Free People of Color - Definition

Definition

Many slave societies allowed masters to free their slaves. As the population of color became larger and more threatening to the white ruling class, governments put increasing restrictions on manumissions. These usually included taxes, requirements that some socially useful reason be cited for manumission, and requirements that the newly freed person show that he or she had some means of support. Masters might free their slaves for a variety of reasons, but the most common was family relationship between master and slave.

Throughout the slave societies of the Americas, some white male slaveowners took advantage of the subordinate status of their female slaves and required them to engage in sexual relations. The Southern diarist Mary Chesnut famously wrote that "like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children..." In some places, especially in Caribbean and South American slave societies, the European might acknowledge the relationship and his children. Some were common-law marriages of affection. Slaveholders were more likely to free their mixed-race children of these relationships than they were to free other slaves. They also sometimes freed the enslaved women who were their concubines.

Slaves might achieve freedom by purchasing it, whether at market or reduced value. Some masters hired out their slaves and allowed them to keep a portion of their earnings. From money saved, they could buy freedom. In other cases, relatives who were already free purchased the freedom of another. Sometimes masters, or the government, would free slaves without payment as a reward for some notable service: a slave who revealed slave conspiracies for uprisings was commonly rewarded with freedom.

Some enslaved black people, such as Charlotte Dupuy, held by a slave of Henry Clay, Secretary of State, sued for freedom in what were known as freedom suits. Slavery law included provisions for persons to sue on the basis of being illegally held in slavery, through a free maternal line, or other reasons. In the nineteenth century, with the abolition and prohibition of slavery in northern states, and increased travel, some slaves sued for freedom on the grounds of having been held illegally in a free state. (Most free states had provisions that slaveholders had to forfeit their "property" if they remained in the state.) These legal cases often created an ambiguous legal space, even if they did not always side in favor of the black defendants. Dupuy lost her suit because it was based on the promise of freedom from an owner before Clay. In the freedom suits, the court had to "assume" the defendant's freedom in order to acknowledge the petition, since enslaved people ordinarily had no legal standing as citizens. For a greater discussion of the liminal space of freedom created by these court cases refer to Edlie Wong's forthcoming Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel.

Many free people of color were born free. By the 19th century, there were flourishing families of free coloreds who had been free for generations. In the United States many of the "old issue" free people of color (those free before the Civil War) were descended from African Americans born free during the colonial period in Virginia. Most of those were descendants of white servant women who entered into relationships with African men, indentured servant, slave or free. Their relationships demonstrated the fluid nature of the early working class, before institutionalized slavery hardened lines between ethnic groups. Many of their descendants later migrated to the frontiers of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, and west, as well as further south.

Sometimes they formed isolated settlements in the frontier where they were relatively free of racial strictures common to the plantation areas. In many cases they were well received and respected on the frontier. Sometimes they identified as Indian or Portuguese, or their neighbors classified them that way, in an attempt to explain their physical characteristics that were different from northern Europeans.

After the American Revolutionary War, a number of slaveholders in the North and Upper South freed their slaves in the period from 1783-1810. From the language of the deeds and wills, many were inspired by the Revolution's ideals; others awarded service. In Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, Quakers and Moravians were influential in persuading slaveholders to free their slaves. The proportion of free blacks went from one percent before the Revolution to 10 percent by 1810 in the Upper South. By 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, 91 percent of blacks in Delaware were free, and 49.7 percent of blacks in Maryland.

Technically a maroon was also a free person of color. This term described slaves who had escaped and lived in areas outside settlements. Because maroons lived outside slave society, scholars regard them as quite different in character from free people of color, who made their way legally within societies.

Many people who lived as free within the slave society did not have formal liberty papers. In some cases these were runaways, who just hid in the towns among free people of color and tried to maintain a low profile. In other cases they were "living as free" with the permission of their master, sometimes in return for payment of rent or a share of money they earned by trades. The master never made their freedom official. Like the maroons, these people were always at risk of losing their freedom.