Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia by Ted Maris-Wolf (review)

Ted Maris-Wolf’s Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia is notable for its narrow scope and broad ambitions. The book focuses on an unusual law passed by the Virginia legislature in 1856 and revised in 1861 that allowed free blacks to petition to be sold into slavery to a master of their own choosing. This option may not sound attractive, but for at least 110 people who petitioned under this law, it was better than either leaving their homes and families forever, as was required of free blacks whose family’s freedom did not predate Virginia’s 1806 emancipation law, or being charged with residing illegally in Virginia for more than a year after their emancipation, a crime that could lead to being sold at auction to the highest bidder. However, such an outcome was unlikely; Maris-Wolf’s meticulous research uncovered only one person in Virginia, Mary Dunmore, who was involuntarily sold into slavery after 1856.

Maris-Wolf’s goal is far more ambitious than simply writing the collective biographies of a handful of unusual people facing a terrible dilemma. Instead, he hopes to use these petitions to help historians think more carefully about slavery itself. Slavery, according to Maris-Wolf, was “adaptable, even amorphous,” and the story of the 1856 law reveals how whites and blacks used and shaped the peculiar institution in surprising ways (p. 130). For example, the 1856 law was not championed by fire-eaters but was inspired by Andrew Doswell and Willis Doswell, two black men freed in 1842, who, with the help of powerful neighbors, petitioned the legislature for an act allowing their voluntary enslavement to their landlord, the nephew of their former master. The act that provided for their enslavement became the model not only for the 1856 law but also for voluntary enslavement laws throughout the South.

Maris-Wolf goes further than the evidentiary record when he describes Andrew and Willis Doswell as the “fathers of Virginia’s first self-enslavement law,” but his argument that free blacks and their white allies used the voluntary enslavement law to their advantage is convincing (p. 97). In about a third of the cases, this law provided a handy form of legal insurance: free blacks living in Virginia illegally could file a petition for voluntary enslavement and then fail to appear in court. In such a case, the petition would have no effect because the court could not act until it had examined the free black petitioner. If the free black person who had filed a petition was later charged with violating the 1806 law, then the petition for enslavement could be revived, thus preventing prosecution under the 1806 law. Although some people used the law as a legal maneuver, the majority of the free blacks who petitioned to be enslaved did surrender their freedom. They did this in order to remain with their families and maintain their place in the community under the ownership of a person of their choosing. Maris-Wolf’s enthralling stories—of slave women who were granted freedom upon the death of their children’s father, of men who traveled to Liberia and decided to return to Virginia, of a successful free black entrepreneur whose businesses flourished during his second enslavement—all remind even the most jaded scholars that the most peculiar things about the antebellum world are the varied ways that whites and blacks, slaves and free people, experienced slavery.