Beyond Slavery's Shadow

Free People of Color in the South

Warren Eugene Milteer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469664408
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250, 000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as "negroes, " "mulattoes, " "mustees, " "Indians, " or simply "free people of color" in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses. These people were both privileged and victimized, both celebrated and despised, in a region characterized by social inconsistency. Milteer's analysis of the way wealth, gender, and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South's free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.

CHAPTER 1

Liberty in the Colonial South

On February 6, 1677, King Tony of Northampton County, Virginia, already knew he was unwell as he dictated his last will and testament—his time was growing short. Before he died, Tony wanted to secure everything for which he had worked so hard in order to pass on something to his family. Over the preceding century, Tony and people like him had come as servants, slaves, and settlers from Europe, Africa, and even South Asia to French, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish colonies, where they tilled ground, pummeled trees, and exterminated both man and beast in order to turn indigenous lands into profits. King Tony now owned enough property to leave a legacy to his wife, Sarah, and granddaughter, Sarah Driggers. Yet as much as he shared in common with the thousands of other people living in colonial North America, King Tony was unlike much of the colonial population in a crucial way. King Tony was categorized as “Negroe,” but he was also free.¹

King Tony was one of a handful of free people of color living in the southern colonies before the outbreak of revolution in the 1770s. While many people living in these colonial settlements who were labeled “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “pardos,” and “morenos” were enslaved, King Tony and others like him enjoyed various levels of freedom inaccessible to their enslaved counterparts. Free people of color came from diverse origins and experienced freedom in many forms. Their ancestral origins were African, European, Asian, and American. Many were born free, while some found liberty later in life. They spoke English, Spanish, French, German, and likely a host of African and indigenous American dialects. Their economic circumstances ranged from rich to poor. They performed a variety of different types of work and practiced a span of religions. Their diverse backgrounds produced a wide range of life outcomes.²

Prejudice and discrimination were inherent to the colonial systems in which free people of color lived. Within imperial settings, these practices justified the European colonial conquests and became important parts of the intellectual technology that supported the enslavement and exploitation of laborers from the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The Spanish, French, and English interspersed ideas about freedom and slavery, proper gendered behavior, relations between elites and people of lesser means, and religion with discriminatory practices tied to racial categories in order to construct the colonial social order. In theory, regardless of the colony, free persons were supposed to be above enslaved people and white people were supposed to be above persons of color. The rise of free people of color in societies in which many persons of color were enslaved and not free troubled those who sought and promoted a world with less complexity, a world in which negroes, mulattoes, mustees, Indians, pardos, and morenos were enslaved and white people, Europeans, enjoyed liberty. Prejudice against free persons of color and attacks on their freedom appeared as quickly as their population grew. No consensus developed in the colonies about the place of free people of color. Yet a small and powerful element among the white population would construct the intellectual and legal infrastructure that permitted discrimination to blossom and reproduce throughout the decades.³

Race-based discrimination contaminated the society but did not completely halt development for free people of color in the colonies. Laboring as servants and apprentices, free persons of color clung tightly to their sense of self-determination while struggling to fulfill their obligations to their masters. Free people of color who existed outside of the colonial servitude system had greater opportunities. They strove for and often obtained property in the form of household goods, tools, livestock, land, and, in a few cases, enslaved people. Free men of color, excluded from the direct influences of the white master class, became heads of households with their own dependents underneath them. Even as legal discrimination slowly increased against free persons of color, free status provided them with social capital and wide legal protections unavailable to the enslaved. A contested freedom was better than no liberty at all.

The Rise of Free People of Color

As early as the sixteenth century, free people of color were woven into the colonial world’s social fabric. By the mid- to late seventeenth century, free people of color existed as a category of individuals legally distinct from whites and enslaved persons in the colonial order. As the children of free mothers, some of these individuals were legally free at birth. With few exceptions, elites in the Spanish, English, and French colonies considered all children born to free mothers to be free persons, regardless of their racial categorization. Of course, this rule excluded people, such as the mass of enslaved Africans, who were born free elsewhere, detained, enslaved, and then transported to the colonies. Early on, the colonizers also permitted indigenous Americans captured in war to be enslaved for life, even though they, too, were technically freeborn. When free birth led to free status, the law provided extensive privileges associated with legal personhood, though it did not offer protection from servitude, poverty, or discrimination. In colonial settings, free persons could own property and had legally recognized kin connections. Colonial lawmakers withheld these legal privileges from enslaved people, who could only gain them through manumission, a centuries-old legal procedure that permitted enslaved persons to become free. In the manumission process, masters rescinded their claims on enslaved people through pecuniary transactions and as gifts to enslaved persons.⁴

