Between Slavery and Freedom

by Julie Winch

  The Articles of Confederation, the framework of government the delegates to the Continental Congress formally adopted in 1781, said nothing about slavery, emancipation, or rights for black people. Those were matters for the individual states to decide upon. There was one piece of legislation passed during the period of Confederation, however, that had far-reaching implications for the nation as a whole and most especially for black Americans. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 described in detail what was to happen to the land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes, the old Illinois Country. The United States had gained the territory from Britain at the end of the war. Lawmakers proposed to divide the vast area into five territories, each of which could apply for statehood. None of those states could permit slavery to exist within their borders. Few of the congressmen who approved the Ordinance were ardent abolitionists. Their goal was to keep the Old Northwest for white family farmers by barring entry to planters from the South with huge gangs of slaves. The fate of the slaves who were already living in the Old Northwest, some of them from the days when the French had controlled the region, remained uncertain. The governments of the new states—states that did not even exist yet—would ultimately have to address that thorny question, along with the issue of what rights, if any, free black people would have.

  When the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation, and ended by crafting an entirely new document, they again skirted around the matter of slavery. They discovered how volatile it could be when they tackled the apportioning of political representation. While each state would have two senators, its number of representatives would depend on the size of its population. Determining who could vote was left up to each state, but determining who should be counted was another matter. The Three-Fifths Compromise resolved the impasse by proposing that, in reckoning population, five slaves would be equal to three nonslaves. So much for the slaves, but when it came to black people who were not enslaved, the Founding Fathers said nothing, beyond implying that the census-takers would enumerate them with all other free people.

  As the white Founding Fathers put the finishing touches to the U.S. Constitution and prepared to depart Philadelphia, a group of free black Founding Fathers set to work. They were a diverse group—Richard Allen, a self-purchased ex-slave from Delaware; Absalom Jones, another former slave who had paid for his freedom and become a moderately successful craftsman; William Gray, an independent tradesman; and some two dozen other men, all of them free and all of them determined to use their freedom well. Their immediate goal was to create an organization that would secure their own and their families’ futures. They knew that if they fell upon hard times they could not expect help from the white community, so they undertook to pay money into a common fund on which they could draw in time of need. Their mutual benefit society was not the only one in existence. Free blacks in Newport, Rhode Island had already formed the Newport African Union, and there were probably similar societies in other cities and towns. However, the Free African Society was undoubtedly the largest and most ambitious of any of the groups. In part, that was because of the sheer size of Philadelphia’s free community of color, which numbered around 1,800 people in 1787, more than any other city in the former British colonies. The message that Jones, Allen, Gray and the other officers of the new Free African Society wanted to send to whites and blacks, though, was about more than strength in numbers. They pledged themselves to live lives that were beyond reproach, and they called upon other free people of color to subscribe to the same moral values of thrift and piety, temperance, charity, neighborliness, faithfulness, and respect for authority because adhering to those values would benefit them all, and because it would prove to doubting whites that all black people, in Philadelphia and throughout the nation, deserved freedom and equal treatment.

  Allen, Jones, Gray and their friends answered loudly and clearly one fundamental question, namely whether they believed that black people had a future in America, or at least anywhere in the vicinity of white people. The issue had already surfaced in the petitions that the slaves in Massachusetts had sent to the General Court and to the British governor in the months preceding the Revolution. Some of the petitioners had declared that if they got their freedom they would leave for Africa, while others had spoken of moving to the western fringes of Massachusetts. Perhaps these two groups of black men had reasoned that whites would be more apt to liberate them if they promised to go away, or perhaps they thought they would be truly free only when they could live as they chose, not as whites chose for them.

