In 1860, roughly half a million free people of African descent resided in the United States. Known alternately as free Negroes, free blacks, free people of color, or simply free people (to distinguish them from post-Civil War freedpeople), they composed less than 2 percent of the nation's population and about 9 percent of all blacks. Although the free black population was increasing during the antebellum years, it was growing far more slowly than either the white or the slave population, so that it was a shrinking proportion of American society.
But free Negroes were important far beyond their numbers. They played a pivotal role in society during slave times and set precedents for both race relations and relations among black people when slavery ended. Their status and treatment were harbingers of the postemancipation world. Often the laws, attitudes, and institutions that victimized free blacks during the slave years--political proscription, segregation, and various forms of debt peonage--became the dominant modes of racial oppression once slavery ended. Similarly, their years of liberty profoundly influenced the pattern of postemancipation black life. They moved in disproportionate numbers into positions of leadership in black society when slavery ended. For example, nearly half of the twenty-two black men who served in Congress between 1869 and 1900 had been free before the Civil War.
Although free Negroes have been described as more black than free, they were not a monolithic group. They can be best understood from a regional perspective, for by the nineteenth century three distinctive groups of free Negroes had developed: one in the northern, or free states, a second in the Upper South, and a third in the Lower South. Each had its own demographic, economic, social, and somatic characteristics. These differences, in turn, bred different relations with whites and slaves and, most important, distinctive modes of social action.
The American Revolution transformed the North from a slave to a free society, greatly enlarging its free Negro population. Although slavery died hard in the northern states, postrevolutionary emancipation ensured that eventually all northern blacks would be free. To their number were added numerous immigrants from the South, most of them fugitive slaves. In 1860, about a quarter of a million blacks, slightly less than half of the nation's free Negroes, lived in the free states. But universal emancipation left them in much the same conditions as before. Slaves in the North had been disproportionately urban in residence, black in color, and unskilled in occupation. Free Negroes followed that pattern, becoming in fact more urban and unskilled during the antebellum years, as they increasingly migrated to cities and found themselves pushed out of artisan trades by European immigrants.
Nevertheless, postrevolutionary emancipation allowed blacks certain rights. Because the abolition of slavery freed northern whites from the fear of slave revolts, they did not look upon every gathering of blacks as the beginning of a revolution. They limited the political rights of free Negroes, but they allowed them to travel freely, organize their own institutions, publish newspapers, and petition and protest. Black men and women transformed these liberties into a powerful organizational and political tradition. From Richard Allen to Frederick Douglass, their primary mode of social action was organizing institutions to protect themselves from the rigors of the white world and to demand an end to slavery.
As in the North, the free Negro in the Upper South was largely a product of the American Revolution. But in this region the ideas and events of the revolutionary era only loosened the fabric of slavery by increasing manumission, self-purchase, and successful suits for freedom. Nevertheless, the free black population grew rapidly, so that by 1810 the Upper South contained nearly 100,000 free Negroes, who composed about 8 percent of the black population in the region and almost 60 percent of free blacks in the United States. Thereafter repression slowed the growth of their numbers, and the proportion of free blacks living in the region declined.
The free Negro population in the Upper South was the product of two patterns of manumissions. The first and most important occurred on a large scale and was indiscriminate and rooted in ideological and economic changes; the second, smaller and more selective, originated in personal relations between master and slave. The first wave of manumissions produced a population that, like the slave population, was largely rural and black in color. To the extent, however, that postrevolutionary emancipation was selective--masters choosing whom they would free--it produced a free Negro population that was more skilled and lighter in color than that of the North. In the course of the nineteenth century, manumission became even more selective, so that free people of the Upper South became increasingly skilled in occupation, urban in residence, and light in skin color. The absence of large-scale European immigration to the slave states and a long-standing reliance on black labor allowed these blacks to enjoy a higher economic standing than those in the free states. In cities like Nashville and Richmond, a quarter to a third of free Negro men practiced skilled trades.
But if the presence of slavery helped elevate their economic status, it severely limited their opportunities for political or communal activism, for southern whites looked upon free Negroes as the chief inspiration and instigators of slave unrest. Whites not only prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, and testifying in court but also barred them from traveling without permission and meeting without the supervision of whites. These constraints circumscribed their political and organizational opportunities. No black newspapers were published and no black conventions met in the South. There were no southern counterparts of Allen or Douglass. Black churches, schools, and fraternal societies were fragile organizations, often forced to meet clandestinely. With limited political outlets, blacks poured their energies into economic opportunities and, as tradesmen and artisans, made considerable gains.
This tendency toward economic advancement at the expense of political activism was present in an even more exaggerated form in the Lower South, particularly the port cities of Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans. These areas were largely untouched by the egalitarian thrust of the American Revolution. Free Negroes there were a product not of ideologically inspired manumission but of paternalistic relations between masters and slaves. Almost all free Negroes were drawn from the small group of privileged slaves who had lived in close contact with their owners. Often these connections bespoke family ties. As a result, former slaves were overwhelmingly urban and light skinned, earning them the title "free people of color," or in New Orleans gens de couleur. Although comparatively few in number, most were far more skilled than free Negroes in the Upper South. In some places, like Charleston and New Orleans, over three-quarters of the free men of color practiced skilled crafts, and they monopolized some trades. A handful of wealthy free people of color purchased slaves and moved into the planter class.
As in the Upper South, the presence of slavery prevented Lower South free people of color from translating their higher economic standing into social and political gains. Denied suffrage and proscribed from office, they found a political voice only by acting through white patrons --their manumittors, customers, and occasionally fathers. Their own organizations remained private, exclusive, and often shadowy, especially in comparison to the robust public institutions created by black people in the North. Although some were well traveled and highly educated, as much at home in Paris and Glasgow as in New Orleans and Charleston, they dared not attack slavery or racial inequality publicly. Many feared to identify with slaves in any fashion. Rather, they saw themselves--and increasingly came to be seen by whites--as a third caste, distinct from both free whites and enslaved blacks.
With the general emancipation of 1863, free Negroes carried their diverse histories into freedom. Although Civil War emancipation liquidated their special status, their collective experience continued to shape American race relations and Afro-American life.
Bibliography:
Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974); Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1965).
Author:
Ira Berlin
See also Allen, Richard; Banneker, Benjamin; Cuffe, Paul; Delany, Martin R.; Douglass, Frederick; Jones, Absalom; Truth, Sojourner; Tubman, Harriet; Walker, David.
