The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860

John Hope Franklin

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807845462, 9780807804087
• eBook ISBN: 9780807866689
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

John Hope Franklin has devoted his professional life to the study of African Americans. Originally published in 1943 by UNC Press, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 was his first book on the subject. As Franklin shows, freed slaves in the antebellum South did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. Even in North Carolina, reputedly more liberal than most southern states, discriminatory laws became so harsh that many voluntarily returned to slavery.

Chapter I
Introduction

History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.
Tolstoy, War and Peace, second Epilogue.

More Than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the appearance of John H. Russell’s Free Negro in Virginia. This was the first exhaustive study of the subject by a trained historian;¹ and the only other work of similar scope and quality, James M. Wright’s The Free Negro in Maryland, appeared twenty years ago. In addition to these detailed accounts, there have appeared from time to time brief sketches on the free Negro in certain areas and on individual free Negroes; but none has approached the standards set by Professors Russell and Wright in their pioneer efforts.² The enthusiasm and zeal so characteristic of the trained student of American history in the pursuit of knowledge concerning so many problems have been almost entirely lacking in the study of the free Negro.

The reluctance of historians to study the free Negro more seriously is not altogether understandable. Perhaps it is simply one of the several phases of our history that has not appeared especially attractive to students who are engaged in research and writing. The very nature of the problem, however, may serve to explain the preference of many for other tasks. As a group whose status, politically, economically, and socially was as indeterminable as it was unenviable, the free Negro as a subject for historical treatment abounds in elusive and difficult problems. The materials from which the picture must be drawn are scattered in scores of unsuspected places; and no small portion of the story calls for a type of sobriety and skill which emphasize the presumptuousness of undertaking such a task. The results, however, are well worth the effort; for as a distinct, indeed an anomalous, group in the social structure the free Negro presents a picture that is at once fascinating and informative.

For several reasons there seems to be a real need for a more careful study of the free Negro in the ante-bellum South. The story of the section and the period cannot be completely told until there is available an adequate account of these quarter of a million people who often influenced the attitudes and policies of the communities in which they lived to a degree all out of proportion to their numbers. A more adequate story of the free Negro will constitute, moreover, another important step in the direction of understanding the relationship which exists between a minority group—in this instance, caste-like in its attributes—and the larger community. The problems which existed during the pre-Civil War period frequently have important bearings on our social attitudes in contemporary race relations. Many of the problems of the chief minority group in America have their roots not in the period of Reconstruction and after but in the earlier period when there was a large slave population and when the treatment of the free Negro by the whites in the community was conditioned by that fact.

We often get our cues for the present from the past in much the same way that a judge is almost invariably influenced by the principle of stare decisis. Any information concerning the genesis of a particular problem is most valuable in understanding it in its present stage. If many of our problems of racial adjustments had their origins in the difficult atmosphere of slavery, they present certain psychological factors that would have been different had they begun in an atmosphere of freedom, difficult though that also might have been immediately after the Civil War. This study of the free Negro makes no pretense of pointing the way to any satisfactory adjustment of race relations as they exist today. Nor is its primary purpose to show how much of the problem had its origin in the period under observation. It seeks merely to clarify and to explain the status of the free Negro in ante-bellum North Carolina as it was related to the larger community. The fuller understanding and solution of existing problems may be left to those whose wisdom and insight are greater than any claimed by the humble student of history.

Few areas possess the variety of geographical features that have played so important a part in the growth of North Carolina and have contributed so much to the development of a distinctive history. The poor harbor facilities in the East prevented the province from becoming an important center of import and export.³ However, its interior provided accommodations for almost every type of settler. The corn and tobacco planter found in the coastal plain wide stretches of relatively unobstructed land suitable for his crops. In this same area the rich growth of pine forests afforded added wealth in the development of naval store industries. For the less enterprising farmer, or one with fewer means, the piedmont yielded a satisfactory crop of tobacco, wheat, corn, and the like. In the mountainous Appalachian region, sheep and cattle walks were obtained with comparative ease. The western part of the State, moreover, offered an excellent opportunity to those of the East who naturally rebelled against its strait-laced system of law and order.

