Mississippi, Marshall - free white mulattos

• Title	Mississippi, Marshall - free white mulattos
  Short Title	Mississippi, Marshall - free white mulattos
  Publisher	«i»AfriGeneas Slave Research Forum «/i» (http://www.afrigeneas.com), posting "Re: Free White Mulattoes in 1860", posted by Tom Blake, 30 July 2004, in which Mr. Blake posts an article, "The Marshall Mulattoes: An Index to Free Individuals with Non-Standard Racial Designations on the Federal Census for Marshall County, Mississippi, 1860" (Beau Bowen, 2002).
  Source ID	S443
  Text	The Marshall Mulattoes: An Index to Free Individuals with Non-Standard Racial Designations on the Federal Census for Marshall County, Mississippi, 1860 Copyright 2002 by Beau Bowen Permission is hereby granted for publication of this article, complete and unaltered, on the AfriGeneas web site, for the personal use of the viewers. Duplication, redistribution, and commercial use is prohibited without the prior written consent of the copyright holder. All rights reserved. Beau Bowen may be contacted at: P O Box 1118, Elkton, MD, 21922-1118. He is the author of The Southern McClatchey Family: The Descendants of John McClatchey in America (manuscript). He discovered the Marshall Mulattoes while researching his own family, the McClatcheys, who are among those listed with non-standard racial designations on the census. Introduction. While researching my own family history I was startled to discover my ancestors listed on the 1860 federal census for Marshall County, Mississippi, listed as 'free white mulattoes' -- a non-standard racial designation for the times. In examining the census I discovered a large number of other individuals enumerated this way as well, all in all about a thousand individuals had this non-standard racial designation applied to them, out of a total of approximately thirty thousand free residents in Marshall County. Through other sources I knew my family had Native American connections and after careful evaluation I concluded the enumerator was attempting to account for people of mixed red and white ancestry on a form that presumed everyone was black or white. The problem. Family researchers debated with me what the designations meant and what they said about our families. Theory can be debated until we are blue in the face, but the answers -- if anything as provocative as 'race' has an answer -- will be found in the lives of the people. However, the 1860 census for Marshall County, Missisippi, was not available in transcript or photocopy from any source I contacted. In order to study these people it is necessary to start by preparing a list of the people so designated. Marshall county of 1860 took in parts of what is now Tate and Desoto counties, and enumerated over thirty thousand individuals, of which only about one thousand have non-standard racial designations, mostly located in southwestern Marshall County (1860 boundary). The listed individuals were located in a rough square with its northeastern point at Holly Springs and its southwestern point near Tyro. (Tyro is now part of Tate County but was in Marshall County at the time of the enumeration.) Only individuals with non-standard designations are included in my index; this means that many of the families listed below are incomplete because members of the household who were not designated as mulatto were not included. No free blacks were encountered in this area, the handful of individuals apparently counted as 'colored' were among the individuals with non-standard racial designations and are annotated in the list below. Census Background. The United States Federal Census for 1860 provided worksheets to the enumerator. At the top of the worksheet was a place to fill in the post office for the area being enumerated, as well as the date of the enumeration and the name of the enumerator. The body of the worksheet featured lines which were numbered and subdivided into various columns for dwelling place, family, name, age, gender, color, occupation, value of real estate, value of personal assets, birth place, and notes about schooling, marriages, deaf, blind, insane, convicts, etc. The column for 'Color' was subdivided into three columns headed 'White,''Black,' and 'Mulatto.'At the bottom of the page were subtotals for number of colored men, white men, colored women, and white women, with totals for coloreds and whites. There was no designation available for other kinds of persons, Chinese and American Indian were not added until the 1870 census. All persons listed on the Population Schedule were free people, slaves were separately enumerated on the Slave Schedule. Transcription process. I had a rental copy of the microfilm to work from at the Family History Center near my home, that facility did not have the ability to make copies from microfilm. Since I was copying the record by hand onto a yellow legal pad I resorted to the expediency of listing names only, along with post office box, enumerator's name, and page on which they occurred. This omits a significant amount of family information as many families had members who were not listed as mulatto along with family members that were so listed. A small number of families were chaotically rendered on the original with different family members being listed with no color, mulatto, white, or colored. Any person who was listed as mulatto, regardless of age, is included in this index. Some are children, and some are employees or spouses, as well as the usual heads of households. Particulars of the census. Only one enumerator in Marshall County listed a significant number of individuals with non-standard racial designations: William Clark. He indicated race by making a hash mark in the appropriate