Between Slavery and Freedom (2 page)

On Liberty's Borderlands

On the eve of the Civil War, the nation's free black population stood at almost half a million, compared to just under four million slaves. About half of the free people lived in the Northern and Western states that had outlawed slavery, and half in the South where slavery was still legal. But while these numbers are obviously important, they tell only a small part of the story. Census takers missed many rural communities and chose not to enter some poor urban neighborhoods. The census does not tell us how many black people kept out of sight when a white stranger started asking intrusive questions. We do not know how often people who were passing as free lied about their status because they were still technically enslaved, or in how many instances light-skinned “colored persons” ended up in the “whites” column on the census form. Above all, the census cannot tell us how individual free men and women of color lived their lives. One truth that does emerge with undeniable clarity, though, from even a cursory glance at the data, is that freedom was something less than true freedom for black people. Approximately half a million African Americans were not slaves in 1860, but they were not free as whites understood the term. They constituted a segment of American society that defied easy categorization: they were free but at the same time they were not free. Theirs was a marginal status somewhere between slave and citizen.

To dwell in the ill-defined borderlands between bondage and freedom was not a comfortable existence, yet it was the only reality hundreds of thousands of blacks knew. Their white friends and neighbors often failed to appreciate how fraught with danger and disappointment that existence could be. All but a handful of white antislavery radicals thought of slavery and freedom as absolutes. In their eyes, a black man or woman ceased being another person's property and joined the ranks of the free. Their journey was done. But as black people who made that move into freedom tried to explain, it was not that simple.

Slavery and freedom were not polar opposites for black Americans. An individual could be more or less free depending on his or her individual circumstances. The enslaved used their wits to try to make their bondage less onerous. They exploited the situations in which they found themselves, while never relinquishing the hope of one day walking away from slavery entirely. They sought to earn money or amass a few possessions that they could call their own, get time away from their owners to spend with family and friends, learn to read and write when the opportunity arose, and in short to do anything and everything to come closer to “free” than “slave.” When they could do so, they escaped and became “free” in fact, if not in law. Those who were legally free so often confronted the bitter truth that their “freedom” left them unable to find gainful employment, or a decent home in which to raise their families, or anything approaching equal treatment in the eyes of the law. “Freedom” without the chance to enjoy the fundamental rights of citizenship was not slavery, but it was not full freedom.

To be free and black was to be “in between” in many ways. In some instances it meant being of mixed race, but light skin was no hallmark of free status. The intermingling of peoples of African, European, and Native American descent had happened from the time the first Europeans established permanent colonies in North America. Liberty and light skin did not go hand in hand, except in the case of individuals who were so close to being white that they slipped across the racial divide, becoming not only free but white. Compounding the issue of racial identification was the lack of agreement among whites about exactly what constituted “black” and “white.” In some instances, having one black grandparent made an individual black, at least in the eyes of the law. In other instances, descent was traced back to one's great-grandparents. “Freedom,” though, had nothing to do with ancestry, unless one could prove descent from a free woman. Law codes invariably decreed that children inherited the status of their mothers. Thus the offspring of a dark-skinned free woman were free, while those born of the union of a light-skinned slave and her white owner were slaves unless and until their father chose to liberate them. And the existence of light-skinned slaves meant that on occasion white people fell victim to slave catchers and ended up in bondage.

If to dwell “in between” was not about appearance and ancestry for most free people of color, what was it about? Simply put, it was about status. It was about how the majority population was willing to let them live. Whites routinely regulated what free black people could and could not do. Regulation took the form of laws and local ordinances. The lists of prohibitions grew longer over time and encompassed everything from voting to owning a dog or walking with a cane (“unless in case of bodily infirmity,” as a South Carolina law stipulated) or smoking a cigar in public. “Free” persons might have to register and pay a special tax for the privilege of remaining in the community where they had been born. If they left, they could perhaps never return. These laws endured in the American South long after the Civil War had ended and long after “free people of color” had ceased to constitute a separate class in society. In many instances, these laws served as the basis of the Black Codes and the Jim Crow legislation that governed the lives of black people during Reconstruction and beyond. There was an obvious logic to this. Once slavery was dead, it seemed only right that the laws that had evolved over centuries of black-white interaction should apply to the entire black population now that all African Americans were free. Even more ominous was the specter of white violence, which sought to enforce “
appropriate
” behavior on the part of free blacks, and racial violence was as common an occurrence in the North and Midwest as it was in the South.

From early colonial days liberty for black people invariably meant something different—something less—than it did for white people. It was a half-way freedom, in that it was not slavery but it was not the freedom that white people thought appropriate for themselves. In that respect it illustrated fundamental contradictions in American life, and not only in those areas where slavery lasted longest as a labor system. Decades after slavery had ended in the New England states, for instance, white residents often delivered to black people salutary reminders that they should “know their place”—and that “place” was not one of equality with whites.

