University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER X
THE FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS

SOME time in the fall of 1828, Benjamin
Lundy, the Quaker abolitionist, met by
accident, in a Boston boarding house, a young
man by the name of William Lloyd Garrison, who
was then publishing a total abstinence newspaper,
the National Philanthropist. The next year, after
returning from a visit to a colony of emancipated
slaves which he had succeeded in settling in the
island of Haiti, Lundy announced in his paper
that William Lloyd Garrison had joined him
at Baltimore, Maryland, and would henceforth
be associated with him in the publication at
that city of The Genius of Universal Emancipation,
the first abolition newspaper in the
United States.

This meeting of Benjamin Lundy and William
Lloyd Garrison and their subsequent association in
Baltimore marks the point in time when the agitation
for the emancipation of the Negro was transferred
from the Southern to the Northern States, and
slavery became for the first time a National issue.
After the Southampton uprising in 1831, the abolition

societies, which up to that time had existed in different
parts of the South, almost wholly disappeared.
With the exception of a few individuals like Cassius
M. Clay who, as late as 1845, published an antislavery
weekly, the True American, at Lexington,
Kentucky, there was no public opposition to slavery
in any of the Southern States.

Opposition to slavery, though silenced in the South,
never wholly ceased there, and the evidence of its
existence was the Free Negro. In spite of the efforts
that were made to limit and check emancipation of
the slaves, the number of free Negroes continued to
increase in the Southern as well as the Northern
States, and the existence of this class of persons was
the silent protest of the Southern slaveholder
against the system which he publicly defended
and upheld.

Under the conditions of slavery, the position of
the free Negro was a very uncomfortable one. He
was, in a certain sense, an anomaly, since he did not
belong to either class. He was distrusted by the
white people, and looked down upon by the slaves.
In spite of this fact, individual slaveholders—sometimes
by providing in their wills for the emancipation
and transportation of their slaves to a free state or
to Liberia, sometimes by permitting individual
slaves to buy their own freedom—were constantly
adding to the number of "free persons of colour."
Among the most illustrious of those who freed their

slaves were George Washington, John Randolph,
and Chief-Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the
famous Dred Scott decision.

When a master liberated his slaves by will, it was
frequently with the explanation, expressed or understood,
that he believed slavery was morally wrong.
When he allowed them to buy their own freedom, it
was a practical recognition that the system was
economically a mistake, since the slave who could
purchase his own freedom was one whom it did not
pay to hold as a slave. This fact was clearly recognised
by a planter in Mississippi who declared that
he had found it paid to allow the slaves to buy their
freedom. In order to encourage them to do this he
devised a method by which they might purchase their
freedom in instalments. After they had saved a
certain amount of money, by extra labour, he permitted
them to buy one day's freedom a week. With
this much capital invested in themselves they were
then able to purchase, in a much shorter time, a
second, a third, and a fourth day's freedom, until
they were entirely free.

A somewhat similar method was sometimes
adopted by certain ambitious freedmen for purchasing
the freedom of their families. In such a case the
father would purchase, for instance, a son or a
daughter. The children would then join with their
father in purchasing the other members of the family.
It was in this way, I have been informed by Mr.

Monroe Work, who is at present a teacher at Tuskegee,
that his grandfather purchased his wife and ten
of his children, including Mr. Work's father. The
grandfather, Henry Work, after securing his own
freedom, went first to Cincinnati, and then to
Decatur, Michigan, where he owned a farm, and on
this farm he and his children earned the money to
purchase one by one the other members of the family.
How much it cost the family to free itself in this way
Mr. Work says he was unable to learn. He knows,
however, that his father sold at one time for $1,400.
When Henry Work died there were still three of his
children in slavery whom he had not been able to
redeem. Ex-President Gibson, of the Negro State of
Liberia, told me that his father purchased himself
and most of the other members of the family in instalments
and transported them to Liberia. Two sons,
who did not care to go back to Africa, were left in
slavery in this country, but with the understanding
that after a certain time they were to become free.

