Malungins ~ Malungens ~ Malungeons ~
Melungens ~ Melungeons ~ Molungeons ~ etc.
Up until the past five years or so
it has been thought by many Melungeon researchers the word was local to
the Newman's Ridge group, but as many old books, journals,
magazines, newspapers, etc., are being brought online this 'old school
of thought' must be
reevaluated. The evidence is overwhleming this word was used far
and wide, long before Will Allen Dromgoole visited Newman's Ridge. The
author of this article mentions the Melungians of Virginia and North
Carolina - how could he have known of these groups and not of the
Newman's Ridge group in Tennessee?
The Literary digest
Volume 44
1912
A
DEFENSE OF THE MOUNTAINEER
HASTY CHARACTERIZATION
of the mountain people of Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas,
and adjacent States as a lawless and murdering lot is denounced as
unjust by people who have known them and their ways for many years. We
might just as well judge all New Yorkers by the "car-barn gang" and the
"gas-house gang," as to judge' all the mountaineers of the Blue Ridge
and the Alle- ghanies by the men who shot the judge and court officers
at Hillsville, say the papers of that region, in reply to Northern
critics. Some of the great men of our Republic have come from these
sturdy and God-fearing people of the rock-ribbed mountain slopes, and,
tho we may disapprove of then: irregular methods of distilling and
their custom of taking the law into their own hands, we are reminded
that they have their own justification for these things, which we may
at least recognize as resembling the ideas of our own forefathers not
many generations back. And it is declared unfair to blame them as'a
class for what a few of the most reckless ones do, for every region has
its ruffians. Many of them are descendants of the best English pioneer
stock, and it is their isolation from advancing civilization that has
made them what they are, we are told by the New York Evening Post anent
the Hillsville tragedy. True, the ancestors of some of them were the
riffraff of pioneer days, but there are many now who are the kindred of
Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Most of these mountain people
started for the West years ago, and, instead of going on with the more
persistent pioneers, they stopt in the Blue Ridge and Appalachians.
Says The Post:
"Those who are
unfamiliar with the region may need to fix in their minds something of
its geography. The mountains are interpenetrated by fertile valleys.
The great valley of Virginia itself, the richest agricultural region in
the State, lies between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, and there
are many lesser valleys. These choicer lands were settled by people who
are not mountaineers at all. Some of the oldest and most aristocratic
towns in Virginia, towns like Abingdon, in Washington County, for
instance, towns which have furnished the State with governors and
senators and judges, stand in the very midst of the mountain region.
These towns never did and do not now —remote as they are from larger
centers—share the life of the mountaineers living among the ' knobs'
just a few miles away. They are members of civilization in good
standing, and have been so from the beginning, possessing rather more
than the American average of education and prosperity and the social
amenities, tho commerce with their primitive neighbors may have tinged
their ideas upon questions like the morality of 'moonshining.'
"As for the mountain
people whose origin has been suggested, they lived apart. They stood
still while their immediate neighbors and those who remained in the
lower country to the east of them, and those who had pushed on to the
west of them, moved on and became the nation that we know. Once only
they were drawn into the main stream of the life of that nation. That
was when the nation was torn by the Civil War. The war came to the
mountaineers and the mountaineers fought. They fought on both sides.
But most of them in the Virginias, in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Carolina
fought on the Union side. They had little in common with the
slaveholders, and of State pride they had little, also—since most of
them knew of the State but vaguely- They were good fighting men. on
whichever side they fought."
"Pent up in their mountains,"
out of touch with their fellow countrymen, the mountaineers live to-day
much as they did a generation ago. Even now, they are "only to a very
small extent reached by schools." But they are, in general, a religious
people, and for the most part moral and honest. Altho:
"There were, and are,
low and brutish types among them. There are families of degenerates,
'clay-eaters' whose miserable state is variously charged to
underfeeding and to inbreeding and original bad blood. There are traces
among them of the less formal morals of that seventeenth century to
which they properly belong, as there is plenty of that same century's
indifference to the practise of sleeping, many and mingled, in a hut,
of its lack of squeamishness about dirt, and a number of the niceties
associated with life in cities. There are scattered among them, too,
queer tribes of
mixt-breed creatures like the gipsy-like 'Melungians' (the spelling is
uncertain), who are to be found in the region of Virginia and North
Carolina adjoining this very county of Carroll in which the
outrage occurred. This particular tribe, for instance, is reputed to
have Portuguese blood, and it has morals of its own. Incidentally, it
is utterly looked down upon by the mountaineers. The point it is
important to make is that the average mountaineer is, according to his
lights, a very fair sample of decent manhood and womanhood."
