[Footnote 16: Nina M. Tiffany ed., Letters of James Murray, Loyalist (Boston, 1901), pp. 67-69.]

[Footnote 17: J.D. Wheeler, The Law of Slavery (New York, 1837), pp. 152-155.]

[Footnote 18: Editorial in the Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 12, 1854.]

The main supply of slaves for hire was probably comprised of the husbands and sons, and sometimes the daughters, of the cooks and housemaids of the merchants, lawyers and the like whose need of servants was limited but who in many cases made a point of owning their slaves in families. On the other hand, many townsmen whose capital was scant or whose need was temporary used hired slaves even for their kitchen work; and sometimes the filling of the demand involved the transfer of a slave from one town to another. Thus an innkeeper of Clarkesville, a summer resort in the Georgia mountains, published in the distant newspapers of Athens and Augusta in 1838 his offer of liberal wages for a first rate cook.[19] This hiring of domestics brought periodic embarrassments to those who depended upon them. A Virginia clergyman who found his wife and himself doing their own chores "in the interval between the hegira of the old hirelings and the coming of the new"[20] was not alone in his plight. At the same season, a Richmond editor wrote: "The negro hiring days have come, the most woeful of the year! So housekeepers think who do not own their own servants; and even this class is but a little better off than the rest, for all darkeydom must have holiday this week, and while their masters and mistresses are making fires and cooking victuals or attending to other menial duties the negroes are promenading the streets decked in their finest clothes."[21] Even the tobacco factories, which were constantly among the largest employers of hired slaves, were closed for lack of laborers from Christmas day until well into January.[22]

[Footnote 19: Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), June 21, 1838, advertisement ordering its own republication in the Augusta Constitutionalist.]

[Footnote 20: T.C. Johnson, Life of Robert L. Dabney (Richmond, 1905), p. 120.]

[Footnote 21: Richmond Whig, quoted in the Atlanta Intelligencer, Jan. 5, 1859.]

[Footnote 22: Robert Russell, North America (Edinburgh, 1857), p. 151.]

That the bargain of hire sometimes involved the consent of more than two parties is suggested by a New Year's colloquy overheard by Robert Russell on a Richmond street: "I was rather amused at the efforts of a market gardener to hire a young woman as a domestic servant. The price her owner put upon her services was not objected to by him, but they could not agree about other terms. The grand obstacle was that she would not consent to work in the garden, even when she had nothing else to do. After taking an hour's walk in another part of town I again met the two at the old bargain. Stepping towards them, I now learned that she was pleading for other privileges—her friends and favourites must be allowed to visit her.[23] At length she agreed to go and visit her proposed home and see how things looked." That the scruples of proprietors occasionally prevented the placing of slaves is indicated by a letter of a Georgia woman anent her girl Betty and a free negro woman, Matilda: "I cannot agree for Betty to be hired to Matilda—her character is too bad. I know her of old; she is a drunkard, and is said to be bad in every respect. I would object her being hired to any colored person no matter what their character was; and if she cannot get into a respectable family I had rather she came home, and if she can't work out put her to spinning and weaving. Her relations here beg she may not be permitted to go to Matilda. She would not be worth a cent at the end of the year."[24]

The cooerdination of demand and supply was facilitated in some towns by brokers. Thus J. de Bellievre of Baton Rouge maintained throughout 1826 a notice in the local Weekly Messenger of "Servants to hire by the day or month," including both artizans and domestics; and in the Nashville city directory of 1860 Van B. Holman advertised his business as an agent for the hiring of negroes as well as for the sale and rental of real estate.

[Footnote 23: Ibid.]

[Footnote 24: Letter of Mrs. S.R. Cobb, Cowpens, Ga., Jan. 9 1843, to her daughter-in-law at Athens. MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

