Free Blacks in the United States

1763-1815

Assessment Questions

• What was the legal status and general plight of free blacks? Did this group of African Americans constitute an American anomaly in a nineteenth century slaveholding society?

• What was the size of the free black population and how did it change over time?

• How did free blacks respond to the conditions under which they lived?

The Plight of African Americans in General

• “One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

• The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

Africans Arrive in the Thirteen Colonies

• 1619--Twenty blacks arrive in Jamestown, VA• 1661---VA enacts a slave law.• 1662---VA law stated that the free or slave status

of children born in the colony would depend on the condition of the mother.

• 1663--Maryland established slavery in law and attempted to impose slave status on all blacks born in the colony regardless of the status of their mothers.

• 1667--VA law stipulated that baptism did not change or alter the status of an enslaved person.

War for Independence• This development gave rise to the first significant

population of free blacks.• The War also laid an ideological foundation that would

forever call into question the existence of slavery in the New Republic. This was expressed most eloquently in the phrase of the Declaration of Independence that said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

• The first antislavery society was in 1775. Thereafter, manumission and antislavery societies grew in the New Republic. (The Quakers took the lead in 1775)

Black Population in 1790• Maine--------536 free blacks• New Hampshire---157 slaves; 630 free blks.• Vermont--269 free blacks• Massachusetts--5,369 free blacks• Rhode Island--958 slaves; 3,484 free blks.• Connecticut---2,648 slaves; 2,771 free blks.• New York--21,193 slaves; 4,682 free blks.• New Jersey--11,423 slaves; 2,762 free blks.• Pennsylvania--3,707 slaves; 6,531 free blks.• Delaware---8, 887 slaves; 3,899 free blks.• Maryland---103,036 slaves; 8,043 free blks.• Virginia---292,627 slaves; 12,866 free blks.• North Carolina---100,783; 5,041 free blks.• South Carolina---107,094; 1,801 free blks.• Georgia ---29,264 slaves; 398 free blks.• Kentucky---12,430 slaves; 114 free blks.• Tennessee---3,417 slaves; 361 free blks.

Additional Demographics on Free Blacks

• Total U.S. population--About 4 million; 750,000 blacks.

• 89 percent of blacks lived in the South Atlantic States.

• In overall numbers, the South’s free black population was larger than the North’s. i.e. 32,048 free blacks; 641,691 slaves, but in proportion to the slave population the number of free blacks in the South was extremely small.

Historians’ Description of Free Blacks

• An “Unwanted People”

• An “Anomaly”

• “Quasi-Free Blacks

• “Slaves Without Masters”

Caricature of Free Blacks

• Zip Coon---This figure was an urban black who was generally described as lazy, irresponsible, a criminal, a dandy, and generally a menace to society. He was largely the opposite of the docile, happy, loyal, and contented “Sambo” slave caricature.

Whites’ General Description of Free Blacks in the Early

Republic• After the War for Independence, whites

began referring to Free Blacks as “Africans.” Then during the 1830s convention movement blacks leaders debated the issue of what appellations should be used when they were discussed. By the 1830s, the preferred group names were “colored people,” “people of color,” or “Colored Americans.”

Geographical Location of Free Blacks

• Free blacks tended to be urban. Unlike whites, this group was significantly more urbanized. They gravitated to cities on the east coast. Yet, most free blacks lived in the countryside.

• 22 percent of all blacks in Massachusetts lived in Boston.

• 32 percent of New York’s free blacks lived in New York City.

• 41.7 of Pennsylvania’s free blacks lived in Philadelphia.

• In the South, free blacks lived in Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans, and Baltimore. Baltimore had the largest free black

population throughout the antebellum period.

Free Blacks as Institution Builders in the Early Republic

After the War for Independence, Blacks created the infrastructure for the black community. They established their own separate schools, fraternal lodges, churches, and mutual aid societies.

