Almost Free

A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia

Eva Wolf, Manisha Sinha, Patrick Rael

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780820343648
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South.

There were several paths to freedom for slaves, each of them difficult. After ten years of elaborate dealings and negotiations, Johnson earned manumission in August 1812. An illiterate "mulatto" who had worked at the tavern in Warrenton as a slave, Johnson as a freeman was an anomaly, since free blacks made up only 3 percent of Virginia's population. Johnson stayed in Fauquier County and managed to buy his enslaved family, but the law of the time required that they leave Virginia if Johnson freed them. Johnson opted to stay. Because slaves' marriages had no legal standing, Johnson was not legally married to his enslaved wife, and in the event of his death his family would be sold to new owners. Johnson's story dramatically illustrates the many harsh realities and cruel ironies faced by blacks in a society hostile to their freedom.

Wolf argues that despite the many obstacles Johnson and others faced, race relations were more flexible during the early American republic than is commonly believed. It could actually be easier for a free black man to earn the favor of elite whites than it would be for blacks in general in the post-Reconstruction South. Wolf demonstrates the ways in which race was constructed by individuals in their day-to-day interactions, arguing that racial status was not simply a legal fact but a fluid and changeable condition. Almost Free looks beyond the majority experience, focusing on those at society's edges to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of freedom in the slaveholding South.

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

almost free

A STORY ABOUT FAMILY AND RACE IN ANTEBELLUM VIRGINIA

EVA SHEPPARD WOLF

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Author’s Note

CHAPTER 1. A New Birth of Freedom

CHAPTER 2. Among an Anomalous Population

CHAPTER 3. Petitioning for Freedom in an Era of Slavery

CHAPTER 4. Visions of Rebellion

CHAPTER 5. Race, Identity, and Community

CHAPTER 6. Legacies

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Detail of map of Warrenton, Virginia, 1840

Map of Virginia, 1811

Fauquier County jailhouse

Samuel Johnson’s 1811 petition to the Virginia legislature

House of Thaddeus Norris

Notes from the Barbours endorsing Samuel Johnson’s 1826 petition

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS BOOK IS NOT FICTION. I have not made up facts, moved events around in time, or invented dialogue. But this book, even more than most history books, is an act of imagination. I wanted to bring to life a person who reached out to me across the years and through the documents. Because those documents are spare and relatively few, I have had to fill in the gaps with my knowledge of antebellum Virginia and human behavior. I have endeavored to indicate clearly what I know for certain and what I have inferred, although I have tried to avoid an abundance of conditional phrases. I trust the reader will employ her or his critical abilities to see the instances where I could have interpreted evidence differently but did not.

It has been a personal journey to write the story of Samuel Johnson. I hope that for readers too the journey becomes a personal one, and that Samuel Johnson—obscure and long dead—enters their hearts as he has entered mine, and takes his rightful place in the grand American story.

almost free

CHAPTER ONE

a new birth of freedom

SAMUEL JOHNSON STEPPED from the dim courthouse to the bright outdoors, the air heavy with late summer’s smells—grass, earth, horses, sweat. The town center stirred with the bustle of court day. Men and women from miles around had come to Warrenton, the Fauquier County seat, to take care of business, to meet, to gossip. Several trials had already been held that day, and some of the participants had gathered in Norris’s tavern behind the courthouse. Johnson knew Norris’s tavern and many of the people inside it quite well since he had worked there as a slave for more than a decade. Now he was a free man. He had just watched as the county justices ordered that the deed ensuring Johnson’s liberty be officially recorded. So before he returned to the tavern to work, Samuel Johnson stood a moment to take in the scene—to see whether he felt different and whether the world had different colors now that he was liberated. He breathed in deeply, closing his eyes, held the breath a moment, and exhaled slowly. Then he opened his eyes and walked toward the tavern.

Or maybe not. Because, like most people who were born as slaves in Virginia, Samuel Johnson could not write, he left no private record of his life—no letters, diaries, or financial account books. We cannot be sure of how he felt about his liberty, or what he saw or smelled, or even whether he attended the proceedings at the courthouse on August 25, 1812, when the deed of manumission that his owner had written three weeks before was filed with the clerk.¹ Maybe he was home, ill with a bad late-summer flu. Or maybe he continued to work at the tavern while the deed’s two witnesses, Thomas Moore and tavern owner Thaddeus Norris, went to the courthouse without him to affirm the deed’s legitimacy. Without his personal account we simply cannot know for certain how Samuel Johnson behaved on that very important day, although we can guess at likely scenarios based on the records that are available.