My goal in
Between Slavery and Freedom
is to probe the ill-defined space between black freedom and white freedom in America from the early colonial era to the Civil War. The location of the boundary markers differed quite dramatically according to time and place. We have to jettison the notion that to be free and black meant the same thing wherever and whenever one lived. We are exploring a dozen generations of black people as they confronted the complex challenges of living somewhere in between lifelong servitude and the kind of freedom that white Americans regarded as their birthright. Life in Virginia in that colony's early days was not the same for blacks—or for whites—as it was in Massachusetts in the midst of the Revolution or in California in the era of the Gold Rush. It was not the same in the French and Spanish and Dutch settlements in North America that would eventually become part of the United States. And yet, in each of those settings, and in many different ways, black people struggled to secure for themselves nothing less than the full measure of freedom that they considered their due. They could
exist
“in between” liberty and bondage, but they were determined to
live
in freedom.

The story of black freedom in America begins in the Spanish outposts in Florida and the American Southwest in the 1500s and runs through to the Civil War and beyond. The first chapter of
Between Slavery and Freedom
, “Property or Persons,”
covers a broad span of time—over two-and-a-half centuries—a wide swath of territory, and a complex mix of cultures as waves of Spanish colonizers, and then their French, Dutch, and English rivals, imported hundreds of thousands of Africans to labor for them in perpetuity, and as those Africans and their American-born descendants fought back to try to claim their freedom. For a brief time it seemed that the American Revolution might usher in liberty for all, regardless of race. Chapter 2, “In Liberty's Cause,” looks at how and why some blacks won their freedom during and immediately after the Revolution, even as the promises of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” remained unfulfilled for the majority of black people.

Chapter 3, “Race, Liberty, and Citizenship in the New Nation,” centers on the growth of America's free black population between 1790 and 1820. Slavery died in some parts of the United States and gained a new lease on life in others, but nowhere did freedom result in equality for black Americans. They were determined to see that it did, though. Chapter 4, “We Will Have Our Rights,” carries the narrative forward to the next generation, whose members came of age between 1820 and 1850. Individually and collectively, free men and women struggled to advance the antislavery cause, while maintaining their own freedom and insisting on their entitlement as Americans to share fully in all of the opportunities that the nation offered its white citizens. In the tension-filled decade after 1850, the focus of chapter 5, some free blacks questioned whether they even had a future in America, especially when the nation's highest court declared that they had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” But if some chose exile, many more chose to stay, confident that the nation
would
finally embrace the principles of liberty and equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence. And if it took a war to achieve those lofty goals that was a war many of them were ready and willing to fight.

Timeline

1500s         
Spanish establish settlements in North America and bring in many thousands of African slaves and a smaller number of free black people as soldiers, settlers, and craftsmen

1600s          
French, Dutch, and British carve out colonies in North A
merica
and import enslaved Africans, some of whom e
ventually
become free

1664           
Britain takes over Dutch colony of New Netherlands, r
enames it
New York, and ends Dutch practice of granting slaves “half-
freedom
”

1660s–

1750s          
Legal restrictions on free blacks in Britain's American co
lonie
s increase

1772           
Verdict in
Somersett
case leads to false reports that Britain has
outlawed
slavery

1775           
American
Revolution begins. Virginia's royal governor o
ffer
s
freedom
to slaves of rebel owners in return for
military
service Prince Hall and other free black men in Boston organize the first black Masonic Lodge

1777           
Vermont becomes the first state to prohibit slavery

1780           
Pennsylvania passes Gradual Abolition Act

1783           
Ruling in
Quock Walker
case that slavery violates the Ma
ssachuset
ts constitution

1784           
Connecticut and Rhode Island pass gradual abolition laws

1787           
Formation of Free African Society in Philadelphia

1791           
African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker c
hallenges
Thomas Jefferson regarding his views on black
freedom

1793           
Passage of first federal fugitive slave law. Some free blacks seized as alleged runaways

1799           
Free black men in Philadelphia petition Congress to o
utlaw
kidnapping
of free people and begin abolishing slavery nationwide
Congress refuses to receive their petition

1804           
New Jersey passes gradual abolition act
Ohio's “Black Code” imposes harsh restrictions on free blacks

1806           
Opening of Boston's African Meeting House

1807           
United States outlaws the trans-Atlantic slave trade as of
January
1,
1808

1808           
Northern free blacks start observing January 1 in the hope that
ending
the slave trade means slavery itself will soon end
Observances cease by 1830 as disillusionment sets in