Free People of Color, American Indians, and Whites

Painting by John White, c. 1590

Dear Readers, this blog is long. If you interested in the complexities of American history and people and ever think about what you might not know about your own family and heritage, read on. For my cousin Greg, this story adds more to his family tree. For me, it also expands my tree, and provides closure for a topic I have researched and been curious about for over sixty years.

It is Black History Month, so it is a fitting time to tell this story. Since I was in my teens I have known about possible Native American ancestors. While having Black relatives, much less Black ancestors was unthinkable among my Southern kin, Indian was all right, especially if the connection was Pocahontas. That one was debunked in my family though it floated around a long time and is still there in some distant cousins’ family trees. After the Pocahontas myth was at last abandoned, information was found that at least one of our Native connections is to the Nansemond Indian tribe, one of the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan groups, who live south of Jamestown, Virginia.

In a letter to me from my mother’s sister, Beth, about a half-century ago, she wrote, “When I was young, family friends and odd cousins would write back to my elders about how “in McIntosh [Florida] everyone knew my grandmother was part Indian.” Indeed, when, in my early twenties, I saw a tin-type photo of Lavinia she did look it. Or, to me, maybe part Black. But she was from my mother’s paternal line. We knew that our Nansemond line, if it existed, connected through my mother’s maternal line from a fifth great-grandfather’s marriage to Lucy Bass.

Lavinia, c. 1870

Aunt Beth went on to write, in response to my querying her about Native American ancestry as to whether she was curious about it, “… it wasn’t the pictures that stirred my curiosity. It had been brewing for years. Heavens knows, a lot of us could pass for Indians.”

The Nansemonds first encountered white people at Jamestown in 1607. The Indians and English soon began skirmishing which turned into the Anglo-Powhatan Wars which lasted from 1610 to 1646. After that, the English began moving into Nansemond lands. The tribe spilt, some became Christianized, others not. The Christianized Indians stayed along the Nansemond River and became farmers. White men were marrying into the tribe. One of them, a Bass (way back the spelling was Basse) from England, turns out to be responsible for the Bass line in my family. With the mixed-race marriages and hastened demise for various reasons, the full-blooded Nansemonds soon died out.

At last, I can claim my family’s descent from this Bass line. There will likely always be questions about the accuracy of what I am putting forth here as there should be about almost any genealogical claim. Days have gone by while I researched newer information and re-examined the older, attempting to solve the puzzle of many decades of not knowing the truth of our connection to these people. One can imagine the problems in tracing a family history almost four centuries old. What one would not expect, but was the case here, was false information intentionally put in a 1961 book by Albert Bell about the Nansemond Basses.¹ I had learned about this back in 2011 during correspondence with the Nansemond Tribal Association genealogist, but not its extent. Unfortunately, a lot of the false information is still “out there” on the internet.

    What initiated this renewed effort is my continued research and friendship with my cousin Greg Green, about whom I have written in an earlier blog post.² We already knew we both had Basses in our ancestry. There are thousands of Basses in this country, so I did not assume we shared any. Recently when tracing how Basses came into Greg’s family, I learned they started with the Pettifords, a group of free people of color, the first of whom in Greg’s family was his great-grandmother, Parthena. In the mid-1700s the Pettifords were mostly in Granville County, North Carolina, part of a larger community of free mixed-race people and prominent enough to be noted in several books on free people of color.³ These Pettifords may have begun as a result of the murder of Captain John Pettiver who had a lot of land and some number of enslaved people in Perquimans and possibly nearby counties. It is a wild story that involves his second wife and his overseerer, Joseph Haines. I cannot find the date of the murder. Haines was hanged for the crime in 1733.⁴ One story says a few of Pettivers’ enslaved people were summoned to testify at the murder trial and for that they were given their freedom. Their names were Tom, Primus, and Hannah.

In the 1600s and early 1700s, mixed-race lines often began with a couple composed of a white female indentured servant and a man of African or mixed heritage. Children from these couples remained free and could not be enslaved as status went with the mother. The story above demonstrates another situation that led to free people of color. Yet another involves the story that unfolds below: a white Englishman marrying a Native American woman.

