organizations predate this surge of social movements in the revivalistic atmosphere. American temperance movements were simultaneously concerned with defining the purity of self and establishing a coherent national identity. The notion and practice of temperance has also been a salient orientation of many religions; however, in the colonial period, not even the New England Puritans were temperance activists. On the one hand, the birth of American temperance seemed to initially appear as a result of the nationalist revolutionary ethos, expressing the desire for widespread civil societies: “temperate” behavior suggested a type of rational, restrained, and public character. On the other hand, temperance movements acquired an evangelical character in the context of the affected and enthusiastic social spaces of “awakening.”

The opening epigraph from Abraham Lincoln captures the contiguity between concepts of slavery and intemperance, as well as the exceptionalist ethos prominent in the United States and brought to bear on issues of individual freedom of the “land.” Indeed, many temperance groups were nativist and virulently racist even when temperance was linked to antislavery. Notably, beyond popular goals of moderation, total abstinence, and prohibition, temperance also expressed different promises and civil ideals for many African American abolitionists who conjoined temperance and antislavery. For the former enslaved, temperance seemed to promote and encompass national values like the Protestant work ethic, self‐reliance, and individual restraint, particularly for the poor and those who were striving for social elevation by inculcating the values of the middle class…

…The word “civilization” does not grow out of American democracy and its revolutionary founding, but rather from modern European imperialism and its emerging structures of civil society. The word is particularly Eurocentric and was not in frequent use until the eighteenth century, first in France and then in England. Historian of religions Charles H. Long observed in his paper “Primitive/Civilized: The Locus of a Problem” that “the meaning of this term cannot be understood apart from the geographies and cultures of the New World that are both ‘other’ and empirical.” While an empirical other—recognized negatively as an enslaved person—Brown consistently wrote of such figures as the “tragic mulatta” and the predicament of one‐drop racism in the United States, with positive views of the eventual “amalgamation” of the “races.” Moreover, discussions of Brown’s work commonly allude to the self‐consciously constructed aspects of his identity—from the lack of a fixed identity, his biracial, nearly outwardly “white” identity that made it possible to almost pass, to Brown’s multiple roles in actual life and his writing. These roles begin with his name William as a child on the plantation being changed to Sandford because another white child had the same name, and his eventual renaming as William Wells Brown. The name was “bestowed upon” him from the Quaker, Wells Brown, who helped him escape. From that fluid and uncertain position, he assumed various vocational and activist roles as a steamboat operator, a barber, a banker, a husband and father, a gentleman among the ladies, a radical abolitionist and republican revolutionary, an anglophile, a temperance activist, a consummate man of letters, a historian, a playwright, a novelist, and, in the 1870s, a medical doctor of uncertain qualifications.

This intermixture of roles and identities also disrupted the familiar binary of primitive/civilized. Brown conceived of the inherently Eurocentric concept of civilization in creolized ways—living an intermixture that opposed the opposition of terms. Indeed, rather than necessarily leading to the situation of the empirical other, what some have understood as Brown’s liminal “trickster” identity could be viewed as a restrained orientation characterizing a basic revolutionary structure out of which Brown saw a modern civilization emerging. This notion of civilization not only came to fruition through Brown’s European travels (1849–1854) and direct reflections on the harbingers of “civilization,” but through his postbellum reflections on African civilizations and his pilgrimage for “home” to establish a dignified relation to the land in My Southern Home (1880). In Brown’s travels, temperance remained the locus for a new, creolized civilization, expressing a manner and style of behavior that resembles a sociogenetic and psychogenetic meaning of restraint forged in light of the history of transatlantic slavery and an imagined revolutionary founding, as well as countering the excesses inherent in modern “civilized” exchanged…

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Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire

Oxford University Press
May 2011
320 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199604159; ISBN10: 0199604150

Damon Ieremia Salesa, Associate Professor of History, American Culture, and Asian/Pacific Islander Studies
University of Michigan

The Victorians were fascinated with intersections between different races. Whether in sexual or domestic partnerships, in interracial children, racially diverse communities or societies, these ‘racial crossings’ were a lasting Victorian concern. But in an era of imperial expansion, when slavery was abolished, colonial wars were fought, and Britain itself was reformed, these concerns were more than academic. In both the British empire and imperial Britain, racial crossings shaped what people thought about race, the future, the past, and the conduct and possibilities of empire. Victorian fears of miscegenation and degeneration are well known; this study turns to apparently opposite ideas where racial crossing was seen as a means of improvement, a way of creating new societies, or a mode for furthering the rule of law and the kingdom of Heaven.