In this and other ways, in spite of the fact that there
were at this time something like 30,000 fugitives in
Canada and 20,000 colonists in Africa and elsewhere,
the number of free Negroes in the United States
increased from 59,466 in 1790 to 434,495 in 1860.
This was about 10 per cent, of the whole Negro
population at that time. Of these free Negroes
considerably more than half—262,000—were in the
Southern States. In the South, the three states of

Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina contained
by far the largest number of the "free citizens of
colour," as they were sometimes called. At the
census of 1860, the slave population of Maryland
was something like 87,000 and the number of free
Negroes was 83,942. From 1830 to 1860 the slave
population of Maryland decreased nearly 16,000
while the population of free Negroes increased something
over 31,000.

In estimating the number of slaves who were, in
one way or another, given their freedom by their
masters, some account should be taken of those who
were, for one reason or another, re-enslaved. A free
Negro might be sold into slavery to pay taxes or to
pay fines, and in Maryland free Negroes might be
sold into perpetual slavery for the crime of entering
the state. In 1829 the practice of selling any free
Negro, who could not account for himself, in order
to pay the jail fines, had become such a scandal as to
attract public attention.

There were other means by which a considerable
number of free Negroes were re-enslaved. The
practice of kidnapping, in spite of severe laws against
it in all the Southern states, was carried on to a
very great extent. In his book on the domestic slave-trade,
Professor Collins, of Claremont College,
Hickory, N. C., estimates that the number of free
Negroes kidnapped and sold into slavery "must have
ranged from a few hundred to two or three thousand,"

and he adds, "it appears quite certain that as many
were kidnapped as escaped from bondage, if not
more."[1]

A disposition to free slaves for personal considerations
of one kind or another began at a very early
period. In York and Henrico counties, Virginia,
as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century,
we find records of the emancipation of Negro slaves.
For example, Thomas Whitehead, of York, emancipated
his slave John, and bequeathed to him, among
other things, two cows and the use of a house and
as much ground as he could cultivate. He further
showed his confidence in the discretion and the
integrity of this Negro slave by appointing him guardian
of Mary Rogers, a ward of Mr. Whitehead. He
also made him trustee of her property, but the court
refused to allow him to fill either one or the other of
these positions.[2] Another instance recorded about
this time was that of John Carter, of Lancaster,
Virginia, who was one of the largest slaveholders in
the colony. He gave freedom to two of his Negro
slaves who were married to each other. To each he
gave a cow and a calf and three barrels of Indian
corn. He also instructed his heirs to allow them
the use of convenient firewood, timber, and as much
land as they could cultivate. He provided that the

two daughters of this couple should receive their
liberty when they reached their eighteenth year, and,
as a provision for them when they reached that age,
he gave each a yearling with its increase, which was
to be permitted to run with the cattle of his wife after
his death.[3]

In the interval between 1635 and 1700, although
the Negro slaves were few in number, and most of the
labour was performed by white servants, there were
a number of persons of African blood in the colony
of Virginia who raised themselves to positions of
some importance. Several of them were able to
write at a time when there were very few schools
and education was a decided luxury. Several had
obtained patents to land. For instance, in 1654, one
hundred acres of land in Northampton County were
granted to Richard Johnson, a Negro, and in the
description of this tract reference was made to
the contiguous estates of John Johnston and Anthony
Johnson, both Negroes. There are in the records
of Northampton County, also, evidences that a suit
was begun by Anthony Johnson for the purpose
of recovering his Negro servant.

