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"TO BE TRULY FREE": LOUIS SHERIDAN AND THE COLONIZATION OF LIBERIA Wilhrd B. Gatetvood, Jr. Few free blacks in antebellum North Carolina enjoyed greater prosperity and more cordial relations with prominent whites than Louis Sheridan , a well-to-do merchant and farmer in Bladen County. 'Throughout his native state," a white acquaintance remarked in 1838, "he is honored and esteemed by all who know him." Endowed with considerable business ability, Sheridan had amassed a small fortune by the 1830s and owned slaves, a plantation and other valuable real estate, and a thriving mercantile establishment in Elizabethtown. He resided in "one of the best houses" in the village and had extensive contacts with merchants in New York and Philadelphia from whom he secured merchandise for his store. In 1834 his purchases in these cities amounted to over $12,000. John Owen, a former governor of North Carolina and a neighbor in Bladen County who provided Sheridan with letters of introduction when he traveled north on buying trips, described him as "a worthy and intelligent merchant entitled to unlimited credit."1 While Sheridan was held in high regard by such whites as Governor Owen and New York merchants Lewis and Arthur Tappan, he was also widely known and respected among blacks. When on 17 March 1835 a son was born to Matthew and Julie Leary, prominent free blacks residing in nearby Fayetteville, they named him Lewis Sheridan Leary after Sheridan who, according to Leary family tradition, had "freed his slaves for conscience sake." While his namesake achieved a prominent place in the pantheon of Afro-American heroes because of his role in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Sheridan himself died in Liberia and has been largely forgotten.2 1 "Expedition to Bassa Cove," African Repository and Colonial Journal, 14 (February 1838): 55; John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 144^45; James Blackwell Browning, "The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 15 (January 1938): 32; Lewis Tappan in The Liberator, 8 (December 1838): 194. 2 Rose Leary Love, "A Few Facts about Lewis Sheridan Leary Who Was Killed at Harper's Ferry in John Brown's Raid," Negro History Bulletin, 6 (June 1943): 198, 215. Sheridan's first name was often spelled Lewis, but it was actually Louis. LOUIS SHERIDAN333 A proud and ambitious free man of color, Louis Sheridan belonged to "a caste" that was neither slave nor free. The status and treatment of free blacks in the antebellum South prompted Ira Berlin to describe them as "slaves without masters." But if Sheridan was a powerless slave, he was also a slave master. To escape the anomalous position that he occupied in the antebellum South, he embarked upon a search for a new home that ultimately led him to take up residence in Africa—a land that he never considered home but rather an alien country of "peculiar barbarousness ." Less than two years before his death, Sheridan wrote, "I am an American, exiled it is true, but no matter."3 Little is known about Sheridan's origins and background. He was born about 1793 in North Carolina, probably in Bladen County, which appears to have possessed a sizablenumber of "free Negars and Mulattus" at the time of the American Revolution.4 He somehow acquired a liberal education, as is evident from the numerous letters from him in the archives of the American Colonization Society, all of which reveal a command of impeccable English, a sophistication of thought, and a keen awareness of events in the world outside Bladen County. Late in the 1820s Sheridan subscribed to and served as an agent for the first two black newspapers in the United States, Freedom's Journal and its successor , The Rights of AU, both published in New York. As a young man he was a preacher for a time, but he abandoned that profession and "engaged in trade, struggling successfully against themost discouraging obstacles." However "adverse and depressing" the environment may havebeen in North Carolina for freepersons of color, Sheridan nonetheless managed to acquire substantial wealth and occupied an extraordinary place in the...

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