University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXI
FREE NEGROES

IN the colonial period slaves were freed as a rule only when
generous masters rated them individually deserving of liberty
or when the negroes bought themselves. Typical of
the time were the will of Thomas Stanford of New Jersey in
1722 directing that upon the death of the testator's wife his negro
man should have his freedom if in the opinion of three neighbors
named he had behaved well,[1] and a deed signed by Robert Daniell
of South Carolina in 1759 granting freedom to his slave David
Wilson in consideration of his faithful service and of £600 currency
in hand paid,[2] So long as this condition prevailed, in
which the ethics of slaveholding were little questioned, the freed
element remained extremely small.

The liberal philosophy of the Revolution, persisting thereafter
in spite of reaction, not only wrought the legal disestablishment
of slavery throughout the North, but prompted private
manumissions far and wide.[3] Thus Philip Graham of Maryland
made a deed in 1787 reciting his realization that the holding
of his "fellow men in bondage and slavery is repugnant to
the golden law of God and the unalienable right of mankind as
well as to every principle of the late glorious revolution which
has taken place in America," and converting his slaves into servants
for terms, the adults to become free at the close of that
year and the children as they reached maturity.[4] In the same
period, upon his coming of age, Richard Randolph, brother of

the famous John, wrote to his guardian: "With regard to the
division of the estate, I have only to say that I want not a single
negro for any other purpose than his immediate liberation. I
consider every individual thus unshackled as the source of future
generations, not to say nations, of freemen; and I shudder
when I think that so insignificant an animal as I am is invested
with this monstrous, this horrid power."[5] The Randolph estate,
however, was so cumbered with debts that the desired manumissions
could not then be made. At Richard's death in 1796
he left a will of the expected tenor, providing for a wholesale
freeing as promptly as it could legally be accomplished by the
clearance of the mortgage.[6] In 1795 John Stratton of Norfolk,
asserting his "full persuassion that freedom is the natural right
of all men," set free his able-bodied slave, Peter Wakefield.[7]
Robert K. Moore of Louisville mingled thrift with liberalism
by setting free in 1802 two pairs of married slaves because of
his conviction that involuntary servitude was wrong, and at the
same time binding them by indenture to serve him for some
fourteen years longer in consideration of certain small payments
in advance and larger ones at the ends of their terms.[8]

Manumissions were in fact so common in the deeds and wills
of the men of '76 that the number of colored freemen in the
South exceeded thirty-five thousand in 1790 and was nearly
doubled in each of the next two decades. The greater caution
of their successors, reinforced by the rise of slave prices, then
slackened the rate of increase to twenty-five and finally to ten
per cent, per decade. Documents in this later period, reverting
to the colonial basis, commonly recited faithful service or self
purchase rather than inherent rights as the grounds for manumission.
Liberations on a large scale, nevertheless, were not
wholly discontinued. John Randolph's will set free nearly four
hundred in 1833;[9] Monroe Edwards of Louisiana manumitted

160 by deed in 1840;[10] and George W. P. Custis of Virginia liberated
his two or three hundred at his death in 1857.[11]

Still other large proprietors while not bestowing immediate
liberty made provisions to bring it after the lapse of years.
Prominent among these were three Louisianians. Julien Poydras,
who died in 1824, ordered his executors to sell his six plantations
with their respective staffs under contracts to secure the
manumission of each slave after twenty-five years of service to
the purchaser, together with an annual pension of $25 to each
of those above sixty years of age; and years afterward a nephew
of the testator procured an injunction from the supreme court
of the state estopping the sale of some of the slaves by one of
their purchasers in such way as would hazard the fulfilment of
the purpose.[12] Stephen Henderson, a Scotch immigrant who
had acquired several sugar plantations, provided as follows, by
will made in 1837 and upheld by the courts: ten and twenty
slaves respectively were to be chosen by lot at periods five and
ten years after his death to be freed and sent to Liberia, and at
the end of twenty-five years the rest were to fare likewise, but
any who refused to be deported were to be kept as apprentices
on the plantations.[13] John McDonogh, the most thrifty citizen
of New Orleans in his day, made a unique bargain with his whole
force of slaves, about 1825, by which they were collectively to
earn their freedom and their passage to Liberia by the overtime
work of Saturday afternoons. This labor was to be done in
McDonogh's own service, and he was to keep account of their
earnings. They were entitled to draw upon this fund upon approved
occasions; but since the contract was with the whole
group of slaves as a unit, when one applied for cash the others
must draw theirs pro rata, thereby postponing the common day
of liberation. Any slaves violating the rules of good conduct
were to be sold by the master, whereupon their accrued earnings
would revert to the fund of the rest. The plan was carried to

completion on schedule, and after some delay in embarkation
they left America in 1842, some eighty in number, with their
late master's benediction. In concluding his public narration
in the premises McDonogh wrote: "They have now sailed for
Liberia, the land of their fathers. I can say with truth and
heartfelt satisfaction that a more virtuous people does not exist
in any country."[14]

Among more romantic liberations was that of Pierre Chastang
of Mobile who, in recognition of public services in the war of
1812 and the yellow fever epidemic of 1819 was bought and
freed by popular subscription;[15] that of Sam which was provided
by a special act of the Georgia legislature in 1834 at a
cost of $1,800 in reward for his having saved the state capitol
from destruction by fire;[16] and that of Prince which was attained
through the good offices of the United States government.
Prince, after many years as a Mississippi slave, wrote
a letter in Arabic to the American consul at Tangier in which
he recounted his early life as a man of rank among the Timboo
people and his capture in battle and sale overseas. This led
Henry Clay on behalf of the Adams administration to inquire
at what cost he might be bought for liberation and return. His
master thereupon freed him gratuitously, and the citizens of
Natchez raised a fund for the purchase of his wife, with a surplus
for a flowing Moorish costume in which Prince was
promptly arrayed. The pair then departed, in 1828, for Washington

en routs for Morocco, Prince avowing that he would soon
send back money for the liberation of their nine children.[17]