subcolumn for color. He omitted hash marks for individuals that were presumably white, only blacks and mulattoes received a marking. His handwriting is neat and legible, the hash marks very clear. There were only one or two markings that were in doubt as to whether they indicated a black or mulatto person, these are annotated. Most names were perfectly legible, but a small number were unclear to the transcriber and are so marked. Clark did not always indicate the post office at the top of the page, it is assumed therefore that they are continuations of the previous pages. A few pages were annotated by the enumerator as 'continued,' but this does not account for all pages lacking a post office designation. Names are listed in the order they occurred on the microfilm, they are not alphabetized. In the case where the same name appears more than once it is because that is how it appeared on the original. In some cases an age check indicates two different individuals with the same name, but others are less clear. In an unusual addition, Clark wrote 'agent for' with several entries. It is not clear if the agents are separate individuals with the same or similar names, or if the same agent was listed multiple times in connection with various individuals; it may be that Clark was attempting to indicate the information about the enumerated persons was given by a third party rather than the individual themselves. This is an important detail, federal censuses are of very uneven quality and errors abound, either because of ignorance, carelessness, or bias on the part of the enumerator, or due to mistakes or withholding of information by the people being enumerated. When enumerators could not get information from the family itself, they often contacted neighbors or other people. The addition of 'agent' notations support the idea that Clark was a meticulous and careful enumerator, and that on the whole his information can be taken as a conscientious effort at recording the truth as he knew it. Even so, all information contained in the census must be corroborated and expanded by information from other sources. The 'free white mulatto' listing, while provocative, only serves to point to a topic that needs to be researched in detail, and is not by any means the final word on the identities and lives of the people so listed. The free white mulatto designation. As indicated above, three colors were officially listed on the 1860 census: white, black, and mulatto. Under normal circumstances, the blacks and mulattoes should have been totaled together as 'coloreds,' in modern times these free coloreds are referred to as 'free people of color.' However, the vast majority of persons listed as 'mulatto' by Clark were totaled with the whites. For example, page 6 of the census listed thirty-nine persons, nineteen were listed as mulatto and twenty were listed with no color and hence presumed white. At the bottom of the page the totals were thirty-nine whites and zero coloreds. This article therefore refers to such people as 'free white mulattoes.' Historical issues of race. It seems plausible that in Mississippi on the eve of the Civil War, persons who could have passed for white would have done so, that is to say, they would not have allowed themselves to be listed as anything other than 'white' if they could have avoided it. That these people were listed as free white mulattoes seems to indicate that they were accepted as 'white' by their communities but were known to have non-white ancestry. It seems equally plausible that if a person were known to have African ancestry he most likely would have been totalled with the 'coloreds' regardless of his place in society. Clark's free white mulatto designation appears to be the best fit for families who were mixed European and Native American ancestry. Historical issues of class. The role of class was explicitly stated by some writers in the antebellum period as affecting racial designations; 'gentlemen' with known non-white ancestry were considered 'white' while 'tradesmen' with the same degree of non-white ancestry were considered 'colored.' It may be therefore that the high economic standing of some of these families protected them from a 'colored' designation, that in other words their money was more important than their ancestry. Nonetheless, some wealthy families were listed as 'colored.' Page 24 lists W. A. Jefferies, planter, with a personal estate valued in six figures -- one of the wealthiest individuals enumerated in Marshall County -- yet he is enumerated as a 'colored mulatto,' one of only a handful of people to be so designated. Theories. Though it is outside the scope of this work, my research shows that some of the families enumerated below had significant Native American connections. Though I have contacted only a few family researchers so far I have turned up additional accounts of (unverified) Native American ancestry for other families on this list as well. These preliminary investigations do not even begin to do justice to the large number of people and the complex issues of ancestry and race involved; the reader is cautioned against making assumptions about the ethnic identity of any person on the list without careful research and analysis. Yet verifying even a small number of individuals on the list below as having Native American ancestry would be highly significant, Mississippi in 1860 returned a census listing only two individuals in the entire state as 'Indian.' If subsequent research bears out the theory of Native ancestry for any of these families then the same research tools may be applied elsewhere to discover 'hidden Indians,' people whose Native ancestry has been erased by subsequent record-keepers.