North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr (review)

Using court records, census data, church meeting minutes, wills, deeds, newspapers, letters, pension files, oral histories, and an array of additional secondary sources, Warren Milteer reconstructs the varied experiences of free people of color in North Carolina from the colonial period through Reconstruction. He convincingly demonstrates that the free “colored” population was much more varied, layered, and complex than historians have acknowledged. Milteer asserts that their lives were shaped by more than a single racial category; the lived experiences of free people of color in North Carolina varied according to their wealth, gender, work, and reputation. For example, a freeborn property-holding man of color lived a fundamentally different life than a formerly enslaved free woman of color who struggled to support herself. Milteer examines the daily lives of free people of color in North Carolina and their interactions with each other, their white neighbors, and the state. Many free people of color lived in poverty and were socially and politically marginalized; however, their status as free people had the potential to place them above white women and poor white men.

North Carolina’s Free People of Color is both chronological and narrative. Milteer uses the personal stories of propertied, well-connected, and prominent free people of color and their poverty-stricken marginalized counterparts to illuminate how their lives were profoundly shaped by, but not entirely restricted by, racial category. He contends that free people of color held a legal status closer to that of whites than of enslaved people. Their personhood was legally recognized, as were their familial relationships; until 1835, propertied free men of color could vote. Milteer highlights that proslavery radicals were unsuccessful in their attempts to enslave or expel free people of color after the American Revolution, and it took them decades to disenfranchise free men of color.

Milteer illuminates the varied racial compositions of the people categorized as free people of color. They were of African, Native, East Indian, white, and mixed heritage and ancestry. He also reminds readers that racial classifications collapsed after the American Revolution; people who had been referred to as “Indian,” “mulatto,” or even “white” became “free people of color” in the early American republic. Moreover, Milteer reveals how important community memory was to recognized racial identity and status. If your neighbors remembered your mother was white or a free woman of color, then you were free. Milteer also details the myriad restrictions placed on free people of color as the colonial period progressed and the American republic came into being; they had to pay race-based taxes and bonds for “good” behavior, had curfews, could not testify against whites in court, and were fined for, and later banned from, marrying whites. White women who had children with nonwhite men were fined or bound out, and their children were apprenticed by the state well into adulthood. Nevertheless, Milteer reminds us that propertied free men of color could and did hold slaves, apprentices, and servants.

Milteer also carefully reveals that the families of free people of color “regularly disrupted the boundaries that racial categories were supposed to create” (127). Some free people of color were emancipated and had close relationships with enslaved people. Others were descended from Native people, white mothers, or those who had been free so long that they did not share close bonds with enslaved people. These free people of color often lived in “colonies” together, intermarried, and had close associations with their white neighbors. Often, free people of color who did not have close association with enslaved people tended to be the wealthy few or middling small landowners and artisans. Poor free people of color, especially women, often struggled to support themselves and keep their children from being bound out by the state.

Milteer contends that because scholars have spent so much time examining the restrictions placed on free people of color, they have not acknowledged how free people...