| | 1 | Author: | Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 1858-1932 | Add | | | Title: | The Free Colored People of North Carolina  | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | IN our generalizations upon American history — and the American
people are prone to loose generalization, especially where the
Negro is concerned — it is ordinarily assumed that the entire colored
race was set free as the result of the Civil War. While this is true in
a broad, moral sense, there was, nevertheless, a very considerable technical exception in the case of several hundred thousand free people of
color, a great many of whom were residents of the Southern States.
Although the emancipation of their race brought to these a larger
measure of liberty than they had previously enjoyed, it did not confer
upon them personal freedom, which they possessed already. These
free colored people were variously distributed, being most numerous,
perhaps, in Maryland, where, in the year 1850, for example, in a state
with 87,189 slaves, there were 83,942 free colored people, the white population of the State being 515,918; and perhaps least numerous in
Georgia, of all the slave states, where, to a slave population of 462,198,
there were only 351 free people of color, or less than three-fourths of
one per cent., as against the about fifty per cent. in Maryland. Next
to Maryland came Virginia, with 58,042 free colored people, North
Carolina with 30,463, Louisiana with 18,647, (of whom 10,939 were in
the parish of New Orleans alone), and South Carolina with 9,914.
For these statistics, I have of course referred to the census reports
for the years mentioned. In the year 1850, according to the same
authority, there were in the state of North Carolina 553,028 white people, 288,548 slaves, and 27,463 free colored people. In 1860, the white
population of the state was 631,100, slaves 331,059, free colored people, 30,463. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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