Prior to the American Revolution, few free blacks resided in the American South, and most of them were in the Chesapeake region. Maryland in 1755 counted 1,817, and Virginia had even fewer as late as 1780. Products of a charter generation of Creoles who came free or who had negotiated freedom out of the yet fluid racial landscape of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, the earliest free blacks in America were largely of mixed ancestry. They never comprised more than a small fraction of the coastal populations of colonial America, especially after the rapid rise of slavery in the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century arrivals of purer African ancestry would also negotiate freedom, but less easily so as Anglo-American racial attitudes hardened alongside proliferation of slavery in the British colonies.
The Revolution was a watershed in the history of African Americans. A powerful combination of republican principles, religious persuasion, economic pressure, and antislavery activity during and immediately after the war fashioned a dual path for blacks in the South. Indeed, the egalitarian ideals that sustained both white and black Americans through their War of Independence now made slavery seem for many to be in contradiction to those ideals; some slaveholders, as a consequence, freed their slaves in the war's aftermath. Yet in the Lower South, ironically, the war entrenched slavery even more deeply than before. The British efforts to use slavery to drive a wedge between Loyalists and Patriots caused thousands of bondpeople to seek freedom. This led many planters to eschew their support for England just as it deepened their commitment to slavery. The spread of cotton in the years after the war set slavery on an irreversible course toward an unparalleled expansion in the Lower South states. From 1790 to 1830, the slave population in the Lower South grew from 136,358 to 845,805, a sixfold increase; in the latter year, free blacks numbered 30,193, or just 3.5 percent of its overall black population. Those few slaves freed in the Lower South were generally lightskinned personal servants, often the products of illicit unions between masters or their sons and their bondwomen, who were often educated, skilled, and frequently given property with their freedom. Indeed, some three-fourths of Lower South freedpeople were of mixed parentage, forming a buffer group whose members styled themselves as "free people of color." As more than one historian has written, free mulattoes occupied a middle ground, enjoying a higher status than the mass of dark-skinned slaves yet denied the rights of full citizenship by whites and being largely despised by both.
Conversely, in the Upper South, the Revolution sparked some waning of slavery. For many white slaveholders, the war unleashed storms that buffeted their ideological stance on slavery as they confronted the contradiction of fighting a war for liberty while maintaining the enslavement of African Americans. That, along with an economic transition from tobacco to grain crops, resulted in a wave of manumissions—by will, deed, and term—that dramatically changed the demographics of the Upper South's black population. By 1790 Virginia boasted 12,766 free blacks while Maryland had some 8,043, constituting some 2.5 percent of the latter state's total population; by 1830 that figure would climb to nearly 12 percent. More telling, the proportion of free blacks to slaves in the Upper South grew appreciably in the early national period, so that by 1820 some 10.6 percent of its black population was free. In Maryland, the figure went up markedly to 27 percent by 1820; a decade later, a full third of Maryland's black population was free.
In marked contrast to the Lower South, as the Upper South's free black population grew, so did it become of a darker hue. Where Lower South masters freed only a select few of their bondpeople, mostly mulattoes, Upper South slave owners liberated their bondpeople more indiscriminately, generally freeing not just one or two but most or all of the master's chattel property. Manumission documents, both deeds and wills, commonly record such wholesale emancipations, involving tens of bondpeople, with men and women appearing in roughly equal proportions. Thousands more owners either simply liberated their slaves or allowed them to purchase their freedom. Such practices soon made the freedpeople of the Upper South most distinguishable from those of the Lower South in their skin color; nearly two-thirds of the Upper South's free blacks were dark-skinned.
Term manumission and term slavery. Unique to the Upper South was the process of term manumission. In an economic environment where slavery was increasingly less profitable, masters could recoup their investment in their slaves, whom they often possessed from an early age and thus provided for them in years when they offered little labor, by promising freedom at a particular age or year in consideration of faithful service. The widespread practice of term slavery created a legal and social contretemps by which term slaves were neither slave nor free, but both at once. Slaves recognized this anomaly and often shrewdly manipulated the existing circumstances to their best advantage. Recognizing their own agency in the slave-master relationship, slaves badgered their owners, threatened their own flight, and even inflicted physical intimidation and violence, to force owners to register documents providing for term manumission for unneeded slaves rather than to sell them to traders who would transport them to the cotton regions.This development, viewed unfavorably by masters largely because it often worked against their interests, played a role in the gradual decline of slavery in the Upper South. Term manumission, in combination with the propensity of owners to free their slaves gradually (by will and deed, the latter promised but not registered until a later date), left the free black class, for the most part, older than the mass of slaves, enough to prompt several states to pass legislation restricting owners' liberty to emancipate their slaves after certain ages.
