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CHAPTER V.
pp. 123 - 177
THE SOCIAL STATUS OF
THE FREE NEGRO
The three
principal elements in the population of Virginia to
which the free negro had to adjust himself were the
whites, the native Indians, and the negro slaves.
A discussion of the social relations of the free negro
class with each of these three other elements of the
population of the State in the order named may well
occupy a place of first consideration in this chapter.
If prejudices did not exist in the minds of the white
inhabitants of Virginia against persons of the black
race before the coming of the negro, they were not long
in springing up after the two races met on Virginia
soil. From the very first mention by whites of
Africans in Virginia special care was taken, in writing
or in speaking of them, to designate their race or
color. In the earliest records of the courts and
the parishes they were carefully distinguished from
other persons by such words and phrases as "negroes,"
"negro servants," and "a negro belonging to" such a one.
As early as 1630 the conduct of a white man who had
violated a rule of strict separation of the white and
black races was denounced as an "abuse to the dishonor
of God and shame of Christians," and in atonement for
such conduct the white man received a sound whipping and
was required to make a public apology.1
In the case of a similar violation of decency and
standards of race purity in 1640 the guilty white man
was compelled to "do penance" in the church, and the
negro woman was whipped.2 So prominent
and uncouth were the physiological characteristics and
so -------------------------
1.
Hening, vol. i, p. 146
2. Ibid., vol. i, p. 552
[Pg. 124]
rude were the manners of the African emigrants that
before the end of the seventeenth century many of the
white colonists came to regard them as not of the human
kind.3
The prejudice against the negro was not the result of
his servile station; for in that respect he was on a par
with a large part of the white population.
Freedom, therefore, was not sufficient to make a negro
servant or a negro slave the social equal of the whites.
By the middle of the seventeenth century there were
negroes who were free from all forms of legal servitude
or slavery, but they were not absorbed into the mass of
free population. Their color adhered to them in
freedom as in servitude, and the indelible marks and
characteristics of their race remained unchanged.4
In 1668 the law-making body of the colony gave
unmistakable sanction to the exclusion of the free
negroes of social equality in a declaration that "negro
women set free, . . . although permitted to enjoy their
freedom, yet out not in all respects to be admitted to
full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the
English." 5
Yet, in spite of strong
racial antipathies, there were some illicit relations
between shameless white persons and negroes, by reason
of which it was deemed necessary as early as 1662 to
enact legislation concerning the status of mulatto
children. In 1691 a law prescribed for "any white
woman marrying a negro or mulatto, bond or free," the
extreme penalty of perpetual banishment.6
The strength of public sentiment was soon tested in the
matter of enforcing this law in the case of Ann Wall,
an English woman, who was arraigned in the county court
of Elizabeth City on the charge of "keeping company with
a negro under pretense of marriage."7
Upon conviction, she and two of her mulatto chil-
-------------------------
3. M. Godwynnn, Negro's
and Indian's Advocate, suing for their admission into
the Church, p. 23 et seq.
4. Compare G. Bancroft, History of the United
States, ed. 1843, vol. iii, p. 410
5. Hening, vol. ii, p. 267
6. Ibid., vol. iii, p. 87
7. MS. Court Records
of Elizabeth City County, 1684 - 1699, p. 27, in
Virginia State Library. In 1737 a negro who
attempted to assault a white girl was compelled to stand
in a pillory for an hour, was
[Pg. 125]
dren were bound for terms of service to a man living in
Norfolk County, and a court order was recorded to the
effect that in case she ever returned to Elizabeth City
County she should be banished to the Barbadoes.8
Whether the "abominable mixture or spurious issue," as
the mulatto was called, was of slave or free negro
parentage, it was equally detested by respectable white
persons.
In the seventeenth century there were a few free
negroes of exceptional merit who were accorded, in all
relations not involving or leading to a blending of the
races, social privileges about equal to those accorded
to freed white servants. A few were prosperous
owners of personal and real property, respected by white
persons, dealt with by white men in business relations,
and permitted to participate in elections, - facts which
seem to indicate that for a while the prejudices of the
white inhabitants against the negroes went only to the
extent of preserving the Teutonic blood from
contamination, and did not at first deny to the African
freedom of opportunity to take such station in other
relations as his individual merit enabled him to assume.
At that time the theory that the negro was fit for
nothing but slavery or some servile capacity had not
been so carefully elaborated nor so generally applied as
it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Although precluded from the possibility of intermarrying
with white persons, the negro freed from servitude or
slavery had about the same industrial or economic
opportunities as the free white servant. But as
slavery advanced toward a more complete inclusion and
subjection of the negro race in Virginia, the social and
industrial privileges of the free negro were gradually,
curtailed. The denial to him, by laws passed in
1723, of the right to vote, the right to bear arms, and
the right to bear witness is proof of the fact that
prejudice had extended beyond a demand for race
separation and race purity to an imposition upon the
negro of a low and servile station.
-------------------------
"pelted by the populace, and afterwards smartly whipped:
(Virginia Gazette, August 19-26, 1737; quoted in
Virginia Magazine of History, vol. xi, p. 424).
8 MS. Court Records of Elizabeth City
County, 1684-1699, p. 83.
[Pg. 126]
From 1723 to the end of the
colonial period the number of the free negroes was, both
absolutely and relative to the other populations, so
small that the social status of the class would have
been unimportant except for the fact that prejudices
accumulating in this period were handed down to the time
when the free colored class became numerically
important. Except for natural procreation, the
principal additions or recruits to this class throughout
this period were the result of illegitimacy. There
was no tendency to attribute to a few free negroes and
mulattoes of such low origin any higher social standing
than that occupied by more than ninety-nine per cent of
their race and color. Too small and of too low an
origin to preserve for itself, by the formation of an
exclusive caste, higher social rights than slaves, the
free colored class was nevertheless sufficiently large
to pass on to the larger free negro class of the period
of the Commonwealth all the disabilities and social
disadvantages that it had gathered to itself for a
hundred years. The freedom which masters were to
be allowed to confer upon their slaves under the act of
1782 was the freedom of the colonial free negro and no
more. Even those persons who professed a desire to
apply to the slaves the principles of natural and equal
rights had no intention or desire to exalt the
manumitted slave to social equality with the whites.
Chastellux, travelling through Virginia in the early
eighties of the eighteenth century, noticed the inferior
social status of the free negroes, and wrote: "In the
present case it is not only the slave who is beneath his
master, it is the negro who is beneath the white man.
No act of enfranchisement can efface this unfortunate
distinction."9
The free negro population which came to be numbered by
tens of thousands in the nineteenth century was as
remote from a social plane upon which intermingling or
intermarriage with the white race was possible as were
the slaves. "A companion to slaves . .
. forbidden to intermarry with whites or to bear
testimony against them; forbidden to learn
-------------------------
9 Vol. ii, p. 99.
[Pg. 127]
to read or to write, or to preach the word of God even
to his fellows, to bear arms or to resist assault - in
every relation from the cradle to the grave he was never
allowed to forget that he was an inferior being."10
Illegal marriages or associations of whites with free
negroes were so disreputable and disgraceful that they
were entered into by the vilest white persons at the
peril of chastisement by privately organized bands of
white persons supported by community sentiment.11
The free mulatto class, which numbered 23,500 by 1860,
was of course the result of illegal relations of white
persons with negroes; but, excepting those born of
mulatto parents, most persons of the class were not born
of free negro or free white mothers, but of slave
mothers, and were set free because of their kinship to
their master and owner.12
When we come to consider the social contact and
affiliation of the free negro with the native Indian,
the barriers to social affinity and intermixing of races
on terms of equality are seen to be less important than
those between free negroes and whites. No law
forbade the intermarriage of free negroes and Indians,
and there existed between them some fundamental grounds
of sympathy and mutual appreciation. Both bore the
marks of a savage race and had a colored skin; hence
they shared the racial antipathy of the whites, although
possibly to a different degree. Both were wanting
in experience and acquaintance with the manners of
civilized life, to which they were being introduced
through the agency of an alien race. Both enjoyed
liberty to go and come at will; but, unlike slaves, they
were dependent upon their own resources for subsistence.
Both were, in a way, misfits and discordant elements in
a society organized as was that of Virginia, on a basis
of slavery, - a society economically and politically
complete, with a governing white aristocracy and a class
of colored toilers living in a condition of com-
-------------------------
10 Message of Governor Smith, 1848-1849, in
House Journal, p. 21.
11 MS. Petitions, Aelia County, 1821, A 781
12 MS. Petitions, King William County, 1825,
B1191; Essex County, 1825, A 5396; Halifax County, 1857,
A 7724
[Pg. 128]
plete subjection. While there existed
dissimilarities between free negroes and Indians, there
was certainly a common bond of union; and it is
significant that in the massacre of 1622 not an African
perished at the hands of the Indians, although there
were at the time of the massacre more than twenty
negroes scattered throughout the little colony.13
Before 1724 there were in the colony some persons of
mixed blood, part negro and part Indian, called mustees
or mustizos.14 A number of reservations
of land, containing from a few hundred to many thousand
acres, were set apart in the eastern section of Virginia
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the use
and enjoyment of the Indians.15 After a
time, these reservations became the common homes of free
negroes and the tribesmen for whom they were intended,
who associated on terms of social equality. It was
said in 1787 of the inhabitants of the Gingaskin
reservation16 that those who were not
entirely black had at least "half black blood in them."17
The place was called Indian Town, but many of the squaws
had negroes for husbands, and Indian braves lived with
black wives. As a means of improving the social
order in Indian Town, the white people thereabouts
proposed that no negroes, except the husbands of female
Indians, be allowed to remain in the tribe. The
town, they said, afforded " a Harbour and convenient
asylum to an idle set of free negroes," and was a great
nuisance
to the public.18
In 1744 the Nottaway and kindred tribes possessed about
-------------------------
13 McDonald Transcripts from the
British Public Record Office, vol. i, p. 46; Hotten,
pp. 218-258; Colonial Records of Virginia, Senate
Document, 1874, Extra, p. 61.
14 "Such as are born of an Indian and negro
are called Mustees " (H. Jones, The Present State
of Virginia, p. 37).
15 Hening, vol. ii, p. 290 ; P. A. Bruce,
Economic History, vol. i, p. 492 et seq. ; vol. ii, p.
115.
16 See Hening, vol. viii, p. 414, for facts
concerning this reservation
in Northampton County. In 1769 it contained six
hundred acres.
The legislature then passed an ordinance providing for
the, sale of two hundred acres of this land, the
proceeds to be used by the parish to provide for such of
the tribe as should become public charges. Compare
Hening, vol. ii, p. 13; vol. iii, p. 85.
17 MS. Petitions, Norfolk County, 1787, B
4865.
18 Ibid., 1782, B 4865 ; 1782, B 4845.
[Pg. 129]
20,000 acres of land which they could not, according to
law, alienate.19 In 1821 they still occupied 3370
acres. White persons in the vicinity of this
reservation affirmed in 1821 that "their [the Indians']
wives and husbands are free negroes,"20 and
that they had neither prudence nor economy.
As late as 1843 the Pamunkeys possessed sixteen
hundred acres of land in King William County. One
hundred and forty-three citizens of the county
petitioned the legislature to have the lands divided,
saying that all but a small remnant of the old Indian
tribe was extinct, and that in its place were free
mulattoes, all of whom were believed to have one fourth
negro blood, - an amount sufficient under the provisions
of the code of 1819 to class them as mulattoes.21
"They are so mingled with the negro race as to have
obliterated all striking features of Indian extraction.
It is the general resort of free negroes from all parts
of the country."22
The association and intermarriage of free negroes with
Indians was not confined to areas given up to
Indians. From an early date mustees were a small
constituent element of the population, intermingling
with the other inhabitants of the colony.23
John Dungie, an Indian of King William County, was
in 1824 legally married to Anne Littlepage, a
mulatto daughter of Edmund Littlepage, esq., a
man of considerable wealth. "The husband was a
sailor . . . constantly employed in the navigation of
the Chesapeake Bay and Rivers of Virginia." He
free mulatto wife was heir to a considerable annuity.24
In a case before the supreme
-------------------------
19 Hening, vol. v, p. 270.
20 MS. Petitions, York County, 1821.
21 Hening, vol. xiv, p. 123; I Revised Code,
423.
22 MS. Petitions, King William County, 1843,
B 1207. Petition B 1208 is a counter-petition from
the chief men of the tribe, who wish to retain their
lands. They admit that some persons not of their
tribe are within their boundaries, but claim that the
inhabitants generally are of at least half Indian
extraction. That members of teh Pamunkey tribe to
this day (1912) bear in their features evidences of a
mixture of the tribe with negroe may be stated on the
authority of a prominent citizen of Richmond who has
observed them.
23 Jones, p. 37.
24 MS. Petitions, King William County, 1825,
B 1191.
[Pg. 130]
court of appeals in 1831 we find an attorney making the
assertion as an historical fact that Indians had
intermarried with negroes.25
The names "mustizo" or "mustee" and "mulatto" were not
always applied with discrimination, the latter being
often used where the former should have been applied.26
In the censuses no separate enumeration is made of the
mustees, but there is no doubt that a considerable
element in the free colored population of the nineteenth
century was of Indian extraction.