People of color were born free under a variety of circumstances, but birth to a free white mother appears to have been the most common circumstance through the colonial period. White women, many of whom were indentured servants, gave birth to a sizable number of free children of color during the colonial period. Writing in 1723, William Gooch unsympathetically declared that most “free-Negros & Mulattos” were “Bastards of some of the worst of our imported Servants and Convicts.”⁵ Nineteenth-century North Carolina lawmaker William Gaston, after speaking with people who lived in the colonial period, concluded that most free people of color in his region established their freedom as the maternal descendants of white women.⁶ Colonial court records document the roots of a significant portion of the free population of color who were the children or descendants of white women in the southern colonies. On October 3, 1699, officials in Gloucester County, Virginia, issued an apprentice indenture for Anne, “a mulatto child,” who was born to Anne Toyer, a white servant woman, and Peter, “a Negro.”⁷ In 1719, Mary Gibson, a “molatto child,” of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, appears in the court records as the daughter of a white servant woman also named Mary Gibson.⁸ Toyer and Gibson were progenitors of generations of free people of color to come.

The incorporation of Native peoples into European colonial settlements created two classifications of indigenous people: those whom colonists recognized as social insiders in their communities and those with recognized ties to sovereign or tributary Native nations. Colonists frequently treated those Native peoples whom they recognized as part of their communities as indistinct from other persons of color. They incorporated Native peoples into their settlements both as bondspeople and as free persons.⁹ These Native people who became part of these colonial communities as free persons passed down their freedom in the same ways white women passed their free status to their children. The child of a free Native woman was free as well. Luke, a “free boy” of Craven County, North Carolina, owed his status to the fact that his mother, Phebe, was “an Indian woman.”¹⁰ In a similar example, James, “a boy of eight years old” in 1765, lived as a free person in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, because his mother, Jenny Zekell, was an “Indian.”¹¹

People of color sometimes arrived in the Americas as free persons as a result of the chase for empire that brought colonizing countries into greater contact with individuals from around the world. Trade associated with these imperial aspirations encouraged the movement of people between Europe and sites of commerce in Asia and Africa. As time passed, increasing numbers of people from trade centers and colonized areas landed in the imperial metropoles. Individuals with roots in South Asia or Africa, who came to Europe primarily as sailors and servants, became part of the social fabric of the colonizing countries. Some of these individuals eventually made their way from Europe to the Americas and thereby supplemented the growth of the colonial South’s population of free persons of color.¹² Like so many white people in the colonies, many of these free persons of color came to the colonies as indentured servants. In 1671, while living in England, Thomas Hagleton, “a negroe,” contracted with Margery Dutchesse to labor as a servant for four years. After making the agreement, Hagleton landed in Maryland and worked there for many years under several masters.¹³ In another case, Thomas Waters, “a Mulatto Servant Man,” arrived in North America from Liverpool, England. By 1745, he worked under the employ of Thomas Bantom in Virginia.¹⁴ James Dunn’s journey to North America began in the East Indies, the place of his birth. From there, a visitor to his homeland transported him to England. After spending a significant portion of his childhood in England, Dunn found himself in Savannah, Georgia, on the eve of the American Revolution. During his time in Savannah, he served multiple masters.¹⁵