Most of the negroes who procured freedom remained in the
United States, though all of those who gained it by flight and
many of those manumitted had to shift their location at the time
of changing their status. At least one of the fugitives, however,
made known his preference for his native district in a manner
which cost him his liberty. After two years in Ohio and
Canada he returned to the old plantation in Georgia, where he
was welcomed with a command to take up the hoe. Rejecting
this implement, he proposed to buy himself if a thousand dollars
would suffice. When his master, declining to negotiate, ordered
him into custody he stabbed one of the negroes who seized
him. At the end of the episode the returned wanderer lay in
jail; but where his money was, or whether in truth he had any,
is not recorded.[18] Among some of those manumitted and sent
out of their original states as by law required, disappointment
and homesickness were distressingly keen. A group of them
who had been carried to New York in 1852 under the will of a
Mr. Cresswell of Louisiana, found themselves in such misery
there that they begged the executor to carry them back, saying
he might keep them as slaves or sell them—that they had been
happy before but were wretched now.[19]

The slaves manumitted for meritorious service and those who
bought themselves formed together an element of substantial
worth in the Southern free colored population. Testamentary
endorsement like that which Abel P. Upshur gave on freeing his
man David Rich—"I recommend him in the strongest manner
to the respect, esteem and confidence of any community in which
he may live"[20] —are sufficiently eloquent in the premises. Those
who bought themselves were similarly endorsed in many instances,

and the very fact of their self purchase was usually a
voucher of thrift and sobriety. Many of those freed on either
of these grounds were of mixed blood; and to them were added
the mulatto and quadroon children set free by their white
fathers, with particular frequency in Louisiana, who by virtue
oftentimes of gifts in lands, goods and moneys were in the propertied
class from the time of their manumission. The recruits
joining the free colored population through all of these channels
tended, together with their descendants, to be industrious,
well-mannered and respected members of society.

Each locality was likely to have some outstanding figure
among these. In Georgia the most notable was Austin Dabney,
who as a mulatto youth served in the Revolutionary army and
attached himself ever afterward to the white family who saved
his life when he had been wounded in battle. The Georgia legislature
by special act gave him a farm; he was welcomed in the
tavern circle of chatting lawyers whenever his favorite Judge
Dooly held court at his home village; and once when the formality
of drawing his pension carried him to Savannah the governor
of the state, seeing him pass, dragged him from his horse
and quartered him as a guest in his house.[21] John Eady of the
South Carolina lowlands by a like service in the War for Independence
earned a somewhat similar recognition which he retained
throughout a very long life.[22]

Others were esteemed rather for piety and benevolence than
for heroic services. "Such," wrote Bishop Capers of the Southern
Methodist Church, "were my old friends Castile Selby and
John Bouquet of Charleston, Will Campbell and Harry Myrick
of Wilmington, York Cohen of Savannah, and others I might
name. These I might call remarkable for their goodness. But
I use the word in a broader sense for Henry Evans, who was
confessedly the father of the Methodist church, white and black,
in Fayetteville, and the best preacher of his time in that quarter."
Evans, a free-born full-blooded black, as Capers went on

to relate, had been a shoemaker and licensed preacher in Virginia,
but while journeying toward Charleston in search of better
employment he had been so struck by the lack of religion and
morality among the negroes in Fayetteville that he determined
upon their conversion as his true mission in life. When the
town authorities dispersed his meetings he shifted his rude pulpit
into the woods outside their jurisdiction and invited surveillance
by the whites to prove his lack of offence. The palpable
improvement in the morals of his followers led erelong to his
being invited to preach within the town again, where the white
people began to be numerous among his hearers. A regular
congregation comprising members of both races was organized
and a church building erected. But the white attendance grew
so large as to threaten the crowding out of the blacks. To provide
room for these the side walls of the church were torn off
and sheds built on either flank; and these were the conditions
when Capers himself succeeded the aged negro in its pulpit in
1810 and found him on his own score an inspiration. Toward
the ruling race, Capers records, Evans was unfailingly deferential,
"never speaking to a white but with his hat under his arm;
never allowing himself to be seated in their houses. . . . 'The
whites are kind to me and come to hear me preach,' he would
say, 'but I belong to my own sort and must not spoil them.' And
yet Henry Evans was a Boanerges; and in his duty feared not
the face of man."[23]

In the line of intellectual attainment and the like the principal
figures lived in the eighteenth century. One of them was described
in a contemporary news item which suggests that some
journalists then were akin to their successors of more modern
times. "There is a Mr. St. George, a Creole, son to the French
governor of St. Domingo, now at Paris, who realizes all the accomplishments
attributed by Boyle and others to the Admirable
Creighton of the Scotch. He is so superior at the sword that
there is an edict of the Parliament of Paris to make his engagement
in any duel actual death. He is the first dancer (even before

the Irish Singsby) in the world. He plays upon seven instruments
of music, beyond any other individual. He speaks
twenty-six languages, and maintains public thesises in each. He
walks round the various circles of science like the master of
each; and strange to be mentioned to white men, this Mr. St.
George is a mulatto, the son of an African mother."[24] Less
happy was the career of Francis Williams of Jamaica, a plaything
of the human gods. Born of negro parents who had
earned special privilege in the island, he was used by the Duke
of Montague in a test of negro mental capacity and given an
education in an English grammar school and at Cambridge University.
Upon his return to Jamaica his patron sought his appointment
as a member of the governor's council but without
success; and he then became a schoolmaster and a poet on occasion
in the island capital. Williams described himself with some
pertinence as "a white man acting under a black skin." His
contempt for his fellow negroes and particularly for the mulattoes
made him lonely, eccentric, haughty and morose. A Latin
panegyric which is alone available among his writings is rather
a language exercise than a poem.[25] On the continent Benjamin
Banneker was an almanac maker and somewhat of an astronomer,
and Phyllis Wheatley of Boston a writer of verses. Both
were doubtless more noted for their sable color than for their
positive qualities. The wonder of them lay in their ambition
and enterprise, not in their eminence among scientific and literary
craftsmen at large.[26] Such careers as these had no equivalent
in the nineteenth century until its closing decades when
Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W. E. B.
DuBois set new paces in their several courses of endeavor.