Salesa explores how and why the preoccupation with racial crossings came to be so important, so varied, and so widely shared through the writings and experiences of a raft of participants: from Victorian politicians and writers, to philanthropists and scientists, to those at the razor’s edge of empire—from soldiers, missionaries, and settlers, to ‘natives’, ‘half-castes’ and other colonized people. Anchored in the striking history of colonial New Zealand, where the colonial policy of ‘racial amalgamation’ sought to incorporate and intermarry settlers and New Zealand Maori, Racial Crossings examines colonial encounters, working closely with indigenous ideas and experiences, to put Victorian racial practice and thought into sharp, critical, relief.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Crossing Races
• 1. Systematic Colonisation and Racial Amalgamation
• 2. Intimate Encounters in New Zealand Before 1840
• 3. Racial Amalgamation in New Zealand 1840-1850s
• 4. Crossing Races, Encountering Places
• 5. The Tender Way in Race War
• Conclusion: Dwelling in Unity
• Bibliography

Between Race and Nation: The Plains Metis and the Canada-United States Border

University of Wisconsin, Madison
May 2009
419 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3384469
ISBN: 9781109476347

Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation examines how the Plains Métis both experienced and shaped their incorporation into two nation-states: the U.S. and Canada. It explores how, as the northern Plains were pulled into the economic, political, and social orbits of distinct metropolitan centers, the social category of race emerged as a key measure of the boundaries of citizenship within new nation-states. The study encompasses a critical time period when ideas about race and the differences it marked were in flux. Set in a place that straddled national borders, where national territorial claims were weak, and where national borders marked different legal regimes, it explores the question of how and why mixed racial groups in North America formed or failed to form. This study asks, What effect did the new political boundaries and racial hierarchies emerging within these new states have on the potential for the creation of the Métis as a distinct people?

The study shows that, as this borderland world became more closely tied to national economies and polities through the nineteenth century, the socio-legal categories of nationality and race became key faultlines that circumscribed Métis claims to belonging in both countries. Incorporative projects, whether commercial or national, initially allowed Plains Métis communities to flourish. But, as settler-based societies supplanted fur trade societies, social relations changed dramatically. Even in Canada, where distinct legal and conceptual categories existed for people of mixed Indigenous and white ancestry and where fur trade interactions had given rise to separate Métis communities in other parts of the country, recurring questions about nationality and race undercut Plains Métis attempts to secure a more permanent place in the borderlands. The precise meanings of the categories of race and nation—or who could be included within them—remained the subject of intense negotiation among officials, the Métis, and their Indigenous neighbors. Ultimately, the absence of appropriate legal frameworks for the recognition of mixed-race groups and state willingness to guarantee the corporate rights of those groups created significant barriers for the continuation of separate, identifiable Plains Métis borderland communities.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Note on Terminology
• INTRODUCTION: Remapping Plains Metis History from the Borderlands
• CHAPTER ONE: Creating a Metis Borderland, 1800-1840
• CHAPTER TWO: Fur Trade, Free Trade, and the Franchise: The Politics and Economics of Metis Borderland Settlements, 1840-1870
• CHAPTER THREE: Crossing Boundaries: The Plains Metis in Montana, 1869-1878
• CHAPTER FOUR: White, Indian, Metis: Race and Incorporation on the Canadian Prairies, 1869-1879
• CHAPTER FIVE: Dismantling Plains Metis Borderland Settlements, 1879-1885
• CHAPTER SIX: Scrip & Enrollment Commissions and the Shifting Boundaries of Belonging, 1885-1920
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Figures

1. “Heart of a Continent”
2. Northern Plains in the 1860s
3. Metis Wintering Sites, 1840s-1870s
4. Metis Migrations
5. Northern Plains in the 1870s
6. Reduction of Montana Indian Reservations, 1885-95

Purchase the dissertation here.

