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Free Blacks
7 articles on Free Blacks
Free African Americans Before the Civil War (North)
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1660 Includes: BibliographyBy 1804 all states in the northern United States had moved to end slavery through gradual emancipation laws, judicial decisions, or the inclusion of the prohibition of slavery in their new state constitutions. As a result, the population of free African Americans in the northern states grew steadily in the decades before the Civil War. Continued growth of the free black population resulted not only from state-level emancipation but also from individual grants of manumission, in-migration of free blacks from the South, the arrival of fugitive slaves, and of course, natural increase. At the turn of the nineteenth century the free African American population of the northern states was approximately 47,000; by 1860 it had grown to over 225,000. The four northern states with the largest free black populations ...
Read full articleFree African Americans Before the Civil War (South)
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1105 Includes: BibliographyIn the decade before the Civil War, there were approximately 500,000 free African Americans in the United States, with the population split nearly equally between the free and slave states. Despite the persistence of slavery in the South, the number of free blacks in that region increased in each decade of the antebellum era; most southern free blacks were either former slaves or the descendants of former slaves. A rising tide of freedom swept the South in the decades surrounding the American Revolution, when many southern states passed laws making it easier for owners to manumit their slaves through wills or by granting deeds of emancipation. According to the U.S. Census, by 1810there were as many as 100,000 free blacks in the southern states, accounting for close to 5 percent of the free population. ...
Read full articleFree African Americans to 1828
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 2818 Includes: Movements to Free Slaves | Emancipation in the South in the Early National Era | Churches' Role in the Fight for Freedom | Disillusionment | BibliographyBefore the American Revolution only very small numbers of blacks gained freedom from slavery. In New Amsterdam in 1644 the first eleven slaves were able to negotiate with the Dutch colonial government for half-freedom, the most important aspect of which was land ownership. In return, the colonial government demanded that the half-free blacks to pay annual tribute in goods to the colony and be available for labor as needed. Additionally, the children of half-free adults were to remain enslaved. Despite these limits, by 1663 there were about seventy-five half-free blacks, to whom the Dutch granted full freedom just before it turned over the colony to the British in 1664. In Virginia, Anthony Johnsonwas the wealthiest of a small group of free black landowners who, by the late seventeenth century, owned ...
Read full articleFree Blacks in the United States
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2278 Includes: Attaining Freedom | Regional Variations | Segregation and Discrimination | Free Black Communities and Institutions | BibliographyAfrican Americans who, during the period of slavery from 1619 to 1860, were not themselves enslaved. In 1966 black author James Baldwin wrote “To be born in a free society and not be born free is to be born into a lie.” Written a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin's words conveyed the pain and the passion that characterized the lives of free blacks in America between 1619 and 1860. Many scholars suggest that during this period free blacks in America were “more black than free.” As historian Leonard Curryexplains, “their educational attainment was limited, their social development was thwarted, occupations were closed to them, housing was denied to them, personal safety eluded them, and basic human dignity was begrudged them. Curry added that, “Because they were black, freedom was always and everywhere for them cruelly incomplete.” ...
Read full articleFree Black Women in the Antebellum North
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 6460 Includes: Black Female Population in Freedom Cities | Racial, Gender, and Class Cleavages | Black Women and Economic Activity | Social and Political Activism | BibliographyBy the 1830s, black women had become a significant part of the migration stream to northern cities. In forging this new path to freedom, black women were being dislocated by the economic and oppressive forces of southern slavery and northern indentured servitude. Many blacks became indentured servants with the gradual emancipation acts in the North that lasted into the antebellum era. New York City did not abolish slavery until 1827 , and the historian Leonard Curry maintains that bound service had a lasting impact on New York, such as thwarting the social activism among blacks. Nevertheless, the promise of a free wage system lured many black women to the cities. Black female workers found the cities appealing, with their innovative technology, the increased mass production of consumer goods, and the expansion of regional, ...
Read full articleFree Black Women in the Antebellum South
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Free black women occupied a unique place in the antebellum South. They were manumitted in greater numbers than were their male counterparts; they represented a larger portion of the free black population; and they controlled a significant percentage of the free blacks' wealth. They gained free status more readily because white men who took slave women as sexual partners sometimes manumitted them and their children. This was especially true in towns and cities, where free blacks tended to congregate. For a variety of reasons—including selective manumission, high male mortality, and large female slave populations—women dominated the urban free black population. By 1860 , in towns and cities with 2,500 or more inhabitants, women constituted 57 percent of the free black population; in ...
Read full articleFree Black Population, Antebellum Era
Source: Atlas of the Civil War
Word Count: 208At the start of the Civil War in 1861, ten percent of the nation’s 400,000 African Americans were free. Nearly half of these free blacks lived in the North, where all states had instituted a form of emancipation by 1804. The degree of legal discrimination in the North was less severe in New England, where free blacks could vote, and in Massachusetts in particular, where blacks could sit on juries. On the other hand, due to its high traffic of fugitive and former slaves, the Lower North border states saw race riots and attacks in addition to conflicts from enforcing "black laws" that denied African Americans most legal rights. Though free blacks in the South may have mingled more freely among whites and were not limited to performing skilled tasks as they were in the North, they faced much worse legal discrimination. Freedom of speech and other basic human rights were entirely nonexistent, and "freedom papers" and "passes" were the ...
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