by Julie Winch
1664 Britain takes over Dutch colony of New Netherlands, renames it New York, and ends Dutch practice of granting slaves “half-freedom”
1660s–
1750s Legal restrictions on free blacks in Britain’s American colonies increase
1772 Verdict in Somersett case leads to false reports that Britain has outlawed slavery
1775 American Revolution begins. Virginia’s royal governor offers 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 Massachusetts constitution
1784 Connecticut and Rhode Island pass gradual abolition laws
1787 Formation of Free African Society in Philadelphia
1791 African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker challenges 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 outlaw 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
1814 Free men of color in New Orleans join Andrew Jackson in fighting off the British Army
1816 American Colonization Society (ACS) founded to encourage free people to leave America for Africa
1817 Free blacks in the North and Upper South begin protesting against the ACS
1818 Illinois outlaws slavery, but (1819) limits rights of free blacks
1821 New York restricts black voting rights
ACS founds the colony of Liberia in West Africa and begins recruiting settlers
1822 Free black craftsman Denmark Vesey heads a conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, to destroy slavery. South Carolina enacts a series of repressive laws
1824 Anti-black violence in Providence, Rhode Island
Mid-1820s Thousands of free blacks leave for Haiti. Most eventually return to the United States
1826 Race riot in Boston
1827 First black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, published in New York City
Emancipation of all remaining slaves in New York
1829 In Boston David Walker publishes his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
Race riot in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many black residents leave for Canada
1830 In Philadelphia, Bishop Richard Allen chairs the first black national convention
1832 Boston’s Maria W. Stewart becomes the first African-American woman to lecture in public to both men and women. She speaks on black rights and women’s rights
1834 Racial unrest in New York City and Philadelphia
In Canterbury, Connecticut, harassment from local whites forces Prudence Crandall to close her school for “young ladies and little misses of color”
1835 African-American men lose voting rights in North Carolina
1837 Colored American newspaper begins publication in New York City
1838 Pennsylvania disfranchises African Americans
1840s Southerners protest when several Northern states pass “personal liberty laws” giving black people arrested as fugitives more opportunities to prove that they are in fact free
1841 Black men in Rhode Island regain voting rights lost in 1822
1842 Three-day race riot in Philadelphia
1845 Texas enters the Union as a slave state and passes laws to control free black people
1850 Passage of a harsher federal fugitive slave law sparks fears that free black people will be kidnapped and enslaved
1852 Black writer Martin R. Delany urges free people to rethink their opposition to emigration
1855 Massachusetts enacts a school integration law
1857 U.S. Supreme Court declares in the Dred Scott case that black people have no rights that whites are “bound to respect”
1859 Arkansas expels its entire free black population
1860 Restrictions on free black people increase in Southern states
1861 Civil War begins. Free black men volunteer for military service throughout the North and West but the U.S. government refuses to let them enlist
CHAPTER ONE
Property or Persons
Black Freedom in Colonial America, 1513–1770
Over the two-and-a-half centuries from the founding of the first permanent European colony in North America to the beginning of the American Revolution, hundreds of thousands of black people arrived on this continent. Many Europeans set sail for America in the colonial era to escape abject poverty, religious or ethnic persecution, or the prospect of the gallows. Even the least free—indentured servants who had agreed to work for a period of time in return for passage to America, or criminals who had traded death sentences for transportation to the colonies—could anticipate that one day they would be at liberty to make a new start on a new continent. Not so black women and men. While some came voluntarily and seized the opportunities the New World offered, most crossed the Atlantic as slaves, with no prospect of freedom, and none for their American-born descendants. Bondage in perpetuity was to be their reality in America, unless they could find a way to “remake” themselves as free people. The nature of black freedom and the routes to that freedom varied greatly over time and space in colonial America. Blacks searched constantly for the weak places in the slave systems the different European and colonial governments had devised, determined to transform themselves from “property” to “people.”
The Spanish made their first foray to the mainland of North America in 1513. Within a couple of decades they were carving out settlements and bringing in both black and white people to make them profitable and productive. The different sets of circumstances under which black people came to North America in the service of the Spanish determined how they fared. Free black men, who already spoke Spanish and had lived for years in Spain itself or on the Spanish Caribbean islands of Hispaniola or Cuba, came as soldiers, artisans, and interpreters. With the white conquistadors they trekked across the American Southeast and Southwest in search of the fabled Fountain of Youth and the Seven Cities of Gold. Like some of the white men they served with, an unknown number eventually settled as free farmers on the fringes of the vast Spanish Empire, intermarrying with Native American or black women.