Of a more normal but less conspicuous type was Jehu Jones,
the colored proprietor of one of Charleston's most popular hotels
who lived in the same manner as his white patrons, accumulated

property to the value of some forty thousand dollars, and maintained
a reputation for high business talent and integrity.[27] At
New Orleans men of such a sort were quite numerous. Prominent
among them by reason of his wealth and philanthropy was
Thomy Lafon, a merchant and money lender who systematically
accumulated houses and lots during a lifetime extending both before
and after the Civil War and whose possessions when he
died at the age of eighty-two were appraised at nearly half a
million dollars.[28] Prosperity and good repute, however, did not
always go hand in hand. The keeper of the one good tavern
in the Louisiana village of Bayou Sara in 1831 was a colored
woman of whom Anne Royall wrote: "This nigger or mulatto
was rich, owned the tavern and several slaves, to whom
she was a great tyrant. She owned other valuable property
and a great deal of money, as report said; and doubtless it is
true. She was very insolent, and, I think, drank. It seems one
Tague [an Irishman], smitten with her charms and her property,
made love to her and it was returned, and they live together as
man and wife. She was the ugliest wench I ever saw, and, if
possible, he was uglier, so they were well matched."[29] One
might ascribe the tone of this description to the tartness of Mrs.
Royall's pen were it not that she recorded just afterward that a
body-servant of General Ripley who was placed at her command
in St. Francisville was "certainly the most accomplished
servant I ever saw."[30]

The property of colored freemen oftentimes included slaves.
Such instances were quite numerous in pre-revolutionary San
Domingo; and some in the British West Indies achieved notoriety
through the exposure of cruelties.[31] On the continent a
negro planter in St. Paul's Parish, South Carolina, was reported
before the close of the eighteenth century to have two hundred

slaves as well as a white wife and son-in-law, and the returns of
the first federal census appear to corroborate it.[32] In Louisiana
colored planters on a considerable scale became fairly numerous.
Among them were Cyprien Ricard who bought at a sheriff's
sale in 1851 an estate in Iberville Parish along with its
ninety-one slaves for nearly a quarter of a million dollars; Marie
Metoyer of Natchitoches Parish had fifty-eight slaves and more
than two thousand acres of land when she died in 1840; Charles
Roques of the same parish died in 1854 leaving forty-seven
slaves and a thousand acres; and Martin Donato of St. Landry
dying in 1848 bequeathed liberty to his slave wife and her seven
children and left them eighty-nine slaves and 4,500 arpents of
land as well as notes and mortgages to a value of $46,000.[33] In
rural Virginia and Maryland also there were free colored slaveholders
in considerable numbers.[34]

Slaveholdings by colored townsmen were likewise fairly frequent.
Among the 360 colored taxpayers in Charleston in 1860,
for example, 130, including nine persons described as of Indian
descent, were listed as possessing 390 slaves.[35] The abundance
of such holdings at New Orleans is evidenced by the multiplicity
of applications from colored proprietors for authority to manumit
slaves, with exemption from the legal requirement that the
new freedmen must leave the state.[36] A striking example of

such petitions was that presented in 1832 by Marie Louise
Bitaud, free woman of color, which recited that in the preceding
year she had bought her daughter and grandchild at a cost
of $700; that a lawyer had now told her that in view of her lack
of free relatives to inherit her property, in case of death intesstate
her slaves would revert to the state; that she had become
alarmed at this prospect; and she accordingly begged permission
to manumit them without their having to leave Louisiana. The
magistrates gave their consent on condition that the petitioner
furnish a bond of $500 to insure the support and education of
the grandson until his coming of age. This was duly done and
the formalities completed.[37]

Evidence of slaveholdings by colored freemen occurs also in
the bills of sale filed in various public archives. One of these
records that a citizen of Charleston sold in 1828 a man slave to
the latter's free colored sister at a price of one dollar, "provided
he is kindly treated and is never sold, he being an unfortunate
individual and requiring much attention." In the same city a
free colored man bought a slave sailmaker for $200.[38] At Savannah
in 1818 Richard Richardson sold a slave woman and
child for $800 to Alex Hunter, guardian of the colored freeman
Louis Mirault, in trust for him; and in 1833 Anthony Ordingsell,
free colored, having obtained through his guardian an
order of court, sold a slave woman to the highest bidder for
$385.[39]

It is clear that aside from the practice of holding slave relatives
as a means of giving them virtual freedom, an appreciable
number of colored proprietors owned slaves purely as a productive
investment. It was doubtless a group of these who sent a
joint communication to a New Orleans newspaper when secession

and war were impending: "The free colored population
(native) of Louisiana . . . own slaves, and they are dearly attached
to their native land, . . . and they are ready to shed
their blood for her defence. They have no sympathy for abolitionism;
no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana.
. . . They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought in
1814-'15. . . . If they have made no demonstration it is because
they have no right to meddle with politics, but not because they
are not well disposed. All they ask is to have a chance, and
they will be worthy sons of Louisiana."[40] Oral testimony gathered
by the present writer from old residents in various quarters
of the South supports the suggestion of this letter that
many of the well-to-do colored freemen tended to prize their distinctive
position so strongly as to deplore any prospect of a general
emancipation for fear it would submerge them in the great
black mass.

