Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson's Virginia

Notes

Notes abbreviations ACCCC Albemarle County Court Commonwealth Causes ACCOB Albemarle County Court Order Book ACDB Albemarle County Deed Book ACLOB Albemarle County Law Order Book ACMB Albemarle County Minute Book ACWB Albemarle County Will Book LoV Library of Virginia introduction 1. U. B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 436–41. 2. For free blacks as anomalous, see Berlin, Slaves without Masters; Condon, “Manumission, Slavery and Family”; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Sensbach, Separate Canaan; Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk; Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives; Burckin, “‘Spirit of Perserverance,’” 61–81; Schwarz, “Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomalies,” 317–38; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground; Ellefson, “Free Jupiter”; and Russell, Free Negro in Virginia. 3. Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 5. 4. See Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood; Condon, “Manumission, Slavery and Family”; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves; Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk; Hanger, Bounded Lives; Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg; Curry, Free Black in Urban America; and Berlin, Slaves without Masters. 5. Russell, Free Negro in Virginia, 60–63; Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 20–30. Berlin does not attribute the 1782 law to Revolutionary rhetoric alone. He correctly sees evangelical Christians as another driving force. But he does summarize the period, stating: “Equalitarian ideals motivated most manumitters in the years following the Revolution” (30). See also Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 3–12; C. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 30–56. 212 Notes to Pages 4–12 6. For more on manumission in Albemarle County, see von Daacke, “Free Black Families and Freedom.” For more on manumission as a complex economic and social negotiation between master and slave, see Whitman, Price of Freedom. 7. For the older view on the color line, mulattoes, and miscegenation, see Williamson , New People; Berlin, Slaves without Masters; Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia. For the new scholarship on miscegenation and the color line, see Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood; Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife; Lockley, Lines in the Sand; Ely, Israel on the Appommattox; Hodes, White Women, Black Men; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household; Buckley, “Unfixing Race,” 349–80; and Mills, “Miscegenation and the Free Negro,” 16–34. 8. See Wolf, Race and Liberty; Ely, Israel on the Appomattox; Schweninger, Black Property Owners; Butler, “Evolution of a Rural Free Black Community”; Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina; and Jackson, Free Negro Labor. For two works that focus on wealthy free blacks as rare exceptions, see Madden, We Were Always Free; and Johnson and Roark, Black Masters. For works that do not focus solely on free blacks but complicate notions of community in the rural antebellum South in important ways, see Kenzer, Kinship and Neighborhood; and Burton, In My Father’s House. 9. For the 1785 law, see Hening, Statutes at Large, 12: 182. See also Russell, Free Negro in Virginia. Starting in 1832, the state legislature ordered that free black criminal defendants be tried in courts of oyer and terminer, which were previously reserved for slave defendants. See Albemarle County Minute Book (ACMB) 1838–42, 152 (Feb. 14, 1840) (free mulatto Woodson Marks found guilty of felony burglary, sentenced to five years in jail). See also ACMB 1842–44, 210 (July 22, 1843) (free man of color Washington Randolph acquitted of feloniously assaulting free man of color John Kenney). 10. This book is informed by a literature that proposes a more complicated notion of freedom. For examples, see Foner, Story of American Freedom; and Patterson, Freedom, Volume I. Patterson employs a tripartite model, and Foner constructs a more elastic definition, with at least five categories. This book is also informed by two anthropological studies: Dominguez, White by Definition; and S. Moore, Law as Process. 1. the right hand men of the revolution 1. No complete accounting of Albemarle’s population exists prior to 1790, but the first decennial census conducted in that year showed over 6,000 white residents, more than 5,500 slaves, and 171 free people of color living in Albemarle County. 2. Officially, anyone coded as a person of color in Virginia during the time period discussed here was legally a “free negro.” However, within that category, persons could be either “black,” denoting no admixture of whiteness, or “negro,” usually referring to darker-skinned individuals, including some mulattoes; or “mulatto,” with a visible admixture of whiteness. “Mulatto” was often further broken down into a Notes to Pages 13–14 213 series of categories running from lightest (very bright, Indian, light yellow complexion...