  The men of the Free African Society engaged in that debate head-on. Heartened by Britain’s creation of the colony of Sierra Leone as a refuge for black loyalists, and disheartened by their own “calamitous state” in America, the men in the Newport African Union contemplated relocating to Africa and asked the Philadelphians what they thought. The Philadelphians wished them well, but they rejected the notion of emigration. They planned on staying in America.9

  While they regretted that many whites were choosing to ignore the nation’s founding principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all Americans, the men of the Free African Society, the leaders of the largest community of free people in the United States, voiced confidence that better times lay ahead. They had been born in America. Some of them had fought for its independence. They belonged in America just as white people did. One’s ancestry was immaterial. Birth and loyalty and commitment were what mattered. They had no intention of leaving. They were worthy citizens of the new nation, as worthy as white Americans. They would stay and see the promise of the Revolution fulfilled.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Race, Liberty, and Citizenship in the New Nation, 1790–1820

  In 1790, the United States conducted its first census. An army of enumerators trudged or rode on horseback across sixteen states and territories, collected their data, and tabulated the results. They put the total U.S. population at just under four million. Black people accounted for over 757,000, or about one in five Americans. Of that number, less than 8 percent were free. By 1820, the nation and its people were very different. The United States now comprised 27 states and territories and its population was over 9.5 million, a figure that included more than 1.5 million slaves and well over a quarter of a million free blacks. By this point, more than 13 percent of the black population was free.

  Within those totals and percentages there were huge regional disparities. More free blacks lived in the slave states of the South than in the Northern “free” states. However, in some Southern states the number of free people was very small. In 1790, as many free blacks lived in the city of Philadelphia as lived in the entire state of South Carolina. Two states in the Upper South, Maryland and Virginia, accounted for almost 21,000 of the nation’s 59,500 free people. By 1820, the demographic patterns were even more marked. The Lower South had slightly more than 20,000 “free colored” residents, but over half of them lived in just one state, Louisiana. Georgia’s free black population was on a par with that of Boston. As was the case with the American population as a whole, free blacks were more likely to dwell in rural areas than in towns and cities, but the growth of the urban black population was very significant. New York City’s free black community surged from just over a thousand individuals in 1790 to 10,500 by 1820, Philadelphia’s went from 1,800 to 10,710, and, most spectacularly of all, Baltimore’s leaped from 323 to 10,326—a massive increase in just one generation. In Baltimore, a city in the slave South, more black people were free than were enslaved.

  Table 3.1 United States Population, 1790–1860

  Year

  Total Population

  Slaves

  Free Blacks

  1790

  3,929,827

  697,897

  59,466

  1800

  5,305,925

  893,041

  108,395

  1810

  7,239,814


  1,191,364

  186,446

  1820

  9,638,191

  1,538,038

  233,504

  1830

  12,866,020

  2,009,043

  319,599

  1840

  17,069,453

  2,487,043

  386,303

  1850

  23,191,876

  3,204,313

  434,495

  1860

  31,443,321

  3,953,760

  487,970

  Source: Federal Population Schedules for the Years 1790 through 1860

  Though freedom came to some black people, the majority of black Americans lived in slavery. The number of free people rose nationwide, but so, too, did the number of slaves. In some states slavery was dead or dying. In others it was thriving, and showing every sign of continuing to do so. In the United States as a whole, the prevailing condition of people of African birth or descent was lifelong servitude, not liberty, and certainly not equality.

  Demographics are important in understanding the patterns of freedom and slavery that evolved in the generation after Independence, but it is equally important to look beyond the check marks on the census-takers’ tally sheets to see what the numbers tell us about the life of the nation and about individual lives. This is the story of black people securing their freedom, passing that freedom on to their children, and forging new communities based on the principles of liberty and opportunity over the course of three tumultuous decades. It is also the story of the nation as it extended its geographic boundaries and grappled with the issues of freedom, race, and the meaning of “citizenship.”

  Scarcely had the census takers completed work on the first census than a wave of immigrants from Haiti pushed upward the total of free blacks. Their arrival had implications that went far beyond mere statistics. In 1791, the slaves in the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, today’s nation of Haiti, rose up under the leadership of the charismatic Toussaint L’Ouverture. The slaughter that ensued as they fought for their liberty and their masters tried to force them back into bondage was truly terrible. White Americans heard of the atrocities and were appalled at the thought that the “contagion of liberty,” as some called it, might spread to America’s shores. The responses of black Americans were more complex. While many took heart from the destruction of Saint Domingue’s brutal slave system, spokesmen for the emerging free black communities in the North and Upper South hastened to reassure whites that they would never sanction violence on the part of their own friends and family members who were still enslaved and that the United States could easily avert a bloodbath by abolishing slavery and recognizing black people as citizens. What was happening in the West Indies need not, and hopefully would not, happen on American soil.