The types discussed thus far were exceptional. The main
body; of the free negroes were those who whether in person or
through their mothers had been liberated purely from sentiment
and possessed no particular qualifications for self-directed
careers. The former slaves of Richard Randolph who were
colonized in accordance with his will as petty landed proprietors
near Farmville, Virginia, proved commonly thriftless for half
a century afterward;[41] and Olmsted observed of the Virginia
free negroes in general that their poverty was not due to the
lack of industrial opportunity.[42] Many of those in the country
were tenants. George Washington found one of them unprofitable
as such;[43] and Robert Carter in 1792 rented farms to several
in spite of his overseer's remonstrance that they had no adequate
outfit of tools and teams, and against his neighbors' protests.[44]
Not a few indeed were mere squatters on waste lands.
A Georgia overseer reported in 1840 that several such families

had made clearings in the woods of the plantation under his
charge, and proposed that rent be required of them;[45] and travellers
occasionally came upon negro cabins in fields which had
been abandoned by their proprietors.[46] The typical rural family
appears to have tilled a few acres on its own account, and to
have been willing to lend a hand to the whites for wages when
they needed service. It was this readiness which made their
presence in many cases welcome in a neighborhood. A memorial
signed by thirty-eight citizens of Essex County, Virginia,
in 1842 in behalf of a freedman might be paralleled from the
records of many another community: "We would be glad if he
could be permitted to remain with us and have his freedom, as
he is a well disposed person and a very useful man in many respects.
He is a good carpenter, a good cooper, a coarse shoemaker,
a good hand at almost everything that is useful to us
farmers."[47] Among the free negroes on the seaboard there was
a special proclivity toward the water pursuits of boating, oystering
and the like.[48] In general they found a niche in industrial
society much on a level with the slaves but as free as might be
from the pressure of systematic competition.

Urban freemen had on the average a somewhat higher level
of attainment than their rural fellows, for among them was
commonly a larger proportion of mulattoes and quadroons and
of those who had demonstrated their capacity for self direction
by having bought their own freedom. Recruits of some skill
in the crafts, furthermore, came in from the country, because of
the advantages which town industry, in sharp contrast with that
of the plantations, gave to free labor. A characteristic state of
affairs is shown by the official register of free persons of color In
Richmond County, Georgia, wherein lay the city of Augusta, for
the year 1819.[49] Of the fifty-three men listed, including a planter
and a steamboat pilot, only seven were classed as common laborers,

while all the rest had specific trades or employments.
The prosperity of the group must have been but moderate,
nevertheless, for virtually all its women were listed as workers
at washing, sewing, cooking, spinning, weaving or market
vending; and although an African church in the town had an
aged sexton, its minister must have drawn most of his livelihood
from some week-day trade, for no designation of a preacher
appears in the list. At Charleston, likewise, according to the
city census of 1848, only 19 free colored men in a total of 239
listed in manual occupations were unclassified laborers, while
the great majority were engaged in the shop and building trades.
The women again were very numerous in sewing and washing
employments, and an appreciable number of them were domestic
servants outright.[50]

In the compendium of the United States census of 1850 there
are printed in parallel columns the statistics of occupations
among the free colored males above fifteen years of age in the
cities of New York and New Orleans. In the Northern
metropolis there were 3337 enumerated, and in the Southern
1792. The former had 4 colored lawyers and 3 colored druggists
while the latter had none of either; and the colored preachers
and doctors were 21 to 1 and 9 to 4 in New York's favor.
But New Orleans had 4 colored capitalists, 2 planters, 11 overseers,
9 brokers and 2 collectors, with none of any of these at
New York; and 64 merchants, 5 jewelers and 61 clerks to New
York's 3, 3 and 7 respectively, and 12 colored teachers to 8.
New York had thrice New Orleans' number of colored barbers,
and twice as many butchers; but her twelve carpenters and no
masons were contrasted with 355 and 278 in these two trades at
New Orleans, and her cigar makers, tailors, painters, coopers,
blacksmiths and general mechanics were not in much better proportion.
One-third of all New York's colored men, indeed,
were unskilled laborers and another quarter were domestic servants,
not to mention the many cooks, coachmen and other semidomestic
employees, whereas at New Orleans the unskilled were

but a tenth part of the whole and no male domestics were listed.
This showing, which on the whole is highly favorable to New
Orleans, is partly attributable to the more than fourfold excess
of mulattoes over the blacks in its free population, in contrast
with a reversed proportion at New York; for the men of mixed
blood filled all the places above the rank of artisan at New Orleans,
and heavily preponderated in virtually all the classes but
that of unskilled laborers. New York's poor showing as regards
colored craftsmen, however, was mainly due to the greater discrimination
which its white people applied against all who had a
strain of negro blood.

