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Introduction
- University of Virginia Press
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Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, in his systematic study American Negro Slavery, stated that “the main body of the free negroes were those who whether in person or through their mothers had been liberated purely from sentiment and possessed no particular qualifications for self-directed careers. . . . Wherever they dwelt, they lived somewhat precariously upon the sufferance of whites, and in a more or less palpable danger of losing their liberty.” By liberty, Phillips meant simply not being slaves—self-ownership. Phillips’s statement loudly declares his belief in black inferiority and condemns free people of color to a well-deserved status of slaves without masters. But Phillips ’s statement also contains within it the basic outlines of nearly a century of scholarship on free blacks. This view of free blacks as only nominally free and trapped in a precarious existence has had a long life. Scholars for decades after Phillips reiterated this basic view. Ira Berlin’s seminal 1974 monograph, Slaves without Masters, confirmed the Phillips picture of free black life. Gone were Phillips’s racism and his blaming of the victim. Instead, Berlin painted a picture of free blacks struggling mightily against virulent white racism, pervasive policing, and a legal system that both severely circumscribed their existence and was rigged against them. Such space as a few free blacks were occasionally afforded came about largely because of support by paternalistic white protectors. Berlin’s powerful thesis remains perhaps the most influential statement on free blacks to this day. For Berlin and many other scholars, free blacks remain a historical anomaly in a society that equated whiteness with freedom and blackness with enslaved status. In Berlin’s famous phrase, they were slaves without masters who spent their days avoiding a pervasive and racist white power structure. Introduction 2 Freedom Has a Face This paradigm remains attractive thanks to four main assumptions undergirding it. First, by the mid-eighteenth century, the legal system in every southern colony plainly announced white objections to free blacks. According to Ira Berlin, anti–free black laws grew out of white efforts to solidify and codify the slave system “by drawing a color line between free and slave.” For Berlin and others, this effort virtually guaranteed that blacks who remained free would suffer despite their best efforts. In a slave society that equated darker skin color with enslaved status, little room seemed to exist for free blacks. They became anomalous, free but black, slaves by appearance but technically free, trapped in a liminal world between slaves and white citizens. A perusal of the legal code in any southern state would support this contention. This study, however, exposes a wide gap between state legal proscriptions on free blacks and actual local practice by examining free black interaction with the legal system in one rural Virginia county. Second, the slaves-without-masters paradigm, which argues that free blacks wherever they existed were visible contradictions of an understood, racially coded socioeconomic system, sees rural areas as the most racist and inflexible of all locales. There, the theory goes, the gaze of racist whites was all but impossible to avoid. Rural slaveholding white elites expressed the greatest concerns about the influence of free blacks upon their slaves. Most rural areas supposedly had tiny and dispersed free black populations. As a result, those free blacks, unlike those in southern cities, could not develop strong and protective communities. Nor could they achieve an anonymity that allowed them some comfortable room for living apart from the white community. Thus, free blacks who remained in rural areas lived in “palpable danger of losing their liberty” and often encountered a local legal and policing system that not only sought them out but also treated them as if they were slaves. According to this paradigm, the result was that free blacks moved continually from these rigidly racist rural areas to developing urban centers, seeking both better opportunity and a chance to live in relative anonymity. Thus, the existence of cohesive free black communities is considered a largely urban phenomenon. A gap between free black proscriptions and actual local practice is likewise seen as having existed mainly in urban areas. This book, however, suggests that rural areas may actually have been more permissive environments for the free blacks who lived there, because those free blacks were well-known and because many developed respectable repu- [18.207.240.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:59 GMT) Introduction 3 tations. A gap between state law and local practice thus developed...