• Free blacks in the early republic also searched for the independence that had eluded them after the War. Here some of the key individuals are Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Benjamin Banneker, Paul Cuffee, Richard Allen, Prince Hall, James Forten, Venture Smith, Olaudah Equiano, and Lemuel Haynes.

• Free blacks in the early republic generally supported the Federalists. i.e. Lemuel Haynes, a Revolutionary War veteran, Congregationalist minister with churches in Connecticut and Vermont, spoke out against the Democratic-Republicans and their ideas on slavery and rhetoric of equality.

He published pamphlets and essays that date back to 1776.

Significant Free Black Leaders and Institution Builders

• Richard Allen--The African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1816. It developed from the activities of the Free African Society of 1787 and the Bethel church that Allen organized in 1794.

• Prince Hall--established the first black fraternal organization, the African Masonic Lodge in America (Boston). Hall and fifteen other blacks had been initiated into Masonry by British soldiers during their occupation of Boston in 1775. When Hall attempted to establish his lodge, he was denied a charter by Americans and applied to the British Masons for his charter, which created as Lodge Number 1. The Lodge was renamed Lodge Number 459 in 1787.

• Boston’s black community built the African Meeting House in 1805, a place that also housed the first independent black church in Boston, the African Baptist Church. Thomas Paul, a minister of the African Baptist Church, also helped established the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York.

Early Free Black Organizations

• Free African Society of Newport, Rhode Island (1780)

• Philadelphia’s Free African Society (1787)

• Boston’s African Society (1796)

• New York African Society for Mutual Relief (1810)

Growth of the Free Black Community

• Birth of free black children

• Manumission• Runaways/fugitives• Self-purchase• Note: Manumission was the primary means that the free black population

increased until this method was severly curbed during the 1830s. By the mid-1830s, Southern states required slaveholders to get judicial or legislative permission to free their slaves and demanded that newly liberated bondsmen leave the state upon receiving their freedom.

• According to the late historian, John H. Franklin, “The General Assembly and the county courts were the media through which masters freed their slaves in North Carolina.” Moreover, this scholar has noted that “the

Assembly came to the conclusion that free Negroes were likely to be ‘burthens’ to the community and that every precaution, short of preventing manumission altogether, should be taken to guard the prospect of having a burdensome element in the community.”

Examples of Proscriptions

• 1805--VA prohibited Negroes from carrying arms without a license.

• 1810--GA legislature passed a law requiring all free Negroes in the state to have a white guardian.

• In 1805 Maryland prohibited free blacks from selling wheat, corn or tobacco without a license.

• Georgia free blacks could not buy on credit without the permission of their white guardians.

• North Carolina prohibited free blacks from traveling beyond the county adjoining the one where they resided.

• All southern states required that free blacks carry passes or wear badges. Any person without such verification of freedom was presumed to be a slave.

• All slave states prohibited the in-migration of free blacks, and every southern state with a seaport required that free black sailors from other states or countries be jailed while their ships were in port.

Occupations of Free Blacks• The majority of the South’s free blacks worked as unskilled

agricultural or common laborers.• Blacks worked in skilled occupations in both northern and

southern communities.• There were few skilled occupations which free black women

could enter. These included spinning, weaving, and dressmaking.

• Many free blacks worked as blacksmiths, cabinet and chair makers, harness and carriage makers, and as boot and shoemakers.

• In the North, blacks could enter professions and hold jobs that were unavailable to them in the South. i.e. Pharmacists, physicians, dentists, gunsmiths, lawyers, and even teachers.

General Scope & Character of Proscriptions

• As Berlin states in Slaves Without Masters, the “system of proscription at first varied from state to state. But as the nineteenth century wore on, Southern legislators reviewed each other’s stature books and gradually made their laws uniform.”

• “By 1860, despite regional variations in racial ideology, the free Negro’s legal status was strikingly similar in every southern state.

Free Blacks’ Response To Their Plight

• They created institutions and organizations to address their concerns.

• They could organize and agitate for their rights.

• They could purchase relatives or other enslaved relatives and friends.

• They could write books, pamphlets, and essays.