1835 was a critical year for Indians in North Carolina. The state called in a constitutional convention, which intended to amend its direction. The original constitution, ratified in 1776, held that all voters be free, male, and meet specific property qualifications; discernible allusions to race are not evident. Yet, by 1835, white North Carolina society deliberated the restructuring of North Carolina government and society with considerations given to questions of race, class, and geographic region. The specter of slave revolts and of "colored" violence played no small part in these considerations. The Nat Turner Rebellion had demoralized the white middle-class and plantation owning classes of the entire South. North Carolina had the largest percentage of Free Persons of Color in the South. For whites, such a large population of "free non-whites" posed a constant threat. Such fears instilled within the psyche of white southerners a determination to control all non-white groups within the landscape and body politic of the state. Ultimately, North Carolina's efforts at social reformation would result in the re-classification of the social and political status of all non-whites (Aptheker 1943:308-309; Maynor 1995:27-31).
|
|
| The Southeast in 1835 |
As "free people of color," Lumbees soon found ourselves deprived of our political and civil privileges - rights we had enjoyed for almost two generations. Simultaneously, the United States initiated its policy of Indian Removal in the southeast, but did not include Robeson County's Indians. As a group, we rarely appear in the historical record before 1835. No government treaties were signed between us and the United States. Members of this group only appear "officially" as individuals, and the way in which we are listed obfuscates our identity as Indians. Consigning ourselves to the remoteness of Robeson County's swamps, "official" and even "unofficial" contact with non-Lumbees seems almost non-existent. Yet, Robeson County's swamps served as a "nebulous borderland where Indians and non-Indians interacted and where social and racial boundaries were fluid (Maynor 1994:34)." The disenfranchisement of Lumbees along racial lines intensified our mood from previously one of caution, sometime indifference, and discrete suspicion, to that of overt hostility. On the occasion of his sons' murder by a local White farmer, George Lowry said:
We were a free people long before the white men came to our land. Our tribe lived in Roanoke in Virginia. When the English came in our land, we treated them kindly. One of our men went to England in an English ship and saw the great country. There is the white man's blood in these veins as well as that of the Indian. In order to be great like the English we took the white man's religion and laws. . . . yet white men treated us as Negroes. Here are our young men killed by a white man, and we get no justice, and that in a land where we were always free (Dial 1993: 45).
Harassment of Lumbees only intensified subsequent to the ratification of an overtly discriminatory state constitution based on considerations of race, as well as Indian Removal during the Antebellum period. With the removal of the so-called "five civilized tribes," southeastern states legislatively, politically, and socially subsumed remaining Indian populations, free blacks, and persons of mixed Native, African, and European ancestry all into one broad category: namely, "persons of color."
 |
| Tobacco Shed, Robeson County |
In 1840, the state General Assembly passed a law prohibiting non-whites, or "persons of color" from owning or carrying firearms. The issue came to a head in 1853 when the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the law's constitutionality with the conviction of Noel Locklear in the State v. Locklear for the illegal possession of firearms (Dial and Eliades 1996:45).
Lumbees also suffered egregiously during this period from what were termed "tied mule" incidents. These incidents occurred when a neighboring white farmer tied his mule on an Indian's land or let his own cattle graze upon an Indian's land. The white farmer would then file a complaint for theft with the authorities who promptly arrested the Indian farmer. Such incidents were invariably mitigated by the Indian agreeing to pay some kind of fine, giving up a portion of his land, or agreeing to a term of labor service with the "wronged" white farmer (Dial 1993: 39).