Slave wages, generally quoted for the year and most frequently for unskilled able-bodied hands, ranged materially higher, of course, in the cotton belt than in the upper South. Women usually brought about half the wages of men, though they were sometimes let merely for the keep of themselves and their children. In middle Georgia the wages of prime men ranged about $100 in the first decade of the nineteenth century, dropped to $60 or $75 during the war of 1812, and then rose to near $150 by 1818. The panic of the next year sent them down again; and in the 'twenties they commonly ranged between $100 and $125. Flush times then raised them in such wise that the contractors digging a canal on the Georgia coast found themselves obliged in 1838 to offer $18 per month together with the customary weekly rations of three and a half pounds of bacon and ten quarts of corn and also the services of a staff physician as a sort of substitute for life and health insurance.[25] The beginning of the distressful 'forties eased the market so that the town of Milledgeville could get its street gang on a scale of $125;[26] at the middle of the decade slaveowners were willing to take almost any wages offered; and in its final year the Georgia Railroad paid only $70 to $75 for section hands. In 1850, however, this rate leaped to $100 and $110, and caused a partial substitution of white laborers for the hired slaves;[27] but the brevity of any relief procured by this recourse is suggested by a news item from Chattanooga in 1852 reporting that the commonest labor commanded a dollar a day, that mechanics were all engaged far in advance, that much building was perforce being postponed, and that all persons who might be seeking employment were urged to answer the city's call.[28] By 1854 the continuing advance began to discommode rural employers likewise. A Norfolk newspaper of the time reported that the current wages of $150 for ordinary hands and $225 for the best laborers, together with life insurance for the full value of the slaves, were so high that prudent farmers were curtailing their operations.[29] At the beginning of 1856 the wages in the Virginia tobacco factories advanced some fifteen per cent. over the rates of the preceding year;[30] and shortly afterward several of these establishments took refuge in the employment of white women for their lighter processes.[31] In 1860 there was a culmination of this rise of slave wages throughout the South, contemporaneous with that of their purchase prices. First-rate hands were engaged by the Petersburg tobacco factories at $225;[32] and in northwestern Louisiana the prime field hands in a parcel of slaves hired for the year brought from $300 to $360 each, and a blacksmith $430.[33] The general average then prevalent for prime unskilled slaves, however, was probably not much above two hundred dollars. While the purchase price of slaves was wellnigh quadrupled in the three score years of the nineteenth century, slave wages were little more than doubled, for these were of course controlled not by the fluctuating hopes and fears of what the distant future might bring but by the sober prospect of the work at hand.

[Footnote 25: Advertisement in the Savannah newspapers, reprinted in J.S. Buckingham, Slave States (London, 1842), I, 137.]

[Footnote 26: MS. minutes of the board of aldermen, in the town hall at Milledgeville, Ga. Item dated Feb. 23, 1841.]

[Footnote 27: Georgia Railroad Company Report for 1850, p. 13.]

[Footnote 28: Chattanooga Advertiser, quoted in the Augusta Chronicle, June 6, 1852.]

[Footnote 29: Norfolk Argus, quoted in Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 12, 1854.]

[Footnote 30: Richmond Dispatch, Jan., 1856, quoted in G.M. Weston, Who are and who may be Slaves in the U.S. (caption).]

[Footnote 31: Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, XL, 522.]

[Footnote 32: Petersburg Democrat, quoted by the Atlanta Intelligencer, Jan., 1860.]

[Footnote 33: DeBow's Review, XXIX, 374.]

The proprietors of slaves for hire appear to have been generally as much concerned with questions of their moral and physical welfare as with the wages to be received, for no wage would compensate for the debilitation of the slave or his conversion into an inveterate runaway. The hirers in their turn had the problem, growing more intense with the advance of costs, of procuring full work without resorting to such rigor of discipline as would disquiet the owners of their employees. The tobacco factories found solution in piece work with bonus for excess over the required stint. At Richmond in the middle 'fifties this was commonly yielding the slaves from two to five dollars a month for their own uses; and these establishments, along with all other slave employers, suspended work for more than a week at the Christmas season.[34]

[Footnote 34: Robert Russell, North America, p. 152.]

The hiring of slaves from one citizen to another did not meet all the needs of the town industry, for there were many occupations in which the regular supervision of labor was impracticable. Hucksters must trudge the streets alone; and market women sit solitary in their stalls. If slaves were to follow such callings at all, and if other slaves were to utilize their talents in keeping cobbler and blacksmith shops and the like for public patronage,[35] they must be vested with fairly full control of their own activities. To enable them to compete with whites and free negroes in the trades requiring isolated and occasional work their masters early and increasingly fell into the habit of hiring many slaves to the slaves themselves, granting to each a large degree of industrial freedom in return for a stipulated weekly wage. The rates of hire varied, of course, with the slave's capabilities and the conditions of business in their trades. The practice brought friction sometimes between slaves and owners when wages were in default. An instance of this was published in a Charleston advertisement of 1800 announcing the auction of a young carpenter and saying as the reason of the sale that he had absconded because of a deficit in his wages.[36] Whether the sale was merely by way of punishment or was because the proprietor could not give personal supervision to the carpenter's work the record fails to say. The practice also injured the interests of white competitors in the same trades, who sometimes bitterly complained;[37] it occasionally put pressure upon the slaves to fill out their wages by theft; and it gave rise in some degree to a public apprehension that the liberty of movement might be perverted to purposes of conspiracy. The law came to frown upon it everywhere; but the device was too great a public and private convenience to be suppressed.

