Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION In 1859 a twenty-eight-year-old free black woman named Jane Moore requested of the Sixth District Court of New Orleans that she be enslaved. Explaining in her petition how she was emancipated in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1855, prior to her move to New Orleans in 1856, Jane Moore did not wish to remain free: By virtue of an act of the legislature approved March 1859, permitting free persons of African descent to select their masters and become slaves for life, she is . . . thereof willing to select and has selected Elias Wolf as a fit and [able?] person to become her said master for life in accordance with the aforesaid act. . . . [The] petitioner shows that this application is her real and voluntary intent and purpose to become the slave of the said Elias Wolf and that she is acting according to her own dictates and in accordance of the provisions of the aforesaid act in selecting Elias Wolf as her master to possess her as his slave for life without the persuasion of any other third person.Wherefore petitioner prays for due and legal publication of this application as required by law, and that she said Elias Wolf, her decided master, be cited to appear and answer this petition and that after due and legal proceeding . . . that your petitioner be decreed a slave for life and the property of Elias Wolf for the costs of suit and all general relief. The “real” writer of this petition (perhaps Elias Wolf himself) was obviously familiar with both the etiquette of legalistic prose and recent changes in Louisiana law that permitted “voluntary” enslavement.1 Jane Moore’s only input was to sign the document with an “X.” Notice of her request was then posted outside the courthouse for the requisite thirty 2 FAMILY OR FREEDOM days, after which Jane Moore became Elias Wolf’s slave. Wolf was described in the 1860 census as a “clothier.” A married man, he had no children and apparently no other slaves. So why might he want to possess Jane Moore as chattel?Was he intimately attached to her? Might Jane Moore have had her own reasons for seeking enslavement to Elias Wolf? Did pecuniary, rather than personal, considerations assume priority in this petition? Like many of the petitions considered here, more questions are raised than can be answered. But explanatory clues can nevertheless be found. Elias Wolf was required only to pay for the “costs of proceedings ,” so in acquiring an adult female under the age of thirty, he probably anticipated considerable financial gain, if not intimate liaisons, with the newly enslaved Jane Moore.2 The “right” of free people of color to enter bondage in the antebellum South was both extraordinary and contradictory.3 With the free black population standing at just over a quarter of a million in 1860, surviving records indicate that fewer than two hundred of these individuals attempted to make use of the legal provisions to allow them to enter slavery. But these petitioners—when viewed in the context of moves to expel or enslave all free people of color by state legislatures in the 1850s—throw into sharp focus the desperate ways free blacks and the enslaved fought to maintain their family formations in a climate of increasing adversity. Placing their families first, enslavement petitioners offer illuminating insights into marital and other familial ties across the slave-free divide, economic conditions and the impact of legislation upon free people of color, relationships across the color line, and the broader proslavery defense in the Old South. HistoriograpHical context This book integrates free people of color into broader historical narratives . While other historians have written about free blacks (particularly more prominent individuals and families) in considerable depth and within broad geographical contexts, little attention has been granted to their relationships with enslaved people outside the major cities of the South and particularly within their affective communities.4 Earlier historians of antebellum free people of color have regarded enslavement petitioners as elderly and impoverished, as claimed by Ira Berlin. John Hope Franklin saw such enslavement as a last resort for desperate individuals seeking a way out of specific legal difficulties.5 But the motiva- Introduction 3 tions behind enslavement (and residency) requests were more complex than Franklin and Berlin recognized.These petitions reveal the ways that free people of color prioritized their families at any cost and were bound...