Manumission played a role in the growth of the colonial population of free people of color, although its role became much more pronounced in the Revolutionary era. Still, the legal transformation of enslaved people into free people contributed to the gradual increase of free persons of color across the colonies. As early as the 1630s, a few Virginia masters had begun to liberate their bondspeople. In 1635, Anthony Longo, a “Negro,” received his freedom from Nathaniel Littleton of Accomack County.¹⁶ Masters manumitted enslaved people for a variety of reasons. Personal motives drove some masters to liberate those they held in bondage. By 1735, Jorge and Marie of New Orleans, Louisiana, were free after their master, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, liberated them for their good and faithful service.¹⁷ In 1741, Gideon and Elizabeth Ellis of Craven County, South Carolina, emancipated Titus, “an Indian man,” whom they described as “true and trusty.”¹⁸ James Bond of Colleton County, South Carolina, purchased and liberated Peggy, a “Negro woman,” and her children, Nanny, Sarah, and Ben, in 1753. Bond declared that he freed them because of the “Natural Love and affection which I have and bear unto my said wife [Peggy] and three children.”¹⁹ Persons of color also obtained their freedom through self-purchase. Sarah, a “mulatto woman,” paid 101 pounds to purchase her freedom and that of her children Mary, Benjamin, and Sarah from William Snow of Craven County, South Carolina, in 1746.²⁰

A small number of individuals received their freedom under atypical circumstances. Although these liberations were unusual, these paths to freedom still played an important role in the overall growth of the population of free people of color. Caesar, an enslaved man from South Carolina, won his freedom after the South Carolina General Assembly learned of his scientific discovery. Sometime before the assembly met to discuss the matter, Caesar had unearthed an antidote to reverse the effects of a poison. Witnesses relayed that Caesar had cured multiple patients. On learning of Caesar, the General Assembly decided to appropriate the funds to purchase him from his master, John Norman, and liberate him.²¹ In the case of Caesar, manumission was a reward for a particular kind of behavior, one that was compatible with the larger system of enslavement. Caesar’s service as a healer and his willingness to share his knowledge to the benefit of white South Carolinians demonstrated his loyalty to the very society that supported his initial enslavement. By manumitting Caesar, South Carolina lawmakers encouraged the larger enslaved population to work for the benefit of the master class. The possibility of freedom served as an incentive to motivate enslaved people to stay within the limits prescribed by their masters and lawmakers.

In reaction to constant conflict between the English and Spanish on the Georgia-Florida border, colonial officials offered freedom to enslaved people who reached their respective colony from the territories claimed by the opposing empire. People of color took advantage of this imperial conflict and fled in search of liberty within the lands of their masters’ enemies. In 1738, Francisco Menendez, along with thirty other enslaved people who were escapees from Carolina, petitioned the governor of Florida, Manuel de Montiano, for their freedom. They argued that they had served faithfully on behalf of the Spanish crown, and on March 15, 1738, Montiano declared all of the runaways free. Menendez and others would go on to found the Spanish outpost Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, a settlement specifically for freedpeople.²² Sometime before August 1748, John Dick, Kingson, Billy, and Lewis were among the enslaved people who ran from Saint Augustine, Florida, to Georgia in search of freedom. On their arrival in Savannah, each man received documents attesting to his free status from local officials. Kingson’s document declared that he was “a free man he having made his Escape from St. Augustine to this Colony.”²³ In these cases, manumission served an important role in undermining the efforts of opposing empires. Imperial officials worked to keep persons of color enslaved within their colonies while encouraging those enslaved by their enemies to abscond, not out of support for liberty as a general principle but because they desired to drain human resources that their enemies could otherwise use against them. Enslaved persons in the competing empires understood these conflicts well and took advantage of the situation to improve their own lives and secure a better future for their descendants.

By the mid-1700s, free people of color lived in every southern colony from British Delaware and Maryland down to Spanish Florida and west into French Louisiana. Whether born free or made free, they became important actors in colonial societies. In the 1600s, when free people of color existed only in small numbers, they attracted the attention of officials at irregular intervals. For some colonists, free people of color were simply part of the diversity of individuals in their communities, but this was not a universally shared opinion.

As the 1600s turned to the 1700s, colonial officials began to notice the presence of free people of color more regularly, and some viewed them as more than simply folks in the neighborhood. For these officials, free persons of color presented a nuisance at best and, at worst, they represented a threat to the developing economy dependent on slavery.

Legal Reaction

The debate over the legal position of free people of color in the colonial South developed during the 1600s and 1700s as lawmakers sought to balance the free status of persons of color with the demands of both slaveholders and others who desired to build stronger racial and class hierarchies. Throughout this period, lawmakers slowly chipped away at the rights and privileges of free people of color. Some laws targeted certain de...