[Footnote 35: E. g., "For sale: a strong, healthy Mulatto Man, about 24 years of age, by trade a blacksmith, and has had the management of a blacksmith shop for upwards of two years" Advertisement in the Alexandria, Va., Times and Advertiser, Sept. 26, 1797.]

[Footnote 36: Charleston City Gazette, May 12, 1800.]

[Footnote 37: E. g., Plantation and Frontier, II, 367.]

To procure the enforcement of such laws a vigilance committee was proposed at Natchez in 1824;[38] but if it was created it had no lasting effect. With the same purpose newspaper campaigns were waged from time to time. Thus in the spring of 1859 the Bulletin of Columbia, South Carolina, said editorially: "Despite the laws of the land forbidding under penalty the hiring of their time by slaves, it is much to be regretted that the pernicious practice still exists," and it censured the citizens who were consciously and constantly violating a law enacted in the public interest. The nearby Darlington Flag endorsed this and proposed in remedy that the town police and the rural patrols consider void all tickets issued by masters authorizing their slaves to pass and repass at large, that all slaves found hiring their time be arrested and punished, and that their owners be indicted as by law provided. The editor then ranged further. "There is another evil of no less magnitude," said he, "and perhaps the foundation of the one complained of. It is that of transferring slave labor from its legitimate field, the cultivation of the soil, into that of the mechanic arts.... Negro mechanics are an ebony aristocracy into which slaves seek to enter by teasing their masters for permission to learn a trade. Masters are too often seduced by the prospect of gain to yield their assent, and when their slaves have acquired a trade are forced to the violation of the law to realize their promised gain. We should therefore have a law to prevent slave mechanics going off their masters' premises to work. Let such a law be passed, and ... there will no longer be need of a law to prohibit slaves hiring their own time," The Southern Watchman of Athens, Georgia, reprinted all of this in turn, along with a subscriber's communication entitled "free slaves." There were more negroes enjoying virtual freedom in the town of Athens, this writer said, than there were bona fide free negroes in any ten counties of the district. "Everyone who is at all acquainted with the character of the slave race knows that they have great ideas of liberty, and in order to get the enjoyment of it they make large offers for their time. And everyone who knows anything of the negro knows that he won't work unless he is obliged to.... The negro thus set free, in nine cases out of ten, idles away half of his time or gambles away what he does make, and then relies on his ingenuity in stealing to meet the demands pay day inevitably brings forth; and this is the way our towns are converted into dens of rogues and thieves."[39]

[Footnote 38: Natchez Mississippian, quoted in Le Courrier de la Louisiane (New Orleans), Aug. 25, 1854.]

[Footnote 39: Southern Watchman (Athens, Ga.), Apr. 20, 1859.]

These arguments had been answered long before by a citizen of Charleston. The clamor, said he, was intended not so much to guard the community against theft and insurrection as to diminish the competition of slaves with white mechanics. The strict enforcement of the law would almost wholly deprive the public of the services of jobbing slaves, which were indispensable under existing circumstances. Let the statute therefore be left in the obscurity of the lawyers' bookshelves, he concluded, to be brought forth only in case of an emergency.[40] And so such laws were left to sleep, despite the plaints of self-styled reformers.

[Footnote 40: Letter to the editor in the Charleston City Gazette, Nov. 1, 1825. To similar effect was an editorial in the Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 16, 1851.]

That self-hire may often have led to self-purchase is suggested by an illuminating letter of Billy Procter, a slave at Americus, Georgia, in 1854 to Colonel John B. Lamar of whom something has been seen in a foregoing chapter. The letter, presumably in the slave's own hand, runs as follows: "As my owner, Mr. Chapman, has determined to dispose of all his Painters, I would prefer to have you buy me to any other man. And I am anxious to get you to do so if you will. You know me very well yourself, but as I wish you to be fully satisfied I beg to refer you to Mr. Nathan C. Monroe, Dr. Strohecker and Mr. Bogg. I am in distress at this time, and will be until I hear from you what you will do. I can be bought for $1000—and I think that you might get me for 50 Dolls less if you try, though that is Mr. Chapman's price. Now Mas John, I want to be plain and honest with you. If you will buy me I will pay you $600 per year untill this money is paid, or at any rate will pay for myself in two years.... I am fearfull that if you do not buy me, there is no telling where I may have to go, and Mr. C. wants me to go where I would be satisfied,—I promise to serve you faithfully, and I know that I am as sound and healthy as anyone you could find. You will confer a great favour, sir, by Granting my request, and I would be very glad to hear from you in regard to the matter at your earliest convenience."[41]