During the early years of slavery, the free Negroes
seem to have had about the same rights under the
law that other free persons had, except, as I have
already stated, they were not allowed to hold persons
of white blood as bond-servants. It appears that,

until after the Revolution, Negro freemen were
allowed to vote in every state, except Georgia and
South Carolina. Between 1792 and 1834 the four
bordering states, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia,
and Kentucky, denied suffrage to the Negro. In
North Carolina, Negroes who paid a public tax
took part in the election until 1835, when a new
constitution excluded them from the suffrage. New
Jersey took away the suffrage of the Negro in 1807,
Connecticut in 1814, and Pennsylvania in 1838.
New York, in 1821, required from them an unusually
high property qualification.[4]

These changes were all evidences of the steady
growth in the United States, both North and South,
of a caste system which excluded the Negro from
the ordinary privileges of citizenship exclusively upon
the ground of his colour. In 1803 Ohio demanded
a bond of five hundred dollars for Negroes who came
into the state. A Negro, even though a free man,
could not at that time testify in a case in which a
white man was a party, and Negroes were not
admitted to the public schools. Similar provisions
were made by Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa when they
became states. Illinois prohibited the entrance of
Negroes to the state at any time. In 1833 Judge
Dagget, of Connecticut, twenty-four years before the
Dred Scott decision, held that a free Negro was a
person and not a citizen. This was in the trial of the

case against Prudence Crandall, the young Quakeress
who had established a school for Negroes
in Canterbury, Connecticut, contrary to a law
which provided that no school could be established
for coloured people who were not inhabitants
of Connecticut.

The effect of the agitation for abolition seems to
have made the condition of the free Negroes steadily
worse, particularly in the Southern states. In some
of these states, they were forbidden to sell drugs,
in others they might not sell wheat and tobacco, and
in still others to peddle market produce or own a boat
was against the law. In several states it was
against the law for a free Negro to cross the state
line; in others, a slave who was emancipated was
compelled to immediately leave the state.

Notwithstanding the hardships and difficulties
under which the free Negro population laboured,
both in the North and in the South, those who have
had occasion to study the local history of the Southern
States have found that the number of Negroes who
had succeeded in making some impression upon their
community, either by their native qualities or by
their success in business, was more considerable than
is usually imagined. Solomon Humphreys, for
instance, after purchasing his freedom, became a
well-known business man in Georgia. Benjamin
Lundy found at San Antonio a Negro who, after
purchasing his own freedom and that of his wife

and family, had become the owner of several
houses and lots.[5]

The number of free Negroes in North Carolina
was considerable because, in spite of the rigorous
laws against the free coloured people, conditions were
more lenient than those of any other Southern state.
The result was that many free Negroes crossed into
North Carolina and settled, undisturbed, in the
northern or southern counties. Speaking of this
class of people, Professor John Spencer Bassett says:

Professor Bassett gives an account of several free
Negroes, of whom he had been able to obtain records,
who were citizens of Newbern, Craven County,
North Carolina. One of the men to whom he refers
was John C. Stanley, the son of an African-born
slave woman, who was liberated by the General

Assembly under the petition of Mrs. Lydia Stewart,
his mistress. Because he got his start in the barber
business, he was generally known as "Barber Jack."
He became the owner of several plantations on which
he employed sixty-four slaves, of which he was the
owner, and as many more bound free Negroes. He
had three sons, John, Alexander, and Charles.
John became an expert book-keeper, and was
employed in that capacity by a prominent firm.
John C. Stanley amassed a fortune, or what was
supposed to be a fortune in those days, of something
like $40,000. Speaking of some of the other
successful Negroes of whom he was able to obtain the
records, Professor Bassett says:

Among the descendants of the free coloured people
of Newbern, North Carolina, with whom I am
personally acquainted is the Hon. John P. Green,
who was for twelve years a justice of the peace
in Cleveland, Ohio, four years a member of the Ohio
House of Representatives, two years a member of the
State Senate, and for nine years at the head of the
Postage-stamp Distribution Bureau of Washington,
filling in the intervals of his public service with practice
at the Cleveland bar. His father was a master
tailor in Newbern, and a member of a family of
free coloured people whose traditions go back something
more than one hundred years.

