Chat
|
Daily Search
|
My GenForum
|
Community Standards
|
Terms of Service
|
|
|
Passing on Tim's reply to Kevin's post. Re: "Melungeon," the word.
Curtis, you may post this if you wish in response to Kevin's response this morning to the other post from me you posted. I don't want to get into a long palaver however.
Kevin, thanks but I don't want to take credit for other folks' research. I didn't originate the malungu-melongo Kimbundu-Portuguese origin theory for the word Melungeon. Furthermore, I included the Afro Portuguese definition almost by default, and in no way is it necessary to the Angola-Jamestown-Gowen events, nor is it a "pillar" of my scenario of DeMarce's tri-racial theory.
No one has proved the origin of the word "Melungeon." However, there is plenty of evidence to prove the White Lion intercepted a Portuguese ship sailing from Angola to Mexico and stole a cargo of Angolans she delivered to Jamestown in 1619, two of which said Angolans became the parents of Mihil Gowen. In the following decades, WIC records (Thornton, Heywood) reveal that other pirates preying upon Spanish Portuguese ships similarly also brought Angolans to Jamestown.
My intent was to just color in the basic outlines sketched by the original Gowen board, and not to draw new pictures. Orr cited the Afro-Portuguese word "melongo", and it seems reasonable that Bantu Africans exiting Portuguese Angola on a Portuguese ship bound for the Americas would be familiar with the Afro-Portuguese word for Bantu Africans sailing from Portuguese Angola to the Americas on Portuguese ships at the time. Prof. John Thornton of Harvard, Cambridge and America's foremost scholar on the African trade to America, thought so too. The word melongo was in widespread use to specifically describe Bantu Africans coming west in Portuguese ships...at that time.
At best you can argue that, yes, the Bantu of the Portuguese slaver San Juan Bautista described themselves, like all other Bantu on Portuguese ships described themselves at that very same time, as "melongo", but that they later dropped "melongo" after they reached Jamestown, and that "melongo" has only a coincidental connection to a later similar sounding but unrelated French word meaning "Melungeon."
You can argue it, but you can't prove it.
To your other point, I don't see how the word "Melungeon" would be used as a color-related insult in the early 19th century. It's not "immediately" derogatory, if you catch my meaning. If its just on the basis that it meant "mixed", then it's a strangely mild insult to use when there's the commonly used word "mulatto" available, not to mention more viciously insulting words for mixed people. And then you have the same problem that you have for "melongo", if you are fair, in devising a chronological origin scenario. When in America was the word "melungeon" first used in the definition you describe, but in a non-Melungeon context? What was the proximity of its first documented American use to, say, 1813 Wise County, Virginia? Is there another "200 year gap"?
You could be right, Kevin. In fact, you may have the weight of evidence on your side. The ethnic origins of the Melungeons is pretty obvious. But the word Melungeon is something else. It can come from any origin that someone mistakenly believed explained the people he was describing, and still not change the dna. So I'm not going to fight to the death over the origin of the word. It is in no way nor has it ever been, in my mind anyway, a "pillar."
One can't easily say that the word Melungeon was in "widespread" use in Richmond and Maryland, and possibly elsewhere, in a strictly political or any other sense. Why, unless he was being intentionally deceitful, wasn't the pre-Civil War 1849 Littell's writer familiar with the word before meeting Collins, if it was already in common use after 1835? He thought he'd discovered a lost colony. Given the early 1810 usage (ref Mooney) of "Lungeons", and 1813 usage (ref Stony Creek) of Melungeons two + decades even "before" the 1835 state constitution conflicts,(ref Dromgoole et al), not to mention three + decades before the advanced states' rights turmoil of the 1840-1850s, (ref. Brownlow), a transition in definition evidently occurred but must be documented. So I'm not swayed by a Copperhead-like origin for the word Melungeon. You'd have to document a "political" use to an earlier, possibly Revolution-era, political schism, one that had possibly faded from memory by 1813. Until then, its conjecture like everything else people say about the word. Because it was not a universally known term in the 1840s, I'm sticking to the belief that there were indeed Richmond Melungeon families, just like there were East Tennessee Melungeon families before the Civil War. I can't see the widespread political usage you are describing. Gov. Wise and others seemed to go out of the way to remark on the word's obscurity, altho they gave self-serving political definitions to it.