As the free black class grew, it quickly shifted its base somewhat from the countryside to the South's cities, especially in the Lower South. As the historian Ira Berlin has written, "free Negroes were the most urban caste in the South," a characterization that complement's Frederick Douglass's observation that "slavery dislikes a dense population." The wide variety of occupations available in the growing cities drew many freedpeople from rural regions, where opportunities were limited largely to agriculture. But nearly as important, the relative anonymity of the city offered free blacks the opportunity to live lives more like their free white urban counterparts than plantation slaves. Where in 1790 Baltimore's free blacks constituted less than 12 percent of its black population, a decade later they made up nearly half; by 1830, its 14,790 free blacks would represent nearly 80 percent of its black population. In some of the port cities of the Lower South, mulattoes made up 90 percent of their free black populations.
Employment, property, and housing. The cities soon offered their free black workers employment opportunities that varied considerably between the Upper and Lower Souths. In Lower South ports such as New Orleans and Charleston, the overwhelming proportion of free black workers labored in skilled trades. With slaves in those cities outnumbering free blacks by more than four to one and thus dominating the unskilled labor market, fewer than one in five free men of color employed in Charleston worked as a common laborer, while just 5 percent held nonmanual occupations such as shopkeeper. The remainder worked as artisans and shopkeepers. Similarly, six of ten free black women in Charleston worked as semiskilled dressmakers, mantua makers, and seamstresses; fewer than one-fourth worked as laundresses and even fewer as domestic workers. Conversely, in Upper South ports such as Baltimore and Norfolk, a large skilled white population drove black workers largely into the ranks of unskilled labor. More than 60 percent of Baltimore's free black men worked as laborers in 1827; black women fared even worse, with more than nine in ten working as laundresses. Those free blacks in both the Upper and Lower Souths who found higher-paying, skilled, semiskilled, and trading occupations soon found themselves forming an elite class within the black communities of their respective cities. Free blacks in Lower South cities were from three to four times more likely to own property than those in the Upper South cities, and the former possessed property of far greater value.
Ironically, such differences in wealth did not find their way so prominently into residential patterns for free blacks. Whether in the countryside or in the cities, free blacks, poor whites, and slaves lived in much the same type of housing, often in close proximity to one another. Most rural free blacks lived in houses indistinguishable from those of bondpeople, and white slave employers generally housed free black hands with slaves. In Deep South cities, high walls enclosed compounds at the rear of owners' residences in which their slaves lived, thus spreading black residents throughout the urban setting and discouraging racial segregation. Economics often relegated most free blacks to poorer neighborhoods, where they lived on alleys and side streets and in garrets and cellars alongside working-class whites. No uniform black ghetto emerged in southern cities; the absence of urban transportation and the need for black workers to live near their place of work scattered free blacks and slaves. Only the most affluent free blacks could live apart from these poor neighborhoods, and some lived on the most fashionable streets of their cities.
In comparative terms, in the Upper South (and especially in its cities) fewer free blacks held noticeably less real property than free blacks in the Lower South. Overall, some two-thirds of the South's free blacks lived in rural areas; in Virginia, for example, only 1.5 percent owned land in 1830. Of Maryland's two hundred black property owners in the twenty-five years after the Revolution, one-fourth lived in Baltimore and the average value of their holdings was $150, as opposed to the average holdings of Maryland's black property owners, which was $104. In direct contrast, Charleston's free persons of color, with access to skilled trades, had begun to acquire property well before the war and by the 1790s the city boasted a number of black craftsmen who possessed impressive amounts of property. Because most propertied blacks in the Upper South engaged in service occupations with generally modest remuneration rather than the more lucrative skilled trades as in the Lower South, the number of black persons acquiring real property, and the value of property held, was unavoidably low. In 1815, property ownership among Charleston's black residents stood at nearly 20 percent; in Baltimore the percentage was a modest 5.3 percent. Because the margin was so thin and the level of ownership so low, black property holding was particularly sensitive to economic downturns. The ability to acquire and hold on to property became ever more important in the growing division within southern free black communities.
Racial stratification. In the cities, occupational diversification soon contributed to a growing racial stratification within black communities. Free African Americans created their own, if often subtle, brand of elitism, employing their own blend of ingredients for defining and measuring others. Freeborn status, education, organizational participation, church leadership, and above all skin color, became defining characteristics of social standing, ones that often worked in complement with occupation and wealth. Mulattoes dominated the most lucrative, artisanal occupations in both the Lower and Upper Souths. In Charleston, free mulattoes held mean wealth more than double that of black-skinned free blacks. By the 1830s, the free black elites had developed a system of stratification that distinguished them from the mass of free African Americans. The prejudice accompanying these stratifications found its way into free black marriage patterns, with free mulattoes throughout the South marrying largely those with similarly light skin, a practice that had prevailed in the Lower South from the earliest days of the free black population. Many with the fairest skins passed as white, legally and illegally, to avoid all racial stigma.