Breaking the Black-White Binary

Fathom: the source for online learning
Columbia University
2002

Gary Okihiro, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

Where do Asians fall in the American construct of race? According to Gary Okihiro, the director of Columbia University’s Center for Race and Ethnicity, the position of Asians has had to be invented and reinvented over the past two centuries to fit into a binary, black-white national racial definition

Gary Okihiro: In the US, the racial formation is a binary of black and white. In fact, there is actually mainly black. White is frequently not seen as a racial category; it is simply the normative. Blackness is race. And when today we deploy the term “minority,” for example, we mean basically African-Americans. I think binaries are simpleminded ways of categorizing not just people but also things, objects other than oneself. Binaries provide a kind of coherence. They allow for a simple and straightforward explanation of who one is and who one is not. And so this binary of who one is, which is whiteness, and who one is not, which is blackness, in this case affords a kind of self-definition and also a privilege that authorizes one to define the other.

Now, Asians and Latinos and other racialized minorities who do not fit into that black-white binary pose a problem for that kind of racialized thinking. The binary itself, by the way, is very functional. Obviously it is an invention, first of all. Who is white, for example, is an invention, and the category “white” is an elastic one. It includes different peoples at different times; for example, at some point Irish people were not included within the category “white” within the United States. Similarly, the category “black” is an invented category and is also an elastic one…

Read the entire interview here.

Five Myths About Multiracial People in the U.S.

About.com: Race Relations
2011-04-09

Nadra Kareem Nittle

When Barack Obama set his sights on the presidency, newspapers suddenly began devoting a lot more ink to the multiracial identity. Media outlets from Time Magazine and the New York Times to the British-based Guardian and BBC News pondered the significance of Obama’s mixed heritage. His mother was a white Kansan and his father, a black Kenyan. Three years later it remains to be seen just what impact Obama’s biracial makeup has had on race relations, but mixed-race people continue to make news headlines, thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau’s finding that the country’s multiracial population is exploding. But just because mixed-race people are in the spotlight doesn’t mean that the myths about them have vanished. What are the most common misconceptions about multiracial identity? This list both names and dispels them.

Multiracial People Are Novelties

What’s the fastest-growing group of young people? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the answer is multiracial youths. Today, the United States includes more than 4.2 million children identified as multiracial. That’s a jump of nearly 50 percent since the 2000 census. And among the total U.S. population, the amount of people identifying as multiracial spiked by 32 percent, or 9 million. In the face of such groundbreaking statistics, it’s easy to conclude that multiracial people are a new phenomenon now rapidly growing in rank. The truth is, however, that multiracial people have been a part of the country’s fabric for centuries. Consider anthropologist Audrey Smedley’s finding that the first child of mixed Afro-European ancestry was born in the U.S. eons ago—way back in 1620. There’s also the fact that historical figures from Crispus Attucks to Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable to Frederick Douglass were all mixed-race.

A major reason why it appears that the multiracial population has soared is because for years and years, Americans weren’t allowed to identify as more than one race on federal documents such as the census. Specifically, any American with a fraction of African ancestry was deemed black due to the “one-drop rule.” This rule proved particularly beneficial to slave owners, who routinely fathered children with slave women. Their mixed-race offspring would be considered black, not white, which served to increase the highly profitable slave population.

The year 2000 marked the first time in ages that multiracial individuals could identify as such on the census. By that point in time, though, much of the multiracial population had grown accustomed to identifying as just one race. So, it’s uncertain if the number of multiracials is actually soaring or if ten years after they were first permitted to identify as mixed-race, Americans are finally acknowledging their diverse ancestry…

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Y-STR diversity and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples

Genetics and Molecular Biology (Former title: Brazilian Journal of Genetics)
Volume 29, Number 4 (São Paulo  2006)
pages 605-607
DOI: 10.1590/S1415-47572006000400004
ISSN 1415-4757

Luzitano Brandão Ferreira
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Celso Teixeira Mendes-Junior
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Cláudia Emília Vieira Wiezel
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Marcelo Rizzatti Luizon
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Aguinaldo Luiz Simões
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

We investigated 50 Mulatto and 120 White Brazilians for the Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers (DYS19, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392 and DYS393) and found 79 different haplotypes in the White and 35 in the Mulatto sample. Admixture estimates based on allele frequencies showed that the admixture of the white sample was 89% European, 6% African and 5% Amerindian while the Mulatto sample was 93% European and 7% African. Results were consistent with historical records of the directional mating between European males and Amerindian or African females.

