Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America from Settlement to the Civil War by Julie Winch (review)

Julie Winch’s Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America from Settlement to the Civil War is a noteworthy attempt to synthesize the historical literature concerning the plight of free people of color in colonial America and the United States up to the Civil War. In a very concise manner, Winch seeks to bridge the often divergent literatures about free people of color in the North and the South and construct a coherent narrative about people whom historians have generally examined through regional and community studies. Her argument harks back to past generations of scholarship as she contends that the liberty experienced by free people of color was “less than true freedom” (p. xiii). According to her reading of the sources, the position of free people of color was “marginal,” uncomfortable, and less secure than that of whites (p. xiii). Yet Winch does not overlook the many instances in which free people of color were able to improve their political and economic positions.

Between Slavery and Freedom is composed of five chapters along with an appendix of select primary documents. The first chapter provides a quick overview of what Winch describes as “black freedom in colonial America.” The contents of this chapter focus primarily on the status of enslaved people in the British and Spanish colonies. The chapter reads as a prelude to the experiences of people whose masters manumitted them after the American Revolution and reflects the limited scholarly exploration into the lives of free people of color in the colonial period. Chapter 2 concentrates on people of color during the American Revolution, exploring the conditions that led to the gradual end of slavery in the northern states after the war. In this chapter, Winch also explains why widespread emancipation did not happen in the South. Chapter 3 focuses on the position of free people of color in the early national period, the processes of emancipation and community development in the North, and the limitations of freedom in the South. Chapter 4 investigates the primarily northern movement to improve the legal position of free people of color between 1820 and 1850. The final chapter, the book’s shortest, summarizes limitations faced by free people of color in the last decade before the Civil War. The documentary appendix provides an assortment of intriguing primary document examples, including laws, letters, and newspaper reports related to free people of color.

Those familiar with Winch’s scholarship on free people of color in Pennsylvania and the Midwest will likely find her most recent work stimulating. However, readers interested in learning more about the experience of free people of color in the South may find Winch’s examination a bit disappointing. Winch provides several examples of the experiences of individual free people of color in the North, yet her discussion of the South is primarily about the region’s strong proslavery stance and failure to grant true liberty to its free people of color. Those interested in the daily lives of free people of color in the South might be better served by recent micro-studies by scholars such as Melvin Patrick Ely, Kirt von Daacke, and Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Even with this limitation, Winch should still be applauded for making the first serious attempt to bring together the scholarship about free people of color in a single, highly accessible volume.