This antipathy and its consequent industrial repression was palpably
more severe at the North in general than in the South. De
Tocqueville remarked that "the prejudice which repels the negroes
seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated."
Fanny Kemble, in her more vehement style, wrote of the negroes,
in the North: "They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs,
debarred from every fellowship save with their own despised
race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated
even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are
free certainly, but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum
and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society. . . . All
hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers points at their
dusky skin, all tongues, the most vulgar as well as the self-styled
most refined, have learned to turn the very name of their race
into as insult and a reproach."[51] Marshall Hall expressed himself
as "utterly at a loss to imagine the source of that prejudice
which subsists against him [the negro] in the Northern states, a
prejudice unknown in the South, where the domestic relations between
the African and the European are so much more intimate."[52]
Olmsted recorded a conversation which he had with a
free colored barber on a Red River steamboat who had been at
school for a year at West Troy, New York: "He said that colored
people could associate with whites much more easily and

comfortably at the South than at the North; this was one reason
he preferred to live at the South. He was kept at a greater distance
from white people, and more insulted on account of his
color, at the North than in Louisiana."[53] And at Richmond
Olmsted learned of a negro who after buying his freedom had
gone to Philadelphia to join his brother, but had promptly returned.
When questioned by his former owner this man said:
"Oh, I don't like dat Philadelphy, massa; an't no chance for colored
folks dere. Spec' if I'd been a runaway de wite folks dere
take care o' me; but I couldn't git anythin' to do, so I jis borrow
ten dollar of my broder an' cum back to old Virginny."[54] In Ohio,
John Randolph's freedmen were prevented by the populace from
colonizing the tract which his executors had bought for them in
Mercer County and had to be scattered elsewhere in the state;[55]
in Connecticut the citizens of New Haven resolved in a public
meeting in 1831 that a projected college for negroes in that place
would not be tolerated, and shortly afterward the townsmen of
Canterbury broke up the school which Prudence Crandall attempted
to establish there for colored girls. The legislatures of
various Northern states, furthermore, excluded free immigrants
as well as discriminating sharply against those who were already
inhabitants. Wherever the negroes clustered numerously, from
Boston to Philadelphia and Cincinnati, they were not only browbeaten
and excluded from the trades but were occasionally the
victims of brutal outrage whether from mobs or individual persecutors.[56]

In the South, on the other hand, the laws were still more severe
but the practice of the white people was much more kindly.
Racial antipathy was there mitigated by the sympathetic tie of

salvery which promoted an attitude of amiable patronage even
toward the freedmen and their descendats.[57] The tone of the
memorials in which many Southern townsmen petitioned for legal
exemptions to permit specified free negroes to remain in their
communities[58] found no echo from the corresponding type of
commonplace unromantic citizens of the North. A few Southern
petitions were of a contrasting tenor, it is true, one for example
presented to the city council of Atlanta in 1859: "We feel
aggrieved as Southern citizens that your honorable body tolerates
a negro dentist (Roderick Badger) in our midst; and in justice
to ourselves and the community it ought to be abated. We, the
residents of Atlanta, appeal to you for justice,"[59] But it may
readily be guessed that these petitioners were more moved by the
interest of rival dentists than by their concern as Southern citizens.
Southern protests of another class, to be discussed below,
against the toleration of colored freedmen in general, were prompted
by considerations of public security, not by personal dislike.

Although the free colored numbers varied greatly from state
to state, their distribution on the two sides of Mason and Dixon's
line maintained a remarkable equality throughout the antebellum
period. The chief concentration was in the border states
of either section. At the one extreme they were kept few by the
chill of the climate; at the other by stringency of the law and by
the high prices of slave labor which restrained the practice of
manumission. Wherever they dwelt, they lived somewhat precariously
upon the sufferance of the whites, and in a more or less
palpable danger of losing their liberty.

Not only were escaped slaves liable to recapture anywhere
within the United States, but those who were legally free might
be seized on fraudulent claims and enslaved in circumvention of
the law, or they might be kidnapped outright. One of those taken
by fraud described his experience and predicament as follows in
a letter from "Boonvill Missouria" to the governor of Georgia:
"Mr. Coob Dear Sir I have Embrast this oppertuniny of Riting

a few Lines to you to inform you that I am sold as a Slave for 14
hundard dolars By the man that came to you Last may and told
you a Pack of lies to get you to Sine the warrant that he Brought
that warrant was a forged as I have heard them say when I was
Coming on to this Countrey and Sir I thought that I would write
and see if I could get you to do any thing for me in the way of
Getting me my freedom Back a Gain if I had some Papers from
the Clarkes office in the City of Milledgeville and a little Good
addvice in a Letter from you or any kind friend that I could get
my freedom a Gain and my name can Be found on the Books
of the Clarkes office Mr Bozal Stulers was Clarke when I was
thear last and Sir a most any man can City that I Charles Covey
is lawfuley a free man . . . But at the same time I do not want
you to say any thing about this to any one that may acquaint my
Preseant mastear of these things as he would quickly sell me and
there fore I do not want this known and the men that came after
me Carried me to Mempears tenessee and after whiping me untill
my Back was Raw from my rump to the Back of my neck sent me
to this Place and sold me Pleas to ancer this as soon as you Can
and Sir as soon as I can Get my time Back I will pay you all
charges if you will Except of it yours in heast Charles Covey
Borned and Raized in the City of Milledgeville and a Blacksmith
by trade and James Rethearfurd in the City of Macon is my
Laller [lawyer?] and can tell you all about these things."[60]

