In reading of the Old West, beyond the Mississippi, after the Civil War, one never hears of whites fighting on the side of the Indian tribes against other whites, but on the old Appalachian frontier it was common. The question is clearly answered in these few quotes from Meshach Browning’s memoir. Note that there is no doubt that a white man can be an Indian, a savage, and that he can be a slave as well. The implications of the discussion of Meshach’s free status and the fact that he was white were:

Whites could clearly be enslaved in 1797.

It was not unusual for whites to join Indians and fight with the utmost ferocity against their former slave masters.

Free blacks in this period could be expected to be treated as subhumans and whooped as much as a white slave, a creature of servitude that was forever beaten and whipped. The implication is that a free black was likely to be kidnapped and enslaved again. Unfortunately, in our sick society, that views only the most abject and extreme servitude as enslavement, the fact that blacks were treated marginally worse than poor whites around 1800 nullifies white slavery in the modern mind, and turns it into something benevolent. This is the price of living in a soulless world—ignorance and lack of differentiation.

Also note the constant truism that occurs in white slave and black slave narratives throughout the entire period, that female slave owners were much more cruel to their human property than male slave owners.

“My Father was one of the last three of this brave party… my father, however, perceived a white man, who had left the settlement several years before, and whom he recognized at first sight. This fellow carried a spear, mounted on a handle like that of a pitch fork, and ran before all the Indians. He was close at my father’s heels… the white Indian made a furious lunge at him. The spear, however, glanced off the log, turned its point upward , and stuck so fast in the standing tree that the white savage could not withdraw it before my father slipped out of his position, escaped unhurt, and reached the fort safely.”

-Nancy Caldwell’s account of the siege of Wheeling, West Virginia circa 1887

“For you must not think, because you have wealth, that I am your servant. I am as free and white as you are, madam…”

-Meshach browning to Mrs. Caldwell

“Well, that’s all true, as he is free, and white too…”

-Mr. Caldwell to Mrs. Caldwell

This last statement clearly indicates that white identity did not confer free status, but rather that once free, whites were treated as person with certain rights, as opposed to free blacks and free Indians.

Perhaps now, the very Caucasian appearance of Eastern Woodland Indian leaders and warriors [though not Indian women] from the 1600s and 1700s becomes more clear. Whites had been running away to live with the Indians in Virginia since 1609 and in a sense, the Mountain Men of the early and mid 1800s would do something similar.