The Brazilian population is a result of interethnic crosses of Europeans, Africans and Amerindians, and is one of the most heterogeneous populations in the world. When the first European colonizers arrived (1500 AD), 1-5 million Amerindians already lived in the region that now is known as Brazil (Salzano and Callegari-Jacques, 1988). Before 1820, European colonization was almost exclusively composed of Portuguese while between 1820 and 1975 the great majority of immigrants were from Portugal and Italy, followed by a small number by people from Spain, Germany, Syria and Japan (Carvalho-Silva et al., 2001). Between the 16th and 19th centuries approximately 3.5 million Africans were brought as slaves to Brazil, coming mainly from West, West-Central and Southeast Africa (Curtin, 1969). The colonization of Brazil involved mostly European men, many of whom produced children with Amerindian and African females.

Although the classification of races is wrong from genetic standpoint (Templeton, 1998), Brazilians are classified for census purposes based on color. According to the last Brazilian government census of the 170 million Brazilians, 84 million were males, of which 52% were White, 39% were Brown, 6% were Black and 3% were classified in other categories (IBGE, 2000). Mulatto is the term commonly used in Brazil to designate the offspring result from the union of White and Black people. We used five Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers, recognized as good markers for population studies, to investigate genetic polymorphism and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples.

We investigated 170 healthy, unrelated, individuals seeking paternity investigation at the Ribeirão Preto University Hospital, in the city of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state, Southeastern Brazil. The race of the individuals in the sample was determined based on their biomedical records, 120 individuals being White and 50 Mulatto, from Ribeirão Preto and the surrounding towns…

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Speaking About Southern Unionists… and Mixed-Race People: A Report and an Announcement

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-05-07

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

I just returned from a wonderful visit to Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I spoke generally about Civil War Southern Unionists and specifically about The Free State of Jones as part of that university’s yearly American Studies Lecture Series. In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, this year’s theme was “The American Civil War After 150 Years: An Unfinished War?”

I was impressed by the deep interest in the American Civil War displayed by Leiden students and faculty. I’m happy to report there were no arguments between True Believers in either the noble “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, or the total benevolence of Northern motives and goals in thwarting the South’s secession from the Union. Rather, discussions centered on understanding that many Southerners–white as well as black–opposed secession and the creation of the Confederacy, and that many more turned against the Confederacy as the war dragged on. How common across the South was guerrilla warfare such as that of Jones County, Mississippi?, they wanted to know. Who was Newt Knight? This question led to a discussion about the deep need displayed by Civil War partisans to turn Newt into either a murderous traitor to ”The South,” or, conversely, into an abolitionist whose racial views anticipated the modern Civil Rights Movement…

…There was special interest among the Leiden audience in the mixed-race community that grew out of Newt Knight’s wartime collaboration with Rachel Knight, the former slave of his grandfather, Jackie Knight. Many of the questions centered on issues of racial identity and the historical importance–and limits–of the “one drop rule” in determining such identities. Members of the audience were fascinated by the variety of racial identities assumed by, as well as imposed upon, descendants of Newt Knight, his white wife Serena, and the two mixed-race women–Rachel Knight and her daughter George Ann–by whom he had children.  Historically, they understood, race is a social, political, and legal construction rather than a biologically rational system…

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New Guinea: Racial Identity and Inclusion in the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indian Communities of New York

New York History
Volume 90, Number 3 (Summer 2009)
23 paragraphs

Christopher Geherin

In 1818 the Stockbridge Indians initiated a series of land sales to the state of New York in order to finance the relocation of the tribe further west. By 1830, the Stockbridges had engaged in some thirteen land treaties, ceding more than 20,000 acres to the state. By the treaty of October 1, 1825, the tribe ceded another 1,436 acres of its land, including a distinct tract of 361.88 acres on the southern border of the community known by the name of New Guinea. An oft-cited history asserts that the Stockbridges had granted this tract to a colony of freed slaves who arrived circa 1800 from the Mohawk Valley. Here, New Guinea settlers are identified as including the Baldwin, Cook, Fiddler, Mitop, and Welch families. An earlier source corroborates the identification of John Baldwin as a settler on the New Guinea tract, adding also the name of Nathan Pendleton. Literature pertaining to the tract remains sparse, and the assumption that its inhabitants were former African slaves has persisted. That individuals of African descent were living at New Stockbridge is substantiated. As early as 1796, the Reverends Belknap and Morse noted the presence of free blacks in Stockbridge and Oneida villages. Similarly, Stockbridge missionary John Sergeant mentioned preaching to a small nearby settlement of mulattos. The 1825 Stockbridge treaty itself names no occupant of the four New Guinea lots, nor does the associated surveyor’s field book. Other evidence, however, identifies the inhabitants and reveals that the families of New Guinea possessed a more complex heritage than their characterization as freed slaves would suggest. Furthermore, the histories of the New Guinea settlers offer a valuable perspective on racial identity in the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indian communities—particularly in regard to intermarriage with African-Americans—and on racial integration in western New York in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

