by Julie Winch
Pennsylvania did not lag far behind her sister colonies when it came to regulating the status of free blacks—and over the years some slaves did succeed in becoming free, most through self-purchase. The colony’s “black codes” told those people with whom they could trade and whom they could welcome into their homes. Aiding a suspected runaway, buying goods from a slave (which he or she was presumed to have stolen), or selling alcohol to a slave could put a free person’s own liberty in jeopardy. Most white Pennsylvanians wished the colony did not have a single free black inhabitant. They believed they were, in the words of the preamble to a 1751 law, an “idle and slothful people.” There were too many of them, and they had a worrisome tendency to congregate in Philadelphia, where (so lawmakers alleged) they rented small hovels and shacks and generally annoyed white people by their presence.6 Whatever whites thought and feared, though, there were only about fifty free black families in Philadelphia by the 1770s, and perhaps the same number scattered throughout the counties adjoining the city—some 500–600 individuals in all. They took whatever employment they could, struggled to keep their heads above water financially, and tried not to fall foul of the law. It was a tough existence, made tougher by the knowledge that they and their children could be bound out to labor if the authorities judged them to be vagrants or paupers.
Just as slavery flourished in the Mid-Atlantic colonies, so it took root in New England. The tendency of masters throughout the region to refer to both hired hands and slaves as “servants” makes it difficult to determine precisely how many slaves there were in any neighborhood at any point in time. It also hides the presence of black people who were free, who earned wages, and were indeed “servants.”
The Puritans of Massachusetts gave legal sanction to slavery early in the colony’s history. The 1641 Body of Liberties ruled that it was lawful to hold as property “Captives taken in just warres,” those who voluntarily sold themselves into bondage, and those who were sold into slavery by others.7 Obviously that covered every category of individuals the Puritans might lay claim to. Within fifty years black slaves were “fixtures” not only in port towns like Boston but in rural areas. Some came directly from West Africa and others from the British colonies in the West Indies. Massachusetts never had the large gangs of slaves one would see in the South or even in the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and there were plenty of white householders who could simply not justify the purchase of a single slave. Nevertheless, black slavery emerged as part of the fabric of social and economic life in colonial Massachusetts. Black freedom, however, did not.
Rhode Islanders were even more eager than their Massachusetts neighbors to acquire slaves. There was a fleeting attempt in the 1650s to limit the period of servitude to ten years, but it went nowhere. The pressure for cheap labor on farms, in private homes, and in the bustling town of Newport was simply too great, and the town’s merchants soon enmeshed themselves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By 1770, Rhode Island, the smallest of the New England colonies, had the highest percentage of slaves. Its free black population, by contrast, numbered just a few hundred individuals, and the colony’s laws, combined with prevailing white assumptions about people of color, left them struggling to maintain their freedom.
Slavery also flourished in Connecticut. Thriving coastal communities were hungry for labor, and slaves supplied it. Slaves accounted for a significant percentage of farmhands, especially in the eastern part of the colony. They did other kinds of work as well. Depending on age and gender, they were blacksmiths and wheelwrights, dairymaids and household drudges. They planted and wormed tobacco, and enslaved black men built, maintained, loaded and helped crew every kind of vessel that sailed out of Connecticut’s ports, from small coasting skiffs, to brigs and schooners in the West Indian trade, and much larger square-riggers plying the trans-Atlantic routes. Although by the end of the colonial period Rhode Island had the highest ratio of slaves to whites, Connecticut had the largest number slaves in New England—nearly 6,500. Its free black population was very small in comparison to the number of enslaved blacks—perhaps 300 people in all.
Further north, New Hampshire law recognized and protected slavery. Once Portsmouth began to grow as a port, merchants shipped in slaves. Black men provided much-needed labor, skilled and semi-skilled, while the white families that prospered through trade bought black women as household “help.” Other coastal communities sprang up, and the more affluent whites in those communities purchased slaves. And even though they were a rarity in the area that would eventually become Vermont, several hundred enslaved black people were there by the beginning of the eighteenth century, struggling to survive, and pushing at the boundaries between slavery and freedom.