There are other, more basic facts that Johnson’s birth into slavery have erased: precisely when he was born, where, and to whom; how he got to Fauquier County; why he was chosen to be a servant in the tavern. It is one of slavery’s functions to obliterate personhood, to wipe out personal history.

But slaves and free blacks did have personal histories even if most of them are lost to us. Fortunately, Samuel Johnson left behind sufficient public records to reveal the arc of his life as well as some of his deepest thoughts, concerns, and feelings. A careful, close reading of Johnson’s documentary imprint—deeds, wills, tax records, court papers, and especially the extraordinary series of petitions that he and his family sent to the state legislature over a nearly thirty-year period from 1811 to 1838—gives a fuller picture of him and his family than we have of almost all contemporaneous free black Virginians. And while any historian would like to have more rather than fewer records, even a large archive, such as the one Thomas Jefferson left behind, can mislead its readers or leave important questions unanswered. Rather than fret over the difficulties of telling Samuel Johnson’s story, we will forge ahead, informed by a large body of knowledge that provides crucial context for Johnson’s life and experience.

Samuel Johnson’s story imparts biographical weight and specificity to our general understanding of how free blacks lived in the era of slavery, but it does more than fill in a chink in our wall of knowledge. In order to understand a society deeply, we must look not only at its center, the majority’s experience, but also at the experiences of those on its edges where a society’s values and norms are delineated. Free black people constituted a small minority in antebellum Virginia, about 3.1 percent of the state’s population in 1810 and about 7.2 percent of Virginia’s black population, itself (slaves and free blacks together) more than two-fifths of Virginia’s population.² Free blacks made up an anomalous population, neither part of the very large slave society nor part of the free white society. Those living on the margins, as Samuel Johnson and other free black people did, helped to define through their experiences and their social interactions precisely what the margins contained between them.

Of particular interest, the story of Samuel Johnson and his family illuminates how race operated in Virginia as something people themselves created and re-created in their multiple interactions with one another. When we examine Johnson’s experience in his community of Warrenton, Virginia, we see that race worked differently from what we might expect based on a reading of the laws regarding free people of color or on white Virginians’ frequently expressed and strong antipathy toward free blacks. Race in antebellum Virginia was simultaneously momentous and tenuous. We see too that a broad space existed between freedom and slavery—that freedom was not simply slavery’s opposite.³ The world we view, then, is a complex one, and sometimes the scene is blurry, the details fuzzy, and we are left to fill in the picture with imaginings.

So, imagine: From where he stood outside the courthouse, Johnson could see most of the town of Warrenton. The courthouse marked the town’s center, and before being incorporated as Warrenton (named after the Revolutionary hero and Massachusetts man Joseph Warren), the town had been called simply Fauquier Court House.⁴ With his back to the courthouse, Johnson could look to his right to Main Street with its shops and houses. Where the buildings ended, Main Street ran southeast out of town and became “the road to Fredericksburg,” which was approximately forty miles distant. Meeting Main Street in front of him was Court Lane, which ran a couple of blocks northeast before turning to become the road to Alexandria, about fifty miles away. And just to his left, abutting the courthouse, stood the jail (now the Fauquier Historical Society’s Old Jail Museum), with lawyers’ offices conveniently nearby. If we read backward to 1812 from what we know existed in 1819, we can imagine that he also saw a cabinetmaker’s shop, the offices of several doctors, and the shops of the town’s hat maker, tanners, and clock maker. With all of these conveniences and with its buildings fairly close together, Warrenton was about as urban as any place in Virginia except for its few real cities, such as Richmond and Alexandria. Warrenton was much more modest and retained a rural flavor; people grew wheat and corn on some of the town lots even up to 1840.⁵

Because Warrenton ran only a few blocks in any direction, if Johnson stood in front of the courthouse, he could have easily seen beyond the town’s boundaries to the rolling countryside. Fauquier County lies in Virginia’s Piedmont region, situated between the lowlands of the coastal plain and the great Appalachian range. It is beautiful country, gently hilly, often green, fertile. The land had appealed to the wealthy gentlemen of the eastern lowlands, men such as Richard Henry Lee, an indomitable member of the Lee family and, like Joseph Warren, a Revolutionary who, along with others, bought up huge tracts of land in Fauquier as an investment. Lee owned the land that became the county seat, although he never settled there.⁶ Like Lee, many of the early investors divided their vast landholdings into smaller plots to sell to settlers. By contrast, the Marshall family, of whom Chief Justice John Marshall would become the most famous member, did settle in Fauquier County, and several family members served as county leaders. In Samuel Johnson’s time, the county lay in the orbit of Washington, D.C., as is still true today. The county’s farmers ...