Charles W. Chesnutt, author of "The Conjure
Woman" and other popular stories of Southern life,
was descended from free coloured people in Fayetteville,
North Carolina. Mr. Chesnutt informs me that
a coloured man by the name of Matthew Leary is
still remembered in Fayetteville who, before the war,
was the owner of considerable land, a number of

slaves, a brick store in the business part of the town,
and a handsome residence in a good neighbourhood.
His sons gained some prominence in North Carolina
during the Reconstruction era. Matthew Leary, Jr.,
went into politics and afterward became a clerk in
one of the Government offices in Washington. A
younger brother, Hon. John S. Leary, was the first
coloured man in North Carolina to be admitted
to the bar, of which he remained a respected member
until he died at Charlotte, N. C. He was, I understand,
at one time a member of the North Carolina
Legislature.

Another of the successful free coloured people of
North Carolina was James D. Sampson, who began
life as a house carpenter and became in the course
of time a man of considerable wealth and some
local distinction. I have been informed that one time
the Legislature passed a bill granting his family special
privileges which were not permitted to other free
people of colour. His children, John, Benjamin, and
Joseph, were all educated in the North. Benjamin
graduated from Oberlin College and afterward
became a teacher at Wilberforce, Ohio. John P.
Sampson published at Cincinnati, during the war,
the Coloured Citizen. After the war he was
commissioned by General Howard to look after the
coloured schools established by the Freedmen's
Bureau in the Third District of North Carolina
He was elected treasurer and assessor of Wilmington,

and was candidate for Congress, but was defeated
because of the fact, it is said, that his father had been
the owner of slaves before the war. While it was true
that James D. Sampson owned a number of slaves, it
is said that many, if not all, of them were held in trust
in order to secure them practical freedom. Recently,
George M. Sampson, a grandson of James D. Sampson,
visited Tuskegee. He is now a teacher in the
State Normal School at Tallahassee, Florida.

There is no reason to believe that the coloured
people of North Carolina made more progress in a
material way than they did in some of the other
states in the South. For instance, in the city of
Charleston, South Carolina, there was a colony of
"free persons of colour" who were proud of the fact
that they sprang from a generation of free ancestors
going back to before the Revolutionary War. In the
list of taxpayers in the city of Charleston for 1860
the names of three hundred and sixty "persons of
colour," whose property was assessed in that year,
are given. They owned real estate which was valued
for taxation at $724,570. Of these three hundred
and sixty taxpayers, one hundred and thirty owned
slaves, aggregating three hundred and ninety in
number. The largest number of slaves held by a
coloured person was fourteen. In this list of "persons
of colour" thirteen are classed as Indians, but
it is quite certain that these so-called Indians were
largely mixed with Negro blood. Like so many other

communities, there were Indians in Charleston who
had been but partially absorbed by coloured people
with whom they had been associated.

In 1860 the population of Charleston was 48,409,
of whom 26,969 were white, 17,655 slaves, and 3,785
were "free persons of colour." It would appear
from the figures given that these free coloured people
probably owned, including slaves, a million dollars'
worth of property. Among the slaves held by coloured
people of Charleston were a number who were
actually free men, and only nominally slaves. For
instance, Richard Holloway, who was a prominent
man among the free coloured people in Charleston,
owned Charles Benford, who was his friend, and with
him one of the leaders in the Methodist Church, at
that time. The circumstances were these: Charles
Benford had arranged with his white master to purchase
his freedom, but at that time the laws were such
that it was difficult for a master to free his slaves,
particularly if the slave purchased his own freedom.
In order to get around this law Charles Benford asked
his friend, Richard Holloway, to purchase him,
Benford himself furnishing the money for the
purchase.

There were a number of other slaves held in trust
by the free coloured people of Charleston. The
wealthiest family in Charleston, among the free
coloured people, were the Westons. They had
among the various members of the family taxable

property to the amount of $80,000. They also
owned thirty-six slaves, nine of whom they held as
trustees. It is said that the number of slaves held
by St. Philip's Church, which was the aristocratic
church of the city, amounted to something over
one hundred. These consisted for the most part of
slaves who had actually bought their freedom and
whom the church held in trust.