Although the majority of black New Englanders were slaves for life, a small minority gained their freedom. In some instances they became free against their will. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island all passed restrictions on which slaves an owner could emancipate and how much that owner had to pay for the privilege of doing so. Lawmakers worried less about the inhumanity of a slaveholder abandoning people who were too old or too infirm to support themselves and more about how much the maintenance of such helpless ex-slaves would cost their locality. Those same concerns occupied the minds of the enslaved, some of whom rejected outright the offer of emancipation. Freedom when it came in one’s old age could prove a curse rather than a blessing if it meant being turned loose to starve or die of exposure in the harsh New England winter.
All of the New England colonies found ways to discourage free black people, young or old, from settling within their borders. In 1717, for instance, Connecticut passed a law forbidding freedmen and women from remaining in any town where whites objected to their presence. They were also prohibited from buying land or opening a business. Some individuals managed to ingratiate themselves sufficiently to get grudging permission to stay in a particular community, but the laws remained on the books, a constant reminder that free black people did not have the same rights as their white neighbors. If they did get the consent to settle down, it would not be as free and independent people. With few chances to become self-supporting, they would have to work as farmhands or live-in servants for whites in a status of dependency that left them little better off than when they had been slaves. They could not get ahead financially because of the hostile laws, and then they had to endure criticism for not making better use of their liberty.
Communities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island routinely “warned out” or expelled anyone who was indigent or seemed likely to become a public charge. Town officials forced them over the boundary into the next town, which then hastily moved them on into a neighboring town until they had nowhere left to go. Admittedly white people as well as people of color felt the weight of these exclusionary practices, but free blacks did so with much greater frequency, and local officials less often gave them the benefit of the doubt when they insisted that they were doing the best they could under difficult circumstances. Free blacks were also much more likely to end up in the region’s jails and poorhouses.
Black New Englanders struggled to make their way in the world. A few managed to buy or rent land and become independent farmers. They generated a paper trail in the form of wills and deeds, and their names also appeared on the tax rolls, often with the notation that they were black. In port towns like Boston and Newport, free people who had access to capital set themselves up as small-scale traders. Those who had mastered a skill as slaves tried to put that skill to use once they were free. Although some free craftsmen and women did prosper, many found it impossible to get customers once they were working for themselves and not for white masters. Generally, free people took work where they could find it. Black men went to sea as sailors, whalers, and fishermen. Black women labored as domestics, performing the same tasks that they had as slaves. Those free black men who married Native-American women, as some did, especially in southern New England, enmeshed themselves in complex kinship networks that brought them not
only companionship but economic opportunities as they traded, farmed, and hunted with their new extended families. However, lack of money or credit, discriminatory laws, and a white community that viewed them with suspicion and outright hostility conspired to relegate most free black people to the margins of New England society.
When it came to formal education, few black people in any of the colonies made the transition from bondage to freedom with the ability to read and write. There were exceptions. Occasionally an owner saw it as a religious duty to ensure that his or her slaves could read the Scriptures. Most, though, believed that an educated slave was a dangerous slave. Admittedly there were regional variations. Where white literacy was higher, for instance in urban areas in New England, more black people were likely to be literate. In the countryside, especially the further south one went, there were plenty of white people who lived their whole lives without being able to sign their names, so understandably their slaves had no better access to literacy than they did. As soon as they were free and had the opportunity to do so, free people seized the chance to educate themselves and their children. To be able to sign one’s name with something more than an X was for many a hallmark of freedom. Those who could read and write often taught their friends and family members. Sympathetic white ministers and priests sometimes organized classes and so did dedicated laypeople, like Philadelphia’s Anthony Benezet.