In recent years, historians have begun to render a fuller picture of a Native American identity as complex and fluid as any notion of an “American” identity itself, as diverse as eighteenth- and nineteenth- century perceptions of “Indian” were typically static and monolithic. Intermarriage with African-Americans represents an important facet of the evolving nature of that identity. At the same time that such intermarriage increased in native communities after the American Revolution—due to declining tribal populations as well as simple proximity—racial sensibilities were developing in American society; more and more preoccupied with racial distinctions, Americans began to categorize people according to heritable and fixed “racial” traits. This emerging ideology had implications for native communities. After the Revolution, “models of Indian citizenship were becoming more English,” and a number of New England tribes moved to restrict acceptance of Africans, largely because of diminishing land and a paucity of eligible men. Intermarriage with Africans became an even more divisive tribal issue in the nineteenth century, influenced in part by the growing insistence in larger society that to be “Indian” required an absence of racial intermixture. Any African descent came to be viewed as eclipsing Indian ancestry. Native Americans with discernible African heritage (and often without) were categorized as black, negro, mulatto, or colored, a practice demonstrated by white and tribal authorities. Both the Brothertown and Stockbridge tribes assimilated this standard, with the Stockbridges in particular manifesting the mutable character of racial consciousness. In 1824 the Stockbridge tribal council formally adopted William Gardner, identifying him as Narragansett. But in 1826 the legislature of New York defined Gardner as “coloured,” and by the 1870s the tribe sought to exclude the Gardners by characterizing the family as “negro.” (This was not the case for Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians of European ancestry.) Despite studies enriching our understanding of the diversity of Native American identity, examinations of the acculturated, multiracial, and multitribal communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown remain lacking.

Formerly from Massachusetts, the Stockbridges—or Muhheakunnuck as they refer to themselves—are a Mohican tribe that resettled in New York in the mid-1780s. The Stockbridge Mohicans originated as an amalgamation of diverse Algonquian groups living between the Hudson and Housatonic River Valleys. The Stockbridge tribe itself came into existence in 1734 as a Protestant mission community resulting from negotiations between Housatonic-Mohican villages and the Massachusetts provincial authorities. In that year, missionary John Sergeant, Sr., began work in the town of Stockbridge at the invitation of the tribe. In a progressive measure for the era, the Stockbridges shared with their English neighbors the governance of their township. Stockbridge warriors fought with the British during with French and Indian War, but, along with the Oneidas, sided with the American colonists in the Revolution. Despite this history and acculturation, however, the Stockbridges continued to face increasing pressures from white settlers in their Massachusetts home.

In 1773 seven other tribes from New York and southern New England formulated a plan to move west together to land among the Six Nations of Iroquois. Though also Christianized and acculturated, the so-called New England tribes had not been integrated into surrounding white society, and found themselves struggling to survive culturally, economically, and literally after decades of poverty, depopulation (due to disease and participation in colonial wars), and dispossession of their lands. They had come to believe that their vision of a Christian Indian community practicing European habits of agriculture could only be realized apart from whites. They also embraced a calling to Christianize and civilize their Six Nations comrades, and had undertaken missionary work among the Oneidas in the 1760s. Implementing their plan to emigrate, representatives from the seven tribes lamented to the Six Nations that the situation in New England had become so dire as to preclude their remaining there. In 1774 the Oneidas responded by designating a tract southeast of Oneida Lake in Madison and Oneida Counties for use by these various tribes, later to be known collectively as the Brothertown Indians.