Of the free coloured people of Louisiana, of whom
there were a very considerable number before the
war, many were slaveholders and large owners of
land. There were a number of settlements of Creole
Negroes, as they were called, in various parts of
Louisiana. When Frederick Law Olmsted visited
that state in 1853, he visited one of these settlements
in the neighbourhood of Natchitoches. The information
which he obtained in regard to these people
was to the effect that they were "honest and industrious
and paid their debts quite as promptly as the
white planters, and were, as far as anyone could
judge, good citizens in all respects!" One of them, he
learned, had lately spent $40,000 in a law suit, and it
is believed that they were increasing in wealth.
Several of these coloured planters were worth four
or five hundred thousand dollars. The little town of
Washington, near Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish,
was formerly called Negroville from the number of
free Negroes living in that village. A number of
them, according to Olmsted, were wealthy and

thriving. They owned some of the best cotton
and sugar plantations.

"An intelligent man whom I met at Washington,"
he said, "who had been travelling most of the time
for two years in the plantation districts, told me that
the free Negroes in the state in general, so far as he
had observed, were equal in all respects to the white
Creoles. Much the larger part of them were poor,
thriftless, unambitious, and lived wretchedly, but
there were many opulent, intelligent, and educated,
The best house and most tasteful grounds that he
had visited in the state had belonged to a nearly
full-blooded Negro—a very dark man. He and his
family were well educated and, though French in
their habitual tongue, they spoke English with a
liberal tongue and one much more eloquent than
most of the liberally educated whites. They had a
private tutor in their family, and owned, he thought,
a hundred and fifty slaves.

It is near here, in the adjoining parish of St. Martin,
that my friend Paul Chretien lived. His father was
a free coloured man who made his money in the
neighbourhood of Calcasieu, but afterward returned
to St. Martin and built himself a beautiful home there
in which his son, whose name I have mentioned, is
now living.

A considerable portion of the Negro population of
Mobile, Alabama, at the present day are the descendants
of these Creole Negroes whose freedom was

guaranteed to them by the France treaty which
transferred Louisiana to the United States in 1803.
There is an island in Mobile Bay, about twenty miles
below the city, Mon Louis Island, which is owned
by the descendants of two families. The lower end
of the island was settled by the veterans of the Revolutionary
War, who lived to a great age; the upper
part of the island was settled by a man known as
Captain Jack Collins, but his real name was Maximilian
Collins, who settled on this island in 1808.
He left a large tract of land to his descendants with
the injunction that they should sell none of it; it has
remained in their hands up to the present time, and
there has grown up there, as a result, a little patriarchal
colony made up of the descendants of the free
Negro, Captain Jack, and the descendants of his
slaves. The oldest living descendant of this patriarch
is the widow of the late Belthair Durette, who
had seventy-two grandchildren, fifty-two great-grandchildren,
ninety-seven of whom are living in this
community of Mon Louis.

I have mentioned here several cases which indicate
that, even in the South and before the Civil War,
the Negro had made some progress along material
lines. It is impossible to tell, of course, how much
property these people possessed. But the aggregate
value of the property of the 262,000 Negroes in the
South in 1860 has been estimated at something like
twenty-five millions of dollars. I should judge,

from what I have been able to learn, that that
was a low estimate.

The question might very well be asked, considering
the success that individuals were able to make before
the war, why it was that the great mass of the Negro
people who were free did not do better? In reply to
that I might say that there were the same reasons and
others why the Negro should not get on or succeed
that there were why the class known as the "poor
whites" in the South did not succeed. If the conditions
of slavery operated to keep the poor white man
in a low stage of civilisation, they certainly operated
to keep the free Negro in a still lower stage.