Hypothetically speaking, if, instead of the Afro-Portuguese root, I adhered to the French Melungeon origin definition, I might look instead to Manakin Town and the French Huguenots for the French origin of Melungeon. Maybe even Charleston where mulattos did in fact successfully "pass" as Huguenots. One scenario might be that the Africans sailed to Jamestown on the White Lion and later ships, some of them became free and intermarried with non-Africans including some frontier Huguenots whose mixed descendants their in-laws then described as "melungeon." Or, perhaps Africans sailed to Jamestown on the White Lion and later ships, called themselves "melongo" in the first couple of generations, and the word "melongo" and the mixed ethnicity of the fpc suggested to French speakers the similar sounding word "melungeons." Two things above all are immediately distinct at first glance, "mysterious" and "ethnicity", but the Portuguese word points to "mysterious" while the French word points to "ethnicity."
More research is needed and more old records will assuredly come to light. The changing and shaded meanings of the word Melungeon in just the 19th century could be the topic of a complete book. At this point it seems to me likely that sometime before 1810 the word "melungeon" originally meant foreigner (ref Jacob Mooney and earlier) and sometime later, after 1835 and possibly as late as the 1840s or 1850s, it took on the extra meaning of "ethnically mixed" (ref Brownlow) though it remained regionally obscure. I suggest that the original definition of the word Melungeon was "foreigner" and that the idea of "ethnically mixed" was after attached to it. Otherwise, why not just call them "mulattos" or "mestizos"? As support, I suggest the case of the fpc William Goyens who came to Texas, if I remember without checking notes, sometime in the 1830s. Goyens sought to marry a white woman, if you recall. Her brothers back east heard that he was a "Negro" and came to Texas to kill him. Upon arriving, they were led to believe that he was in fact not a Negro but a "Melungeon", and they let the wedding go on. Why would they do that if they understood Melungeon as a political or ethnic insult?
The Goyen case again seems to argue that the earliest use of the word Melungeon meant "stranger or foreigner" and that only sometime "after" the 1835 conventions and the stripping of fpc rights, it came to also mean "ethnically mixed." Of course, they were already mixed before that but I would argue that under the old colonial pre-Revolution mixed blood law, ethnicity was not the chief determining characteristic. Only AFTER 1835 did the ethnic mixture become relevent. In this view, what changed the meaning of Melungeon from "foreigner" to "mixed race," was the American Revolution and the subsequent state constitutions that reduced fpc rights, followed by the states' rights conflicts just before the Civil War.
I believe that the monumentous events of 1835 and the pre-Civil War state debates of the 1840s and 1850s, gave the word "Melungeon" a semi-legal ethnic meaning in addition to its previous colonial meaning of "mysterious, foreign, or stranger".
Furthermore, how did folks from Georgia and the Carolinas (Goyens and his in-laws) even know the word Melungeon to use it in Texas around the time of the Alamo? Especially since a reporter, of all people, in 1849 Virginia had never heard of Melungeons? This suggests to me that Melungeons before 1810 were self-identifying communities scattered in widespread pockets from Virginia to the Deep South, as indeed we find in the genealogies. Goyens identified himself as a Melungeon. The idea of "self-identifying Melungeons" best fits the Kimbundu Portuguese "foreigner" origin of the word Melungeon dating back to colonial times. The word was both obscure, yet scattered across half the country. This suggests the Melungeons at some point were carrying the name with them of their own free will before the Civil War. How did people in Arkansas know what a Melungeon was in 1810 if a Virgina reporter didn't know wha t it meant in 1849? The Lungeons likely identified themselves. Otherwise, we would be faced with unlikely repeated coincidental scenarios of people in Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Texas, and Arkansas oddly initiating the same supposedly French exonym name to scattered people with much the same surnames in all these places. On the otherhand, why would Melungeons want to identify themselves with a French word meaning "mixed raced" as they moved about the country? That doesn't make sense.
It's an intriguing mystery but one which people can discuss without hostility.
The definition of the word is NOT, however, a "pillar" of my so-called theory of Melungeon origins. The people were a mystery to their neighbors who may or may not have called them Melungeons for ANY fool reason and it still wouldn't effect their dna, or the WIC records documenting the origin of the Africans brought to Jamestown throughout much of the 17th century. The only way the word could shake any pillars is if you found that there were Africans in Scotland before 1607 who were called "Melungeons" (or even McMelungeons for that matter}.
Regards,
Tim Hashaw
Notify Administrator about this message?
Followups:
|
| http://genforum.genealogy.com/melungeon/messages/25738.html | ||
 |
Link to GenForum Add Forum |
|