[Footnote 41: MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga., printed in Plantation and Frontier, II, 41. The writer must have been well advanced in years or else highly optimistic. Otherwise he could not have expected to earn his purchase price within two years.]

The hiring of slaves by one citizen to another prevailed to some extent in country as well as town, and the hiring of them to themselves was particularly notable in the forest labors of gathering turpentine and splitting shingles[42]; but slave hire in both its forms was predominantly an urban resort. On the whole, whereas the plantation system cherished slavery as a wellnigh fundamental condition, town industry could tolerate it only by modifying its features to make labor more flexibly responsive to the sharply distinctive urban needs.

[Footnote 42: Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, pp. 153-155.]

As to routine control, urban proprietors were less complete masters even of slaves in their own employ than were those in the country. For example, Morgan Brown of Clarksville, Tennessee, had occasion to publish the following notice: "Whereas my negroes have been much in the habit of working at night for such persons as will employ them, to the great injury of their health and morals, I therefore forbid all persons employing them without my special permission in writing. I also forbid trading with them, buying from or selling to them, without my written permit stating the article they may buy or sell. The law will be strictly enforced against transgressors, without respect to persons[43]."

[Footnote 43: Town Gazette and Farmers' Register (Clarksville, Tenn.), Aug. 9, 1819, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 45, 46.]

When broils occurred in which slaves were involved, the masters were likely to find themselves champions rather than judges. This may be illustrated by two cases tried before the town commissioners of Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1831. In the first of these Edward Gary was ordered to bring before the board his slave Nathan to answer a charge of assault upon Richard Mayhorn, a member of the town patrol, and show why punishment should not be inflicted. On the day set Cary appeared without the negro and made a counter charge supported by testimony that Mayhorn had exceeded his authority under the patrol ordinance. The prosecution of the slave was thereupon dropped, and the patrolman was dismissed from the town's employ. The second case was upon a patrol charge against a negro named Hubbard, whose master or whose master's attorney was one Wiggins, reciting an assault upon Billy Woodliff, a slave apparently of Seaborn Jones. Billy being sworn related that Hubbard had come to the door of his blacksmith shop and "abused and bruised him with a rock." Other evidence revealed that Hubbard's grievance lay in Billy's having taken his wife from him. "The testimony having been concluded, Mr. Wiggins addressed the board in a speech containing some lengthy, strengthy and depthy argument: whereupon the board ordered that the negro man Hubbard receive from the marshall ten lashes, moderately laid on, and be discharged."[44] Even in the maintenance of household discipline masters were fain to apply chastisement vicariously by having the town marshal whip their offending servants for a small fee.

[Footnote 44: MS. archives in the town hall at Milledgeville, Ga., selected items from which are printed in the American Historical Association Report for 1903, I, 468, 469.]

The variety in complexion, status and attainment among town slaves led to a somewhat elaborate gradation of colored society. One stratum comprised the fairly numerous quadroons and mulattoes along with certain exceptional blacks. The men among these had a pride of place as butlers and coachmen, painters and carpenters; the women fitted themselves trimly with the cast-off silks and muslins of their mistresses, walked with mincing tread, and spoke in quiet tones with impressive nicety of grammar. This element was a conscious aristocracy of its kind, but its members were more or less irked by the knowledge that no matter how great their merits they could not cross the boundary into white society. The bulk of the real negroes on the other hand, with an occasional mulatto among them, went their own way, the women frankly indulging a native predilection for gaudy colors, carrying their burdens on their heads, arms akimbo, and laying as great store in their kerchief turbans as their paler cousins did in their beflowered bonnets. The men of this class wore their shreds and patches with an easy swing, doffed their wool hats to white men as they passed, called themselves niggers or darkies as a matter of course, took the joys and sorrows of the day as they came, improvised words to the music of their work, and customarily murdered the Queen's English, all with a true if humble nonchalance and a freedom from carking care.