Parthena’s Pettiford’s great-grandfather, Drury Pettiford, married Lucy “Dicey” Bass in 1781. Dicey’s second great-grandparents are the Englishman, John Basse, and his wife Elizabeth of the Nansemond Indian tribe. John and Elizabeth were married in 1638 when she was a little over twenty years of age. The combination of the Christianized Elizabeth being the daughter of the Nansemond chief and her marrying an Englishman along with Cousin Greg’s notable Pettiford line meant an abundance of records: deeds, wills, historical

The prayer book record about John and Elizabeth's marriage in 1638.

accounts, church notations, records from the Nansemond’s efforts to get federal recognition (successful in 2018), and more. Greg’s lineage and some of mine is illustrated at the website, The Lost Creek Settlement of Vigo County, Indiana.⁵

After a very long time and a lot of investigation, I now know John Bass and Elizabeth the Nansemond Indian are also my tenth great-grandparents as well as Cousin Greg’s. I have cousins on Ancestry from John and Elizabeth’s branches including two males in direct lines to John Bass so they still carry the Bass name. I found them because we share DNA. There are also Pettifords in trees of several distant cousins to me, one is African American.  Finding these connections made my skin tingle and my lungs stay still while I took it all in.

In the early 1600s in what was to become our country and before racial laws prohibiting such marriages came along, white men marrying Indian women was not unusual as few white women were available. History about this is widely available. This brings us to John and Elizabeth’s children and how they relate to Cousin Greg and me. The couple had two girls and six boys. Of the boys, only three lived long enough to have children. This means for Greg’s and my lines from John and Elizabeth, theoretically any of the three male children could be our ninth grandfather. Greg’s was easy to trace, mine is another matter. These words appear easily but for me they come from a pilgrimage over sixty years in the making. Finally, a conclusion emerged, a certain one for Greg and one not as clear for me.

The three male sons of Elizabeth are Richard, b. 1658; William, b. 1654; and John Sr., b. 1660. Long ago, I obtained information about these lines from several sources: a second cousin, the Bell book, and personal correspondence and visits to the Nansemond Nation. Delving into this again, I have spent a lot of time re-examining my own records and those on the internet, looking at new ones, and confirming the non-existence of records (at least as far as I can tell from internet), that would allow me to identify my correct ninth great-grandfather. With much disappointment I have had to conclude that I cannot establish a definite ninth generation for myself, not yet anyway. Richard’s two wives are in dispute, and he would have been about sixty when my sixth great-grandfather, Thomas Bass, was born. Thomas’s purported mother would have been in her upper fifties. This suggests a missing generation though there are no records to back up the possibility.

Thomas is the father of my fifth great-grandmother, Lucy Bass, who brought the Basses into our family line. Though I can’t be sure who either of Thomas’s parents were, I do know from deeds that by 1744 when Lucy was two-years old, she and her parents were in Bertie County, North Carolina. Later, as suggested by deeds for land, they moved to Craven County, then Granville County, and still later to Craven County, South Carolina. These counties are noted for areas where the mixed-race descendants of John and Elizabeth migrated to seek better lives. Another brother, John Sr., may have had children and may have married, possibly to an Indian woman, but there are no confirmations of any of this, just suggestions. That leaves William, who I cannot confidently link to myself either, though I have not ruled him out. Cousin Greg’s line is clear; his is through William Bass. Read on for a surprise about William.

Virginia 1627

Many of my maternal ancestors lived in the part of Virginia that included Williamsburg and the then counties, Surry, Isle of Wight, Nansemond, and Norfolk. I have traced my connection to Lucy Bass forwards and backwards and think it is sound except for not being able to determine with certainty which of her Nansemond great-great grandfathers her line goes through. I have DNA matches to the descendants of William as well as to people who think they descend from Richard. (None are available for John, Sr.) That I have matches to both makes sense as both Richard and William have the same mother. It was fascinating to me when I found distant white and Black cousins with names from relevant family trees in the counties these brothers migrated to in the early 1700s and beyond. In tracing some of the families, it was easy to see where some branches became darker-skinned, obviously marrying people of color, and other branches became white as they married lighter people. This is well illustrated by my Cousin Greg’s and my families presented here.

