Mixed Race Studies

Letters from a Planter’s Daughter: Understanding Freedom and Independence in the Life of Susanna Townsend (1853-1869)

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
Volume 12  (Spring 2012)
pages 145-174

R. Isabela Morales

Wealthy Alabama cotton planter Samuel Townsend had already fathered eight children by the time Susanna Townsend was born in 1853—her mother, like all the mothers of her half-brothers and sisters, was an enslaved African-American woman on one of Samuel Townsend’s large plantations. Samuel’s fourth daughter and youngest child, Susanna was a vulnerable young girl born into the turmoil and turbulence surrounding the probation and execution of Samuel Townsend’s will when, to the shock of his white relatives, Samuel left the bulk of his $200,000 estate to his nine enslaved children. Susanna, seven years old when she and her extended family were emancipated, may have remembered little of the courtroom drama that ended in 1860, when the Probate Court of Madison County declared Samuel’s will valid. But the nominally favorable courtroom ruling did not mark the end of Susanna’s liminal existence. Until her death, Susanna Townsend lived in a borderland of race, class, and family status. A reconstruction and examination of a life (1853-1869) that straddled the Civil War provides insight into meanings of freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency in the post-emancipation moment—as well as revealing interactions of gender, race, and power in the creation of the archive.

Mr Cabaniss i write to you in haste, Susanna began in her letter of 4 June 1868. There was a man in Cincinnati, the nicest young man i ever did see, who wished to have her for a wife, and if Cabaniss could simply send her some money for a dress and shoes (common enough apparel, for she was very plain in dressing), and if he would pay their train fare to Kansas, Susanna could marry the man within the month. She did not want a large wedding—no church service at all, in fact—but would take her vows in the mayor’s office and be off to her new life as fast and far as the train cars could take her. If Alabama lawyer S.D. Cabaniss, executor of her father’s estate, would only write her by the tenth of June, Susanna would be ready, for her fiancé was in a hury to move. He was a gentleman, fifteen-year-old Susanna Townsend assured her attorney, and also, she added almost as an afterthought, he is a white man.

Susanna’s wishes were modest: a simple gown for a simple wedding ceremony, a husband who says he will [do] his best for me as long as he lives, a small sum of money out of her inheritance to visit her extended family in Leavenworth County and buy a little house in Kansas if there is no more than three rooms and an acre of grown [ground]. The attorney Cabaniss owed Susanna twelve thousand dollars out of her father Samuel Townsend’s property—Samuel, a wealthy cotton planter from Madison County, Alabama, had bequeathed his $200,000 estate to Susanna, her eight elder siblings, and their mothers in 1856. On paper, at least, Susanna was a privileged young woman with every opportunity. In reality, her future was far less certain.

Susanna Townsend was a former slave living and working in Reconstruction-era urban Ohio, the daughter of the white planter Samuel and the fourth of his seven enslaved African-American mistresses. The Civil War had drastically devalued the Townsend property, and neither Susanna nor any of her half-siblings would ever receive a quarter, if that, of their inheritance in the following years. She was mixed-race—perhaps, as a Freedman’s Bureau agent later said of her half-sister Milcha, “the woman is nearly white”—but whether or not her appearance could fool Cincinnati society, her father’s attorney knew she was the daughter of an enslaved woman. If S.D. Cabaniss replied to Susanna’s  June letter, the archive holds no record; he certainly never sent money by the tenth of that month. In five months, Susanna would give birth in her half-brother Wesley’s home outside of the city—a hint at her urgency to marry and leave the state. In another six, Susanna would be dead.

