Notes
161 NOTES introduction 1. Hereafter, the word “voluntary” will not be placed in quotation marks; neither will “choice.” The problematic nature of both words is considered throughout the work. 2. See the petition of Jane Moore (no. 7589), 11 January 1860, Sixth District Court of New Orleans, New Orleans Public Library (hereafter NOPL). See also Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans,1846–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 158; 1860 census, New Orleans Ward 2, Orleans, Louisiana, roll M653_416, p. 518, image 200, Family History Library Film 803416. All census records accessed via ancestry.com. 3. “Possibly the most extraordinary legal right possessed by free negroes at any time during the continuation of slavery was the right to choose a master and go into voluntary bondage,” wrote John Russell in 1969. See The Free Negro in Virginia,1619–1865 (NewYork: Dover, 1969), 108. 4. A good example of work on free people of color within a wide geographical context is Jane G. Landers, ed., Against the Odds:Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London: Frank Cass, 1996). I espoused my early ideas on this project in EmilyWest,“‘She Is Dissatisfied with Her Present Condition’: Requests forVoluntary Enslavement in the Antebellum American South,” Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 3 (December 2007): 329–50. 5. Both authors were pioneers in the study of free people of color, expulsion , and enslavement, with the latter having been relatively neglected since their important works. Franklin’s The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 first appeared in 1943, and Berlin’s equally groundbreaking Slaves without Masters:The Free Negro in the Antebellum South was published in 1974. However, Berlin gives only scant attention to voluntary enslavement, situating it within the context of moves toward expulsion or forced enslavement in the 1850s. John Hope Franklin developed the topic in more depth within his book and a related article, although rather vaguely; he wrote only that “large” numbers of free blacks sought enslave- 162 Notes to Page 3 ment in North Carolina before describing in more detail some of the individual cases, with little analysis of possible motivations. See John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 218–19, and “The Enslavement of Free Negroes in North Carolina,” Journal of Negro History 29, no. 4 (1944): 401–28. See also Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (NewYork: Pantheon, 1974), 367. 6. Some of the earlier state-based research into voluntary slavery bears the taint of proslavery rhetoric. Andrew Forest Muir, writing in 1943 about Texas, described how “free negroes all over Texas took the opportunity of exchanging the dubious and unsatisfactory liberty of free people for the restriction and security of slavery.”Yet Muir describes only one case of voluntary bondage—that of Bob Allen, who requested enslavement to William Thomas McNeil of Harris County. Moreover, I found fewer than ten individuals in Texas petitioning for enslavement, so the phenomenon was considerably less extensive than Muir suggests. See Andrew Forest Muir, “The Free Negro in Harris County, Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 46, no. 3 (January 1943): 235. 7. For example,Thomas D. Morris has drawn attention to the complexity of motivations for enslavement in his detailed and nuanced book Southern Slavery and the Law, whileAlvin O.Thompson writes briefly in Flight to Freedom about southern states’ laws permitting free blacks to “re-enslave themselves.” His phrase is slightly misleading because, as will be shown, few free blacks requesting bondage had previously been enslaved. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 35, and Alvin O.Thompson, Flight to Freedom:African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston , Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006), 54. 8. Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free, esp. 153–55. Schafer explores the phenomenon of voluntary enslavement in much more depth than H. E. Sterkx, who in The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972) claimed just one free black person sought enslavement, when John Clifton chose Green Bumpass as his master (148–49). The original request appeared in New Orleans Daily Delta, 18 May 1860. 9. Schafer, Becoming Free,Remaining Free, 150. 10. Ibid. 162. 11.William A. Link, Roots of Secession:Slavery and Politics in AntebellumVirginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina...
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