These men and their families were the fortunate ones. Most black people in Spain’s American dominions were slaves. The Spanish made extensive use of slave labor in the Caribbean and South and Central America, and they soon introduced the system to North America. They were as brutal in their exploitation of Africans and their descendants as any of their colonial rivals. Spanish law did, however, confer upon the enslaved some rights. The medieval Spanish code known as the Siete Partidas (Seven-Part Law) required masters to pay attention to their slaves’ physical and spiritual welfare. More importantly, it offered slaves a path to freedom.
Under the principle of coartación, a slave could ask the authorities to name a price for his liberty, and his owner had to agree to it. Once a slave had scraped together part of his purchase price, he could hire himself out a few hours each week and earn more money. A larger payment gained the slave the right to move away from his owner’s home. More freedoms came with more money, until the day when the slave paid the price in full and became a free person.
Throughout Spanis
h North America, in Texas and California, and most especially in Florida, slaves achieved their freedom in other ways as well. Relatively few white women came to the Spanish colonies, so white men routinely cohabited with enslaved women. The law forbade it, and so did the Catholic Church, but slaveholding merchants and planters ignored the secular and religious authorities when it came to their private lives. In some instances, they freed their concubines and their children and provided for them financially. Other slaves got their liberty because of their skills as craftsmen. Slave artisans were much more likely than field hands to be able to earn enough money to start the process of coartación. They might in time be able to buy not only themselves but their wives and children.
Other black men in Spanish territory fought their way to freedom. In 1565, Spain established the settlement of St. Augustine in Florida. The authorities quickly realized that to protect their beleaguered outpost from Native attacks, they had to call upon every able-bodied man, regardless of race. Thus they turned to their slaves, promising them freedom in return for military service. What began as a short-term survival tactic resulted in the creation of a sizable free black and pardo (mixed-race) fighting force. Wherever the Spanish founded settlements, sooner or later they recruited their slaves to help defend those settlements, and they accepted the reality that no man would risk his life if he knew he had to remain a slave. Military service led to freedom. Eventually the authorities in Florida organized their free black and pardo soldiers into formal military companies. Although the Spanish tried to keep these forces under white control, they could not do so. Black and mixed-race men rose through the ranks to become officers, and they led the men under their command into battle with the enemies of Spain. In the process, they claimed many of the same rights that other Spanish subjects enjoyed, insisting that their courage and loyalty entitled them to nothing less.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black and pardo population of Spanish North America was a complex one. While Spain’s slave system was undeniably brutal, it was loose enough to allow some people to gain their freedom. Throughout Spanish territory African and African-American men and women maneuvered, negotiated, and fought their way out of slavery. Those who became free began seeking ways to prosper as landowners, as business owners, and in some instances as slave owners.
While the Spanish were asserting their rights to all of North America, other Europeans were making their presence felt on the continent. Their settlements also relied, to varying degree, on the labor of enslaved black people. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the French spread steadily north from the Gulf of Mexico and south from Canada down the Mississippi. In the vast Louisiana Territory, French colonists engaged in raising sugar cane in the swampy, humid lands around the Mississippi Delta, cultivating grain in the Midwest (the so-called “Illinois Country”), and trading furs for European manufactured goods with Native peoples. With a constant need for workers, settlers enslaved Indians. They also brought in black slaves from Africa and the West Indies. Regardless of the race of their slaves, French settlers treated them with appalling cruelty. They met every act of rebellion or defiance, real or imagined, with savage reprisals.
Securing one’s freedom in French territories proved more difficult than in Spanish territories, in part because there was no French equivalent of coartación. A slave could attempt to bargain for his or her freedom, but a master or mistress had no obligation to agree to any kind of arrangement. Theoretically, the French slave system did not allow slaves to own property or earn money, hence depriving them of the means to purchase their liberty. In practice, though, some slaves were able to buy themselves. The port of New Orleans, for instance, could never attract enough skilled white artisans. That spelled opportunity for slaves whose masters arranged for them to be trained in a specific trade and then permitted them to hire their time. Cohabitation was also as common in French settlements as it was in Spanish ones. Some Frenchmen took Native American “wives.” Others took enslaved women as their “housekeepers,” and in some instances they freed them. And, like the Spanish, the French recognized the wisdom of employing black men as soldiers, and granting them freedom for their service.
