Commentary on Brownlow's "Impudent Malungeon"

From Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia
By MHS President, Wayne Winkler
(2004, Mercer University Press)

The [October 7] 1840 article [Archived here] was printed in the Jonesborough Whig, a political newspaper edited by William Gannaway “Parson” Brownlow, later to become the controversial Reconstruction governor of Tennessee. Over the next two weeks, Brownlow’s Whig made several references to the “Malungeon” which made clear that Brownlow considered a Melungeon to be “a scoundrel who is half Negro and half Indian.” References to “the big Democratic Negro” were meant to associate the Democrats with the concept of racial equality, a notion repugnant of southern Whigs (and to southern Democrats as well).

The origin of this “impudent Malungeon” is given as “Washington City.” This raises some questions. Jonesborough, where the newspaper was published, is the seat of Washington County, Tennessee, and there is a Washington County nearby in Virginia. However, there is no city or town named “Washington” anywhere near Jonesborough. In the 1840s, “Washington City” often referred to Washington, D. C. If the “scoundrel who is half Negro and half Indian” came from the District of Columbia, the term “Melungeon” obviously had a far broader meaning and more widespread usage than anyone has suggested to date. If the term was being used in the nation’s capital, one could reasonably assume the term would exist in numerous other records. It does not; as of this writing, the Jonesborough articles of 1840 are only the second known written record of the word, the first being the Stony Creek church minutes of 1813. The author may have been applying a local term to an outsider, someone who would not have been called a “Malungeon” anywhere else?. The more likely explanation, however, is that the reference to “Washington City” is a mistake or a typographical error, and the origin of the “impudent Malungeon” was Washington County. [Cty, an abbreviation for County, might have been mistaken for City when the type was set.]

Tennessee politicians, particularly in the post-Civil War era, would use the term “Melungeon” to describe opposing politicians, particularly Republicans from the eastern third of the state. During the post-war Reconstruction era, bitter epithets flew freely between Democrats and Republicans. This particular epithet, however, seems never to have lost its suggestion of non-white ancestry. When Nashville writer Will Allen Dromgoole asked two Tennessee legislators of the 1890's to define “Malungeons,” the answers were “a dirty Indian sneak” and “a Portuguese nigger.”


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