Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South

4. Free People of Color and the Enslaved

93 4 FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR AND THE ENSLAVED Born free, because although her father was enslaved, her mother was white, Lucy Andrews from Lancaster District, South Carolina, petitioned the South Carolina State Assembly for enslavement in the late 1850s. She described how, as a sixteen-year-old mother: “she is dissatisfied with her present condition, being compelled to go about from place to place to seek employment for her support, and not permitted to stay at any place more than a week or two at a time, no one caring about employing her.” Andrews wanted to raise a family, yet said she was unable to provide a subsistence standard of living for them. She also emphasized slaveholder benevolence by professing to believe that “slaves are far more happy, and enjoy themselves far better than she does in her present, isolated condition of freedom, and are well-treated and cared for by their masters, while she is going about from place to place hunting employment for her support. She therefore prays that your honorable body would enact a law authorizing and permitting her, to go voluntarily into slavery, and select her own master.” Fifty signatures appeared on the petition in support of her request, but Andrews herself could only provide a cross.1 Andrews’s request appears not to have been granted, as she again requested enslavement in 1860. This petition described how she was “isolated from both the free whites and the slaves, that she has no one to protect, provide for or take care of her, in her ignorant, destitute and help- 94 FAMILY OR FREEDOM less state, and she is convinced it would be far better for her to relinquish and give up her freedom to become the slave of a kind master and thus secure to herself the benefits of the relation of master and slave.” Three witnesses had apparently examined Lucy Andrews, and they vouched she was “fully informed of the purpose, nature and effect of said petition and that she expressed herself willing and desirous to go into slavery . . . that she has been induced to take this step of her own free will, without any compulsion.” The witnesses were also well acquainted with Mr. Henry Duncan “and recommend him as a worthy clever man and state that we know of no undue influence nor have we heard of any having been exercised to unduly influence the within named Lucy Andrews.”2 This petition also seems to have failed, because more than three years later, during the wartime upheaval of 1863, Lucy Andrews was still legally requesting enslavement. The rhetoric employed in this request focused much more explicitly on her need for subsistence as she had no family to support her in a challenging economic climate. Aged “about twenty one” with a daughter of three years old, and a fourteen-monthold boy, Andrews described how “for the last six years she has made her home at Mr. Henry H. Duncan’s . . . and has had a comfortable living at his house, much more so, indeed than she had previously; for having no relations of her color in the state and District she found it extremely difficult to procure sustenance.” She also wrote how she wished to belong to Henry Duncan, who “owns her husband Robbin, with whom she, together with her above mentioned children, [are] comfortably fixed and situated.” Moreover,“in these times of scarcity of provisions and clothing and the consequent high prices of the same,” she requested that she and her children—Emily and Robbin Jr.—be enslaved to Duncan. In the same handwriting (so revealing himself the writer of her petition ), Henry Duncan provided his written consent to take Andrews as his slave and, before signing his name underneath, further stated he had “no objection to the prayer of Lucy Andrews being granted.” Duncan’s prose is eloquent throughout all of the legislative requests, and his reference to economic difficulties during wartime conveys how he had put real thought into the framing of these petitions. Lucy Andrews lacked a wider familial support network, and her enslaved husband was unable economically to provide for his wife or children. If he took the responsibility for Andrews, her enslavement would have facilitated Duncan’s sense of his own benevolence as well as been justified on economic grounds. He would relieve society of the “burden” imposed by Lucy Andrews.3 Free People of Color and...