The most
congenial companion of the free negro outside of his own
class was found among his kinsmen in bondage. The
larger part of the free negro class met and mingled with
negro slaves on a plane of almost perfect social
equality.27 Prior to 1782 the fact that
the free colored persons were few in number would have
been sufficient to prevent the formation of an exclusive
caste had there been differences between free and slave
negroes so radical as to render conditions favorable for
such a development. Even when their numbers became
sufficiently large for the formation of an exclusive
caste, there were absent those differences in economic
and political station to make it desirable either for
the free negro or the slave class to exclude the other
from its social life, the freedom of the free negro
being in most lines of activity only nominal.
There were lacking to the free negro the better
education, the higher standard of wants, and the better
opportunities for acquiring wealth and position
necessary to supply an actual basis of superiority and
to give him higher social rank than that occupied by the
slave.
-------------------------
25 Gregory v. Baugh, 2 Leigh,
665; cf. also Jenkins v. Tom, I Hening &
Munford, 123; T. Jefferson, Notes on the State of
Virginia, ed. 1801, p. 182.
26 Virginia Gazette, Dec. 1, 1782. A
reward is offered for a runaway slave who, according to
the description, was the offspring of an Indian and a
negres; but he is called a mulatto.
27 "The free negroes continue to live with
the negro slaves, and never with the white man" (Chastellux,
vol. ii, p. 199).
[Pg. 131]
Had it been
possible for the free negro to hold himself aloof from
the slaves, he might have borne a better reputation
among slave owners; for, as will appear later, his
connection and his relation with slaves rendered him the
object of much undeserved suspicion and criticism.
To the slaves themselves the free negro was a welcome
visitor; at feasts, barbacues, dances, and negro
meetings of every kind he was present to participate on
a plane of equality with his slave neighbors.
While very few would have exchanged this condition for
that of the slave, they rarely ever regarded slavery as
the badge of a rank inferior to their own.
It was very common in the nineteenth century and the
twenty years immediately preceding for free negroes to
marry slaves. Numerous instances can be cited of
marriages of free negro women with slave men. A
case occurred in Brock County in 1826. 28
A free negress by the name of Rachel married a
slave in Alleghany County in 1828.29
Dilly, a free negro woman of Giles County, was
married to a slave husband by whom she had two children.30
Similar examples may be found in almost any county.31
Since the status of the mother became the status of the
offspring, it might be supposed that free colored women
would have had less aversion to choosing slave husbands
than free colored men would have had to marrying slave
wives, but that does not appear to have been the case.
Numerous examples might be cited to show that the
prospect of having children who would be slaves did not
deter free negro men from marrying slave wives.
Rice Stephens, a freeborn negro, was living in
Northampton County in 1843 with a slave wife and
three children.32 Samuel Johnson,
a
-------------------------
28 MS. Petitions, Brock County, A 2684.
29 MS. Petitions, Alleghany County, A 651
30 MS. Petitions, Giles County, 1829, A 6784
31 MS. Petitions, Goochland County, 1840, A
7109. According to the story of Mary Winston,
a free negro woman of Hanover County still living
(1909), her grandmother and great-grandmother married
slaves.
32 MS, Petitions, Northampton County, B 4905
[Pg. 132]
free negro of Fauquier County, had a slave daughter who
became the wife of a free negro.33
Indeed, it is apparent that there were not a few free
negroes who preferred a slave to a free wife.
Certainly there was less responsibility upon a husband
whose wife and children were slaves and were therefore
supported by their white owners than upon one whose wife
and children had to be provided for by himself. "A
freeman," says a pro-slavery editor in 1802, "as soon as
he is his own master, marries the female slave of some
farmer. He cannot well be prevented from residing
with his wife. She feeds him gratis."34
This was the opinion also of a later pamphlet writer who
wrote under the pseudonym of "Calx." "Every male
free negro," he wrote, "prefers to have a slave wife,
and will be so provided, if permitted by too careless
indulgence. In this manner he will not only have
his wife and children supported by the owner, and a
lodging provided for himself, but much of his own food
will be obtained from his wife and, directly or
indirectly, to the loss of her master."35
In addition to the temptation to free colored men to
select wives who were sure of support, and who might
even partly support their husbands, there was after 1806
another reason why some free negroes might have
considered themselves fortunate to be connected by
marriage with a slave woman. Such a family
connection often prevented a free negro manumitted after
1806 from having to leave the State, according to law,
within twelve months from the date of his manumission.
If such a free negro husband comported himself well and
made a useful laborer in the community, he was sure to
have the good will of his wife's master, to whose
interest it was to keep his slaves contented in their
place. If the free husband stayed in the
community, his presence would not only be a guaranty
against his slave family making trouble for their master
by becoming runaways, but he himself might also become a
useful employee of his wife's
-------------------------
33 MS. Petitions, Fauquier County, 1837, A
5859
34 Richmond Recorder, Nov. 10, 1802.
35 "Calx," p. 5 et seq.
[Pg. 133]
master. If he was forced to leave, he immediately
endangered the interest of the master by establishing
himself in a border State and inducing his wife and
children to join him. Many a free negro
petitioning the legislature for permission to remain in
the State made a special point of the fact that his wife
and children were slaves.36 Many
slave-owners endorsed their petitions, and joined in
asking the legislature to grant the privilege asked for.
Particularly was it true in counties bordering on
Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky that the
slave-owners realized and were frank to admit that a
free negro, though not desirable on his own part, was
more desirable in Virginia than in a border county of an
adjoining State.37
There is, however, nothing in the facts above stated,
nor in truth in any authentic evidence thus far
examined, to give support to the contention frequently
made by slavery apologists in the nineteenth century,
and to this day not in frequently repeated, that slaves
generally regarded free negroes as of inferior social
rank. The negro "aristocracy," if such there was,
was not based on the superiority of slaves over the free
negroes, but on the superiority of the wealthy planter's
"servants" over the "poor man's nigger."38 Thomas
Bruce, writing in 1891 concerning the happy, state
of slavery, said: "As a class, happier beings never
existed, and they had a most unbounded contempt for a
free negro . . . and shunned him as they
would a leper, and even to this day that prejudice still
exists in the minds of the negro who can recall the days
of slavery."39 Ellen Glasgow,
in her novel entitled "The Battle-Ground," depicts Free
Levi as a free
-------------------------
36 House
Journal, 1832-1833, p. 201.
37 Writing to the legislature to ask that a
certain free negro be permitted to remain in the State,
fifty-five slave-owners of Harrison County say: "He will
take up his residence in the nearest visits to
Pennsylvania or Ohio and of course will make occasional
visits to his family, and from the clamor which is going
on in those states upon the subject of abolition we
judge that we should have more to fear from that source
than from his being permitted to remain among us"
(MS. Petitions, Harrison County, 1839, A 8677; see also
MS. Petitions, Cumberland County, 1815, A 4728)
38 A. Bagby, King and Queen County,
p. 283.
39 T. Bruce, Southwest Virginia and
the Shenandoah Valley, p. 46.
[Pg. 134]
colored man "who shares alike the pity of his white
neighbors and the withering contempt of his black ones."40
If there is a basis of truth which gave rise to this
mistaken belief here and elsewhere expressed, it is in
the fact that slave-owners disapproved of the
association of their slaves with free negroes, whom they
suspected of scattering seeds of discontent in slave
quarters. The master of slaves did indeed have a
withering contempt for free negroes, but one of the
reasons for such a feeling was the realization that his
slaves might readily emulate the superior privileges of
freedom as exemplified in the free negro. The
slaves, being generally of a docile, tractable
disposition, may have pretended to regard free negroes
as their inferiors, but their "unbounded contempt" was
merely an echo.41
From one source, however, there sprang up in slaves a
certain dislike of free negroes with whom they were
required to work, but the feeling was quite different
from contempt. When free negroes were employed to
work for wages with slaves, as they often were,42
and to do no harder work than the slaves, the slaves
were sometimes envious of the free negroes because of
the superior privileges of the latter in the way of
recompense. Such dislike for the free negroes on
the part of slaves was envious dislike for a superior
rather than contemptuous dislike for an inferior.48
-------------------------
40 P. 148.
41 William Dunston, slave of John
R. Dunston, of Accomac County, married a free
negress whose name was Jane Jubilee. In
this instance it required not a little determination and
self-will for the slave to follow his suit to victory;
for he was constantly met by his master's reproachful
quaries. "Bill would you marry into that
family of Jubilees? They are free
negroes." This incident, related to the author by
C. C. James, of Northampton County, illustrates
the way in which masters tried to create in their slaves
a dislike for free negroes.
42 "They [free negroes] are sometimes hired
for field labor in times of harvest and on other
particular occasions." (Madison's Writings, vol.
iii, pp. 310-315).
43 William E. Waddy, esq., of
Eastville Virginia, born in 1827, and familiar with the
facts concerning the relation of free negroes and slaves
form his boyhood to the close of the Civil War, vividly
recalls that a distaste for working with free negro
hired laborers was often manifested by slaves. He
was unaware, however, of the existence among
slaves owned or observed by him of a feeling of social
superiority over free negroes.
[Pg. 135]
The
acknowledgment repeatedly made by the enemies of the
free negro is alone sufficient to controvert the
traditional belief that slaves considered themselves in
a superior station or social rank to that of the free
negroes. The latter were spoken of as "possible
chieftains of formidable conspiracies," and "leaders" in
servile outbreaks.44 Mr.
Moore, in the slavery debate of 1832, said, "I lay
it down as a maxim not to be disputed, that our slaves,
like all the rest of the human race, are now and will
continue to be actuated by a desire of liberty."45
This assumption was constantly made by both antislavery
and proslavery advocates, and particularly by that
portion of the latter class who regarded the presence of
the free negroes as a source of danger to the
institution of slavery as well as a menace to the
discipline and control of slaves. Antebellum free
negroes and their descendants still living are very
proud to relate facts concerning their free ancestry;
and while the most reliable of the survivors of this
class admit that many free negroes were on no higher
plane than slaves, they hold to the view that many of
the better class of free negroes considered themselves
socially superior to any slave. This must indeed
have been true of the free negroes who owned
considerable property, or owned or hired negro slaves
and servants, as did a few in the seventeenth century
and many in the nineteenth. It was certainly true
of some free mulattoes who because of their white
connections had received special opportunities for
education and an independent support.46
Whether a free negro was to be married to a free person
or to a slave, who was legally incapable of making a
con-
-------------------------
44 Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 18, 1805.
45 Ibid., Jan. 19, 1832.
46 In 1857 eight quadroon children belonging
to Craddock Vaughnto reside in the State
notwithstanding the law of 1806, which applied to them.
The petitioners affirmed that they had had every care in
bringing up, and that they were "beyond the sphere of
the free negro class so degraded" (MS. Petitions,
Halifax County, 1857, A 7724). See also MS.
Petitions, King William County, 1825, B 1191; Alleghany
County, 1828, A 651; Halifax County, 1783, A 7751.
[Pg. 136]
tract,47 legal forms were adhered to, and the
nuptial ceremonies observed by white persons were
imitated. White ministers officiated at weddings
of all classes of colored persons. Free colored
candidates for matrimony obtained licenses just as did
white persons, and often procured the parlor of a white
family as a place for the ceremony. A glance at
the records of marriages by the ministers of Henrico
parish from 1823 to 1860 will reveal numerous instances
of marriages of free colored persons and a few of
marriages of free negroes with slaves.48
Of six marriages solemnized by Rev. Edward Peet
in 1831 one was the union of free colored persons
and of sixteen persons married by the same minister in
1832, four were free colored. In 1829 Rev. W.
F. Lee married eight white and two free colored
persons; in 1833 the record was the same as in 1829; in
1834 he married ten white and two free colored couples;
and in 1846, four white couples and one free colored
couple.49.
In the seventeenth century and the part of the
eighteenth when the free negro class was so small as to
be numbered in hundreds there were to be found examples
of well regulated, orderly families, appreciative of the
sanctity of the family relations, in which both parents
were free colored. The Northampton County records
show a few examples as early as 1655.50
The parish registers of the eighteenth century contain
numerous examples of free colored parents
-------------------------
47 "It is agreed that slaves have no power [of
contract]. Hence the marriages of slaves are void"
(Minor, vol. i, p. 168).
48 L. W. Burton, Annals of Henrico Parish, pp. 236-248.
For instances of marriages of free with slave negroes,
see p. 247: "Morris Harris a free colored man, to
Patience, a servant to Mrs. Mary E. Robinson by
Rev. H. S. Kepler, 1855." "Servant" in this
register was a euphonious designation for "slave."
The entries concerning the marriage of a free colored
man with a free colored woman uniformly stated that both
were free, as: "Ned lightfoot and Sophy Buck, both free
people of color. License bearing date as above."
By Rev. W. M. Hart: "Aug. 16, 1825, JohnJarvis,
a free man of color, and Lucy Marble, a free
woman of color. License bearing date Henrico
Court, Aug. 1825." For another example, see p. 248
49 Burton, pp. 236-244.
50 MS. Court Records of Northampton County, 1651-1654,
pp. 28, 161.