In her sixteen years, Susanna straddled slavery and freedom, the antebellum South and the post-war Northwest, a life of in-between’s on the borderlands of race and society. She had an uncertain place within the extended Townsend family: as the youngest child with no living parents and no full siblings, she could neither support herself independently nor depend on her extended family supporting her indefinitely. She had an uncertain inheritance: when the Civil War broke out, the new Confederate government prohibited Cabaniss, living in Alabama, from sending any money into the Union. For Susanna, this ban meant serious financial insecurity. Finally, she had an uncertain racial status within the society at large. Because she was a “white-looking” woman of some promised financial means, Susanna upset categories of a social hierarchy that equated African ancestry with powerlessness and inferiority. Despite these potential advantages, as a fifteen-year-old mixed-race girl, Susanna remained subject to the machinations of the senior white lawyer. Occupying these in-between spaces meant a life of inherent instability—poignantly expressed in her letter of 4 June, in which she explains her young man’s offer of marriage and promise of security: He says I have been going around long enough without anyone to take care of me.” The liminality of her circumstances drew Susanna Townsend to this seemingly desperate point in the summer of 1868, when vistas of possibility for her future could be opened or closed by a single stroke of her lawyer’s pen.

In fiction, all tragedy has meaning. But what meaning can be drawn from the life and death of a teenage girl like Susanna Townsend? Her time was short, a fleeting sixteen years easy to overlook in the contemporary convulsions of war and the national drama of Reconstruction. Her biography is not so extraordinary; she was neither the only child of sex across the color line or the only mixed-race woman who would attempt to “pass” across that line. Nine letters in her own words exist, both on fragile paper in a university manuscript library and in high-quality pixels online, but still she is elusive. Susanna’s letters reveal only pieces of her mind—the pieces she deliberately crafted for the eyes of her father’s attorney. What was Susanna truly thinking, hoping, and wishing for when she wrote to Cabaniss on 4 June 1868? What is at stake when we speculate? And for us of the twenty-first century, does it even matter? The significance of Susanna Townsend’s story lies in these very questions: this micro history is as much about the problems and impossibilities of reconstructing Susanna’s life as it is about Susanna herself. This story fits into the existing historiography in that it is a gendered analysis of her life in urban Ohio during Reconstruction. Its specificities, however, raise new questions about freedom in this particular socio-historical context. Her letters and words, evasive as they may be, are a lens through which to draw inferences about how the daughter and former slave of an Alabama cotton planter understood her emancipation, pursued independence and self-sufficiency, and exercised her freedom on the borderlands of society…

Read the entire article here.

Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue

Palgrave Macmillan
June 2006
408 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-7140-1, ISBN10: 1-4039-7140-4
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-230-10837-0, ISBN10: 0-230-10837-7

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Arlington

Winner of the Society for French Historical Studies 2007 Gilbert Chinard Prize!

In 1804 French Saint-Domingue became the independent nation of Haiti after the only successful slave uprising in world history. When the Haitian Revolution broke out, the colony was home to the largest and wealthiest free population of African descent in the New World. Before Haiti explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members both supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they created their own New World identity in the years from 1760 to 1804.

Table of Contents

• The Development of Creole Society on the Colonial Frontier
• Race and Class in Creole Society: Saint-Domingue in the 1760s
• Freedom, Slavery, and the French Colonial State
• Reform and Revolt after the Seven Years’ War
• Citizenship and Racism in the New Republic Sphere
• The Rising Economic Power of Free People of Color in the 1780s
• Proving Free Colored Virtue
• Free People of Color in the Southern Peninsula and the Origins of the Haitain Revolution
• Revolution and Republicanism in Aquin Parish

Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line

Backintyme Publishing
April 2010
258 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780939479320

Edited by

Scott Withrow

Borderlands of “Racial” Identity

Some Americans pretend that a watertight line separates the “races.” But most know that millions of mixed-heritage families crossed from one “race” to another over the past four centuries. Every essay in this collection tells such a tale. Each speaks with a different style and to different interests. But taken together, the seven articles paint a portrait, unsurpassed in the literature, of migrations, challenges, and triumphs over “racial” obstacles.

Stacy Webb tells of families of mixed ancestry who pioneered westward paths from the Carolinas into the colonial wilderness, paths now known as Cumberland Road, Natchez Trace, Three-Chopped Way, and others. They migrated, not in search of wealth or exploration, but to escape the injustice of America’s hardening “racial” barrier.

Govinda Sanyal’s astonishing research uses mtDNA markers to trace a single female lineage that winds its way through prehistoric Yemen, North Africa, Moorish Spain, the Sephardic diaspora, colonial Mexico, and finally escapes the Inquisition by assimilating into a Native American tribe, ending up in South Carolina. He fleshes out the DNA thread with documented genealogy, so we get to know their names, their lives, their struggles.