Not only did the free people of colour have to meet
all the difficulties to which I have referred, but it was
against the law for them to meet together in any large
number in order to coöperate to improve their
condition. The great benefits of coöperation which
go so far to extend to the mass of individuals the
benefits which are obtained by a few were denied
them.

In spite of this fact, in Charleston, Baltimore,
Washington, New York, and in other places where
there were large numbers of free Negroes, little
societies for mutual helpfulness were established.
For instance, in 1790 there was formed in Charleston
what was known as the "Brown Fellowship Society."
This society was started at the suggestion of the director
of St. Philip's, of which a number of free Negroes

were members. Besides cultivating a spirit of fellowship
among its members, it sought to provide school
privileges for their children and to provide relief
and extend aid to worthy persons of their colour.
One of the first things they did was to purchase
a burial lot for their dead. This organisation
befriended helpless orphans; one of these orphans
was the well-known Bishop Daniel A. Payne, the
founder of Wilberforce University. This organisation
still maintains its existence, and celebrated a few
years ago its centennial. The records have all been
preserved, and one of the most interesting of these is
one which commemorates, in a formal way, the
expulsion of one of its members on suspicion of
having assisted in kidnapping and selling into slavery
a free coloured man. The success of this first organisation
led to the establishment of other similar
organisations. "The Humane and Friendly Society"
was established in 1802; "The Friendly Union,"
in 1813; and later still, "The Friendly Moralist,"
and the "Brotherly Association," and the "Unity
and Friendship." Each of these had its own burial
plot and system of mutual benefit.

After the attempted conspiracy of Denmark Vesey,
in 1822, all these organisations came under suspicion,
and there was a time when they were kept up under
the greatest difficulties, but they never ceased to
exist. There were similar organisations, as I have
said, in several of the larger cities of the South.

Frederick Douglass, while living in Baltimore,
attended one of these societies, known as the "East
Baltimore Mental Improvement Society." This
society was formed by a number of free coloured
young men who, like Frederick Douglass, were engaged,
as ship caulkers. In this organisation he
frequently took prominent part, although, being a
slave, he would naturally have been excluded. He
has said that the society of the young men he met
there aided him considerably in completing the
education that he had already begun in secret. As
Baltimore probably had more free coloured people
at the time than any other city, with the exception
of Washington, it was natural that there should be
a large number of these societies of a literary and
mutual-benefit and benevolent character. Baltimore,
in fact, seems to have been the home of the Negro
mutual benefit societies, many of which now in
existence date back to 1820.

The New York African Society, for mutual relief,
which has been in existence for over a hundred
years in New York City, held its first meeting in a
coloured school-house in Rose Street in 1808, nearly
twenty years before the final emancipation of the
slaves in New York State. Although it has not
increased its membership in recent years, this society
has become, I understand, comparatively wealthy
as a result of its earlier investments. The first property
owned by this society was on Baxter Street not

far from the spot that afterward became notorious
under the name of Five Points. It was purchased
in 1820 for $1,800, and when it was sold later the
funds were used to purchase a five-story flat at No.
43 West Sixty-sixth Street and another building at
No. 27 Greenwich Avenue, both of which the society
still owns.

In Maryland these beneficial organisations were
especially exempt from the general prohibition
against public meetings of free coloured people In
other places in the Southern States there was no
such exemption and, although the law was usually
got around in some way or other, not infrequently
members of these organisations were arrested, fined,
and sometimes sent to prison. Frederick Law
Olmsted records one such instance in Washington,
D. C., in the first chapter of his journals of "In the
Seaboard Slave States."

He says:

Nothing contributed more to keep the free Negroes
from making the great advancement that they did
during the period of slavery than the fact that they
were not allowed to organise and unite their efforts
for their own improvement in any large way. On
the other hand, nothing has more prevented and held
back the progress of the coloured people since slavery
than the fact that they have had to learn how to unite
their efforts in order to improve their condition.