Nowhere in any of the colonies, Spanish or French, Dutch or British, did a slave’s conversion to Christianity entitle him or her to freedom. Some owners queried whether they would have to free any of their slaves who became Christians, and everywhere the churches, Protestant and Catholic, gave the same comforting answer. It was good to communicate one’s Christian faith to one’s slaves. In the case of Catholic owners, the Church urged them to let their slaves receive the sacraments. A Christian slave was still a slave, though. Some masters and mistresses did feel compelled to share their religious values with their slaves, and some slaves embraced one or other varieties of Christianity. However, having to occupy the separate “Negro pew” or “Negro gallery” in a church or meetinghouse and listen to tedious sermons that stressed obedience to one’s earthly master did little to make a slave want to share in a faith that seemed anything but liberating.
The Great Awakening, a wave of religious fervor that swept the British colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, transformed some parts of the religious landscape and profoundly affected both the institution of slavery and black spiritual life. From their pulpits ministers urged the need for repentance and a “born again” experience. Itinerant preachers expanded upon that message and proclaimed that true believers had a divine obligation to bring into the Christian fold every member of their household, regardless of race or condition. Some slave owners listened. New religious groups appeared on the scene. Baptists and Methodists embraced, sometimes literally, their black brothers and sisters, while individual ministers and white laypeople made efforts to evangelize the black community. Of the older denominations, only the Society of Friends (Quakers) rejected slavery outright. A few Quakers had been preaching for years that slavery violated God’s law. Most Friends ignored them, but a series of crises among Quakers in the 1750s led to a period of deep introspection and ultimately to a decision that one could not be both a Quaker and a slaveholder. Friends liberated their slaves and some actually compensated them for their years of unpaid toil. It was an important victory. It did not mean, however, that slavery was dead even in Pennsylvania, the heartland of Quakerism, nor did it necessarily imply a commitment to racial equality.
As the colonial era drew to a close, there were some glimmers of hope for some enslaved blacks that they might be able to make their way to freedom and for those who were already free that the future might be brighter for them and their freeborn children. In 1754, war broke out between Britain and France. As they had done in earlier years, the French turned to their slaves to help fill the ranks of fighting men. Bondsmen gained their liberty through military service, and the free black soldiers serving in the existing military companies proved once more their importance as defenders of French colonial interests. While the English were far more reluctant than the French, the Spanish and the Dutch to use their slaves as soldiers, and certainly they never organized anything like the black and mixed-race militia companies that existed in Louisiana and Florida, as the French and Indian War dragged on, black men did serve. Recruiters anxious to fill their quotas turned a blind eye as black men, some free and others undoubtedly runaways, turned up to enlist.
The war ended in a stinging defeat for France, with far-reaching repercussions in the realm of international politics. In 1763, hard-pressed by the British, the French king traded the entire Louisiana Territory to Spain. For the first time, slaves in the Territory could take advantage of the Spanish institution of coartación. The number of self-purchased free people, especially in and around New Orleans, rose significantly. However, the overwhelming majority of Africans and African Americans in the Louisiana Territory and in Spain’s older settlements in North America reaped no benefit from the change from French to Spanish rule. They remained enslaved, as did an unknown number of black people in another piece of the once-great French empire. Under the terms of the treaty that ended the French and Indian War the British took over the Illinois Country, the land east of the Mississippi. Home to French farmers and traders for several generations, the region had never had a large enslaved population because most of the whites who lived there were too poor to buy even one slave, but some had the means to do so. The forced handover to Britain did nothing to ease the plight of the slaves of the Illinois Country, and a steady influx of white settlers from the older British colonies resulted in an increase in the slave population, since some of those settlers brought their human “property” with them to perform the backbreaking labor of clearing the land and carving out farms.