Cyndie Goins Hoelscher focuses on a specific family that scattered from the Carolinas. One branch fled to Texas, becoming friends with Sam Houston and participating in the founding of that state. Other bands fought in the war of 1812, or migrated to Florida or the Gulf coast. Nowadays, Goins descendants can be found in nearly every state and are of nearly every “race.”

Scott Withrow (the collection’s editor) concentrates on the saga of one individual of mixed ancestry. Joseph Willis was born into a community of color in South Carolina. He migrated to Louisiana, was accepted as a White man, founded one of the first churches in the area, and became one of the region’s best-loved and most fondly remembered Christian ministers.

S. Pony Hill recounts the historic struggles of South Carolina’s Cheraw tribe, in a reprint of Chapter 5 of his book, Strangers in Their Own Land.

Marvin Jones tells the history of the “Winton Triangle,” a section of North Carolina populated by successful families of mixed ancestry from colonial times until the mid-20th century. They fought for the Union, founded schools, built businesses, and thrived through adversity until the civil rights movement of 1955-65 ended legal segregation.

K. Paul Johnson traces the history of North Carolina’s antebellum Quakers. The once-strong community dissolved as it grew morally opposed to slavery. Those who stayed true to their faith migrated north. Those who remained slaveowners left the church. The worst stress was the Nat Turner event. Its aftermath helped turn the previously permeable color line into the harsh endogamous barrier that exists today.

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Scott Withrow
• They Were Other: Free Persons of Color, Restrictive Laws and Migration Patterns by Stacy R. Webb
• The Amorgarickakan Lineage of Sarah Junco by Govinda Sanyal
• Judging the Moore County Goings / Goyens / Goins Family 1790-1884 by Cyndie Goins Hoelscher
• Joseph Willis: Carolinian and Free Person of Color by Scott Withrow
• The Leading Edge of Edges: The Tri-racial People of the Winton Triangle by Marvin T. Jones
• The Cheraws of Sumter County, South Carolina by S. Pony Hill
• Dismal Swamp Quakers on the Color Line by K. Paul Johnson
• Meet The Authors

Professor Ira Berlin: Slavery

U.S. History: Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium
Meet the Historians
1999-04-12

Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor of History
University of Maryland

These renowned historians and experts chatted with students online. Read the transcripts.

Ira Berlin is a leading historian of southern and African-American life. He is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Most recently he has published a book “Many Thousands Gone,” which is a history of African-American slavery in mainland North America during the first two centuries of European and African settlement. He is also the editor of “Remembering,” a book-and-tape set, which incorporates poignant voices of people who had been slaves. The recordings of interviews with former slaves were conducted by the Federal Writers Project in the early 1930s. The interviewers included such luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston and John Lomax, who talked to the ex-slaves about their relationships with their former owners and their relationships with other slaves. In addition, Professor Berlin has written or edited numerous other books on African-American history including, “Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South,” “Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era” and “Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War.”

US: It’s a little after 10 in the morning on April 12, 1999, in College Park, Maryland. We are here with Professor Ira Berlin. 

Ques: How long was the average time interval between capture in Africa and arrival in the plantation?

Berlin: There is no meaningful average. The Atlantic slave trade lasted over 4 centuries. And, of course, connected very different places in Africa and America. But throughout the trade’s long history, the Atlantic crossing rarely took less than a few weeks. And, sometimes, it took many months. If viewed from the point of capture, travel from the interior of Africa to a plantation in the New World could be well over a year.

Ques: What percentage of Southerners were slaveholders?

Berlin: In 1860, the South had a population of 12-1/2 million. Of those, 4 milliion were slaves. The vast majority of the population was white. Of the whites, only 400,000 owned slaves. If the average slave-holding family contained 5 individuals, then only 2 of the 8 million whites held slaves or were members of families that held slaves.

xena: How about Northern percentages?

Berlin: First, slavery in the North was largely a 17th and 18th century phenomenon. The largest concentration of slaves in parts of the Middle Colonies: New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island never reached above 20% of the population. The vast majority of Northerners did not own slaves, either…

…xena: How were mixed-raced children looked upon?