[Pg. 137]
whose children were regularly baptized into the church.51
When toward the latter part of the eighteenth century
and on to the end of the antebellum period the free
colored population came to be numbered by tens of
thousands, numerous examples of respectable free colored
families are to be found. On a petition signed by
ninety free colored persons of Richmond in 1823 there
were nineteen families represented by the names of both
husband and wife.52 It was thought that
a rather large proportion of free colored females,
particularly free mulattoes, were unchaste.53
How ever this may have been, there is ample documentary
evidence to show that in the nineteenth century there
was a certain large class of the free colored population
the members of which were respectable and observant of
decency and regularity in their family relations.54
Throughout the period of the colony when the number of
free negroes was comparatively small, and even in the
nineteenth century before the time of the active
propagation of antislavery doctrines, there existed
little if any prejudice against the education of free
colored persons. In the third quarter of the
seventeenth century there was opposition to offering
baptism to negro slaves until it was determined by law
that the administration of the baptismal rite did not
bestow freedom.55 This objection did
not apply, however, to the religious instruction of free
negroes or negro apprentices. Before the middle of
the seventeenth century provision was made by certain
white persons for guaranteeing religious instruction and
education to negro servants who
would eventually become free.56 In
1654, when Richard
-------------------------
51 Bruton Parish Register, p. 57 ff.
Original copy, Bruton Church,
Williamsburg.
52 MS. Petitions, Henrico County, 1823, A
9335.
53 Calx," pp. 5-1 1.
54 Cf. MS. Petitions, Accomac County, A 42.
55 Hening, vol. ii, p. 260 ; Godwyn, p. II
ff.
56 General Court Records, printed in
Virginia Magazine of History, vol. xi, p. 281; MS. Court
Records of Northampton County, 1645-1651, p. 82.
[Pg. 138]
Vaughan freed his negroes, he provided in his
will that they should be taught to read and to make
their own clothes, and that they should be brought up in
the fear of God.57
In colonial times the Anglican church did a great deal
to provide for the religious instruction and baptism of
the free colored class. The reports made in 1724
to the English bishop by the Virginia parish ministers
are evidence that the few free negroes in the parishes
were permitted to be baptized, and were received into
the church when they had been taught the catechism.58
It had been a practice of the seventeenth century to
stipulate in the indenture or contract by which a free
negro was apprenticed to a master that the master, in
return for the negro's service, must provide instruction
in the Christian religion in addition to sufficient
food, apparel, and lodging.59 In 1691
the church became the agency through which the laws of
negro apprenticeship were carried out.60
Free mulatto children born of white mothers and any free
colored boy or girl without visible means of support
were bound by the churchwardens to serve white men for a
certain term of years. The custom of the
churchwardens of requiring these masters to provide some
degree of education for the colored apprentices remained
in vogue throughout the colonial period, as is shown by
numerous orders of the vestry meetings and orders of the
county courts for binding out free colored children.
For example, in 1727 it was ordered that David
James, a free negro boy, be bound to Mr.
James Isdel, "who is to teach him to read ye
bible distinctly also ye trade of a gunsmith that he
carry
-------------------------
57 MS. Court Records of Northampton
County, 1654-1655, pp. 102, 103.
58 Papers Relating to the History of
the Church: Westminster parish, p. 261; Lawn's Creek
parish, p. 289.
"The church is open to them all" (Report of the
minister in Isle of Wight County, in Papers Relating to
the History of the Church, p. 274). As a means of
encouraging baptism of negro children, a proposition was
made to exempt from taxation for four years any negro or
mulatto child baptized (ibid., p. 344).
59 See an indenture to this effect executed
by Francis Pott in 1646, in MS. Court Records of
Northampton County, 1645-1651, p. 82.
60 Hening, vol. iii, p. 87.
[Pg. 139]
him to ye Clark's office & take Indenture to that
purpose."61 By the Warwick County court
it was " ordered that Malacai, a mulatto boy, son
of mulatto Betty be, by the church wardens of
this Parish, bound to Thomas Hobday to
learn the art of a planter according to law."62
By the order of the Norfolk County court, about 1770, a
free negro was bound out "to learn the trade of a
tanner."63 After 1785 the duty of
binding out free colored children was placed upon the
overseers of the poor, who required of the masters,
according to the laws and the custom, an agreement to
teach the apprentice reading, writing, and arithmetic.64
In the period between the Revolutionary War and the
beginning of the nineteenth century there were two
religious societies that were very active in teaching
and offering religious instruction to the free negroes,
namely, the Quakers and the Methodists.65
The Quakers set free no inconsiderable part of the
slaves manumitted in this period, and the various
meetings took official action to see that negroes set
free by their members were taught and Christianized.68
It was in accordance with the advice of the yearly and
quarterly meetings of Friends that the monthly meetings
extended "a watchful care over those negroes . . . set
free within the verge of the monthly meeting,
administering counsel and advice particularly to those
in their minority" and rendering them temporal and
spiritual assistance.67 In 1781 a
-------------------------
61 From the court records of Princess Ann
County, cited in Virginia Magazine of History, vol. ii,
p. 429. See also MS. Minutes of Northampton
County, 1754-1757, p. 100.
62 MS. Minutes of Warwick County, 1748-1762,
p. 30, in Virginia State Library.
63 MS. Orders of Norfolk Count, 1768-1771,
pp. 232-233. See also ibid., pp. 11, 91; Vestry
Book of Saint Peter's Parish, p. 135: an order, 1771;
Register of St. Peter's Parish, p. 117.
64 Hening, vol. viii, pp. 376-377; vol. xii,
pp. 28, 29; vol. xvi, p. 124.
65 The friendship of the Quakers and the
Methodists for the negro was mentioned by Randolph
in the Federal Convention at Philadelphia, 1787.
(Papers of James Madison, ed. by Gilpin,
vol. iii, p. 1396).
66 MS. Minutes of the Hopewell Monthly
Magazine, 1777-1791, p. 190.
67 MS. Minutes of the Fairfax Monthly
Meeting, 1776-1802, p. 105 (1776), pp. 110, 243 (1782);
MS. Minutes and Proceedings fo Goose Creek Monthly
Meeting, 1785-1818, p. 533.
[Pg. 140]
committee of Friends appointed by the Warrenton and
Fairfax Quarterly Meeting "to have under their Care and
labour to promote the Education and religious
Instruction of such negroes as have been set free"
reported that "a good degree of care and labor had been
extended, and that there still remained other work along
the same line that must be done."68 The
Methodists were likewise mindful of the spiritual
welfare of the negroes, whether free or slave, and were
so active in the advocacy of the cause of freedom that
they were denied by many slave-owners the opportunity of
instructing slaves;69 but they continued to
offer private instruction to free negroes, and to slaves
when opportunity was afforded.70
Besides Quakers and Methodists, there were smaller
religious societies, such as Moravians, Harmonites, and
Shakers, who, besides giving the negroes religious
instruction, taught them many useful industries, and
even worked with them in creating a common property.71
After the fears of the slave-owners were aroused by the
Gabriel insurrection in 1800 and by rumors of a general
out break, it was thought desirable to curtail the
opportunities of the free negroes for acquiring a
knowledge of books which might render them propagators
of seditious antislavery doctrines among the slaves;
hence the overseers of the poor were commanded by
legislative authority to cease requiring the master or
mistress to whom a free negro or mulatto child was
apprenticed to teach the child reading, writing, and
arithmetic, as had hitherto been the custom.72
-------------------------
68 MS. Minutes of Warrenton and Fairfax Quarterly
Meeting, 1776-1787, p. 123.
69 Journal of the Rev. Francis Asbury vol. ii,
p. 71; vol. iii, pp. 253, 257; Bennett, p. 547.
70 "What directions shall we give for the promotion of
the spiritual welfare of the colored people?
"We conjure all our ministers and preachers . . . to
leave nothing undone for the spiritual benefit and
salvation of them . . . and to unite in Society those
who appear to have a real desire of fleeing from the
wrath to come; to meet in such in class and to exercise
the whole Methodist discipline among them" (Annual
Minutes, 1787, quoted from H. N. McTyeire,
History of Methodism, p. 381).
71 Madison's Writings, vol. iii, pp. 495, 497
72 Hening, vol. xvi, p.
124.
[Pg. 141]
A more rigorous
enforcement of the laws against unlawful assemblages of
slaves further discouraged efforts to give instruction
to negroes, bond or free. Quakers were prosecuted
in court for assembling negroes for instruction in their
meeting-houses.73 Probably owing to
discouragement thus received and to some relaxation of
their former zeal due to other causes, the Friends were
not so active in behalf of the negro in Virginia as they
had been in the eighteenth century, although they
continued to hold a prominent place among his
sympathizers and helpers. In 1816 a committee
appointed by the Goose Creek Monthly Meeting to inquire
into the opportunities for education afforded African
children in the homes of Friends reported that "only two
in stances were found of colored children suitably
provided for, and opportunity afforded them of acquiring
useful school learning."74
In the nineteenth century the Baptist Church, by a less
bold assertion of views in opposition to slavery than
those advanced by Methodists, avoided the hostility of
the slave owners which fell to the share of the
Methodists, and thus gained the larger share of negro
evangelization.75 Even when the laws
discouraged negro education, the Baptists did much
toward instructing free negroes privately and in Sunday
schools,76 and received them into their
churches.77 In churches where colored
persons attended in considerable numbers a section of
the pews was set aside for their use, and at all times a
strict observance of the color line seems to have
prevailed. The condition of the free colored
people before 1831 as regards religious and educational
advantages is so well shown by a petition to the
legislature in 1823 of
-------------------------
73 See E. Woods, Albemarle
County, in Virginia, p. 111, for instances of
indictments of Friends for unlawfully assembling slaves.
74 MS. Minutes of Goose Creek Monthly
Meeting, 1785-1818, p. 534.
75 In 1835 Professor E. A. Andrews
wrote a letter from Fredericks burg saying that the "
religious instruction [of the free negroes] has fallen,
in a great measure into the hands of the Baptists, as in
Baltimore it is conducted by the Methodists" (Slavery
and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States, p.
162).
76 Cf. The Liberator, July 4, 1845.
77 MS. Petitions, Floyd County, 1836, A
6081.
[Pg. 142]
ninety-one free negroes of Richmond that the document is
worth reproducing in full:—
The petition of
a number of persons of colour residing in the City of
Richmond,, respectfully represents: that from the rapid
increase of population in the City, the number of free
persons of colour and slaves has become very
considerable and although few of them can boast any
knowledge of letters, yet that they are always desirous
of receiving such instruction from public and divine
worship as may be given by sensible and prudent Teachers
of religion.
It has been the misfortune of your petitioners to be
excluded from the churches, meeting-houses and other
places of public devotion which are used by white
persons in consequence of no appropriate places being
assigned for them, except in a few Houses, and they have
been compelled to look to private Houses, where they are
much crowded and where a portion of their Brothers are
unable to hear or to partake of the worship which is
going on. Your Petitioners consisting of free
persons and slaves, have been for sometime associated
with the Baptist church. A list of their members
consisting of about 700 persons has been submitted for
his inspection to the Head of Police of this City and no
objection has been by him made to their moral
characters.
Your Petitioners for these reasons humbly pray that
your honour able body will pass a law authorizing them
to cause to be erected within this city a house of
public worship which may be called the Baptist African
Church. To such restrictions and restraints as are
consistent with the laws now existing or which may
hereafter be passed for the proper restraint of persons
of colour and for the preservation of the peace and good
order of society . . . your petitioners are prepared
most cheerfully to submit, and although it would be
pleasing to them to have a voice in the choice of their
Teachers yet would they be quite satisfied that any
choice made by them should be approved or rejected by
the Mayor of this city, they ask not for the privilege
of continuing in office any preacher who shall in any
manner have rendered himself obnoxious to the Mayor, nor
can they reasonably expect to hold night meetings or
assemblages for Baptizing but with the consent of that
officer. And your Petitioners as in duty bound
will ever pray. . . . 78
-------------------------
78 MS. Petitions, Henrico County, 1823, A 9335.
Affixed to this petition were the following names of
free colored persons of Richmond and the mayor's
certificate, as follows: -
"I hereby certify that I have examined the list of
signatures of free persons of colour hereunto attached
and believe them to be respectable.
"I am of opinion that the prayers of their petition, if
granted, may be productive of benefit to themselves as
well as to the white population of Richmond and most
sincerely wish them success.
JOHN ADAMS,
Mayor of the City of Richmond.