In 1729, the French in and around New Orleans began freeing some of their slaves and arming them to help repel attacks by the Natchez Indians. The black soldiers met a vital need and fought well. Yet the French were no more committed to freedom than the Spanish, but did what they had to for their own security. As the influence of the black troops increased with every challenge to French power in the region, the authorities found they could not do without them. Eventually French colonial administrators followed the lead of the Spanish and organized the soldiers into military companies commanded by their own officer corps. The soldiers, and especially their officers, became not only free but in some instances wealthy.
Once France began acquiring colonies and importing black people to labor in them, the French king and his ministers crafted a series of laws that set down the rights and obligations of masters and slaves. The so-called Code Noir (Black Code) concentrated power in the hands of white slaveholders and made slaves subservient in basically every aspect of their lives. Theoretically, there were two classes in the colonies, white slave owners and black slaves, but the Code Noir did not entirely ignore the presence of a third class, the gens de couleur libres, or free people of color.
Although the Code Noir forbade interracial cohabitation and marriage, the authorities in France tacitly admitted that white men were living with black and mixed-race women and that those relationships were producing children whom their fathers might, if they were so inclined, set free. They also acknowledged that slaves were finding other ways to get their freedom. A free population existed and they needed to determine the status of that population.
Not surprisingly, the Code Noir tried to prevent free blacks from aiding and abetting slaves in rebelling or escaping. Gens de couleur who sheltered runaway slaves risked heavy fines, and if they could not pay them they could lose their own freedom. The Code Noir instructed former slaves always to show great respect to the white family that had been kind and generous enough to free them and warned them that any sign of disrespect would result in harsh punishment. However—and this was a provision unlike that in any of the other European colonies in North America—the Code Noir also declared that the King of France granted “to manumitted slaves the same rights, privileges and immunities . . . enjoyed by free-born persons . . . not only with regard to their persons, but also to their property.”1 The Code Noir at least implied that ex-slaves would enjoy a certain measure of equality with whites once they ceased to be slaves.
It was one thing for the king across the ocean to declare what should and should not happen in his distant colonies. It was quite another to put those declarations into practice. Despite what the Code Noir said, one’s “rights, privileges and immunities” often depended on the color of one’s skin. Full equality did not prevail throughout the Louisiana Territory, although it is fair to say that in some of the French settlements free people of African ancestry did enjoy a higher status than their brothers and sisters in the British colonies. However, it would be incorrect to claim that the situation of free people of color in French North America was better than it was anywhere else or that white racial attitudes were any more benign.
In the colonial era time and place determined just what free black people could do and indeed what opportunities they had to become free. That was not only the case in French and Spanish territories, but in all of the thirteen British colonies. The slaves would have to rely on luck, determination, and courage to gain their liberty, and free blacks would have to be equally resourceful to hold on to it. Slavery took root more quickly in some of Britain’s colonies than in others, but within a generation the institution existed in all of them, along with a patchwork of laws and practices that kept most black people from achieving freedom.
The white planters who converged on the wharf
of Jamestown, Virginia in the summer of 1619 to inspect an enterprising Dutch captain’s human cargo were not personally familiar with slavery. They knew, though, that the Spanish practiced it, and that the Dutch and the Portuguese were competing with one another to keep Spain’s colonies throughout the Americas fully stocked with slaves. They also knew that for decades some of their countrymen had been trying to muscle their way into the African trade. A few of the Virginia planters had seen black people because some aristocratic households in England had acquired them as dependents or servants. What exactly those early white Virginians thought about darker-skinned people is a subject that has intrigued historians for decades. Certainly the thought uppermost in the minds of the planters that day in 1619 was that here was an excellent opportunity to solve their most pressing problem, namely the labor shortage. They could never get enough white indentured servants from Britain, or hold on to those they got for long enough to make a profit, and they were uneasy about the idea of coercing Native Americans into working for them. It was impractical and it was dangerous in a region where Indians vastly outnumbered whites. The Dutch captain offered them a “parcel” of Africans they could purchase and send into the fields to cultivate the tobacco on which the colony’s prosperity depended.
Given the economic and social patterns that had developed in Virginia by the mid-eighteenth century, it is tempting to assume that the English planters bought all of the Africans on that unidentified Dutch ship as slaves, that they kept them in lifelong bondage, that they continued buying African slaves as more ships arrived in their ports, and that slavery emerged as a fully developed labor system almost immediately. That is a highly inaccurate picture, though, and represents the dangers of judging one era by the customs and practices of another. The Virginia that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson knew in the 1750s and 1760s was not the Virginia that the planters of the 1620s and 1630s knew or that the colony’s earliest black settlers knew.