The differentiation of slave types was nevertheless little more than rudimentary; for most of those who were lowliest on work days assumed a grandiloquence of manner when they donned their holiday clothes. The gayeties of the colored population were most impressive to visitors from afar. Thus Adam Hodgson wrote of a spring Sunday at Charleston in 1820: "I was pleased to see the slaves apparently enjoying themselves on this day in their best attire, and was amused with their manners towards each other. They generally use Sir and Madam in addressing each other, and make the most formal and particular inquiries after each other's families."[45] J.S. Buckingham wrote at Richmond fifteen years afterward: "On Sundays, when the slaves and servants are all at liberty after dinner, they move about in every thoroughfare, and are generally more gaily dressed than the whites. The females wear white muslin and light silk gowns, with caps, bonnets, ribbons and feathers; some carry reticules on the arm and many are seen with parasols, while nearly all of them carry a white pocket-handkerchief before them in the most fashionable style. The young men among the slaves wear white trousers, black stocks, broad-brimmed hats, and carry walking-sticks; and from the bowings, curtseying and greetings in the highway one might almost imagine one's self to be at Hayti and think that the coloured people had got possession of the town and held sway, while the whites were living among them by sufferance."[46] Olmsted in his turn found the holiday dress of the slaves in many cases better than the whites,[47] and said their Christmas festivities were Saturnalia. The town ordinances, while commonly strict in regard to the police of slaves for the rest of the year, frequently gave special countenance to negro dances and other festive assemblies at Christmas tide.

[Footnote 45: Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America, I, 97.]

[Footnote 46: J.S. Buckingham, Slave States, II, 427.]

[Footnote 47: Seaboard Slave States, pp. 101, 103. Cf. also DeBow's Review, XII, 692, and XXVIII, 194-199.]

Even in work-a-day seasons the laxity of control gave rise to occasional complaint. Thus the acting mayor of New Orleans recited in 1813, among matters needing correction, that loitering slaves were thronging the grog shops every evening and that negro dances were lasting far into the night, in spite of the prohibitions of the law.[48] A citizen of Charleston protested in 1835 against another and more characteristic form of dissipation. "There are," said he, "sometimes every evening in the week, funerals of negroes accompanied by three or four hundred negroes ... who disturb all the inhabitants in the neighborhood of burying grounds in Pitt street near Boundary street. It appears to be a jubilee for every slave in the city. They are seen eagerly pressing to the place from all quarters, and such is frequently the crowd and noise made by them that carriages cannot safely be driven that way."[49]

[Footnote 48: Plantation and Frontier, II, 153.]

[Footnote 49: Letter of a citizen in the Southern Patriot, quoted in H.M. Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (Emory, Va., 1914), p. 144.]

The operations of urban constables and police courts are exemplified in some official statistics of Charleston. In the year ending September 1, 1837, the slave arrests, numbering 768 in all, were followed in 138 cases by prompt magisterial discharge, by fines in 309 cases, and by punishment in the workhouse or by remandment for trial on criminal charges in 264 of the remainder. The mayor said in summary: "Of the 573 slaves fined or committed to the workhouse nearly the whole were arrested for being out at night without tickets or being found in the dram shops or other unlawful places. The fines imposed did not in general exceed $1, and where corporal punishment was inflicted it was always moderate. It is worthy to remark that of the 460 cases reported by the marshals for prosecution but 22 were prosecuted, the penalties having been voluntarily paid in 303 cases, and in 118 cases having been remitted, thus preventing by a previous examination 421 suits." Arrests of colored freemen in the same period numbered 78, of which 27 were followed by discharge, 36 by fine or whipping, 5 by sentence to the workhouse, and 10 by remandment.

In the second year following, the slave and free negro arrests for being "out after the beating of the tattoo without tickets, fighting and rioting in the streets, following military companies, walking on the battery contrary to law, bathing horses at forbidden places, theft, or other violation of the city and state laws" advanced for some unexplained reason to an aggregate of 1424. Of those taken into custody 274 were discharged after examination, 330 were punished in the workhouse, 33 were prosecuted or delivered to warrant, 26 were fined or committed until the fines were paid, for 398 the penalties were paid by their owners or guardians, 115 were runaways who were duly returned to their masters or otherwise disposed of according to law, and the remaining 252 were delivered on their owners' orders.[50]

[Footnote 50: Official reports quoted in H.M. Henry, The Police Control of Slaves in South Carolina, pp. 49, 50.]