Free persons of colour of the City of Richmond of the
Baptist denomination:
|
Richard Dye,
Teanah Dye, |
Hembrey Tompkins,
Mary Tompkins, |
[Pg. 143]
Although it appears that the
bill introduced in the House of Delegates granting the
privileges asked for in this petition was lost, the
negroes were enabled by some means to erect church
houses for their use. There were three African
Baptist churches and two African Methodist churches in
Richmond in the decade before the Civil War.79
When the agitation for the abolition of slavery became
acute and antislavery tracts and pamphlets were in wide
circulation in the State, the friends of the institution
of slavery became apprehensive of the evil which might
result from the reading of such literature by free
negroes, and in consequence brought about legislation to
prevent free negroes from acquiring a knowledge of
books.79a The proximate cause of
legislative action was probably the discovery in 1830 by
the mayor of Richmond of a copy of Walker's Appeal to
the Colored Citizens of the World in the house of a free
negro after his death.80 By an act of
Apr. 7, 1831, "all
___________________________________________
William Caswell,
Robert Dandridge,
Martha Dandridge,
Thomas Mondowney,
Catherine Mondowney,
Exland Henderson,
P. Wm. Reynolds,
Sarah Reynolds,
Isaac Vines,
Nicholaus Scott,
Betsy Scott,
Mary Barges,
David Bowles,
Susan Bowles,
Joseph Bell,
John Peters,
Agness Peters,
Douglass Tinsley,
John Green,
Isham Ellis |
Nancy Ellis,
Phillip Robenson,
Richard Vaughan,
Agness Vaughan,
John Harper,
Caesar Hawkins,
Fanny Hawkins,
James Greenhow,
Alice Greenhow,
Minis Hill,
Cas Hill,
Isaac Reyals,
Billy Swann,
Aley Swann,
Edwd. Lightford,
Edward Casey,
Nanney Casey,
Wilson Morris,
Fanney Drummond,
Pleasants Price. |
and 47 others, with certificates and
endorsements by Joseph Price, master of
police, and seven other prominent white men of the
city.
-------------------------
79 Richmond Directory, 1852, p. 165; 1856
passim.
79a In his message to the legislature
Governor Floyd asserted that the free negroes had
helped to stir up revolt, and had "opened more enlarged
views," and that inasmuch as they were allowed to go at
liberty they could "distribute incendiary pamphlets and
papers" (House Journal, 1831-1832, p. 10).
80 Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 28, 1830.
Cf. J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the
United States, vol. vi, p. 70.
[Pg. 144]
meetings of free negroes or mulattoes at any
school-house or other place for teaching them reading or
writing, either in the day or night, under whatever
pretext," were declared to be unlawful assemblies.
Any justice either of his own knowledge or on
information of others could issue his war rant to an
officer authorizing him to enter the house and arrest or
disperse the offending free negroes and to inflict upon
them, at the discretion of a justice of the peace,
corporal punishment not exceeding thirty-nine lashes.
If a white person attempted to teach free negroes for
pay, he was liable to a fine of fifty dollars and
imprisonment.81 After "Brother" Nat
Turner's insurrection the ban was put upon negro
preachers and teachers by an act declaring it unlawful
for negroes, whether ordained or licensed or other wise,
to preach, exhort, or conduct any meeting for religious
or other purposes.82 In the revision of
this law in 1842 it was declared that "every assemblage
of negroes for the purpose of religious worship, when
such worship is conducted by a negro, and every
assemblage of negroes for
the purpose of instruction in reading and writing, or in
the night time for any purpose, shall be deemed an
unlawful assembly."83 Some free colored
persons who possessed sufficient means began sending
their children to the North to be educated; but in 1838
all such efforts were forestalled by an act declaring
that any free person of color who should go beyond the
State for education should be considered to have
emigrated.84 This was equivalent to a
declaration that no free negro going out of the State
for education should return. It was apparently in
anticipation of this act forbidding Virginia free
negroes to seek education in the North that sixteen free
negroes of Fredericksburg, all of whom possessed
considerable property, petitioned the Virginia leg-
-------------------------
81 Acts, 1830-1831, p. 107; Supplement to
Revised Code, 244-245.
82 Acts, 1831-1832, p. 20; Supplement to
Revised Code, 246-247. In 1834 ten free negroes of
Richmond complained in a petition to the legislature
that the consequence of this law was that many colored
human beings were interred like brutes, their friends
and relatives being unable to procure the usual ceremony
in the burial of the dead (MS. Petitions, Henrico
County, 1834, A 9483).
83 Acts, 1840-1842, p. 21; 1847-1848, p.
120; Code (1860), 810-811.
84 Acts, 1838, p. 76; Hurd, vol. ii, p. 10;
Acts, 1847-1848, p. 119.
[Pg. 145]
islature in 1838 for the privilege of establishing a
school for free colored children in their city.85
They complained of the inconvenience of sending their
children to the North for education, and very tactfully
added that they preferred not to send them where " they
imbibe bad doctrines." The legislature refused
them the right to establish the school,86
and attended in its own way to the danger of
imbibing bad doctrines by withdrawing from free negroes
even the privilege of educating their children beyond
the limits of the State. From 1838 to the close of
the Civil War the only educational advantage that could
lawfully be given to the free negroes was strictly
private instruction. Rarely and with difficulty
did some free colored families procure white persons to
teach their children privately.87
In view of the difficulties to be met by free colored
persons in the pursuit of learning, the discovery of a
high percentage of illiteracy in that class of the
population occasions no surprise. "Calx," writing in the
later fifties, observed that "the free negroes, as a
class, are ignorant."88 There were,
however, in 1850 a little above one free negro in six
who could read and write. In the white population
of the State a little more than eleven out of twelve
were literate. In other words, about eighty per
cent of the free colored population throughout the State
was illiterate, as compared with eight per cent in the
white population.89 Quite generally
throughout the entire period of two and a half centuries
under review free negroes and mulattoes could merely
make their marks in affixing their signatures to records
of legal or business transactions.
In the fifty years before 1861 it was the practice of
persons
-------------------------
85 MS. Petitions, Spottsylvania County,
1838.
86 House Journal, 1837-1838, p. 248.
87 Upon the authority of elderly men who are
able to recall events of the lust two decades before the
Civil War, it may safely be stated that white persons
sometimes taught free negro children in the homes of the
negroes.
88 Calx," p. 4.
89 Census of 1850, Population, vol. vii, p.
271.
[Pg. 146]
opposed to the residence of free negroes in Virginia,
particularly the promoters of societies for colonizing
them in Africa, to condemn them almost indiscriminately
as being not only morally depraved but economically
worthless.90 Fortunately there are
other and less biased witnesses from whose evidence may
be formed an estimate of the value and merits of the
free colored class as an economic factor. It
should be remembered that all efforts to remove the free
negroes from Virginia failed utterly, and with truth it
may be said that one of the chief obstacles in the way
of those efforts was, then as at the present time, the
demand for their labor. Between 1790 and 1860 the
free negro class, numbering from twelve thousand to
sixty thousand, was far from being a negligible factor
in the labor supply of that half of the State in which
they resided and to which their labor was accessible.
Any conception that the free negro was crushed in the
scramble for employment between the slave and the white
laborer may at the outset be banished from mind.
Let us see in a general way what were the conditions
affecting the economic opportunities of the free negro
from 1782 to the Civil War as regards the character of
employment and employers.
The agricultural and especially the plantation work was
done principally by slaves. But there was a large
element in the white population, even in the eastern
part of the State, which was non-slaveholding and not
devoted to agriculture, except in an avocational and
subsidiary manner. To this element belonged the
larger part of town and city populations. Whatever
employment was furnished to laborers by the
non-slaveholding class of whites was open to competition
by the free negro; and his competitors were white
laborers and persons who had slaves to hire.91
But many non-slave
-------------------------
90 Compare what William Jay
had to say in 1835 on the character and tendency of the
American colonization societies, in a little book
entitled Slavery in America, chapters i-v. He
quotes C. L. Moseby's address before the Virginia
Colonization Society, as follows: "This class of persons
is a curse and a contagion wherever they reside" (p. 12;
African Repository, vol. iii, p. 203).
91 Local newspaper advertisement, City
Point, 1800: "Encourage-
[Pg. 147]
holding employers preferred free labor to slave labor be
cause of conscientious scruples as to the moral
justification of slavery,92 and hired slaves were not
well suited to do small irregular jobs. Hence there was
a certain amount of employment for which the free negro
had no competitor, except the white laborer, or white
hireling, as he was sometimes called.
Within this field of demand for free laborers, where
the only handicap upon the free negro in his contest
with the free white workman was race prejudice, he was
easily the winner. In the first place, white men
of pride, disdaining to enter into competition with the
free negro for employment open to them, emigrated to the
West. "While he [the free negro] remained here,"
asserted citizens of Henrico County in 1825, "no white
laborer will seek employment near him. Hence, it
is that in some of the richest counties east of the Blue
Ridge the white population is stationary and in many
others it is retrograde."93 Governor
Smith in his message of 1847 to the legislature
said, "I venture the opinion that a larger emigration of
our white laborers is produced by our free negroes than
by the institution of slavery."94
Such white laborers as remained to seek employment in
the State fared badly where the free negroes were at all
numerous. There were at least two important
reasons for the free negro's supremacy over the white
laborer: First, his standard of living and mode of
living permitted him to accept smaller wages than the
whites could accept and live. Governor
Smith protested in 1848 that in the kind of work
-------------------------
ment offered to free negroes or to persons having
negroes to hire. - William Heth." The work
to be done was ditching and draining. (Taken from
a fragment of a newspaper accompanying a legislative
petition, in Virginia State Library.)
92 MS. Petitions, Loudoun Co., 1843, B 1900;
F. L. Olmstead, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave
States, p. 94; see statement of Randolph in the National
Federal Convention, 1787, in Madison Papers, vol. iii,
p. 1306
93 MS. Petitions, Henrico County, 1825, A
9358, A9359.
94 House Journal, 1847-1848, p. 20.
Governor Smith reaffirmed this belief in his message
of 1848 (ibid., 1848-1849, p. 22)
[Pg. 148]
required in cities and in odd jobs the free negroes
"wholly supersede by the smallness and nature of their
compensation the employment of white men."95
Secondly, the free negro, being naturally of an
obedient, tractable disposition and respectful of
personal authority, and being hedged about by numerous
legal incapacities and perils, was more easily commanded
and directed, and was therefore a more desirable
servant. Again, we have Governor Smith
to testify, not in praise, but in blame, of the free
negroes that "they perform a thousand little menial
services to the exclusion of the white man, preferred by
their employers because of the authority and control
which they can exercise and frequently because of the
ease and facility with which they can remunerate such
services."96
The extent of the white employer's power to command a
free negro workman or servant was even greater than that
3o30f a master over a slave; for by nature the free
negro was quite as docile and as amenable to supervision
as the slave, and unlike the slave he could be driven
from the job and thus deprived of his means of support.
Hence, as a matter of practice, the free negro was not
infrequently a better " slave" than his kinsman in
bondage. Between 1806 and 1860 large numbers of
free negroes, when found beyond the limits of the
counties or towns where they were known to have legal
residence rights, were hired out by law as vagrants.
Upon an occasion of a number of arrests, or when such
prisoners arrested at various times had accumulated, the
sheriff held a public auction, and cried off to the
highest bidder the services of these freemen for a
definite term of months or years, their labor selling
from a few cents up to twenty-five cents per day.97
Certainly with this system of hiring out free negroes
under the vagrancy laws nothing but "poor white trash"
could compete. The feelings of the white
-------------------------
95 Message, in House Journal, 1848-1849, p. 22.
96 Message, in House Journal, 1847-1848, p. 20. •
97 Hiring out free negroes who were willing to be
engaged by enterprising white agents became such a
prosperous business that in 1852 a license tax of
twenty-five dollars was exacted of such agents (Acts,
1852-1853, p. 15; 1855-1856, p. 45).
[Pg. 149]
laborer in view of the conditions were correctly voiced
by a white citizen writing in the Richmond Whig, Dec.
11, 1845: "Those whose hearts are now sickened when they
look into the carpenters' shops, the blacksmiths' shops
and the shops of all the different trades in Richmond
and see them crowded with negro apprentices and negro
workmen, are ready to quit in disgust." Laws
imposing direct restriction upon the economic activities
and competition of the free negro were repeatedly asked
for, but ware refused by the legislature.98
Further light may be thrown upon the character and
scope of the economic need served by the free negro by
summarizing from many concrete cases the occupations in
which he prospered. From the list may be
eliminated lawyers, doctors, and, after 1832, teachers
and preachers. Free negroes were forbidden by law
to act in an official capacity, to administer medicine,
and to teach or preach to persons assembled." By
reason of a prejudicial interpretation of the laws, if
not in open violation of them, free negroes were not
allowed to pursue unmolested the business of an inn
keeper or proprietor.100 A small part
of the free colored class were landowners and farmers,
having come into possession of land usually by bequest
from their former owner.
-------------------------
98 House Journal, 1830-1831. Citizens
of Culpeper County petitioned the legislature in 1831 to
pass a law " for encouraging white mechanics by
forbidding any slave free negro or mulatto to be bound
apprentice to learn any trade or art " (House Journal,
1831-1832, pp. 2, 84). Certain limitations were placed
by law upon the economic freedom of the free negro ; but
they were ostensibly for police purposes, and only
incidentally affected his freedom in getting employment.
99 See above, pp. 116, 144.
100 In 1844 Jacob Sampson, a
free mulatto, was ordered to show why his license of the
court of Goochland County for keeping an inn or ordinary
should not be revoked, and with no charges against him
his license was revoked without any portion of the tax
being refunded to him. By way of appeal to the
legislature, he procured testimonials from a number of
white citizens showing that he was honest, sober, and of
good character; that in an orderly house which he had
kept for fifteen years on the "three chopped" road
he had entertained persons generally, and stock drivers
especially, in a . satisfactory manner. But his
appeals were rejected by the legislature (MS. Petitions,
Goochland County, 1844, A 7113; House Journal,
1844-1845, P. 37).
