Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston by Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (review)

Free black women comprised a small but significant portion of the population in Charleston, South Carolina, in the seven decades preceding the American Civil War. Their presence, while highly visible to contemporaries, has remained largely obscured to historians. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers ably fills this gap in the literature of African American history with Forging Freedom, a thoroughly researched, detailed, and nuanced account of the women who made up nearly 5 percent of Charleston’s inhabitants in the mid-nineteenth century and who engaged in a constant struggle to preserve their liberty in a slave society.

Myers notes that free black women’s unending battle for their rights was fought at the individual level, extending in some cases to include family members but eschewing any effort to push for widespread emancipation. Similarly, the concept of freedom and the methods employed to obtain it differed among individual women. Nevertheless, black women shared some goals. Simple liberation from slavery, Myers observes, “was never an end in and of itself” (3). Instead, they sought the advantages that freedom would bring them, including the opportunity to pursue work of their own choosing, achieve financial independence, acquire property, and make their own decisions regarding marriage and religious worship.

To achieve their aims, free black women had no choice but to work hard; build beneficial relationships with those in a position to aid them, including prominent whites; take advantage of the few opportunities they possessed to use the legal system; and conform to white South Carolinians’ views of what constituted acceptable behavior. In the latter case, this often resulted in free black women purchasing African American slaves to labor for them. Much skill and intelligence was needed for these women to adroitly maneuver through a society that classified free blacks as “denizens” rather than “citizens” (4) and to overcome the twin barriers of race and gender.

After providing an overview of her topic in the introduction and explaining that her study of free black women includes both those who had been legally emancipated and those who were “virtually free” (13) in that they lived as free persons although their legal status as free was unclear, Myers sets the stage in the first chapter with a detailed description of antebellum Charleston and a description of eighteenth-century black life in the city. She then uses the next chapter to examine how slave women achieved freedom. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, a few slave owners, influenced by the era’s rhetoric regarding liberty and equality, emancipated their bondspeople. Some black women purchased their freedom with funds they had earned or were bought and freed by already emancipated family members; others were freed after providing extraordinary services to their owners, such as nursing them through extended illnesses. Many free blacks arrived from Saint-Domingue (Haiti) as refugees from the island’s turmoil. Numerous black women and sometimes their mixed-race children were freed by their white male owners after long conjugal relationships. As Myers notes, these relationships may not have been consensual, but enslaved women were often willing to tolerate such affairs in the hope that through them they could achieve freedom.

Liberty became more difficult to achieve as the South Carolina legislature made manumission increasingly difficult throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The legislature enacted the first such law in 1800. It required slave owners to prove to a court that if freed, a slave would be capable of supporting himself or herself. In 1820, another law barred free blacks from entering the state and required the approval of the legislature for manumission. Slaves and cooperative owners managed to circumvent the 1820 law by the use of “freedom trusts” (65), whereby a slave was transferred to a new owner with the understanding that the slave could choose his or her place of residence and type of work and could keep his or her...