Berlin: By law, children followed the status of their mothers. So that a descendant of a free man (white or black) and a slave woman would be a slave. Meaning many people of equal white or European descent were slaves and they were treated as slaves by their parents and other white people. However, throughout the period of slavery, the black community always accepted people of mixed descent a s part of their own community and incorporated them into African-American society…

Read the entire transcript here.

Vogue Italia and Hoop Earrings

Havana Barbie’s thought on the arts
2011-08-23

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

I have always loved to wear hoop earrings. In fact, they are my earrings of choice. Big and silver, that’s how I like them. Imagine my surprise and shock when I saw earrings I have always called hoop earrings called “Slave Earrings” by Italian Vogue. Really? Slave earrings? Vogue wants to link an ornamental accessory, a mark of indulgent aestheticism to a historically denigrated body that did not have the choice or power to choose how to look, let alone what to do? Even more appalling was the text (which has since been removed so as “not to offend” and are now called “ethnic earrings” … sigh):
 
“Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops. If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.”
 
I want to focus on the phrase “the decorative traditions of the women of colour.” Woman of colour is a charged label, especially when connected to the legacy of slavery, miscegenation, and sexual peccadilloes not just in the US South, but in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean as well. Historically, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century woman of colour meant creole, métisse, passe-blanc, mulatta, or mulattresse, i.e., the mixed race woman who was black… but not quite. With her many names and pigments, the woman of colour and “her decorative traditions” in the southern United States is often problematically romanticized through the stories of the quadroon balls of New Orleans where wealthy white men attended in search of sexual relationships. These women of colour negotiated liaisons called plaçage which were economically beneficial for themselves and their extended, often matrilineal family. Many of these women of colour were free and some even owned slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Jefferson’s Women

The Humanist: A Magazine of Critical Inquiry and Social Concern
March/April 2012

Cleo Fellers Kocol

Thomas Jefferson was a private man who kept his personal life to himself, and yet today 18,000 of his letters exist in the public forum. In them, this farmer, architect, inventor, philosopher, politician, attorney, and “man of letters”—learned in all disciplines, a true visionary—expounded upon everything but his love life. This we know of Jefferson: he was a deist, a moralist, and a revolutionary. He wrote the Declaration of Independence and, in a letter to James Madison from Paris, suggested adding a Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. He held positions of prominence within the newly formed United States (secretary of state, vice president, and president). He also wrote the book, Notes on the State of Virginia, and edited the New Testament into a volume he considered more believable, leaving out all the miracles and keeping what he considered the moral teachings of Jesus. He was proudest of founding the University of Virginia. And like all of the Founding Fathers, he’s become an icon, above the hoi polloi. But historians have had to connect the dots to give us a real picture of Jefferson the man—one who has become the model, not only of our intellectual and democratic ideals, but, inadvertently, of the often subtle racism that exists today.

In 1810, he listed his daily schedule in a letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko, the engineer from Poland responsible for the Colonies’ fortifications, “My mornings are devoted to correspondence, from breakfast to dinner I am in my shops, my garden, or on horseback among my farms. From dinner to dark I give to society and recreation with my neighbors and friends, and from candlelight to early bedtime, I read.” He got a bit closer to confiding more personal information to Dr. Vine Utley, of Lyme, Connecticut. In 1819 he wrote: “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an ailment but as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” But despite this sharing of his personal life, he never wrote of the two women who were closest to him during his life—his wife and his slave mistress.

What manner of a man was the undisclosed Thomas Jefferson? Of course we know he was born just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the frontier in those days. His parents were aristocrats; his mother, Jane, was a Randolph, and his father, Peter, was a planter and surveyor whose map of Virginia was universally used in the colonial era. The elder Jefferson had an extensive library that included William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift among others. Peter Jefferson died when Thomas was fourteen. During his formative years Thomas was tutored by the extremely conservative Reverend James Maury, an Anglican clergyman. Jefferson’s ideas about morality and religion would later jell in a way his tutor would not have applauded…

…Jefferson’s daughter, Patsy, had already been in Paris with him, and he now sent for his daughter Polly, asking that she be accompanied by a woman servant. Instead, one of the Hemings children, fourteen-year-old Sally, was sent. We don’t know when Jefferson and Sally became intimate, but we do know that she was pregnant when they returned to Monticello.