[Pg. 150]
But the free negro was in general a toiler.
Tucker observed that "the occupations of persons of
this class are nearly the same as those of slaves."101
Among those petitioning the legislature between 1776 and
1860 were the following, enumerated by trades and
occupations: barbers, coopers, carpenters, mechanics,
cabinet-makers, wheelwrights, chairmakers, bricklayers,
plasterers, painters, tanners, shoemakers, blacksmiths,
millers, sawyers, wood-dealers, draymen, hucksters,
gardeners, confectioners, bakers, fishermen,
fishmongers, oysterers, commanders of boats, lead
miners, day laborers at all work, body servants and
attendants, household servants, and washerwomen.
There were known also to be a few merchants or dealers,102
a few musicians,103 and a few undertakers.104
A glance at this list will reveal the reason why free
negroes flocked to the cities and towns. The
employment in urban districts was in the nature of job
work and service in unskilled trades to which the free
negroes were adaptable. "Bad as they are,"
admitted an unfriendly critic in 1859, "the free negroes
[in cities and towns] serve best in many menial and low
stations."105 Furthermore, as between
occupations on the water and on the land, the free negro
showed
an inclination to choose the former. Tucker
thought that one reason why the number of adult free
colored females
-------------------------
101 G. Tucker, Progress of the United
States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years, p. 139.
In the census enumeration made in Virginia in 1782 some
free negroes appear as appurtenances of the estates of
white persons (Heads of Families, First Census of United
States, 1790, Virginia, pp. 112-118).
102 Law and sentiment were not favorable
toward free negro dealers, especially hawkers and
pedlars (2 Revised Code, 43). See Richmond Daily
Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1858, on the whipping of a free negro
poultry dealer for stealing.
103 At one time before the Civil War the
colored band of the Richmond Blues was composed of free
negroes.
104 A free negro undertaker of Charleston,
West Virginia, makes the assertion that before the Civil
War he buried the dead of the better classes of whites.
105 "Calx," p. 15. See petition from
Norfolk to the legislature, which, while pleading the
cause of a free negro who was about to be forced to quit
the city, pleaded also in behalf of "female families" of
the city whom the free Negro had been supplying with
fuel (MS. Petitions, Norfolk County, 1834, B 4566).
[Pg. 151]
exceeded the number of adult males of this class, while
the reverse was true of other classes of the population,
was that the male free negroes sought a seafaring life.106
Bagby hints that the negro's preference for
the Baptist Church may possibly find some explanation in
his love for the water.107 Fishing,
oyster-dredging, and working on ships or boats as
servants, cooks, stewards, stevedores, or navigators
were all enticing employments for the free negro.
Many of the best patronized boats on the rivers and bays
were owned by free persons of color.
Probably the most prosperous and useful class of free
negroes were the barbers. Many of the towns and
cities, for example Lynchburg and Richmond, were at
times almost wholly dependent upon free colored barbers.108
Reuben West, a Richmond free negro
following the trade of a barber, acquired a fortune of
several thousand dollars.109 In his
shop on Main Street he ran from one to four chairs, and
had as apprentice a free mulatto, William
Mundin, who learned, and for a number of years
followed, the trade as an apprentice to this free black
man. If an assertion may be based wholly upon the
declaration of a freeborn and very respectable negro yet
living110 who knew Reuben West, the latter
owned for a few years two slaves whom he employed at his
trade in his shop.
In some trades there were free negro entrepreneurs, who
used and directed the labor of hired free negroes and
slaves. A. E. Andrews, writing from
Fredericksburg in 1835, asserted that "some of the best
mechanics of the city are coloured men, and among them
are several master workmen,
-------------------------
106 G. Tucker, Progress of the United
States, p. 60.
107 P. 278.
108 A distinguished gentleman of Richmond,
who in 1912 was eighty-four years of age, asserts that
in all his life he never had a barber who was not
colored to cut his hair or shave him. This was
told the author to illustrate the extent to which the
free negro was relied upon in the barber's trade.
109 Tax-books, 1856, 1857, 1859. City Hall,
Richmond.
110 James H. Hill, 227 V Street, N. W.,
Washington, D. C, instructor in wood-work in the public
schools, owns property in Richmond which belonged to the
Hill family of free negroes long before the Civil War:
[Pg. 152]
who employ a considerable number of coloured laborers."111
It was no uncommon practice for free negroes to
hire slaves to labor for them. The legislature
considered repeatedly the expediency of denying to free
negroes the right to hire slaves,112 the
ground of objection probably being the tendency of such
employment to cause the slave, commanded by one not
socially his superior, to despise his slavery, or the
opportunity in such employ to acquire a knowledge of
antislavery doctrines and propaganda.
How largely the failure of all attempts to remove the
free negro from the State was due to a fairer
appreciation of his economic worth when the value of an
individual was to be considered than when the class as a
whole was under review is shown by the protests
forthcoming from the white inhabitants wherever and
whenever an effort was made to enforce the law requiring
negroes set free after 1806 to quit the State.113
The protests are hardly less significant because they
attempt to have only individuals excepted from the
operation of the law than if they aimed at saving the
entire class. In 1810 sixty persons prayed the
legislature to allow a free negro wheelwright, "who will
benefit the whole country," to remain in the State and
the county;114 and in the same year citizens
of Petersburg declared to the Assembly that the town
could not spare without
loss one Uriah Tyner.115
In 1812 a large number of citizens of Berkeley and
Frederick counties told the legislature that "there is
not a human being in this part of the country where they
[Jerry and Susanna, free colored] reside
who is
-------------------------
112 The
matter was before the legislature of 1841-1842 (House
Journal, p. 16) ; a bill was introduced to prevent the
practice in 1843 (ibid., 1842-1843, p. 182) ; the
expediency of similar legislation was considered in 1844
(ibid., 1844-1845, p. 66), but the committee asked to be
discharged.
113 "The harsh measures often proposed in
the legislature by those who feel the evil of their
increasing numbers, have not been carried into laws
"because of " the examples of intelligence, honesty and
worth among them" (Message of Governor Smith,
in House Journal, 1850-1851, p. 30).
114 MS. Petitions, Henrico County, 1810, A
9180.
115 MS. Petitions, Dinwiddie County, 1810, A
4946.
[Pg. 153]
opposed to their remaining in Virginia."116
The plea of the inhabitants of Lynchburg for Pleasant
Rowan, a free colored carpenter and mechanic, was that "
his loss would be felt in the community;"116a
for Frederick Williams that he was a much
needed barber;116b and for Ned
Adams, that he was an almost indispensable cooper.117
The people of Henrico County, petitioning for John
Hopes, a free negro, said that he was a cooper "
who would be useful in any community."118
The same thing was said of Daniel Warner,
a free negro barber of Warrenton, by one hundred and
twenty white petitioners.119
Ninety-five citizens of Accomac County declared to the
legislature in 1838 that the services of John, a free
negro sawyer, "are much required in his neighborhood."120
Henry Parker of Loudoun County was
considered by his white neighbors as "a good and useful
man," desirable in the community as a day laborer.121
No better example of the economic value placed* upon the
free negro could be found than the following petition
from thirty-eight citizens of Essex County: "We would be
glad if he [Ben, a free negro] could be permitted
to remain with us and have his freedom as he is a well
disposed person and a very useful man in many respects,
he is a good carpenter, a good cooper, a coarse
shoemaker, a good hand at almost everything that is
useful to us farmers."122
In behalf of Harriet Cook, free colored,
nearly one hundred white persons, among whom were seven
justices of the peace, five ex-justices, sixteen
merchants, six lawyers, and one postmaster, made to the
legislature this petition: "It
-------------------------
116 MS. Petitions, Berkeley County, 1812, A 1980. Cf. a
petition in behalf of Thomas Richard, of
Lee County, who, it was asserted, could have got every
man who knew him to consent to his remaining (MS.
Petitions, Lee County, 1820, B 1315).
116a MS. Petitions, Campbell County, 1826, A 3482.
116b Ibid., 1834, A 3546, one hundred and seventy-five
white petitioners.
117 Ibid., 1834, A 3544, one hundred and sixty names.
118 MS. Petitions, Henrico County, 1836, A 9531.
119 MS. Petitions, Fauquier County, 1836, A 5848.
120 MS. Petitions, Accomac County, 1838, A 88.
121 MS. Petitions, Loudoun County, 1848, B 1961 ; 1849,
B 1971.
122 MS. Petitions, Essex County, 1842, A 5413.
[Pg. 154]
would be a serious inconvenience to a number of the
citizens of Leesburg to be deprived of her services as a
washerwoman and in other capacities in which, in
consequence of her gentility, trust-worthiness, and
skill she is exceedingly useful."123 In
a similar manner Fortune Thomas, free
colored, had rendered her services indispensable to the
town of Halifax by baking cakes and tarts and making
candies. "In fact," say the petitioners in her
behalf, "she has been earnestly assured by the ladies
that they can in no measure dispense with her assistance
and that no party or wedding can well be given without
great inconvenience should her shop be broken up and
discontinued."124 But rarely were
protests uttered against favorable legislation in aid of
a free negro who sought permission to remain in a
community.125
After many years of futile effort to put into operation
laws for the purpose of removing the free negro from the
State it gradually dawned upon some white persons that
the inhumanity of such laws was not the only great
obstacle to their enforcement, but that the
unwillingness of his neighbors to part with his services
was the freedman's constant shield and protection.
In 1838 certain fishermen in Westmoreland and Prince
William counties complained of the scarcity of hands
that could be hired in those counties because of the
emigration of white and slave laborers, and sought from
the legislature the privilege of using free negroes and
mulattoes from the District of Columbia and Maryland,126
contrary to the laws forbidding the migration of free
negroes into the State.127 In 1852
citizens of Accomac County frankly admitted that they
wished the free negroes to remain among them, and prayed
" the Honorable Assembly to privilege them to remain and
pass a law binding all male negroes under 45 years who
are not mechanics or sailors
-------------------------
123 MS. Petitions, Loudoun County, 1850, B
1988.
124 MS. Petitions, Halifax County, 1850, A
7722.
125 See MS. Petitions, Accomac County, 1850,
A 403a.
126 MS. Petitions, Westmoreland County,
1838; Prince William County, 1839.
127 The petitions were rejected (House
Journal, 1839, pp. 84, 180, 246, 249).
[Pg. 155]
or who are not able to carry on a farm, to hire
themselves out by the year."128 With
reference to female free negroes a similar plan for
utilizing their services was suggested. In the
same year certain citizens of Culpeper County expressed
to the legislature their desire that a law be passed to
make binding any contract by which a free negro
obligated himself to a permanent or lifelong servitude.129
Governor Henry A. Wise, in a message to the
General Assembly in 1857, asserted that one objection to
a wholesale removal of the free negroes has been and is
" that their labor is needed in many parts of the state
where they are most numerous and that to get clear of
them in any way is considerably to reduce pro tanto our
population."130
In the foregoing paragraphs setting forth the position
of the free negro population with reference to industry
the aim has not been to convey an impression that
opportunities to find useful, remunerative employment
were abundant for all persons of this class. While
it is true that of free laborers of all kinds the free
negro was best fitted to survive under the adverse
conditions confronting them, and that he appropriated
for himself the better share of employment open to free
laborers, the fact remains that a proportionately large
class of free negroes were without any settled
employment. Aside from every consideration of the
character or natural propensities of the free negroes,
that a portion of this population should have become
vagabonds was the in evitable result of legislation made
applicable to the free negro only. Two laws
deserve particular mention in this connection. By
an elaborate act passed in 1801 free negroes and
mulattoes were forbidden to go beyond the county or town
in which they were registered in order to seek
employment or for ,any other purpose. A violator
was made liable to arrest as a vagrant.131
It is unimportant in this connection that the law was
not consistently or generally enforced;
-------------------------
128 MS.
Petitions, Accomac County, 1852, A 137.
129 MS. Petitions, Culpeper County, 1852, A
4630.
130 House Documents, no. 1, 1857, p. 151.
131 Hening, vol. xv, p. 301; 1 Revised Code,
441.
[Pg. 156]
the terms of the act placed a penalty upon white persons
employing a free colored person not known to be a
resident of the county or town in which the employer
lived, thus narrowly limiting the scope of industrial
activity of every free negro to his home town or county
unless he ventured abroad to face conditions of
employment doubly hazardous.
Five years later an act made unlawful the permanent
residence in Virginia of any slave set free after May 1,
1806. For a number of years there was almost no
effort made to punish violators of this law;
consequently there accumulated a considerable number of
free colored persons who were not by law entitled to
reside in the State. By and by spasmodic efforts
began to be made to give the act life. The efforts were
not such as to prevent the increase of this expatriated
class by means of manumission, but were sufficient to
incite many of them to leave a community in which they
were threatened or molested, and to seek safety and a
means of subsistence elsewhere in the State. Some
who were forced to move by the operation of this law
were kept from settling by the above-mentioned
prohibitions upon white employers to furnish them work.
