Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South by Emily West (review)

Emily West’s study on the voluntary enslavement and residency petitions of free people of color is among the latest scholarly works to widen our awareness of just how peculiar an institution slavery was in the United States. Her primary mission: examining the ways in which anxious free blacks and enslaved people used these petitions to preserve “family” ties during the late antebellum period, a time when white southerners were justifiably concerned about the future of slavery. Proceeding often chronologically, she takes up the many strands to this issue with the now-obligatory nod to Walter Johnson. In other words, she never overstates the “agency” of free blacks in their seeming use of proslavery laws to enhance their own condition.

West pursues her topic by first providing an overview of the increasing number of laws and restrictions on free people of color, state by state. She is especially concerned with the 1850s, a period when “moves to expel or enslave free blacks reached a crescendo” especially after the 1857 Dred Scott case brought the question of citizenship for African Americans up for political debate and the 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid revealed the extent of white disagreement on the subject of slavery (19, 25).

Next, West focuses on residency requests, carefully showing that most of these were made prior to the 1850s, the decade that saw a greater number of enslavement petitions. Notably, much of the surviving evidence of residency requests comes from Texas. Though she does not say so explicitly, this might possibly be a result of the point at which Texas entered into the Union. While a republic, free African Americans and their white advocates in this territory “took advantage of a perceived malleability in race relations” (58). But, even after residency restrictions were passed following Texas’ admission as a state in 1845, free people of color quietly ignored them. For example, Greenberry Logan moved to Texas following his manumission from Kentucky. In his 1837 petition, he stated that he had been informed that he could only live legally in Texas only by “the consent of Congress,” something that distressed him, as he had fought during the Texas War of Independence (59). While his request was sent to a special committee, it was apparently never heard. Yet Logan continued to live quietly in the state with his free-born wife.

Logan’s experience demonstrates the ineffectiveness of residency and enslavement laws, which decreed one thing while black and white bodies did something else. The fuzziness around the outcomes of such laws is one reason why earlier scholars have been reluctant to examine them. Such reluctance is also a consequence of the admittedly small body of evidence. West herself relied on just 143 petitions for enslavement and 38 for residency, drawn primarily from the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, supplemented by primary sources in earlier published work, some of the latter verified when possible.

Scholarly foot-dragging, as West remarks, is also a result of the huge challenge of doing textual analyses. When one gets right down to it, the true authors of these petitions, as she writes, were often never known. West rightly embraces Stephanie Camp’s injunction that we speculate bravely on what people really meant or wanted. Thus, in later chapters, she devotes considerable space to exploring the motivations of those who claimed to write them (blacks), or those who seemed to benefit most from them (whites). While West is keen to foreground kinship as the leading impetus for why blacks resorted to so drastic an act as re-enslaving themselves or their family members, the multiple meanings of kinship might be better tackled in the same manner that she troubles the notion of freedom. While it is certain many blacks were “cajoled,” as West often notes, into making such petitions by unscrupulous whites, the tensions between these blacks’ experiences...