Nowhere was the intraracial divide in black communities more evident than in the growth of slave ownership by free blacks. Though never a large portion of the free population (they numbered only 3,600 in 1850), free black slave owners most often owned their own family members, using their states' legal property protections to guard their wives and children from whites. Others owned their own relatives because in many southern states, freedpeople had to leave the state after their manumissions. Many free blacks worked their entire lives to purchase their family members' legal freedom. Yet a handful of free black slaveholders operated slave plantations or industries, behaving much like whites in the way they treated their slave workers. That meant whipping them and also buying and selling slaves to obtain more labor or in response to bad behavior. The Metoyer family of Louisiana owned several hundred slaves in 1830; similarly, William Ellison of South Carolina owned dozens of slaves, whom he employed in his cotton gin manufactory. Both the Metoyers and Ellison were mulattoes; most of their slaves were black.
During the early national period, white southerners increasingly viewed their states' free black populations with suspicion. Where once the South's free blacks enjoyed relative freedoms consistent with citizenship, especially in the Upper South where in Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee they held voting rights for a time (largely as a result of their voting clout having been severely limited because so few were eligible to vote because of small numbers and property qualifications), by the latter years of the period white southerners began to consider them a visible contradiction to the prevailing notion that freedom was a white-only domain and that slavery was the natural condition for people of African descent. Consequently, southern politicians began enacting laws circumscribing the liberties of free blacks while curbing the growth of the free black population. States like Virginia tightened their manumission laws by requiring that freed slaves leave the state within a year or face reenslavement; others barred free blacks from moving into their state. In Mississippi, individual manumissions required a special act of the state legislature. All states required free blacks to carry papers proving their legal freedom and enacted legislations defining racial caste; other states banned free blacks from certain occupations, restricted their movements, denied them voting privileges and the right to testify in court against whites, and barred them from owning guns and even dogs. Some of the states segregated their public facilities. White southerners gave impetus to national and state colonization initiatives, including the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, which sought to remove freed slaves and free blacks from America, transplanting them variously to Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and the American West. Many left voluntarily, going to those places or to the North or Canada rather than face the growing web of racial restrictions. Increasing violence drove others out; a race riot in Cincinnati in 1829 reduced the city's black population by half. By 1830, free blacks had become the South's most reviled class of people.
Churches, schools, and communities. Despite, and in part because of whites' perceptions and efforts to restrict free blacks, the South's African Americans (especially those in the growing cities) began to evolve from a formless aggregate of transients from the countryside to societies that coalesced around their communities and their various bulwarks. The creation of independent black churches began the process, creating spiritual and psychological bedrocks upon which to construct their communities' social foundations. By 1812, three African Baptist churches existed in Savannah; the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church organized in the slave states began meeting in Baltimore in 1816. Branches soon sprang up in other southern cities as far south as Charleston.
Independent black churches, predominantly Baptist in the Lower South and Methodist in the Upper South, soon became the social centers of urban and rural communities. As corporate bodies, churches provided innumerable services to the community, as educational centers, libraries, meeting halls, community recreational centers, and social centers. Each conducted Sabbath schools, sponsored benevolent societies, held fairs, exhibits, Christmas pageants, and concerts for the financial benefit of their church, the moral and cultural improvement of their parishioners, and for the future of their children. Moreover, by providing burial sites for black parishioners—which few white churches and private burying grounds would permit in the nineteenth century—the African churches provided respectability even in the afterlife.
Moreover, black churches played an essential role in the founding of, and worked in tandem with black private schools; many of the teachers were themselves ministers or prominent members of those churches. Because the African church had available rooms in which to conduct classes, and because of its nearly immediate function as the focal point for black life in the city and country, black churches affiliated naturally with the nascent movement for black education. Thus the black church became the primary vehicle of education for most of those black community members who received formal schooling.
Finally, black organizations emerged in southern cities, bringing together those residents with the same moral and behavioral practices into socially cohesive, self-conscious groups. Beginning in the 1820s, many free blacks aspiring to respectability exerted their commitment to self-help by organizing, joining, and in various ways sustaining a wide array of black fraternal societies, benevolent associations, mutual aid and relief societies, and literary and debating societies in various southern cities. Like black schools, African American social organizations were often tied inextricably with the churches and fulfilled a multitude of purposes. As early as 1821, one such benevolent society was in existence in Baltimore, the Baltimore Bethel Benevolent Society of the Young Men of Color; in Charleston the Brown Fellowship Society had existed since the 1790s.