  The killings on Saint Domingue continued. The rebels made no distinction between their oppressors based upon race, and on Saint Domingue there were both white and “free colored” slaveholders. The gens de couleur libres, the mixed-race descendants of French men and African women, had as much to fear as white planters, and they joined them in fleeing to safety in North America. Once in the United States, the white exiles received sympathy and even charitable assistance, since many of them had escaped with little more than the clothes on their backs. The mixed-race newcomers received neither sympathy nor charity. Whites in the United States found the presence of the so-called “French Negroes” very worrying. They did not understand that these free people had actually supported slavery. They persisted in seeing them as rebels, as threatening in their way as the forces of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The gens de couleur libres were so different from American free blacks—in religion and language and in their sense of themselves. On Saint Domingue they had constituted a separate caste midway between the white planter elite and the slaves, and they had enjoyed certain privileges as a result. Once they set foot in the United States, however, they discovered that their privileges vanished. Whites treated them just as contemptuously as they did American free blacks. Some of the lighter-skinned gens de couleur responded by “passing” as white. Some kept to themselves and tried to maintain a separate identity as French-speaking “colored” Catholics. A good many, though, realized that they had no alternative but to ally with American-born free people of color. They forged friendships with them, intermarried with them, and ultimately increased by their presence not only the numbers of free people but the cultural diversity of the free community of color.

  Although a few of the Saint Dominguan exiles headed to New England, most ventured no further north than New York City. New England’s free black population grew not because of the arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean but because the states in the region had done away with slavery. Abolishing slavery did not mean abandoning the patterns of thought and behavior that had governed the interactions between blacks and whites for generations. Freedom had not come with much in the way of rights. In Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont—and for a time in Rhode Island and Connecticut—black men could vote, and they made use of that, supporting any candidate they thought would address their concerns, although they learned quickly that politicians had a habit of repudiating campaign promises once they got into office. Even with the chance to participate in the political process, black New Englanders received constant reminders of their second-class status. In 1800, the authorities in Boston expelled 239 out-of-state black people, and there were no doubt similar less well publicized “warnings out” elsewhere. Across the region, many of the repressive colonial-era laws remained in place.

  The situation in the Mid-Atlantic states with respect to black freedom was more complicated. Pennsylvania had enacted gradual emancipation during the Revolution, and each year more black people became free. Not surprisingly, blacks from other states flocked to Pennsylvania, and especially to the city of Philadelphia, in search of work and a place of refuge. Some were free, while others were runaway slaves. Whites complained incessantly that the census figures underreported the numbers of black residents of Philadelphia and the surrounding counties because many hid from the census-takers. The 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Law gave them every reason to lie low. The law empowered slave owners and professional slave catchers to cross state lines in search of runaways. In an era before fingerprints and photographs, vague written descriptions sufficed as proof of identity, and the description of one black person could easily fit another of approximately the same age, height, and build. Slave catchers picked up people and hustled them before a magistrate who made an on-the-spot determination as to whether or not they were in fact escaped slaves. In Pennsylvania and throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, free people needed to be constantly on their guard. The enduring legacy of slavery robbed them of any real sense of security.

  Pennsylvania had acted in 1780 to phase out slavery. New York took much longer to begin the process. The forces of antislavery, black and white, achieved a partial victory in the legislature in 1799 with the passage of a law that provided for the freeing of children born to enslaved women after July 4 of that year, although not until they were in their twenties. In 1817, lawmakers finally decreed that on July 4, 1827 slavery in New York would officially end and all the remaining slaves in the state would be free.

  Long before the state of New York abolished slavery, New York City had an articulate and well-organized free black community. There were also sizable clusters of free people in other urban centers. Lawmakers might envision African Americans as a permanent underclass, even after emancipation, but that was not the future black New Yorkers accepted for themselves. They wanted what they considered their birthright, namely equality and full citizenship. Affluent free black men were legally entitled to vote in New York, and members of New York City’s small but rapidly growing entrepreneurial elite were particularly active in that regard. They favored Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, who were usually antislavery in their sympathies. When Democrats attacked them as mindless tools of the oppositi
on, black New Yorkers responded that they had enough sense to vote for the party that guaranteed them “the blessings of Liberty and Justice.”1