In a few cases claims of ownership were resurrected after a
long lapse. That of Alexander Pierre, a New Orleans negro who
had always passed as free-born, was the consequence of an affray
in which he had worsted another black. In revenge the defeated
combatant made the fact known that Pierre was the son of a
blind girl who because of her lack of market value had been left
by her master many years before to shift for herself when he
had sold his other slaves and gone to France. Thereupon George
Heno, the heir of the departed and now deceased proprietor, laid

claim to the whole Pierre group, comprising the blind mother,
Alexander himself, his sister, and that sister's two children.
Whether Heno's proceedings at law to procure possession succeeded
or failed is not told in the available record.[61] In a kindred
case not long afterward, however, the cause of liberty triumphed.
About 1807 Simon Porche of Point Coupée Parish had
permitted his slave Eulalie to marry his wife's illegitimate mulatto
half-brother; and thereafter she and her children and
grand-children dwelt in virtual freedom. After Porche's death
his widow, failing in an attempt to get official sanction for the
manumission of Eulalie and her offspring and desiring the effort
to be renewed in case of her own death, made a nominal sale of
them to a relative under pledge of emancipation. When this
man proved recreant and sold the group, now numbering seventeen
souls, and the purchasers undertook possession, the case
was litigated as a suit for freedom. Decision was rendered for
the plaintiff, after appeal to the state supreme court, on the
ground of prescriptive right. This outcome was in strict accord
with the law of Louisiana providing that "If a master shall suffer
a slave to enjoy his liberty for ten years during his residence
in this state, or for twenty years while out of it, he shall lose all
right of action to recover possession of the said slave, unless
said slave shall bè a runaway or fugitive."[62]

Kidnappings without pretense of legal claim were done so furtively
that they seldom attained record unless the victims had
recourse to the courts; and this was made rare by the helplessness
of childhood in some cases and in others by the fear of
lashes. Indeed when complexion gave presumption of slave
status, as it did, and custody gave color of ownership, the prospect
of redress through the law was faint unless the services of
some white friend could be enlisted. Two cases made conspicuous
by the publication of elaborate narratives were those of Peter
Still and Solomon Northrup. The former, kidnapped in childhood
near Philadelphia, served as a slave some forty years in

Kentucky and northern Alabama, until with his own savings he
bought his freedom and returned to his boyhood home. The
problem which he then faced of liberating his wife and three children
was taken off his hands for a time by Seth Concklin, a freelance
white abolitionist who volunteered to abduct them. This
daring emancipator duly went to Alabama in 1851, embarked the
four negroes on a skiff and carried them down the Tennessee
and up the Ohio and the Wabash until weariness at the oars
drove the company to take the road for further travel. They
were now captured and the slaves were escorted by their master
back to the plantation; but Concklin dropped off the steamboat
by night; only to be drowned in the Ohio by the weight of his fetters.
Adopting a safer plan, Peter now procured endorsements
from leading abolitionists and made a soliciting tour of New
York and New England by which he raised funds enough to buy
his family's freedom. At the conclusion of the narrative of their
lives Peter and his wife were domestics in a New Jersey boarding-house,
one of their two sons was a blacksmith's apprentice in
a neighboring town, the other had employment in a Pennsylvania
village, and the daughter was at school in Philadelphia.[63]

Solomon Northrup had been a raftsman and farmer about
Lake Champlain until in 1841 when on the ground of his talent
with the fiddle two strangers offered him employment in a circus
which they said was then at Washington. Going thither with
them, he was drugged, shackled, despoiled of his free papers,
and delivered to a slave trader who shipped him to New Orleans.
Then followed a checkered experience as a plantation hand on
the Red River, lasting for a dozen years until a letter which a
friendly white carpenter had written for him brought one of his
former patrons with an agent's commission from the governor
of New York. With the assistance of the local authorities
Northrup's identity was promptly established, his liberty procured,

and the journey accomplished which carried him back
again to his wife and children at Saratoga,[64]

A third instance, but of merely local notoriety, was that of
William Houston, who, according to his own account was a British
subject who had come from Liverpool as a ship steward in
1840 and while at New Orleans had been offered passage back
to England by way of New York by one Espagne de Blanc. But
upon reaching Martinsville on the up-river voyage de Blanc had
ordered him off the boat, set him to work in his kitchen, taken
away his papers and treated him as his slave. After five years
there Houston was sold to a New Orleans barkeeper who shortly
sold him to a neighboring merchant, George Lynch, who hired
him out In the Mexican war Houston accompanied the American
army, and upon returning to New Orleans was sold to one
Richardson. But this purchaser, suspecting a fault of title, refused
payment, whereupon in 1850 Richardson sold Houston at
auction to J. F. Lapice, against whom the negro now brought
suit under the aegis of the British consul. While the trial was
yet pending a local newspaper printed his whole narrative that it
might "assist the plaintiff to prove his freedom, or the defendant
to prove he is a slave."[65]

Societies were established here and there for the prevention
of kidnapping and other illegal practices in reducing negroes to
slavery, notable among which for its long and active career was
the one at Alexandria.[66] Kidnapping was, of course, a crime
under the laws of the states generally; but in view of the seeming
ease of its accomplishment and the potential value of the victims
it may well be thought remarkable that so many thousands
of free negroes were able to keep their liberty. In 1860 there
were 83,942 of this class in Maryland, 58,042 m Virginia, 30,463
in North Carolina, 18,467 in Louisiana, and 250,787 in the South
at large.

A few free negroes were reduced by public authority to private
servitude, whether for terms or for life, in punishment for
crime. In Maryland under an act of 1858 eighty-nine were sold
by the state in the following two years, four of them for life and
the rest for terms, after convictions ranging from arson to petty
larceny.[67] Some others were sold in various states under laws
applying to negro vagrancy, illegal residence, or even to default
of jail fees during imprisonment as fugitive suspects.