By 1860 probably from one fourth to one third of the
free colored population in Virginia were unlawful
residents under the provisions of the act of 1806.
How little wonder it is that a colored population,
facing the adverse industrial conditions which produced
the "poor whites," and contending furthermore with every
obstruction to economic freedom that laws could provide
short of slavery, furnished many recruits for a class of
negroes that were idle, vagrant, and parasitical in
their method of obtaining a living.
In passing now to a discussion of the moral character
of the free negro, we must avoid the error of his
unfriendly contemporary critics who judged him solely by
that portion of his class which was wandering through or
living in the State without employment. If we have
in mind only this idle set of vagabond free negroes, it
would indeed be difficult
[Pg. 157]
to exaggerate the moral degradation into which they
fell. It is well worth while to take notice of
some of the many adverse criticisms of the Virginia free
negro by persons and societies unfriendly to him,
because such characterizations may be justly applied to
the worst element of the free colored population.
A petition of the Virginia Colonization Society for
legislation in aid of efforts to remove the free negroes
declared in 1833 that "the free negro is degraded,
vicious and criminal."132 In 1846
Governor Smith asserted that " our criminal
statistics . . . demonstrate the moral degradation of
the free negro, the hopelessness of his reform, the
mischievous influence of his associations."133
Again, in 1847 Governor Smith
characterized the free negro class as " a race of
idlers, thriftless and unproductive; they labor only
from necessity, are content to put up with only a meagre
supply of wants, prowl at dead of night and filch the
labor of others."134 Olmstead
found a Virginia slave-owner who contended with him that
the free negroes were "a miserable set of vagabonds,
drunken, vicious, worse than those who are retained in
slavery."135 C. L. Moseby, in a
speech before the Virginia Colonization Society,
characterized the free colored class as "a large mass of
human beings who hang as a vile excrescence upon
society."136 General Mercer,
vice-president of the society, described the class as "
a horde of miserable people—the objects of universal
suspicion - subsisting by plunder."137
-------------------------
132 MS. Petitions, Henrico County,
1833, A 9456.
133 House Journal, 1846-1847, p. 9.
134 Ibid., 1847-1848, p. 20. But
Governor Smith's generalizations were not
expressed in words which conceal his prejudiced point of
view. Having declared that the free negro was " a
moral leper," he added: "That he will prove the ready
instrument of those to be found in certain sections of
our Union, who would kindle into flame our social
edifice, cannot be doubted," thus revealing a strong
motive for finding fault with the free negro character
(ibid., 1846-1847, 135 P. 44
136 Address before the Virginia Colonization
Society, Quoted from Jay, Slavery in America, p.
12; African Repository, vol. iii, p. 203.
137 African Repository, vol. ii, p. 189.
[Pg. 158]
A few of the free negro's critics were more
discriminating, and by carefully confining their
criticisms to the lowest stratum of the free negro class
they afford additional proof that persons or societies
who indiscriminately condemned all free negroes were
judging the whole in view of only its worst part.
For an example of the more conservative opinion of the
degradation of the free negroes we may note the petition
of the county court of Loudoun County to the legislature
in 1836: "It is a curious fact that this unfortunate and
degraded population, unwilling to leave the state; and
placing itself in a condition to elude the officers of
justice by flying from neighborhood to neighborhood and
from county to county, is restrained from making
permanent settlements; and is thus actually legislated
into poverty, vagrancy, and crime."138
In the debate of 1832 Thomas Marshall
with truth and with a discernment not usual with those
who attempted to solve the free negro problem declared
that in proportion as they were idle they were
mischievous.139 Professor Thomas R.
Dew saw the close relation which the crimes and
moral degradation of free negroes bore to their poverty
and want, and explained it thus: "Idleness generates
want, want gives rise to temptation, and strong
temptation makes the criminal."140 The
wisdom of these observations is abundantly verified when
we turn to the record of free negroes who were able to
find remunerative employment in a tolerant community.
In the place of such descriptive words as "degraded,"
"idle," "vicious," "drunken," "dishonest," which filled
the memorials of the colonizers, there appear such
phrases as " a man of integrity and honesty,"141
" honest and prosperous man,"142 "gentility,
trustworthiness and skill."143 In 1810
some of the most prominent citizens of'Accomac County
certified to the legislature that Jingo, a free negro,
-------------------------
138 MS. Petitions, Loudoun County, 1836, B
1849.
139 Richmond Enquirer, February 14, 1832.
140 P. 83.
141 MS. Petitions, Campbell County, 1822, A
3460.
142 Ibid., 1851, A 3684.
143 MS. Petitions, Loudoun County, 1850, B
1988.
[Pg. 159]
"hath uniformly supported an excellent character for so
briety, honesty and industry and that he hath a wife and
five children. . . . His wife is a woman of good
character. . . . The husband and wife have
provided well for their children and bring them up in a
moral way."144 Even among the class of
whites who were hostile to the continued existence of
the free negroes in Virginia there was an occasional
witness to the fact that "examples of intelligence,
honesty and worth are not lacking among them,"145
and that "there are many of better habits - and a few
who are industrious, provident and even worthy and
useful;"146 and a traveller from a Northern
State expressed the opinion that "the free blacks are
more moral and respectable than many among the lowest
class of whites."147 In view of the
various conflicting assertions we are led to give credit
to the recollections of respectable free negroes still
living, who insist on dividing the free negroes, on a
moral and social basis, into two classes, the upper one
of which was thoroughly respectable, law abiding, and
prosperous, while to the lower element properly belongs
the reputation for being evil associates and corruptors
of slaves, and parasites on the community in which they
lived.148 Persons of the former class
were designated by the respectful name of "men of color;
" individuals of the latter class were called "free
niggers."148
The foregoing remarks on the moral character of the
free
-------------------------
144 MS. Petitions, Accomac County, 1810, A
42.
145 Governor Floyd's message,
in House Journal, 1850-1851, p. 30.
146 " Calx," p. 5. In his essay, written
about 1859, Calx proposed a scheme for reducing
the number of free negroes by making a lack of
employment evidence of guilt sufficient to authorize
sale into slavery as a punishment. He opposed any
indiscriminate sale or removal of both good and bad.
147 Andrews, p. 162.
148 This is the testimony of William
Mundin, born 1839, now living (1911) in Richmond.
149 Interview with Richard A. Tucker,
13 Suffolk Street, Norfolk, Virginia. Judge
Crothers, of Portsmouth, recalled that when he was a
boy going to school four miles from his home in Isle of
Wight County he passed on the way five families of free
negroes. "They were respectable, respected, and fairly
well-to-do." As far
as he knew, there was no desire on the part of the white
persons of the community to be rid of them (interview,
Portsmouth, January 4, 1911).
[Pg. 160]
negro have been made touching his deportment in general.
To be able to determine what measure of justification
there was for a vast deal of legislation imposing
special limitations and restrictions upon his conduct
inquiry must be made specifically into the truth of a
few of the oft-repeated charges and indictments upon
which discriminatory legislation was based. The
four charges which were made with most telling effect
were: (1) that he was a thief and a receiver of stolen
goods; (2) that he was criminally disposed in an unusual
degree; (3) that he was insurrectionary; and (4) that he
was lazy and improvident.
First, then, as to his propensity to steal. That
the free negro class produced a rather disproportionate
number of thieves should not be doubted, but that the
free negroes were worse in this respect than the slaves,
or that they were worse than so many white persons would
have become if placed in their circumstances and forced
to remain there, is by no means proved.
Jefferson observed with truth that "a man's moral
sense must be unusually strong if slavery does not make
him a thief."150 While many of the free
negroes of the period between 1782 and 1865 received
their training in slavery, the possession of such
qualities as trustworthiness, honesty, and faithfulness
to duty was a prerequisite to the attainment of freedom.
A bad slave, like an unruly horse, was more likely to go
on the market, and was less likely to have the
commiseration of his master, than one of better
qualities. The fact is that the free negroes, as
far as they had employment, were less inclined to steal
than were slaves; but in this regard the less fortunate
free negroes were subject to greater temptation, if
possible, than slaves, and the evidence is conclusive
that they were surpassed by no other inhabitants of the
Commonwealth in the number and variety of their
depredations. Mr. Archer, addressing
the Virginia Colonization Society, said: "The free
blacks are destined by an insurmountable barrier - to
the want of occupation, thence to the want of food -
thence to the distresses
-------------------------
150 Writings of Jefferson, vol. v, p. 66
(1789).
[Pg. 161]
which ensue that want - thence to the settled
deprivation which grows out of those distresses and is
nursed in their bosoms."151 "Since they
are idle," observed ninety citizens of Culpeper County,
" they either steal or perish."152
It should, however, be kept in mind in a comparison of
the free negro with the slave in regard to all such
misdemeanors as thievery that the free negro was
severely brought to account and universally criticised
for his offenses, whereas the slave was often shielded
from prosecution and criticism by reason of the dignity
and authority of his master. Slave owners were
sometimes reluctant to admit that their slaves were as
bad as or worse than the slaves of their neighbors, and
by way of self-defense and self-protection from
criticism condoned the misdemeanors of their slaves or
punished them in private. But there was no cloak
for the "free nigger." The old warning "Be sure
your sin will find you out" had abundant sanction as
applied to him.
The economic activities of the roguish free negroes and
slaves were thoroughly complementary and harmonious.
The free negro, unlike the slave, could market products,
the presumption being that he lawfully possessed them.
The slave possessed first-hand information as to the
location of many articles of produce. Hence the
problem of production was managed by the slave; the
burden of transportation was borne by the free negro;
and the method of distribution was determined by mutual
agreement. As early as 1691 the free negro was
charged with being a receiver and conveyer
-------------------------
151 Quoted from Dew, p. 83.
152 MS. Petitions, Culpeper County, 1846, A
461 1. County and hustings court records of the
nineteenth century contain numerous examples of theft by
free negroes. See, for example, case of Bob Green,
a free negro, who in a single night stole seven hams of
bacon (Orders of the Richmond Hustings Court, no. 11,
1814, p. 153). Newspaper notes of their larcenies
were sometimes tinged with a sarcasm that is indicative
of their frequent repetition, as for instance the
following: "The Poultry Trade - A negro engaged in the
poultry business was detected a few nights ago in the
act of robbing a hen house on the premises of a citizen
of Manchester. A magistrate ordered '39' for his
benefit the next day" (Richmond Daily Dispatch, February
18, 1858).
[Pg. 162]
of stolen goods,158 and upon this and other
accusations was based the legal restriction upon
manumission. Soon after the act removing these
restrictions went into effect, in 1782, complaints were
heard from different quarters that "free negroes are
agents, factors, and carriers to the neighboring towns
for slaves, of property by them stolen from their
masters and others."154
In the neighborhood of almost every gristmill in
certain parts of eastern Virginia there were located
squads of free negroes who were suspected by their white
neighbors of procuring a large part of their sustenance
by concert with roguish slave millers. In 1831 a number
of citizens of Charles City and New Kent counties,
seeking from the legislature relief from such
conditions, asserted that it was a custom almost
universal with owners of mills in their counties and in
fact in the whole lower part of the State to employ
slaves to attend the mills, and that the millers "are a
sort of communication between slaves and the free
persons of color" in the neighborhood.155
The legislature, however, took no action in relief of
the persons aggrieved.156
A complaint of a similar kind was received by the
legislature in 1836 from Loudoun County. According
to the petitioners, free negroes who owned " trading
carts " and operated them between Washington or
Georgetown and the rural communities of Virginia near
the District of Columbia line were in the habit of
receiving stolen goods from free negroes and slaves.157
Complaints were heard at the same time from other
quarters of the State, and, although the legislature
refused to grant the specified request of the Loudoun
County petitioners,158 a bill of general
application was introduced which was designed to prevent
free negroes from trading
-------------------------
153 Hening, vol. iii, p. 87.
154 MS. Petitions, Hanover County, 1784, A
8124; Henrico County, 1784, A 8971.
155 MS. Petition, Charles City County, 1831,
A 3962.
156 House Journal, 1831-1832, pp. 56, 84
157 MS. Petitions, Loudoun County, 1836, B
1840.
158 House Journal, 1835-1836, p. 262.
[Pg. 163]
beyond the town in which they resided. The measure
met with defeat.159
There was a manifest reluctance on the part of the
legislature to interfere by law with the right of the
free negroes to trade freely, and, although complaints
were becoming ominous,160 proposed
legislation for prohibiting them from selling grain
without a certificate or evidence that they were the
lawful possessors of it was in 1840 declared
inexpedient.161 In some counties,
however, the white citizens were determined not to take
further denial from the legislature. In 1843 one
hundred and twenty-seven citizens of Accomac County
signed a petition for a law imposing a penalty upon all
white persons who made purchases of grain from free
negroes without requiring from them the certificate of
two respectable housekeepers showing that the grain was
law fully possessed. "Country stores are in the
habit," reads the petition, "of receiving grain from
free negroes who are not the producers of a single
bushel of grain of any kind. The grain they sell
is either stolen by the negroes who sell it or more
frequently received by them of slaves who steal it from
their masters and others and by this means exerts a most
pernicious influence upon our slaves."162
In response to the appeal there was introduced in the
House of Delegates a bill containing provisions similar
to those asked for by the Accomac petition and
applicable to the entire State. It was later
narrowed in application to the counties of Accomac and
Richmond and enacted into law.163
-------------------------
159 Ibid., p. 244.
160 In 1836 the following petition was made to the
legislature by citizens of Northumberland County: "This
class of people, as is well known to your honorable
body, is everything that is the very opposite of honesty
and industry . . . . The law to prevent dealing
with slaves is a dead letter
[Pg. 164]
The second
charge or accusation, as above enumerated, which was
repeatedly made against the free negro was that he was
unusually criminal. Upon the assumption of the
truth of this indictment were based the criminal laws of
the second quarter of the nineteenth century applicable
to the free negro. Before the beginning of the
nineteenth century the free negro class was not so large
as to attract special attention to its criminal record.