As we have been told
by other reliable authorities, these people do not think they are
violating any moral law when they make whisky of the corn they raise on
their poor little farms. The mountaineer lives out of touch with
Federal laws, and thinks that internal-revenue officers ought to stay
away and not bother him in his efforts to earn a living. Moreover, we
read on:
"Such as he was, the
end of the war found him following his immemorial custom of making a
part of his poor corn-crop into whisky. If one mountaineer in a dozen
miles of rocky and remote and difficult country had a pot-still and a
copper worm, he enabled a score of mountaineers besides himself to get
more profit out of those little patches of corn. If the corn were made
into meal, it might serve with the help of a little pork to give him
and his family a slender daily ration. If part of the corn were made
into whisky, one could sell it to buy more and better food and clothing
as well. ... As soon as things settled down after the war, the
activities of the Government toward the collecting of the whisky-tax
and the hunting down of illicit stills were redoubled. The
revenue-officer began to pervade the mountains, 'ruining trade,' and
destroying the mountaineer's property in the way of liquor and pots and
copper-coils, besides arresting the mountaineer and locking him up
in a jail, or even killing him when he attempted to defend his home and
his factory.
"Observe that the
mountaineer had no consciousness of wrongdoing, no conviction of sin.
He had made whisky of his corn. He had as much right to do that,
according to his lights, as he had to make meal of it or hominy of it.
The Government meant nothing to him. He owed it nothing. The law gave
him no protection. He did not need it. He protected himself when he had
an enemy. Otherwise, there was no protecting to do. The revenue-officer
was to him a mere invader—he was no better than a pirate, and fit to be
shot on sight as so much human vermin. The situation was precisely—from
the mountaineer's point of view—as if, say, a United States ship-of-war
should drop into the harbor of Hamilton and send an officer and armed
men ashore to confiscate the Bermudians' crop of spring onions. The
Bermudian would, naturally, resist, and afterward he would not feel
kindly toward the visitors who, by force, destroyed or carried off the
crop and perhaps burned his house and killed some of its occupants.
"It is the collection
of the Federal internal revenue which has created, in the minds of a
primitive community which had always been a law unto itself, an
attitude of hostility to the agents of a law coming from outside and
made by and for those outsiders. A warlike people by nature—tho they
are gentle enough except when aroused by what they regard as aggression
—they have made war on the revenue-officers and the United States
marshals for decades. They have slain and been slain, and when their
friends and brothers and fathers and sons have been carried off to jail
in the civilized settlements in the valleys, they have come down and
rescued them, as their ancestors might have rescued clansmen of theirs
held in a robber baron's hold."
Samuel Cecil Graham, a lawyer
of Tazewell, Va., writes that the three million people of the Southern
mountain districts should not be blamed for the murder of the
Hillsville court officials by "a half-dozen savages." We quote this
paragraph from his letter:
"Take your map, if you
please, and for a few moments study it. Adjoining Carroll is the
country of Patrick, where the cavalier Gen. J. E. B. Stuart was born;
adjoining it also is the county of Floyd, where Admiral Robley D. Evans
was born; hard by is the county of Franklin, where Gen. Jubal A. Early
was born. Maybe you will say that it was the savage in them that made
them great chieftains by land and sea. Was it the storms of the
mountains and the floods that called them to the shock of battle and
the roar of the ocean? Over yonder among the mountains of Harrison
County, now West Virginia, taken from Virginia by a revolutionary rape,
Stonewall Jackson was born. True he prayed, but maybe you would call
him the greatest savage war-god since Napoleon. These are but a few
brilliant examples of the product of the Virginia mountains. The. plain
people—the bone and sinew of our country—are intelligent, energetic,
educated, brave, and, in many instances, wealthy."