John Punch was an African indentured servant who lived in seventeenth-century colonial York County, Virginia. In 1640, he was bound as a servant for life as punishment for having tried to escape from his indenture. Some genealogists and historians describe Punch as "the first African documented to be enslaved for life in what would eventually become the United States."^[1]

In July 2012, Ancestry.com published a paper documenting the combination of historic research and Y-DNA analysis that supports the conclusion that Punch was an eleventh-generation maternal grandfather of President Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the United States.^[2][3][4] Punch was an ancestor through the Bunch family, free people of color in colonial Virginia, who were ancestors of Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.^[2] Her ancestors were primarily of European-American ethnicity. Her line of Bunch ancestors had largely intermarried with whites, and probably appeared white by 1720. Children born to free women were free because of the status of the mother.^[1] DNA testing of the male Bunch descendants has revealed that John Punch was probably from present-day Cameroon, in West Africa.^[1]

Punch is also believed to be one of the ancestors of American diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.^[5]

Life

In 1640, Punch was an indentured servant of the Virginia planter Hugh Gwyn. He escaped to Maryland with two other indentured servants, a Dutchman, Viktor, and a Scot named James Gregory.^[1] All three men were caught and sentenced to whippings ("thirty stripes apiece"). In addition, the European men were sentenced to have their terms of indenture extended by four years each, but Punch was sentenced to a life of servitude.^[1] Historians consider this difference in penalties to mark this case as one of the first to make a racial distinction between black and white indentured servants.^[6]

While indentured servitude was not slavery and laws protected rights that slaves did not have, most historians agree that John Punch effectively ceased being an indentured servant and became a slave when he was sentenced to "serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life."^[7][8] Edgar Toppin describes Punch as a slave, saying "Punch, in effect, became a slave under this ruling."^[9] Another historian, Henry Robert Burke, says "John Punch's status was changed from an indentured servant to a slave," as the result of his court case.^[10] The National Parks Service notes that while it was a "customary practice" by the 1630s for some negroes to have lifetime indentures, Punch was the "first documented slave for life."^[11] While most historians refer to John Punch as an indentured servant before he was sentenced to slavery, some argue that there is no evidence showing Punch was ever an indentured servant. While John Henderson Russell points out that if Punch was not an indentured servant, his punishment was less severe than that "inflicted on the white men," supporting that it was most likely that Punch was an indentured servant sentenced to slavery,^[12] Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry argues that the court ruling specifically refers to the indentured contracts of Viktor and James Gregory and extends them while the court decision makes no recognition or determination that such a contract existed for John Punch. Perry adds, "What is likely is that" Punch "was previously subjected to limited-term chattel bond-servitude" and "that in Virginia chattelization was imposed on free laborers, tenants, and bond-servants increasingly after 1622, that it was imposed on both European and African descended laborers, that it was a qualitative break from English labor law, and that the chattelization of plantation labor constituted an essential precondition of the emergence of the subsequent lifetime chattel bond-servitude imposed on African American laborers in continental Anglo-America under the system of racial slavery and racial oppression." ^[13]

Descendants

Drawing on a combination of historical documents and Y-DNA analysis, Ancestry.com stated in July 2012 that it is a strong likelihood that Punch is an eleventh great-grandfather of United States President Barack Obama through his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.^[2][14]

Punch is believed to have fathered children with a white woman, probably also an indentured servant. Such relationships were common among the working class in the early colonial years.^[15] Their mixed-race children inherited their mother's free status as an English subject. Informal then, the principle of partus sequitur ventrem was incorporated into slave law in 1662 by the Virginia colony. Generally, this law held that children of slave mothers were born into slavery, regardless of whether their fathers were free and English/European; it thus made slavery a racial caste associated with people of African descent. It overturned the common law applicable to the children of two English subjects, in which the father's status determined that of the child.

Punch's male descendants became known by the surname Bunch, which is very rare among colonial families.^[1] Before 1640, there were fewer than 100 African men in Virginia, and John Punch was the only one with a surname similar to it.^[16] The Bunch descendants were free people of color who became successful landowners in Virginia and eventually assimilated as white, according to generations of marrying whites.

A man referred to by researchers as John Bunch III, in September 1705 petitioned the General Court of Virginia for permission to publish banns for his marriage to Sarah Slayden, a white woman. Their minister had refused to do so. (There had been a ban on marriages between Negroes and whites, but Bunch posed a challenge, as he was apparently the son of a white woman, with only a degree of African ancestry. At the time, mulatto meant a person of half Negro and half white ancestry.)^[16] John Bunch III appealed the denial to the General Court of Virginia. The decision of the Court on that occasion is unknown; however in October 1705 the General Court of Virginia issued a statute detaching "mulatto" from immediate parentage and defining non-whiteness as someone who was a "child, grandchild, or great-grandchild of a black or Native American."^[16] Persons of less than one-eighth African or Native American ancestry were considered legally white, a more detached definition than the 20th-century "one-drop rule" incorporated into Virginia law in 1924.

Records do not show who John Bunch III married, but the mother of one of his children was later noted as being named Rebecca. He had moved to Louisa County as part of the westward migration to the frontier of Virginia.^[16] Through continued intermarriage with whites in Virginia, Obama's maternal Bunch ancestors gradually assimilated and probably appeared as and identified as white as early as 1720. This line eventually migrated into Tennessee and ultimately to Kansas, where descendants included Obama's maternal grandmother and mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.^[1]

Another branch of the Bunch family migrated to North Carolina, where they were classified in some records as mulatto. They intermarried with people of a variety of ethnicities, including European.^[1] The Bunch surname lines also became associated with core mixed-race families later known as Melungeon in Tennessee.^[5]

Y-DNA testing of descendants of the Bunch family lines has revealed common ancestry going back to a single male ancestor of sub-Saharan African ethnicity.^[1][17][3] This male ancestor is believed to be John Punch the African, who probably originated in present-day Cameroon in West Africa, where his particular type of DNA is most common.^[1]

See also

• Family of Barack Obama
• Melungeon
• Ralph Bunche
• John Casor

References

External links

• "The Bunch y-DNA Project", hosted by World Families.net
• "President Obama descends from the first African enslaved for life in America", press release, July 2012, Ancestry.com
• "Responses to Enslavement: John Punch", SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA, 2004, American Experience, PBS-WNET

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