Before a 1998 DNA analysis showed a match between the Jefferson male line and a Hemings descendant, scholars, historians, and the public denied that a romantic relationship between Jefferson and his slave could have happened. As Joseph Ellis notes in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1998), Jefferson had become not only an icon but a myth, larger than life. This thinking temporarily blinded people to reality. Today, however, we can look to other events and speculate how his relationship with Sally Hemings may have played a role. His beloved daughter, Patsy, for example, married just two months after returning home from Paris. There is no indication that she and her husband-to-be, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., had been eager correspondents while she was away, and there is no indication that they had been anything more than friendly cousins before she went to France. Could she have been afraid of losing her number-one spot with her father? Or can we attribute her actions to shock and anger upon learning of her father’s affair with a slave she’d known her entire life?

Such a reaction certainly would have echoed the hypocritical and confusing feelings the majority of Americans held about slavery during those colonial and post-revolutionary years. Abigail Adams, for example, was a devout abolitionist but, after seeing Othello, wrote that she was quite undone seeing a play about a marriage between a black man and a white woman. She felt horror and disgust every time she saw the Moor touch the gentle Desdemona. Abigail was no different than most of her peers. When she referred to Hemings as “the girl” rather than using her name, it was hardly seen as strange.

At Monticello, Sally Hemings was known as “dashing Sally” and was said to have a pleasing disposition. Beautiful and extremely light-skinned, she bore a probable resemblance to her late half-sister, Martha, Jefferson’s beloved wife. Hemings could also read and write and had learned to speak French while in Paris…

…Today, when African-American representatives of the government are spit upon and verbally assaulted, or when more subtle or more blatant acts erupt, the legacy of the past cannot be dismissed, and our most revered historical figures must bear some blame. We could say that Jefferson and the others reflected the social and economic mores of the times, and in a way that’s true. But their thinking had serious limitations and lasting implications. We see this thinking now, not in blatant violence like the lynching of black people or the violent reactions of some whites during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but in less easily discernible ways, like the slow pace we took in eliminating “separate but equal,” in getting rid of poll taxes, or integrating neighborhoods. Today blacks are still paid less than whites in many instances. Discrimination in housing, schooling, and voting still takes place. As a society, we routinely deplore racial violence and say we are not prejudiced, but racism still exists. For instance, U.S. presidential candidates routinely speak at universities, schools, and public venues that discriminate against African Americans. Also, too often religion and bigotry go hand in hand. And when the main objective of a political party is to “make Barack Obama a one-term president,” few people protest, even those who support him. So if we’re being honest, we must contend that otherwise admirable historical figures like Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Monroe, and Abigail Adams contributed to the legacy of racism.

It is now accepted as fact by most historians that Sally Hemings bore six of Jefferson’s children, four of whom survived to adulthood—Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston, all named by Jefferson after his best friends. (Was James Madison amused, annoyed, or was it a habit friends indulged in even as they indulged their libidos?) Jefferson’s belief in racial superiority is evident in his theory about the offspring of mixed-race couples, including his own. He felt that an infusion of white blood could make a person half black, and another infusion would make their offspring one-fourth black. Sally Hemings was one-fourth black. Offspring of a so-called quadroon and a white man would, in Jefferson’s thinking, make them equal to whites. And yet his children by Sally were never treated as completely equal. The contradictions were rife…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White

The Penguin Press
2011-02-17
416 pages
6.14 x 9.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Winner of the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear.

In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed.