A few others voluntarily converted themselves into slaves.
Thus Lucinda who had been manumitted under a will requiring
her removal to another state petitioned the Virginia legislature
in 1815 for permission, which was doubtless granted, to become
the slave of the master of her slave husband "from whom the
benefits and privileges of freedom, dear and flattering as they
are, could not induce her to be separated."[68] On other grounds
William Bass petitioned the South Carolina general assembly in
1859, reciting "That as a free negro he is preyed upon by every
sharper with whom he comes in contact, and that he is very poor
though an able-bodied man, and is charged with and punished for
every offence, guilty or not, committed in his neighborhood; that
he is without house or home, and lives a thousand times harder
and in more destitution than the slaves of many planters in this
district." He accordingly asked permission by special act to become
the slave of Philip W. Pledger who had consented to receive
him if he could lawfully do so.[69] To provide systematically
for such occasions the legislatures of several states from Maryland
to Texas enacted laws in the middle and late fifties authorizing
free persons of color at their own instance and with the
approval of magistrates in each case to enslave themselves to
such masters as they might select.[70] The Virginia law, enacted
at the beginning of 1856, safeguarded the claims of any creditors

against the negro by requiring a month's notice during which
protests might be entered, and it also required the prospective
master to pay to the state half the negro's appraised value.
Among the Virginia archives vouchers are filed for sixteen such
enslavements, in widely scattered localities.[71] Most of the appraisals
in these cases ranged from $300 to $1200, indicating
substantial earning capacity; but the valuations of $5 for one of
the women and of $10 for a man upwards of seventy years old
suggest that some of these undertakings were of a charitable nature.
An instance in the general premises occurred in Georgia,
as late as July, 1864, when a negro freeman in dearth of livelihood
sold himself for five hundred dollars, in Confederate currency
of course, to be paid to his free wife.[72] Occasionally a
free man of color would seek a swifter and surer escape from
his tribulations by taking his own life;[73] but there appears to
be no reason to believe that suicides among them were in greater
ratio than among the whites.

Invitations to American free negroes to try their fortunes in
other lands were not lacking. Facilities for emigration to Liberia
were steadily maintained by the Colonization Society from
1819 onward;[74] the Haytian government under President Boyer
offered special inducements from that republic in 1824;[75] in 1840
an immigration society in British Guiana proffered free transportation
for such as would remove thither;[76] and in 1859 Hayti
once more sent overtures, particularly to the French-speaking

colored people of Louisiana, promising free lands to all who
would come as well as free transportation to such as could not
pay their passage.[77] But these opportunities were seldom embraced.
With the great bulk of those to whom they were addressed
the dread of an undiscovered country from whose bourne
few travellers had returned puzzled their wills, as it had done
Hamlet's, and made them rather bear those ills they had than to
fly to others that they knew not of.

Their caste, it is true, was discriminated against with severity.
Generally at the North and wholly at the South their children
were debarred from the white schools and poorly provided with
schools of their own.[78] Exclusion of the adults from the militia
became the general rule after the close of the war of 1812.
Deprivation of the suffrage at the South, which was made complete
by the action of the constitutional convention of North
Carolina in 1835 and which was imposed by numerous Northern
states between 1807 and 1838,[79] was a more palpable grievance
against which a convention of colored freemen at Philadelphia
in 1831 ineffectually protested.[80] Exclusion from the jury boxes
and from giving testimony against whites was likewise not only
general in the South but more or less prevalent in the North as
well. Many of the Southern states, furthermore, required license
and registration as a condition of residence and imposed
restrictions upon movement, education and occupations; and several
of them required the procurement of individual white guardians
or bondsmen in security for good behavior.

These discriminations, along with the many private rebuffs
and oppressions which they met, greatly complicated the problem
of social adjustment which colored freemen everywhere encountered.
It is not to be wondered that some of them developed

criminal tendencies in reaction and revolt, particularly when
white agitators made it their business to stimulate discontent.
Convictions for crimes, however, were in greatest proportionate
excess among the free negroes of the North. In 1850, for example,
the colored inmates in the Southern penitentiaries, including
slaves, bore a ratio to the free colored population but half as
high as did the corresponding prisoners in the North to the
similar population there. These ratios were about six and
eleven times those prevalent among the Southern and Northern
whites respectively.[81] This nevertheless does not prove an excess
of actual depravity or criminal disposition in any of the
premises, for the discriminative character of the laws and the
prejudice of constables, magistrates and jurors were strong contributing
factors. Many a free negro was doubtless arrested
and convicted in virtually every commonwealth under circumstances
in which white men went free. The more severe industrial
discrimination at the North, which drove large numbers to
an alternative of destitution or crime, was furthermore contributive
to the special excess of negro criminality there.

In some instances the violence of mobs was added to the might
of the law. Such was the case at Washington in 1835 when following
on the heels of a man's arrest for the crime of possessing
incendiary publications and his trial within the jail as a precaution
to keep him from the mob's clutches, a new report was
spread that Beverly Snow, the free mulatto proprietor of a saloon
and restaurant between Brown's and Gadsby's hotels, had
spoken in slurring terms of the wives and daughters of white
mechanics as a class. "In a very short time he had more customers
than both Brown and Gadsby—but the landlord was not
to be found although diligent search was made all through the
house. Next morning the house was visited by an increased
number of guests, but Snow was still absent." The mob then

began to search the houses of his associates for him. In that of
James Hutton, another free mulatto, some abolition papers were
found. The mob hustled Hutton to a magistrate, returned and
wrecked Snow's establishment, and then held an organized meeting
at the Center Market where an executive committee was appointed
with a view to further activity. Meanwhile the city
council held session, the mayor issued a proclamation, and the
militia was ordered out. Mobs gathered that night, nevertheless,
but dispersed after burning a negro hut and breaking the windows
of a negro church.[82] Such outrages appear to have been
rare in the distinctively Southern communities where the racial
subordination was more complete and the antipathy correspondingly
fainter.