The current study concerns the integration of people of African descent in the transplanted, multitribal communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown—in particular on a specific tract in New Stockbridge—and does not explore this issue among the Oneidas who welcomed them. Beyond the distinct history of tribal relocation and amalgamation, it is also worth noting significant cultural differences between the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians and their Oneida benefactors. Unlike the Christian communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown, potent and enduring factions within the Oneida tribe continued to resist the very acceptance of aspects of European culture, including agriculture and Christianity. Still, the Oneidas, too, constituted a multi-ethnic, multiracial community. (This despite disparaging the Brotherton Delawares who joined the Stockbridges in 1802 as “those newcomers from New Jersey, who consist of Indians, mulattoes and some white women connected with Indians.”) In 1796 Belknap and Morse reported that “among the Oneidas there is scarcely an individual who is not descended on one side from Indians of other nations, or from English, Scots, Irish, French, German, Dutch and some few, from Africans.” By welcoming the beleaguered New England tribes among them, the Oneidas sought to bolster their standing with their fellow Iroquois and deflect the State of New York’s acquisitive land efforts. It was also no coincidence that the land they offered stood on the eastern border of their territory, thus serving as a buffer against encroaching white settlement…

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Gouldtown: A Very Remarkable Settlement of Ancient Date

J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia (Digitized by Google)
1913
237 pages

William Steward, A.M.

Rev. Theophilus G. Stweard, D.D., Chaplain, U.S. Army, Retired

Studies of some sturdy examples of the simple live, toghether with sketches of early colonial history of Cumberland county and Southern New Jersey and some early genealogical records.

CHAPTER I: Gouldtown; its tradition; its people; its general History.

In Judge Lucius Q. C. Elmer’s history of Cumberland County, New Jersey, written in 1865, occurs this statement:

“Gouldtown—partly in the Northern part of Fairfield, and partly in Bridgeton Townships—although never more than a settlement of mulattoes, principally bearing the names of Gould and Pierce, scattered over a considerable territory, is of quite ancient date. The tradition is that they are descendants of Fenwick.”

Judge Elmer, a distinguished Supreme Court Jurist of New Jersey, was the son of General Ebenezer Elmer, of New Jersey, who was an officer in the Revolutionary Army, first as an ensign, and shortly after as lieutenant in a company, and later, being a physician, serving as a surgeon; he served, in all, during the war of the Revolution, a period of seven years and eight months. In 1814, he commanded a brigade of militia called out for the defence of Philadelphia against the British, and was ever after that known as General Elmer. Judge Elmer was born soon after the close of the Revolution in 1798, and had ample opportunity and ability for research in his native county. He died in 1888.

Much interest has always been taken in the community of Gouldtown by the neighboring communities, and this was always of a friendly character; in early times because of its traditional descent, and later because of the ethnological features recognizable.

General Elmer and his son were accustomed, on Sunday afternoons to meet in a schoolhouse and catechize the children of Gouldtown, in the neighborhood, in the years following the Revolution. These children and youth would not all be mulattoes (the term “mulattoes” is used in this book in its general significance, applying to the people of color of mixed blood) however, for in the community were pure white families—as for instance the Woodruff’s, the Luptons, the Fullers, the Seeleys, and the Whites, and others; traces of whom are to be found only in the farms they left, which were known by their names as the “Fuller Fields,” the “hite Fields,” the “Jay Fields “; the names remaining a century or more after their owners had vanished. Only one of these names has been perpetuated in a village, and that of recent date and several miles distant from the original location. This is Woodruffs, about three or four miles northward from Gouldtown. It is a wealthy farming settlement on the line of the Central Railroad, and has a Methodist Church and a schoolhouse and post-office.

Gouldtown is comprised in two sections—following the two family names of Gould and Pierce, which were always known by their separate names, Gouldtown and Piercetown, but both known comprehensively as Gouldtown. It is remarkable in that it has perpetuated its family name in its locality for nearly two hundred years; also because it is a community of mulattoes who, contrary to the pet theory of some astute ethnological scientists, have perpetuated themselves generation after generation for almost two centuries; remarkable, too, for the known longevity of its people, who do not begin to grow old, as is often said, until they come to three-score years, and a number of whom have reached the century mark, one of whom (Ebenezer Pierce Bishop) is still living, at this writing, who is one hundred and six years old, and one of whom (Mrs. Lydia Gould Sheppard) was buried in the year nineteen hundred and eleven, at the age of one hundred and two, in the Gouldtown Cemetery, and a number of others who are still living at ages between seventy and ninety-five years…

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