Ramapough Mountain Indians - Earlier Exonym

Earlier Exonym

Until the 1970s, the tribe was frequently referred to as the "Jackson Whites", which, according to legend (folklore or myth) was shorthand for "Jacks and Whites", reflecting their multiracial ancestry. In part because of their multiracial ancestry, the outside community assumed they were descendants of runaway and freed slaves ("Jacks" in slang) and whites. Over time, the latter were believed to have included Dutch settlers (reflected in surnames common among the people) and later, Hessian soldiers, German mercenaries who had fought for the British during the American Revolution; that is, people who were considered suspect by the dominant British Americans. The people supposedly fled to frontier areas of the mountains after the end of the Revolutionary War. Thousands of escaped slaves had gone to British-occupied New York City on the promise of freedom. Some left the city for more isolated areas to escape capture after the war. There is no documentation of slaves, freed or runaway, nor of Hessian soldiers' marrying into the tribe.

The group rejects this name and its associated legends as pejorative. On July 30, 1880, The Bergen Democrat was the first newspaper to print the term Jackson Whites. A 1911 article noted it was used as a title of contempt.. Instead, they called themselves "The Mountain People."

The New Jersey historian David S. Cohen has confirmed that the old stories were legends, not history. He said the legend was untrue and was "the continuing vehicle for the erroneous and derogatory stereotype of the Mountain People." He said that some of the group's ancestors were multiracial, free Afro-Dutch who had migrated from lower Manhattan to the frontier and become landowners in the Tappan Patent in the seventeenth century.