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Archiver > Melungeon > 2006-01 > 1138196032


From: "Penny Ferguson" <>
Subject: RE: [Melungeon] Re: Who were they
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 08:33:52 -0500
In-Reply-To: <011c01c62191$1547f650$3382b443@curtisnew>


What Joanne sent shows too many incidences of people saying they were
Portuguese, sometimes Spanish, to be ignored. All these people didn't get
together and decide to say that. Did attorneys find a precedent to win
cases? Or were all the witnesses telling it like it was?

Judge Shepherd said:

"About the time of our Revolutionary war, a considerable body of these
people crossed the Atlantic and settled on the coast of South Carolina, near
the North Carolina line, and they lived among the people of Carolina for a
number of years. At length the people of Carolina began to suspect that they
were mulattoes or free Negroes and denied them the privileges usually
accorded to white people. They refused to associate with them on equal terms
and would not allow them to send their children to school with white
children, and would only admit them to join their churches on the footing of
Negroes.
Race Holds Its Own

South Carolina had a law taxing free Negroes so much per capita, and a
determined effort was made to collect this of them. But it was shown in
evidence on the trial of this case that they always successfully resisted
the payment of this tax, as they proved that they were not Negroes. Because
of their treatment, they left South Carolina at an early day and wandered
across the mountains to Hancock county, East Tennessee; in fact, the
majority of the people of that country are "Melungeons,:" or allied to them
in some way. A few families of them drifted away from Hancock into the other
counties of east Tennessee and now and then into the mountainous section of
Middle Tennessee. Some of them live in White, some in Grundy and some in
Franklin county. They seem to prefer living in a rough, mountainous and
sparsely settled country."

http://jgoins.com/lewis_shepherd.htm

Can we connect the families in Hamilton County to the Hancock bunch, as
Shepherd says?. Yes the Goins connect and also go on, some of them, to be
known as the Graysville Melungeons in an adjoining county (to Hamilton.)
Can any of the others? We're working on it.

On Pony Hills site was a small piece of a document out of South Carolina
that Joanne found where people were trying to show they should not pay the
pole tax:

"We therefore being sensibly grieved our present situation, also having
frequently discovered the many distresses occasioned by your act imposing
the pole tax, such as widows with large families, & women scarcely able to
support themselves, being frequently followed & payment extorted by your tax
gatherers--"

When we obtained the whole document, some names are interesting. Do you see
some names of people you consider "mixed" signing the petition in support of
those trying to not pay the tax? So some were being taxed while others were
not? See the whole document:

http://jgoins.com/sc_petition.htm

Penny



-----Original Message-----
From: friend9nine9 [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 4:24 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [Melungeon] Re: Who were they

Well, Joanne, you certainly did more than your share of the homework on this

topic.




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