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Three American families’ stories…

The Gibsons
The Gibsons were among the first free people of color in seventeenth-century Virginia, most of whom were free because their mothers were English and by law slavery followed the status of the mother. In the early l700s, as Virginia’s laws made it increasingly difficult for free blacks to own property and earn a living, the Gibsons left the colony for the southern frontier. When the Gibsons reached South Carolina in the 1730s, the colonial assembly worried.that they had come to organize a slave revolt. But after personally interviewing the family, the colonial governor granted them hundreds of acres of land in a Welsh and Scots-Irish community. After one generation they were neither black nor white-they were planters. In the nineteenth century, they rose to the heights of the Southern aristocracy. They sent their sons to Yale and had vast holdings of land and slaves near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Lexington, Kentucky, and Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Gibsons were rebel officers, powerful opponents of Reconstruction, and leaders of the New South.’ One became a United States Senator from Louisiana.

The Spencers
The Spencers’ story begins in the Appalachian Mountains. In an area that had more slaves and more free blacks than anywhere else in eastern Kentucky-largely because of a bustling salt mining industry there in the early 1800s-two free men of color began having children with a pair of white sisters who had recently moved from South Carolina. Shortly before one man, George Freeman, was prosecuted for interracial sex, the other man, Jordan Spencer-possibly Freeman’s brother or son-moved with his family one hundred miles deeper into the mountains. Even though he was visibly dark-skinned, his new community in Johnson County, Kentucky, decided that he could be white. His family hovered on the line between black and white for the rest of the century, farming and logging in a mountain hollow before heading into the coal mines.

The Walls
The Walls trace their roots to a wealthy plantation owner in Rockingham, North Carolina. Stephen Wall never married, but he had children with three of his slaves, In the 1830s and 1 840s, he freed his children and sent them to Ohio to be raised by radical Quaker abolitionists. He bought land for them, generously supported their education at places like Oberlin College, and willed them a lot of money. No one knows why. He kept their mothers in bondage. The children became ardent abolitionists and served in the Union Army and Freedmen’s Bureau. After the War, several moved to Washington, D.C., where they fought for civil rights and women’s rights and raised their families to expect nothing less than equality. But as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, their children disappeared into the white world.

For A Century, The First Underground Railroad Ran Slaves South To Florida (PHOTOS)

The Huffington Post
2012-03-18

Bruce Smith, Associated Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. — While most Americans are familiar with the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape north before the Civil War, the first clandestine path to freedom ran for more than a century in the opposite direction.

Stories of that lesser-known “railroad” will be shared June 20-24 at the National Underground Railroad Conference in St. Augustine, Fla. The network of sympathizers gave refuge to those fleeing their masters, including many American Indians who helped slaves escape to what was then the Spanish territory of Florida. That lasted from shortly after the founding of Carolina Colony in 1670 to after the American Revolution.

They escaped not only to the South but to Mexico, the Caribbean and the American West.

And the “railroad” helps to explain at least in part why the lasting culture of slave descendants – known as Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Florida and Georgia – exists along the northeastern Florida coast.

“It’s a fascinating story and most people in America are stuck – they are either stuck on 1964 and the Civil Rights Act or they are stuck on the Civil War,” said Derek Hankerson, who is a Gullah descendant and a small business owner in St. Augustine, Fla. “We have been hankering to share these stories.”…

…Slaves likely started fleeing toward Florida when South Carolina was established in 1670, said Jane Landers, a Vanderbilt University historian who has researched the subject extensively. The first mention of escaped slaves in Spanish records was in 1687 when eight slaves, including a nursing baby, showed up in St. Augustine.

Spain refused to return them and instead gave them religious sanctuary, and that policy was formalized in 1693. The only condition is that those seeking sanctuary convert to Catholicism.

“It was a total shift in the geopolitics of the Caribbean and after that anyone who leaves a Protestant area to request sanctuary gets it,” Landers said.

Read the entire article here.

Spotlight on Jon Veilie: A Man on a Thirteen Year Mission

The Modern American
Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
Article 8
pages 22-23