Obviously, all the descendants of Elizabeth the Nansemond Indian and John Bass from England started out as mixed-race. My sixth great-grandfather, Thomas Bass, fits the early migratory pattern for descendants of Richard, William, and John. He leaves the Nansemond area with his wife and first child for Bertie County, North Carolina. Years later, his line becomes “white” if not already so when his daughter, Lucy and her husband, my white fifth great-grandfather, Zachariah Nettles, moved to Darlington, South Carolina, where he becomes a slave-holding planter. Perhaps the move was an attempt at an easier life. Even if Lucy had “olive” skin, her Indian ancestry would likely not be known this far away from her origin. This would give the couple a fresh start free from tithes and taxations and other penalties and hardships that were imposed on people of color.

Along the way, just last week, I learned—it is astonishing to learn this — the results of twenty years of Wikitree research I had not known about, which found that William’s father was not John Bass, but a man of Sub-Saharan origin.¹ Furthermore, it is said that it is genetically established that Elizabeth is his mother; he was not adopted. William is the sixth of her eight children, born when she was thirty-two. The identification of William’s father as an African man was possible by looking at yDNA results of two male direct descendants as all direct male descendants would have the same yDNA as William. (The Y chromosome DNA is found only in males and is passed down unchanged except for rare mutations from father to son over many generations.) The direct male descendants of William have yDNA  A-M31, an unusual subclade denoting African men from a particular area which means William’s origin was Africa. Richard’s line’s yDNA has also been checked in the same manner and it confirms a European origin.  

Powathan village by John White c. 1590

In 1727, William Bass went to court to prove he and his several children were of Native and English with no African descent. Since Elizabeth’s other children’s “race” was not questioned, I assume this request to the court meant that he wanted himself and his children to be designated American Indian and English like his siblings even though his appearance may have suggested that he was at least part-African (which he was). At that time, free people of color including mixed-race, Indians, and Blacks, were increasingly subject to legal and social restrictions, hence the migrations that began to occur to North Carolina and soon the Mid-West where for a while conditions were better.  William’s immediate need was to be able to conduct the necessary legal processes to clear titles to land he owned in Norfolk County that would not be allowed were he considered Black. A hearing was held on March 17 whereupon the court declared,

“An Inquest pertaining to possession and use of Cleared and Swamp lands in and adjoining ye Great Dismal by William Bass, Sr. and His kinsmen who claim Indian Privileges, Sheweth by the testimony of White Persons and sundry records of great age and known to be authentic, That said William Bass, Thomas Bass, and Joseph Bass and spinister daughter Mary Bass are persons of English and Nansemond Indian descent with no admixture of negro, Ethiopic, and that they and all others in kinship with them are freeborn subjects of his Majesty living in peace with his Majesty’s Government entitled to possess and bear arms as permitted by Treaties of Peace by and between Charles II of blessed memory and ye Indians of Virginia and the said William Bass, Sr. and als are in Rightful, and Lawful possession thereof and are not to be further Molested by any person or persons whatsoever under any pretended Authority under Penalties etc. etc., whilst ye said Bass and his kinsmen claim Indian privileges pursuant to the aforesaid Treaties of Peace.”

17 day of March 1726/27

Solo. Wilson, Cl. Cur.

In 1742, William’s son, William, Jr., went to court at the then old age of sixty-six for a similar certificate. Like his father, he must have been having trouble not being considered fully Nansemond and English. Something must have made him push for the increased legal rights that people declared English and Indian enjoyed. As an aside, another reason for free people of color to get such a document was for protection from the ever-present threat from slave catchers. Free people of color would often go to court for an affidavit declaring them as free. Otherwise, these vicious slaver kidnappers would consider anyone of color as a freedom-seeking enslaved person (who used to be called a runaway) and grab them to sell. Obtaining such a certificate occurred in some other branches of Greg’s ancestors.