North Carolina was essentially a rural state during the entire period under observation. Her shifting sand bars and shallow sounds prevented the rise of a Charleston; and, at best, Wilmington and New Bern were hardly satisfactory as ports of entry for a great interior that often looked to cities outside the province to furnish certain necessaries of life. Her lack of navigable rivers and her consequent relative isolation prevented the rise of a Richmond or a Memphis; and Fayetteville became and remained at best a leading village and a serviceable county seat. Thus, North Carolina presents one of the best examples in our history of the extent to which geography may play an important role in the development of an area.

No small factor, however, in the development of North Carolina was the racial and cultural characteristics of the people who lived there. Of the aborigines, the Tuscaroras on the seaboard, the Catawbas in the lower piedmont, and the Cherokees in the west were the most important.⁴ Though these Indians showed marked differences in customs and tribal practices, each group easily manifested a remarkable achievement in accommodation to life in the Carolina wilderness and did a great deal to assist the white population to adjust itself to life in the new world.⁵

The group that constituted the white population of early Carolina represented an even wider variety of racial, national, and cultural backgrounds than did the Indians. There were not only the English, who in 1790 comprised more than 80 per cent of the white population, but there were also the Germans, French, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch. The following table is illuminating on the subject of white population in North Carolina in 1790:

TABLE I. WHITE POPULATION IN NORTH CAROLINA IN 1790^6
Nationality	Number	Per cent of total
English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	240,309	83.1
Scotch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	32,388	11.2
German. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	8,097	2.8
Irish. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	6,651	2.3
French. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	869	.3
Dutch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	578	.2
All other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	290	.1

A knowledge of racial and national stock alone is inadequate in an attempt to understand the development of North Carolina in the early period. The white population represented at once a diversity of national stock and a relative economic and social homogeneity. The early and subsequent history of the State seems to uphold the point of view that the majority belonged to the yeomanry and that there were very few who could rank with the Byrds and Lees of Virginia or the Pinckneys and Laurenses of South Carolina. Peopled by a hardworking group of English, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch yeomanry and influenced culturally by Quakerism, Lutheranism, and Moravianism, North Carolina was to present a picture somewhat different from that of her neighbors in her attitude on many public questions and in her treatment of the races and classes of men found in her midst.

Just as there were important variations in the racial, economic, and social pattern of North Carolina, there were also interesting conditions peculiar to the free Negro of North Carolina. The free Negro population in Virginia and in Maryland was numerically greater than that of North Carolina; but the economic and social conditions in those states provided ways of life for the free Negro that differed markedly from conditions in North Carolina. In no State south of North Carolina were there half as many free Negroes as in that State. One can be sure, therefore, that because of these circumstances the problem of the free Negro in North Carolina will be different from that in any of the neighboring states.

A further distinction between the free Negroes of North Carolina and those of other states can be made. The free Negroes in other sections were essentially an urban group. In South Carolina, the majority was in or near Charleston. In Maryland, they lived in Baltimore or other towns. In Virginia, they were in Richmond, Norfolk, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg. In North Carolina, however, there were no such urban centers. The free Negroes of North Carolina, moreover, did not congregate in what urban centers there were. They, like most of the other North Carolinians, were rural and, therefore, agricultural. This condition had a most profound effect on the development of the free Negro in North Carolina. The isolation and general backwardness that were the results of rurality played an important part in the development of the social and economic pattern in which the free Negro had to live. This disadvantage was offset, in part, at least, however, by the protection from the public attack which the rurality afforded.

The year 1790 has been chosen as a starting point for several reasons. In the first place, the information concerning the free Negro in the earlier period is wholly inadequate for any kind of detailed treatment of the subject. It is impossible, for example, to obtain even a satisfactory estimate of the number of free Negroes before the first decennial census. In the second place, the year seems to coincide, roughly at least, with the period in which North Carolina ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter I Introduction
• Chapter II Growth of the Free Negro Population
• Chapter III Legal Status of the Free Negro
• Chapter IV The Free Negro in the Economic Life of North Carolina
• Chapter V Social Life of the Free Negro
• Chapter VI An Unwanted People
• Chapter VII Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Bibliographic Afterword
• Index