Lydia Edwards

It all started one month after he passed the bar. Sylvia Davis, a black Seminole, came to Jon for help. She had been to many lawyers already. She told Jon Velie her story about how her 13 year old son was denied clothing benefits because he is black. “It hit me as obviously wrong. So I naively took the case on a contingency basis not knowing there would be no real payment. I naively thought I could inform the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the tribe they missed this.” What Jon really stepped into was something like the uphill civil rights battles of the 1960s. “It was straight up racism in conversations with the involved parties including the tribe and BIA; the ‘N word’ was thrown all around.” For his entire legal career, Jon Velie has sought to bring justice to Ms. Davis and other black Seminoles as well as black Cherokees.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Jon Velie graduated from University of Oklahoma Law School in 1993. As an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley he was a Native American studies major. During law school he was a research assistant for Rennard Stickland, a renown Indian Law scholar who is now Dean of Oregon Law School. Before attending U.C. Berkeley, Jon had already developed an affinity for Native American issues. As a child he grew up in the Absentee Shawnee tribal community. Many of his friends were from the tribe and he was exposed to sacred activities otherwise unseen by outsiders. His father, Alan Velie, taught the first course in contemporary Indian studies.

Alan Velie was a Shakespearean professor at the Oklahoma University in the 1970s in the midst of the American Indian rights movement when he was approached by Native American students and agreed to teach a course on American Indian literature. At the time, all the courses taught about Native Americans were concentrated on the past and more in the anthropological sense. He now travels the world talking about Native American literature and has written seven books on the subject.

WHO ARE THE BLACK INDIANS?

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek) have had long traditions of African membership and enslavement. The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had a form of African slavery that closely mirrored that of Southern white plantation owners. The Seminole tribe, however, has had a unique relationship with its African members. The Seminole tribe and its African members (commonly referred to as Freedmen Freedmen) have coexisted together since the 16th Century. Many slaves of white plantation owners ran away to live with the Seminole tribe. Both Seminole Wars were fought over the number of runaway slaves who lived with the tribe. African members could intermarry and take on positions of leadership. Many served as translators between the Spanish, the tribe, and southern white plantation owners.

During the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes fought with the Confederacy against the Union. After the war, all of the tribes signed treaties with the United States government in order to maintain their sovereignty and reinstitute an autonomous government. In all of their treaties, there were clauses ordering the tribes to free their slaves and treat them and their descendants equally. Over the years, Congress and the courts have enforced the treaties to assure equal rights for the black Indians. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Congress set up the Dawes Commission to record all the members of respective Indian Tribes. Their records are called the Dawes Rolls. The commission recorded black Indians on separate rolls for all of the tribes. Cherokees and Seminoles that were ¾ white were recorded on a “full blood” list while their black members were enrolled on the Freedmen list. The quantity of Indian blood of each black Indian was not recorded by the Dawes Commission…

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Catholic records of slave baptisms in colonial New Orleans go online

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2011-02-01

Bruce Nolan, Beat Reporter

On Sunday, the 6th of May, 1798, an enslaved New Orleans woman named only Manon, owned by Mr. LeBlanc, presented her 2-year-old child, Antoine Joseph, at St. Louis Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas to be baptized at the hands of Father Luis Quintanilla, a Capuchin friar there.

Manon was probably accompanied by her owner, as was the custom of the day, according to Emilie Leumas, an expert on the era and the keeper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ sacramental records.

In racially complex, laissez-faire New Orleans, where categories of race were faithfully noted then sometimes dismissed, Quintanilla noted the pertinent details. Manon was a mulatto, or mixed-race woman, and the baby’s father was officially unrecognized but apparently white, as the baby is described with the Spanish term “quarteroon,” which means three-fourths white.

The record of that event has always been preserved in the rich archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. But it has never been easily accessible.

But Tuesday, the 1798 baptism of Antoine Joseph, with thousands of similar baptismal records from colonial New Orleans, were posted on the Internet as a new tool for genealogists everywhere.

“Now people can sit in their slippers at 11 o’clock at night and read away,” said Leumas, the archdiocese’s archivist…

..In Antoine Joseph’s case, the godparents were there: Marie Joseph and Antonio, neither with a family name. Still attentive to the complex categories of race and color, Quintanilla noted that the baby’s godfather was “metis”—another mixed-race classification, perhaps suggesting American Indian blood, according to Leumas.

By the end of 2012, the archdiocese hopes to go both forward and backward in time, posting all of its sacramental records—baptisms, marriages, funerals and other life cycle events—from the founding of the city in 1718 to the date of Louisiana’s admittance to the union in 1812, Leumas said…

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