Since the whites everywhere held the whip hand and nowhere
greatly refrained from the use of their power, the lot of the colored
freeman was one hardly to be borne without the aid of
habit and philosophy. They submitted to the régime because it
was mostly taken as a matter of course, because resistance would
surely bring harsher repression, and because there were solaces
to be found. The well-to-do quadroons and mulattoes had reason
in their prosperity to cherish their own pride of place and
carry themselves with a quiet conservative dignity. The less
prosperous blacks, together with such of their mulatto confrères
as were similarly inert, had the satisfaction at least of not being
slaves; and those in the South commonly shared the humorous
lightheartedness which is characteristic of both African and
Southern negroes. The possession of sincere friends among the
whites here and there also helped them to feel that their lives lay
in fairly pleasant places; and in their lodges they had a refuge
peculiarly their own.

The benevolent secret societies of the negroes, with their special
stress upon burial ceremonies, may have had a dim African
origin, but they were doubtless influenced strongly by the Masonic
and other orders among the whites. Nothing but mere
glimpses may be had of the history of these institutions, for lowliness

as well as secrecy screened their careers. There may well
have been very many lodges among illiterate and moneyless
slaves without leaving any tangible record whatever. Those in
which the colored freemen mainly figured were a little more affluent,
formal and conspicuous. Such organizations were a recourse
at the same time for mutual aid and for the enhancement
of social prestige. The founding of one of them at Charleston
in 1790, the Brown Fellowship Society, with membership confined
to mulattoes and quadroons, appears to have prompted the
free blacks to found one of their own in emulation.[83] Among
the proceedings of the former was the expulsion of George Logan
in 1817 with a consequent cancelling of his claims and those of
his heirs to the rights and benefits of the institution, on the
ground that he had conspired to cause a free black to be sold as
a slave.[84] At Baltimore in 1835 there were thirty-five or forty
of these lodges, with memberships ranging from thirty-five to
one hundred and fifty each.[85]

The tone and purpose of the lodges may be gathered in part
from the constitution and by-laws of one of them, the Union
Band Society of New Orleans, founded in 1860. Its motto was
"Love, Union, Peace"; its officers were president, vice-president,
secretary, treasurer, marshal, mother, and six male and twelve
female stewards, and its dues fifty cents per month. Members
joining the lodge were pledged to obey its Jaws, to be humble to
its officers, to keep its secrets, to live in love and union with fellow
members, "to go about once in a while and see one another
in love," and to wear the society's regalia on occasion. Any
member in three months' arrears of dues was to be expelled unless
upon his plea of illness or poverty a subscription could be
raised in meeting to meet his deficit. It was the duty of all to
report illnesses in the membership, and the function of the official
mother to delegate members for the nursing. The secretary was
to see to the washing of the sick member's clothes and pay for
the work from the lodge's funds, as well as the doctor's fees.
The marshal was to have charge of funerals, with power to commandeer

the services of such members as might be required. He
might fee the officiating minister to the extent of not more than
$2.50, and draw pay for himself on a similar schedule. Negotiations
with any other lodge were provided for in case of the
death of a member who had fellowship also in the other for the
custody of the corpse and the sharing of expense; and a provision
was included that when a lodge was given the body of an
outsider for burial it would furnish coffin, hearse, tomb, minister
and marshal at a price of fifty dollars all told.[86] The mortuary
stress in the by-laws, however, need not signify that the lodge
was more funereal than festive. A negro burial was as sociable
as an Irish wake.

Doubtless to some extent in their lodges, and certainly to a
great degree in their daily affairs, the lives of the free colored
and the slaves intermingled. Colored freemen, except in the
highest of their social strata, took free or slave wives almost indifferently.
Some indeed appear to have preferred the unfree,
either because in such case the husband would not be responsible
for the support of the family or because he might engage the protection
of his wife's master in time of need.[87] On the other
hand the free colored women were somewhat numerously the
prostitutes, or in more favored cases the concubines, of white
men. At New Orleans and thereabouts particularly, concubinage,
along with the well known "quadroon balls," was a systematized
practice.[88] When this had persisted for enough generations
to produce children of less than octoroon infusion, some
of these doubtless cut their social ties, changed their residence,
and made successful though clandestine entrance into white society.
The fairness of the complexions of some of those who to
this day take the seats assigned to colored passengers in the
street cars of New Orleans is an evidence, however, that "crossing
the line" has not in all such breasts been a mastering ambition.

The Southern whites were of several minds regarding the free

colored element in their midst. Whereas laboring men were
more or less jealously disposed on the ground of their competition,
the interest and inclination of citizens in the upper ranks
was commonly to look with favor upon those whose labor they
might use to advantage. On public grounds, however, these
men shared the general apprehension that in case tumult were
plotted, the freedom of movement possessed by these people
might if their services were enlisted by the slaves make the efforts
of the whole more formidable. One of the Charleston
pamphleteers sought to discriminate between the mulattoes and
the blacks in the premises, censuring the indolence and viciousness
of the latter while praising the former for their thrift and
sobriety and contending that in case of revolt they would be
more likely to prove allies of the whites.[89] This distinction,
however, met no general adoption. The general discussion at
the South in the premises did not concern the virtues and vices
of the colored freemen on their own score so much as the
influence exerted by them upon the slaves. It is notable in this
connection that the Northern dislike of negro newcomers from
the South on the ground of their prevalent ignorance, thriftlessness
and instability[90] was more than matched by the Southern
dread of free negroes from the North. A citizen of New Orleans
wrote characteristically as early as 1819:[91] "It is a melancholy
but incontrovertible fact that in the cities of Philadelphia, Hew
York and Boston, where the blacks are put on an equality with
the whites, . . . they are chiefly noted for their aversion to labor
and proneness to villainy. Men of this class ate peculiarly
dangerous in a community like ours; they are in general remarkable
for the boldness of their manners, and some of them
possess talents to execute the most wicked and deep laid plots."