Statistics relative to the inmates of the penitentiary
made and published during the first quarter of the
nineteenth century brought to the attention of the
public the fact that the free negroes were committing
from two to twelve times as many of the crimes of the
State for which punishment was meted out as an equal
number of average white persons. According to
criminal statistics in 1804, the free negroes committed
in proportion to the population twice as many crimes as
the free whites. In 1808 in proportion to the
population they committed twelve crimes punished in the
penitentiary to one among the whites; in 1810, three to
one; in 1812, eight to one; and in 1824, twelve to one.
The conclusions drawn from these statistics created a
very general belief that the free negro was fast
becoming more criminal, and that existing criminal laws
were wholly inadequate for a class so vicious as the
free Africans. Consequently, in 1823 a law was
passed which substituted for confinement in the
penitentiary, transportation and sale as a method of
punishing the crimes of free negroes. For four
years this law was effective, during which time
thirty-five free negroes were convicted, transported,
and sold into slavery.164 During this
period the number of free negro convicts in proportion
to the whites was no less than it had been under the
penitentiary system. It is to the credit of
Governor William B. Giles that the law was repealed
in 1828. He realized the absurdity of taking the
number of free negro convicts and comparing it with the
number of white convicts in judging the relative
criminal capacities and tendencies of the free negroes
and the whites.
-------------------------
164 House Documents, no. 15, 1848-1849; no.
4, 1853-1854.
[Pg. 165]
The injustice to the negro of such a method consisted,
first, in an erroneous assumption that the laws were
administered as severely against white persons as
against free negroes, 165 and, secondly, in a comparison
of the record of the free negroes with the whole white
population instead of with an equal number of whites
similarly situated as to means of earning a living.
So pertinent in this connection are the remarks of
Governor Giles that they may be quoted at some
length: -
I am far from
yielding to the opinion expressed by the intelligent
committee of the House of Delegates of Virginia and the
enthusiastic memorialists of Powhatan respecting the
degraded and demoralized condition of this caste
- at least in degree and extent. It will be
admitted that this caste of colored population
attracted but little of the public sympathy and
commiseration, - in fact, that the public feeling and
sentiment are opposed to it. It is also admitted
that the penal laws against it have been marked with
peculiar severit; 166 so much so, as to form
a characteristic exception to our whole penal
code. When I first came into the office of
Governor, such was the severity of the penal laws
against this caste, that for all capital offences
short of punishment by death and for many offences not
capital, slavery, sale and transportation formed the
wretched doom denounced by the laws against this
unfavored, despised caste of colored population .
. . . I have also reason to fear, that
under the influence of general prejudices, the laws, in
some instances, have been administered against this
class more in regour than in justice. Yet,
notwithstanding all these deprecated circumstances, the
proportion of convicts to the whole population has been
small.
He points out
the fact that only about one out of every thousand free
negroes was a criminal, and concludes that
-------------------------
165 It was made a penitentiary offense for a
free person "to advise any slave to abscond from
this master or aid such slave to abscond by procuring
for or delivering to him a pass, register or other
writing or furnish him money, clothes, etc."
(Acts, 155-1856, p. 42).
In 1848 ten out of eighty-one free negroes in the
penitentiary were there for aiding or abetting slaves to
escape from their masters. This is only one
example of the many more chances for a free negro to be
sent to the penitentiary than for a white person (House
Journal, 1847-1848, pp. 20, 22; M. S. Petitions ,Henrico
county, 1844, A 954). Two thirds of the offenses
for which free negroes were arraigned before the
hustings court of Richmond were defined by laws which
did not apply to white persons, - such, for instance, as
that which made it a criminal offense for a free
negro to remain in a city or county without proper
registration (Richmond Daily Dispatch, Feb. 8, 1859).
166 Compare Howison, vol. ii, pp. 458-459,
for similar expressions. For example, he says:
"They are subject to restraints and surveillance in
points beyond number.
[Pg. 166]
"these facts prove, first, that this class of population
is by no means so vicious, degraded and demoralized as
represented by their prejudiced friends and voluntary
benefactors. And, second, that evils attributed to
this class are vastly magnified and exaggerated."167
From 1828, the date of the repeal of the law fixing
transportation and sale as a penalty in the case of free
colored convicts, to 1861 the free colored class
furnished from one tenth to one fifth of the inmates of
the penitentiary. The apparent disproportion of
the crimes of this class was often pointed out in
argument for a general deportation or colonization.168
Governors Smith, Floyd, Johnson,
and Wise brought the fact repeatedly to the
attention of the legislature.160
Governor Smith, however, attributed much of
the disparity to circumstances which, for the free
negro, were unavoidable. "If there be," said he,
"in his natural character the elements to make him a
great and good man, it is hopeless to expect that they
will ever be developed under our policy."170
Governor Wise, in stating in 1857 some
possible arguments in defense of the free negro,
observed that "if many of them are corrupted and
degenerated ... it is owing not only to their own
improvidence, but to evil communication with bad white
men who associate and deal with them and abuse their
weakness and who are not restrained by penal laws."171
It should be said that the penal record of the Virginia
free negro was not worse than that of the negro in some
northern free States, - for instance, Massachusetts.
Between 1840 and 1850 the number of colored convicts to
one white convict, in proportion to the population, was
in Massachusetts,
-------------------------
167 P. 20.
168 An ominous disparity! which was constantly pressed
upon the attention of the reflecting men of the state" (Howison,
vol. ii, p. 458)
169 Messages of the Governors, in House
Journal, 1846-1847; 1847-1848, p. 20; 1850-1851, p. 30;
1853-1854, doc. no. 1, p. 14; House Documents, no. 1,
1857-1858, p. 151.
170 House Journal, 1847-1848, p. 20.
171 House Documents, no. 1, 1857, p.'\ 151.
[Pg. 167]
9.6; in Virginia, 7.2. For the first two years of
the decade of the fifties it was in Massachusetts, 13;
in Virgnia, 6.3.172
If a comparison is made of the criminal record of the
negroes of Virginia at the present time on the basis of
the relative number of white and black convicts in the
penitentiary, the disparity will appear as great today
as at almost any time prior to the Civil War.173
The conclusion seems irresistible that the criminal
capacities and tendencies of the antebellum free negro
were not so great as they were quite generally believed
to be.
Thirdly, was the free negro insurrectionary and
turbulent? No criticism of the free negro was more
general and more undeserved than that he contrive, or
was disposed to contrive, insurrections, and that he
induced the slaves to rebel against their masters.
He was referred to on the floor of the legislature in
1805 as a possible leader of a rebellion or an "active
chieftain of a formidable conspiracy." 174
The insurrection in Santo Domingo, headed by the free
blacks of the island, for a long time furnished the
starting-point of arguments advanced to show that free
negroes might at any time head a slave rebellion.
In 1823 Lafayette asked Madison whether it was
considered that the increase in the proportion of free
blacks to slaves tended to increase or diminish the
dangers of insurrection. Madison's answer was,
"Rather increases," and that in case of a slave
insurrection the free blacks would be more likely to
side with the slaves than with the whites. Madison
certainly gave a correct expression of the general
feeling or belief of the white population, but there is
really little evidence to show that the impression was
correct. There are no instances on record of
insurrections in Virginia initiated by or carried out
under the leadership of free negroes. Not a free
negro was proved to have had any criminal relation to
the Gabriel plot in 1800, and only two free negro men
-------------------------
172 House Documents, no. 14, 1853-54, pp.
38, 54.
173 Reports of Virginia Penitentiary,
October, 1909, September 30, 1910.
174 Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 15, 1805.
[Pg. 168]
whose wives were slaves were implicated in the Nat
Turner insurrection; neither of the two seems to
have been a leading spirit among the seventy or more
slaves who participated in the affair.175
An insurrection always brought out expressions of fear
of the free negro, first, because he was presumed to
have kindred and sympathetic feelings for the slave and
to share with him prejudices against the whites; and
secondly, because he was known to have intimate
relations with the slaves and an increased capacity for
organization by reason of his freedom to go from place
to place. Expressed opinions of the danger of free
negro insurrections were very numerous for a while after
the Southampton affair,176 but occasionally
some writer or speaker who thought twice be fore
venturing a remedy for the ills of society pointed out
the fact, which now seems plain enough, that the free
negroes who had a legal right to remain and those who,
despite the law, were tolerated in Virginia were too
well satisfied to create insurrection.177
Thomas Marshall observed with truth in the
legislature of 1832, " There is no evidence of a
disposition to join in revolt or disturb the public
tranquility."178 Professsor
Dew observed that the Virginia free negro had been
taught to understand his place and to occupy it humbly.179
The antebellum free negro did not demand social or
political equality, but rather felt that any right that
he possessed was so much for which he should be
thankful. The slave set free because of
meritorious conduct or faithful ness of service, far
from being insurrectionary, was an example of
politeness, humility, and respect for superiors and for
authority such as is rarely if ever seen at the present
-------------------------
175 Richmond Enquirer, November 18, 1831 ;
W. S. Drewry, The Southampton Insurrection, appendix.
176 "We are not unmindful of the aid slaves would
get from this source [the free negroes] in case of a
servile insurrection " (Petition of 200 citizens of
Northampton, in MS. Petitions, December, 1831, A 4884).
177 See article contributed to the Richmond
Enquirer, November 18, 1831.
178 Richmond Enquirer, February 14, 1832.
179 Pp. 85, 87.
[Pg. 169]
among either the white or the black population.180
The infusion of this, the best type of African in
America, among the free negro class was sufficient in
itself to influence the class toward submissiveness.
Thomas Marshall believed with not a few
thoughtful men that the free negro constituted "no
inconsiderable, barrier to a future insurrection of
slaves."181 A similar opinion was
expressed on the floor of the legislature in 1805.
182 In truth, there are numerous instances
of the forestalling of insurrections and the preventing
of plots of slaves through the agency of free negroes.
Moses, a free negro of Goochland County, revealed
a conspiracy of slaves in 1822. 183 In
1810 two hundred citizens of Petersburg declared to the
legislature through a petition that a free negro,
Emanuel, had saved the town from conflagration by
reporting and aiding in the capture of incendiary,
plotting slaves.184 Lewis Bowlagh
presented certificates to the legislature to show that
he had given information to the whites in time to
prevent bloodshed plotted by slaves.185
A petition in behalf of Isaac, of Rockbridge County,
w.as based on the ground that he had been a useful man
in detecting and bringing negroes to account for their
wrongdoing.188 Daniel Brady's
father, a man of good character, even surrendered up his
own son to stand his trial and suffer punishment.187
It was certainly not the disposition of the free negro,
knowingly and with design, to increase the prejudices of
the whites against him by creating insurrection.
Far from being of "a turbulent and discontented"
disposition, as those in favor of coloniza-
-------------------------
180 " They are peaceable, orderly in their
deportment, humble to
those whom the law has made their superiors and polite
to those who
are considered their equals." Said by fifty-nine white
persons of
Caroline County of nine free negroes—Joseph Tyree, his
wife, and
seven children (MS. Petitions, Caroline County, 1821, A
3804).
181 Richmond Enquirer, Feb. 14, 1832.
182 Ibid., January 15, 1805.
183 MS. Petitions, Goochland County, 1822, A
7085.
184 MS. Petitions, Dinwiddie County, 1810, A
5196.
185 MS. Petitions, Henrico County, 1824, A
9353.
186 MS. Petitions, Rockbridge County,
uncatalogued.
187 Pardons issued by Governor Wise, in
House Documents, no. 1, 1857-1858, p. clxx.
[Pg. 170]
tion declared him to be, he longed to be left alone in
the place of his birth, free from, fears of molestation
and annoyance, to enjoy perfect contentment. Without
question the free negro population in Virginia was in
general meek and submissive and not inclined to
rebellion.188
Fourthly, the charge often made that the free negro was
lazy and improvident must not be accepted without some
qualification. It is reasonable to believe that
the free negroes, like the slaves, were naturally lazy;
but it is really remarkable what examples of thrift and
economy this class produced. Within the space of
four years Rose Hailstock purchased with
her saved earnings her own freedom and, one by one, the
freedom of her three children, paying altogether £125
sterling.189 Samuel Jackson
saved enough to purchase in 1815 the freedom of his wife
and two children.190 Arthur
Lee, of Alleghany County, displayed a perseverance
and an ability to economize that is not often surpassed
by laboring men of any race or condition. For
sixteen years he was the slave of a man named Brown,
who lived in North Carolina, but he was permitted to
remain in Virginia on the condition that he pay his
owner one hundred dollars per annum. Having paid,
at this rate, sixteen hundred dollars by 1835, he
purchased his freedom, paying his owner five hundred
dollars for his future liberty. Not satisfied, he
immediately set to work to earn three hundred and fifty
dollars with which to purchase his wife's freedom.