William Jr.’s document read:

“William Bass, the Bearer, tall, swarthy, dark eyes, weight abt. 13 stone, scar on back of left hand, is of English & Indian descent with no admixture of negro blood, numbered as a Nansemun by his own Choosing. The sd. Bass dwells in this County and hath a good name for his industry and honesty.”¹

The comment that follows is mine alone as I have not read anywhere in my research. The fact that William and his son went to these lengths to establish that they (supposedly) did not have any African blood suggests they had some African features and were being suspected from time to time as being “negro.” The son’s features are listed; “swarthy and dark eyes.” These two Bass men bravely went to court and were successful in doing what they could to protect themselves and their families against growing racial prejudice.  I also speculate that the elder William’s father may have been mixed-race himself and likely came from England as a skilled worker or artisan.

The Nansemond Indians, like all Native people in Ameria lost many, if not most, of their people to wars, disease, and hardship—pushed out by the white foreigners from across the mighty ocean who had invaded their land. The Nansemonds had split into two groups, one Christianized, the other not, the last of this group dying in 1806. Over the centuries, some had their land taken by Europeans and some they sold when they saw no way out. They struggled to keep their identity in the face of increasing legislation by white Virginians to define people as only white and “colored.” This effort culminated in 1924 with the Racial Integrity Act and subsequent legislation which banned interracial marriage in Virginia. This

legislation legally wiped the existence of Virginia’s Native people off the map for almost a half a century. They were to call themselves “colored.” Many of us remember when the United States Supreme Court in 1967 at last declared the 1924 Act unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia.

Despite centuries of hardship, the Nansemond Indians endured. Can we even start to imagine their sorrows and their struggles over these three-hundred plus years in our history in order to survive, to keep their beliefs and traditions, and to adapt to surviving in a white man’s world? Furthermore, in the last forty-three years of this very long period they could not even identify as Indians. After 1967, the Nansemond tribe demonstrated that they had endured by seeking formal recognition by the Commonwealth of Virginia which was granted in 1985. The Nansemond Indian Nation received federal recognition in early 2018.⁶ Their headquarters are still near the Nansemond River.

At the end of this long story, here we are, Cousin Greg and I, related through people from the earliest days of what became the United States through the efforts of all people like these-- the captured Africans brought here to be enslaved, the Indigenous people, and the European oppressors along with their poor who came as indentured servants. Writing this has been like traversing a puddled path, sometimes steep and rough, sometimes, sweetly winding and soft with greenness; always challenging yet with great beauty and reward. Greg and I are the result of the mingling and survival of all these people. We unite in strength and love.

John Bass (1616–1699) m. Elizabeth (Nansemond Indian) b. 1616      Marcia

├── William Bass b. 1654 or Richard Bass c. 1658 or John Bass b. 1660

     └── ?

          └── ?

               └── Thomas E. Bass, Sr. 1719- 1755?  m. Sophia 1727-1819 (neé name unknown)

                    └── Lucy Bass 1742–1804 m. Zachariah Nettles 1737-1821

                               └── and four more between Lucy and Zachariah to my parents

John Bass (1616–1699) m. Elizabeth (Nansemond Indian) b. 1616     Greg

├── William Bass b. 1654

     └── John, Jr. b. 1673

          └── Lovey Bass, b.1714

               └── Lucy “Dicey” Bass, b. Abt. 1766 m. Drury Pettiford, Sr. b. 1751

                    └── Edmund Pettiford, b.1795 m. Sally Carter, b. 1794

                                └── and four more to Greg’s parents

Notes

1.      Bell, Albert D. Bass families of the South; a collection of historical and genealogical source materials from public and private records. Rocky Mount, N.C, 1961 and nansemond.gov/, www.wikitree.com/wiki/Nansemond-1, and https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Basse-69, and more

2.      www.marciahermangiddens.com/post/a-few-spooky-surprises-while-researching-a-relative

3.      nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/the-nansemond-indian-bass-family-of-granville/

4.      ncgenweb.us/perquimans

5.      lost-creek.org/genealogy/histories/feature3.php

6.      www.commonwealth.virginia.gov/virginia-indians/state-recognized-tribes/nansemond-tribe, and the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017 (P.L. 115-121) which officially acknowledged their sovereignty

7.      Photo of Chief Jesse Bass. www.wvtf.org/podcast/tribal-truths/2023-05-25/nansemond-indian-

nation-looking-for-ancestors-in-the-great-dismal-swamp

*A Powhatan village, watercolor by John White, c. 1587, in the British Museum, London