In all of the colonies the enslaved did as they had always done. They fled in droves, exploiting everything they could use to their advantage—their ability to speak different languages, their job skills, their talent for talking their way out of trouble, their knowledge of the lay of the land, and their ties of kinship or friendship to other slaves, to free blacks, to various Native peoples, and occasionally to whites. How many passed successfully into the free community is unknown. Safety and security lay in avoiding detection. Others tried to negotiate their way to freedom, offering money or a promise of faithful service in return for one day being free. And in a few instances they turned to the courts to sue for their liberty.
The Massachusetts Body of Liberties had extended to slaves in that colony in 1641 a right slaves did not have anywhere else in British North America, namely the right to initiate a lawsuit. With the help of a few liberal-minded white lawyers, some Massachusetts slaves looked for legal loopholes in the terms of their enslavement—a freeborn mother, an abusive master, a promise of freedom uttered and not honored—and they sued. Sometimes plaintiffs won and some of those who emerged victorious even secured damages for unlawful imprisonment. A few owners panicked, wondering how long it might be before one of their slaves took them to court, and the number of private manumissions rose slightly, but slavery survived in Massachusetts, as it did elsewhere in the British colonies.
For a brief while, though, it seemed that slavery was about to die throughout the whole of the British Empire. The enslaved hoped that was the case and many slaveholders feared they were justified in that hope. In London in the autumn of 1771, a slave by the name of James Somersett fled from his master, Charles Stewart. Stewart pursued Somersett, recaptured him, and put him in jail to await transportation to the West Indies. Somersett got word of his plight to members of the small but influential antislavery movement in the city and the group took the matter to court. In 1772, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield ruled that Stewart did not have the right under English Common Law to detain James Somersett and remove him from the kingdom against his will, since slaves in England had access
to the justice system. It was a landmark decision. Although Mansfield did not outlaw slavery and he carefully spelled out that his verdict applied only to slaves in England, most people who heard about the verdict ignored its subtleties. In England black people and their white friends contended that all the slaves in the kingdom—some 15,000 individuals—were now free. Across the Atlantic newspapers were full of reports of slaves stowing away on ships bound for England.
Freedom remained the elusive goal of hundreds of thousands of Africans and African Americans, not only in the British colonies but throughout North America. Some slaves were more free than others. With their owners’ permission they went off to sea for months at a time. They hired themselves out. They had masters and mistresses who allowed them certain privileges and treated them better than others did. In some communities, the enslaved actually enjoyed a few days of respite and merrymaking each year—as long as their owners felt confident that they could reassert control once the brief “holiday” was over. The enslaved were under no illusions, though. Whatever fleeting freedom they experienced as slaves, they wanted the freedom that came with belonging to no one but themselves.
Those who ultimately did make the transition from “property” to “persons” all too often discovered that their hard-won freedom did not guarantee them anything approaching equality with whites. Whatever the laws of a particular colony said—and most of them were very restrictive when it came to what free black people could and could not do—the attitudes of the majority community were even more important. What whites in a particular neighborhood might tolerate in the case of a free black man or woman they trusted would result in harassment or open violence in the case of someone they disliked or distrusted. And distrust of free black people was pervasive in colonial America. Rumors abounded about their alleged contempt for authority. In Rhode Island they were allegedly enticing slaves to gamble and carouse. In South Carolina “a Gang of Banditti” composed of “Mulattoes, Mustees and Free Negroes” was stealing horses.8 In Virginia free people were inducing slaves to raid their owners’ homes and plantations. In Pennsylvania they were helping their enslaved friends escape. In Massachusetts they were congregating in the streets of Boston and other towns after dark. In New York they were doing all sorts of things that threatened peace and good order. The litany of complaints went on and on and the demands for harsh new laws grew louder and more urgent during the course of the eighteenth century as the numbers of free people grew. Free blacks responded by refusing to become the victims of white fear and prejudice. They pushed back against attempts to reclaim them as slaves, deny them the chance to make a living, and render their freedom something far less than white people were accustomed to. By the time of the Revolution, free blacks were a force, albeit a small force, to be reckoned with in the British colonies and beyond.