This done, he procured the signatures of one hundred and
seventy-six citizens of Alleghany County to his humble
petition to the legislature for a law granting to him
and his wife a legal right to reside in the
Commonwealth, that he might continue to ply the
honorable trade of a blacksmith.191 As
to the character for industry of Billy
Williams, forty-seven
-------------------------
188
Professor Dew admitted, or, we might say, contended
that the Virginia free negro was more orderly and well
behaved than the free negro of the Northern States.
In the North, he said, the negro was taught arrogance
and equality. In the South he was made to
understand his place and to occupy it humbly (pp. 85,
87).
189 Hening, vol. xiii, p. 618.
190 MS. Petitions, Fauquier County, 1815, A
5750.
191 MS. Petitions, Alleghany County, 1835, A
666.
[Pg. 171]
citizens of Campbell County said: "We are his neighbors
and are willing and indeed desirous that the legislature
pass the law permitting him to remain in the state, as
he is not only an honest, prosperous man, but in truth a
most useful and accommodating man to his neighbors and
all with whom he has anything to do. A farmer by
occupation and owns 100 acres of land."192
Examples could be multiplied indefinitely in
contradiction of indiscriminating indictments, such, for
instance, as that made by Governor Smith when he
characterized the free colored population as a "race of
idlers, thriftless and unproductive." 193
The exaggerated and often self-contradictory character
of the statements of colonization zealots will best
appear by a quotation from a widely circulated memorial194
to the legislature: -
Their idleness
is proverbial; they live, few know in what way and fewer
where . . . . Whatever energy can be spared from
annoying both classes [slave and white] is expended in
multiplying their own numbers.
And yet this same individual, the pest of the land
which gives him only birth, when transported to a seat
where his industry may have excitement and object
becomes the active, thriving, and happy citizen of
Liberia.195
Rigorous and
discriminatory as were the laws of Virginia enacted for
the purpose of controlling that presumably law-
-------------------------
192 MS.
Petitions, Campbell County, 1851, A 3684.
193 House Journal, 1847-1848, p. 20.
194 MS. Petitions, Henrico County, 1831, A
9431. See also memorial of the Auxiliary
Colonization Society of Buckingham County in MS.
Petitions, Buckingham County, 1832, A 3080. A
memorial of the Fairfax Colonization Society read:
"Pursuing no course of regular business and negligent of
everything like economy and husbandry they are a part of
the community supported by the industry of others"
(MS. Petitions, Fairfax County, 1832, A 5578).
195 With this picture of what the Virginia
colonizers professed to think the free negro would
become in Liberia may be compared what citizens of
Somerset County, Maryland, thought of the Virginia free
negroes who had come into Maryland from Virginia after
the law of 1806 made the residence of certain ones
illegal in Virginia: "We reap not the rewards or fruits
of our labor . . . all is snatched from us by that curse
of God's Creation, the degraded free negro . . . he
toils not neither does he spin, yet like Dives he
fares sumptuously and is arrayed in purple and fine
linen and well he may, for he appropriates to his own
use the labors of the entire white population"
(MS. Petitions to Maryland Legislature, in Maryland
Historical Society, portfolio 7, no. 28).
[Pg. 172]
less, disorderly and vicious member of society, the free
negro, they fail in some respects to reveal the extent
to which he was subjected to surveillance and
discipline, while in other respects they represent a
harsher treatment than he actually received. In
the nineteenth century there existed a law for keeping
watch over and controlling the conduct of free negroes
not found among the statutes or supported by legal
precedents. Its sanction was in community sentiment, and
its name was lynch-law. The practice before the
Civil War of policing the free negroes by self-appointed
bailiffs was the historical antecedent of the Ku Klux
Klan of reconstruction days, although there was not the
same degree of organization and not so wide a gap
between local sentiment and legal administration before
as during that time.
Prostitution and vice among the free colored population
were frequently dealt with by methods not approved by
law. For example, in Amelia County in 1821 the
inmates of houses of ill repute were visited and
chastized by a party of disguised white men.196
Although a fine was imposed upon at least one of the
persons connected with this raid, the state of sentiment
favorable to the method of procedure is seen in the
effort made by half a hundred of the local residents to
have the convicted man released from his fine.
General Brodnax, speaking from the floor of
the legislature in 1832, was not challenged upon the
assertion that such methods of getting rid of
undesirable free negroes were of common occurrence.
"Who does not know," said he, " that when a free negro,
by crime or otherwise, has rendered him self obnoxious
to a neighborhood, how easy it is for a party to visit
him one night, take him from his bed and family, and
apply to him the gentle admonition of a severe
flagellation, to induce him to go away. In a few
nights the dose can be repeated, perhaps increased,
until, in the language of the physicians, quantum
suff has been administered . . .
-------------------------
196 MS. Petitions, Amelia County, 1821, A
781.
[Pg. 173]
and the fellow becomes perfectly willing to go away."197
So commonly was lynch-law of this character
resorted to by the whites in prevailing upon free
negroes to yield to their wishes that one argument
strongly urged in 1832 in favor of a law authorizing the
use of force in carrying out a colonization scheme was
the necessity of shielding the negroes from the cruelty
of private intimidation and compulsion.198
William Miles Cuffee, a free negro born in
1839, now living at Hickory Ground, Virginia, tells how
in 1859, upon a rumor of insurrection, whites assembled
in bands to intimidate and frighten the free negroes in
the community. According to his report, he
remained hidden in the woods for about three days and
nights while the raids were being conducted against
persons of his class.
While local sentiment often permitted the authority of
the law to be exceeded or ignored by individuals
self-appointed to discipline and punish free negroes, it
no less frequently permitted laws to remain unenforced.
Speaking of the laws which forbade free negroes to move
from one town or locality to another and to assemble in
considerable numbers and of those which compelled them
to submit to search of their houses and persons by
patrols, a writer in the Richmond Enquirer declared that
"these provisions and many other laws on this subject
are so much at variance with the feelings of our
citizens that in many parts of the state they are merely
a dead letter. . . . So long as our humanity
preponderates over our fears, so long will those laws be
very partially and feebly executed."199
The same writer clearly discerns and explains the
reason why legislation dealing with the free negroes
outran execution: "As legislators, impressed with the
jeopardy that threatens the public safety, men readily
give their assent to
-------------------------
197 Richmond Enquirer, February 14, 1832.
Compare Jay, Slavery in America, p. 45.
198 Speech of Mr. Chandler, in
the Richmond Enquirer, February 14, 1832.
General Brodnax said that he understood that
the consent of the emigrants in a cargo which had
recently set sail for Africa was obtained by private
compulsion.
199 Richmond Enquirer, October 8, 1805.
[Pg. 174]
any measure that seems calculated to protect it, but
when they return to the bosom of their families and are
surrounded by those among whom they were born and nursed
and from whose labor they obtain the means of comfort
and independence the sentiments of the legislator are
frequently lost in the feelings of humanity and
affection in the private man."
An illustration of this fact is seen in the operation
of that law which directed emancipated slaves to leave
the State within twelve months from the date of their
emancipation. Henry Howe said in
1845 that "these laws, and every other having the
appearance of rigor . . . are nearly dead letters upon
our statute books, unless during times of excitement, or
since the efforts of the abolitionists have reanimated
them. I have, until lately, scarcely known an
instance in which they have been enforced."200
Petitions were continually being sent to the legislature
by white persons complaining "that the law requiring the
removal [of ex-slaves] is in its operation perfectly
nugatory."201
In certain localities, however, and at certain times
the law was rendered in some measure effective.
The act was a penal statute, depending upon local
officials for its execution; hence enforcement was not
uniform as to times and places. The appearance of
the successive census reports showing the rapid increase
and accumulation of the free negroes in the State
usually gave rise to some zeal for proceeding against
free negroes who remained in violation of the law.202
The number and the deportment of these negroes in a
community went far toward determining the length to
which the local officials would go in prosecuting them.
In the counties of western Virginia, where but few
negroes resided, almost no use was made of this law.
In
-------------------------
200 Historical Collections of Virginia, p. 157.
201 MS. Petitions, Hampshire County, 1836, A 7904 ;
Loudoun County, 1836, B 1849; Loudoun and Fauquier
Counties, 1847, B 1952.
202 " The excitement which now prevails will in a
little while entirely subside and you will see things
move on just as they have done until the next census,
when we shall again begin to stir and flutter for
awhile" (Richmond Whig, December 11, 1845).
[Pg. 175]
most of the eastern counties the prescribed penalty -
sale into slavery - was so much at variance with
sentiment that grand juries usually refused to indict,
or attorneys refused to prosecute, violators of the law.203
When indictments were made, the cases were continued
from time to time or finally dismissed.204
When arrests, prosecutions, and sales of free negroes
were made, the object was usually to make examples of
some that all others might take warning and leave the
community. The overseers of the poor of Accomac
County held a meeting in 1825, and determined to make an
example of one negro, thinking that they would by this
means be spared the necessity of selling as slaves the
free negroes who had become unlawful residents under the
act of 1806.205 A negro named Jack
Bagwell was the unlucky victim; hut a single
example was not sufficient to induce all other free
negroes liable to sale to quit the community, and at a
meeting held the following year the Board of Overseers
ordered that notice be posted throughout the county
"that the Overseers of the Poor . . . will sell one free
negro in each district of this county for every month
from this date."206
In pursuance of the order, seven negroes were sold into
slavery on June 5, 1826. The maximum price
received for any one of the seven freemen was thirty-six
dollars and fifty cents. The fact that some of
them brought so low a price as one dollar creates a
doubt as to whether the purchasers expected to force
them into bondage or whether they did not intend to
allow them to escape from the neighborhood. In
1839 Richard Rew purchased at the price of
five hundred and thirty dollars a free negro who had
lived in Virginia contrary to law since his manumission
in 1819.
-------------------------
203 MS.
Orders of Northampton County, 1831-1836, pp. 136, 147,
505; MS. Petitions, Loudoun and Fauquier Counties, 1847,
B 1952; Frederick County, 1828, A 6495.
204 "By this mode, they were annually before
the court, their cases called and continued and in this
evasive way, they spent the remainder of their days in
their old communities" (T. K. Cartmell,
Shenandoah Valley Pioneers and Their Descendants, p.
521).
205 MS. Petitions, Accomac County, 1825, A
91.
206 Ibid., 1826, A 80.
[Pg. 176]
The negro made good his escape to New York, and Rew, who
had paid a high price for him, expecting to subject him
to actual bondage, appealed earnestly but in vain to the
legislature for a refunding of the purchase money.207
Even such a timid and spasmodic enforcement of this law
as these instances represent rendered the condition of a
great number of free negroes anomalous and insecure.
Not only those negroes emancipated after 1806, but also
their posterity were liable to be sold as slaves, and
many deserving negroes were forced to appeal to the
humanity of their white neighbors to save them from
banishment or sale. In 1834 Titus Brown,
whose hair was white with age, related how he and his
wife, childless and almost as old has he, had been
"ordered to depart from the Commonwealth."208
It was not often that a free negro of fair character was
unable, even in times of excitement, to get his white
neighbors to intercede in his behalf. These could
usually bring about a relaxation of energy in the
prosecution, or, as in the case of Archy Carey,
they might "agree that so long as his conduct comports
with his recommendation they will not enforce the law
against him."209 If in this way they
could not render secure a negro threatened with sale or
banishment, his white sympathizers would often draft
earnest appeals to the humanity of the legislators, and
procure to these petitions hundreds of white
subscribers. Very frequently the legislature was
moved to pass acts excepting certain free negroes from
the operation of the law.210 In some
such way were tolerated nearly all ex-slaves who
ventured to assume the risk of losing their freedom.
It was asked in the House of Delegates in 1843 why the
laws providing for the banishment or sale of certain
free negroes had not been carried out. The answer
was: "because its provisions were in violation of the
feelings of the people. A thousand such laws would
-------------------------
207 House, Journal, 1839-1840, p. 205.
208 MS. Petitions, Loudoun County, 1834, B
1830
209 MS. Petitions, Campbell County, 1830, A
1013
210 For examples, see Acts, 1821-1822, p.
84; 1833-1834, p. 316; 1834-1835, p.240; or Acts of any
year from 1812 to 1848.
[Pg. 177]
fall to the ground and be inoperative for lack of public
sentiment."211 The same explanation was
given by Governor Wise in his message to the
legislature in 1857. "It would be more humane and
more just," he said, "to sell them wholesale into
slavery" than to force upon them dispersion and
extinction in the cold climate of the free States; "but
the moral sense of our people would revolt at a
violation of individual and personal rights like this
and no such usurpation would be tolerated by public
sentiment."212
-------------------------
211 Richmond Enquirer, Feb. 14, 1832.
212 House Democrats, no. 1, 1857, p. 151
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