4. “Small Races” of the Middle Atlantic
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4. “SMALL RACES” OF THE MIDDLE ATLANTIC Isolated communities throughout the region have preserved their Native heritage through centuries, usually without official encouragement or recognition. The preservation planning regime racial identity. Racial designations appear in the requires that each property must be considered record only on an ad hoc basis, determined for in terms of its larger cultural and historical each occasion. The Constitution required a context. An obvious context for the subject decennial census, that would identify whites, property is the post-contact history of Native slaves, free persons of color, including everyone American populations in Delaware, not except “Indians not taxed.” Indians not taxed previously treated by the planning process. were those who lived on reservations set aside by While creation of a new planning context is not the U. S. government or by the colonies before the appropriate in a site-specific study, some Revolution. information is necessary in order to place the Taxed Indians were enumerated in the site in its own proper historical milieu. census together with African Americans under the In this chapter we will review available classification of “free persons of color.” Some information on Native American communities were classified as white. Because there were no in the Middle Atlantic region, with emphasis reservations in Delaware, where untaxed Indians on the Delaware communities. In the next would reside, an Indian could be either black or chapter we will examine the history of the Kent white, but not “red.” Many were called County community and its relationship to the “mulattoes,” an ambigous term that encompassed residents of Bloomsbury. any nonwhite person, regardless of ancestry. The 1800 census of Delaware (the 1790 returns having At least two tenants on the Bloomsbury been lost) did not list any person identified as an property, John Sisco and Thomas Conselor, are Indian. known to have been members of a local Native American remnant population often misnamed For thirty years before the Civil War, “moors” or “high yellows,” historically increasingly strict laws controlled the actions of centered around the town of Cheswold in Little blacks and mulattoes, who were considered likely Creek and Duck Creek hundreds of Kent to foment rebellion against slaveowners. Because County. Two of the European-American Delaware was a slave state, these restrictions were owners, Patrick Conner and Francis Denney, relatively onerous. A few well-off Indians were identified with these people through close challenged the restrictions in court, but failed. business and personal relationships. Another After the Civil War, Indian people were family on the property, the Loatmans, also are able to obtain limited separation of their schools related to the local Indian remnant community. from the black school system, but official From the end of the seventeenth recognition of individuals as Indians escaped century, until the last decades of the nineteenth them until the twentieth century. century, no Indians were legally identified in Indian people clearly have been living in Kent County government records. Census, tax, the area since contact, but their ethnic identity has and school records contain no record of any been systematically erased or concealed from the race other than black or white during nearly public record for centuries. It is generally not two centuries (Heite and Heite 1985). possible to find individuals who were Before the United States census of unequivocally classified as Indians in the public 1790, there was no legal requirement in record after about 1700. On the other hand, it America to classify everyone by race, and there is possible to identify was no generally-accepted standard for community of people who have maintained a number of families belong to another organization tradition of Indian descent. These communities in southern Delaware. have maintained internal cohesion through Official silence concerning race during three centuries of European domination and the eighteenth century has complicated the official denial of thier Indian identities. The historian’s task of making a racial or cultural two Indian communities in Delaware and a identification of these people during a critical third community centered around Bridgeton period in their history, and the time when this site New Jersey maintained strong social ties was occupied. The concept of “race” presents throughout the nineteenth and twentieth some problems to the historian. If “race” is centuries. Today about 1,500 families belong to defined by genealogy, or pure descent from the a regional Nanticoke-Lenape organization in core population, very few people can be classified Kent County and across the river in New Jersey as belonging to a single race. (Nanticoke-Lenape 1996: 9). An unknown Figure 15 Detail of the 1719 Senex Maryland map This Maryland map varies little from the Augustine Herman map issued a generation earlier. The project area (arrow) is shown as virtually unknown territory, inaccurately located on a shrunken Delaware Bay shore. Even the heads of Delaware rivers were claimed by Maryland. Indian tribes were still identified on the New Jersey side of Delaware Bay near the project area. Native-descended populations have intermarried across Delaware Bay throughout recorded history. 47 If, on the other hand, a “race” is studies are fragmentary and others remain defined as a self-defined community who unpublished (such as Segal 1976), leaving the intermarry freely and share cultural traditions, field wide open for future researchers. then a person’s “race” is easy to define, regardless of individual genetic makeup. Genealogical and anthropological scholarship has shed light on the isolates’ origins, For purposes of census and enforcement of but researchers generally recognize that much discriminatory laws, race in America has been basic data must yet be gathered before the subject defined by yet a third standard, which is the can be adequately understood (DeMarce subjective opinion of the person keeping 1993:39). Before the advent of modern DNA records. In the case of Indians living in a studies, there were several attempts to quantify in society where everyone was either black or genetic terms the racial makeup of the isolate white, subjective racial assignments varied groups (Pollizer 1972) by looking at gross through the spectrum. perceived racial characteristics. While the house at Bloomsbury was As details have fallen together, it has standing, the economic, legal, and social status become apparent that the isolate groups are, in of the local Native American community was fact, remnant Native American communities that slipping from a largely undifferentiated white have remained outside the official system of or “not black” designation to a status legally recognized tribes. indistinguishable from free Negroes. Partly as a consequence of this change in designation, REMOVALS native people became poorer, less literate, and almost invisible. Almost immediately after the beginning This isolation and alienation had its of colonialization, the European and Native beneficial effects, however. During nearly three communities recognized the need to keep space centuries, Indian remnant communities between themselves. managed to retain their separate identities, Among the first laws issued by the some social structure, and the oral heritage of a English under the Duke of York was a law native ancestry. forbidding freedom of worship for Native people (Linn 1879:33): ISOLATE GROUPS = INDIANS? “No Indian whatsoever shall at any time be Racially ambiguous communities, Suffered to Powaw or performe outward sometimes collectively called isolates or, in worship to the Devil in any Towne within this former times, tri-racial isolates, are found Government.” throughout the United States, but they are best The same law, however, required settlers to help known in the upper South. These groups fence Indians’ corn fields against wandering typically are self-defined and are recognized by cattle, and to compensate Indian farmers for crop the larger communities that surround them. damage from settlers’ cattle. Strong liquor was Sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and not to be given to Indians, except for medicinal genealogists have studied these “small races” purposes. from several complementary points of view. Figure 16 The first published overall survey of (Facing Page) isolate groups in the upper South was a This map of Virginia and Maryland was published sociological study by Brewton Berry, Almost just before the Winnesocum uprising of 1742. White (Berry 1963). The most recent scholarly Indian towns are shown in the area now study is a genealogical survey by an historian recognized as part of Sussex County. Note the (DeMarce 1992, 1993). Published scholarly wavy line representing the disputed boundary of accounts of individual communities are Pennsylvania and a shrunken Delaware with Maryland. appearing regularly (Cissna 1986). Some 48 49 By about 1718, some of the Southern tribal labels attached to groups today are not Maryland Piscataway had moved north and necessarily the ones their ancestors carried. The established Conoy Town on the Susquehanna in Sussex County Nanticoke community, for example, Pennsylvania, near the present Bainbridge. To may in fact contain significant numbers of this location came other Piscataway from the Choptanks, Assateagues and Gingaskins Weslager present Washington metropolitan