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Conclusion From the eve of the American Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century , skilled black workers in New Bern, North Carolina, demonstrated the multiple possibilities of crafting identities as American artisans and citizens . Like their counterparts throughout the nation, they employed techniques learned through apprenticeships or from family members to make the objects their community needed. Many simply scraped by, while some used their trade skills along with their acumen and relationships to accumulate property, establish strong families, and win business and community status. As town dwellers, they shared with other urban craftspeople the opportunities to encounter people of all classes and races, to learn new styles and new ideas, and to form new relationships. In some periods they continued traditions and personal skills learned from parents or grandparents , while at other times they met challenges that demanded new strategies to protect or advance their status. As southern blacks, New Bern’s artisans of color confronted situations different from those known to their northern and white counterparts. In an economy and a social structure based on slavery, enslaved and free black artisans contended with legal and extralegal restraints that circumscribed their work and their lives. Once freedom came, they, like white artisans, dealt with the impact of mass production on all craft trades, but they also encountered racial barriers to advancement in the industrialized economy as manufacturers, contractors, or architects. In every period, successful artisans of color mastered the complex art of calibrating competence and ambition with techniques of self-presentation and communication that best served their purposes. For black craftspeople in New Bern and other southern cities, their circumstances might seem to offer little chance to define themselves as part of the American ideal of artisan and citizen identity. Yet through their experiences in New Bern we can see how black artisans found ways to create their own versions of American ideals that could take root in southern soil. The picture in New Bern is especially compelling because of particular factors that opened up promising opportunities: the latitude permitted slaves and free blacks by state law and local practice; the large number and proportion of black people, including accomplished free blacks; the extraordinary years of wartime freedom; and the unique political and racial conditions in the city and county after the Civil War. Black artisans found New Bern a conducive setting in which to develop valuable skills, to build up their sense of their own worth, to imagine new ways of living, and to define their goals not so much by the limits imposed by white southern society as by their own vision of their rightful place in the American Republic. Throughout changing definitions of the meaning of race and alternating periods of opportunity and oppression, New Bern’s black artisans demonstrated their resilient sense of their place as artisans and as citizens. Time and time again, they took action to improve their situations within their circumstances—or to move beyond what their circumstances seemed to allow . An enslaved brickmason dreamed of being a free master craftsman and used his skills, industry, and relationships to attain his goals; thereafter he trained and helped to free other black artisans and voted regularly for as long as the law allowed. A freeborn seamstress, wearied by hostility from whites and fearing a bleak future for her children, sold her house, packed her worldly goods, and took her children to join friends and relations in the North. An enslaved shoemaker collected some shoe leather and tools of his trade and escaped from his employer in hopes of reaching freedom by sea. An enslaved blacksmith developed his inventiveness, and when freedom came he acquired property, won public office, and campaigned for schools for black children. A freeborn carpenter augmented his wages by running a grocery and supported his widowed mother until her death at more than a hundred years of age. An enslaved house carpenter and his wife mourned their children sold away by her owner, and he worked overtime to enable his owner to buy his wife and youngest child to keep the family and their future children together. A runaway brickmason and his friends traveled to the nation’s capital to appeal to the president of the United States for universal manhood suffrage. An illiterate and emancipated widow saved a dollar for her fatherless grandson to attend grammar school before starting his apprenticeship; his stepfather helped him master the carpentry trade, and he won...

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