In October 1705 Virginia passed a law which defined who could hold office. It barred anyone convicted of a crime and also included "any negro, mulatto or Indian" and added, "for the clearing all manner of doubts which hereafter may happen to arise upon the construction of this act, or any other act, who shall be accounted a mulatto, Be it enacted and declared...That the child of an Indian and the child, grandchild, or great grandchild, of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto" [Hening, The Statutes at Large, III:229-235]. This has been taken by some to mean that there was a community of people of mixed white and Indian ancestry in Virginia. However, no such community existed. And I have found no record that the law barring criminals from holding office was ever used in a case relating to race in my reading of every colonial county court record in Virginia.


In October 1785 Virginia passed a law specifically "declaring what persons shall be deemed mulattoes:"every person of whose grandfathers or grandmothers any one is, or shall have been a negro, although all his other progenitors, except that descending from the negro, shall have been white, shall be deemed a mulatto, and so every person who shall have one-fourth or more of negro blood, shall, in like manner, be deemed a mulatto [Hening, The Statutes at Large, XII:184].


But regardless of the legal definition, the word "Mulatto" was most commonly used by the county courts of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware during the colonial and early national period when they prosecuted over one thousand cases in which white women who had children by a slave of African descent were sold with their "Mulatto" children as servants. The very few cases in which a woman had a child by an Indian were prosecuted under the same law as white bastardy for which the penalty was a fine or corporal punishment. 


The existence of mixed Indian and white communities was invented after the Civil War when mixed-race people who had been free since colonial times refused to go to school with the newly freed slaves. The status in society for those free since colonial times was actually reduced by Emancipation. The authorities responded by offering them separate schools. There were a number of such communities throughout Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina that owned land, could vote under the grandfather clause and had no cultural connection to slaves. The new schools were at first called "for old issue negroes," for the Cuban race" in one North Carolina county, and "for a certain class of colored people" in Delaware. Then in 1885 the head of the Democratic Party in Robeson County, North Carolina, came up with the idea to call them Indians. He invented an Indian tribe called "Croatans" and gave the mixed-race group in the county their own schools in exchange for their votes for Jim Crow legislation. On hearing about this new tribe, Anthropologist Frank Speck and others visited these communities in hopes of discovering more lost tribes. The "certain class of colored People" as they referred to themselves in Delaware in 1875 became Nanticoke Indians in the early 1900s after a visit by anthropologists.

Paul

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