At an earlier period a South Carolina law had required the public whipping of negro offenders at prominent points on the city streets, but complaints of this as distressing to the inhabitants[51] had brought its discontinuance. For the punishment of misdemeanants under sentences to hard labor a treadmill was instituted in the workhouse;[52] and the ensuing substitution of labor for the lash met warm official commendation.[53]

[Footnote 51: Columbian Herald (Charleston), June 26, 1788.]

[Footnote 52: Charleston City Gazette, Feb. 2, 1826.]

[Footnote 53: Grand jury presentments, ibid., May 15, 1826.]

In church affairs the two races adhered to the same faiths, but their worship tended slowly to segregate. A few negroes habitually participated with the whites in the Catholic and Episcopal rituals, or listened to the long and logical sermons of the Presbyterians. Larger numbers occupied the pews appointed for their kind in the churches of the Methodist and Baptist whites, where the more ebullient exercises comported better with their own tastes. But even here there was often a feeling of irksome restraint. The white preacher in fear of committing an indiscretion in the hearing of the negroes must watch his words though that were fatal to his impromptu eloquence; the whites in the congregation must maintain their dignity when dignity was in conflict with exaltation; the blacks must repress their own manifestations the most severely of all, to escape rebuke for unseemly conduct.[54] An obvious means of relief lay in the founding of separate congregations to which the white ministers occasionally preached and in which white laymen often sat, but where the pulpit and pews were commonly filled by blacks alone. There the sable exhorter might indulge his peculiar talent for "'rousements" and the prayer leader might beseech the Almighty in tones to reach His ears though afar off. There the sisters might sway and croon to the cadence of sermon and prayer, and the brethren spur the spokesman to still greater efforts by their well timed ejaculations. There not only would the quaint melody of the negro "spirituals" swell instead of the more sophisticated airs of the hymn book, but every successful sermon would be a symphony and every prayer a masterpiece of concerted rhythm.

[Footnote 54: A Methodist preacher wrote of an episode at Wilmington: "On one occasion I took a summary process with a certain black woman who in their love-feast, with many extravagant gestures, cried out that she was 'young King Jesus,' I bade her take her seat, and then publicly read her out of membership, stating that we would not have such wild fanatics among us, meantime letting them all know that such expressions were even blasphemous. Poor Aunt Katy felt it deeply, repented, and in a month I took her back again. The effect was beneficial, and she became a rational and consistent member of the church." Joseph Travis, Autobiography (Nashville, 1855), pp. 71, 72.]

In some cases the withdrawal of the blacks had the full character of secession. An example in this line had been set in Philadelphia when some of the negroes who had been attending white churches of various denominations were prompted by the antipathy of the whites and by the ambition of the colored leaders to found, in 1791, an African church with a negro minister. In the course of a few years this was divided into congregations of the several sects. Among these the Methodists prospered to such degree that in 1816 they launched the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with congregations in Baltimore and other neighboring cities included within its jurisdiction.[55] Richard Allen as its first bishop soon entered into communication with Morris Brown and other colored Methodists of Charleston who were aggrieved at this time by the loss of their autonomy. In former years the several thousand colored Methodists, who outnumbered by tenfold the whites in the congregations there, had enjoyed a quarterly conference of their own, with the custody of their collections and with control over the church trials of colored members; but on the ground of abuses these privileges were cancelled in 1815. A secret agitation then ensued which led on the one hand to the increase of the negro Methodists by some two thousand souls, and on the other to the visit of two of their leaders to Philadelphia where they were formally ordained for Charleston pastorates. When affairs were thus ripened, a dispute as to the custody of one of their burial grounds precipitated their intended stroke in 1818. Nearly all the colored class leaders gave up their papers simultaneously, and more than three-quarters of their six thousand fellows withdrew their membership from the white Methodist churches. "The galleries, hitherto crowded, were almost completely deserted," wrote a contemporary, "and it was a vacancy that could be felt. The absence of their responses and hearty songs were really felt to be a loss to those so long accustomed to hear them.... The schismatics combined, and after great exertion succeeded in erecting a neat church building.... Their organization was called the African Church," and one of its ministers was constituted bishop. Its career, however, was to be short lived, for the city authorities promptly proceeded against them, first by arresting a number of participants at one of their meetings but dismissing them with a warning that their conduct was violative of a statute of 1800 prohibiting the assemblage of slaves and free negroes for mental instruction without the presence of white persons; next by refusing, on the grounds that both power and willingness were lacking, a plea by the colored preachers for a special dispensation; and finally by the seizure of all the attendants at another of their meetings and the sentencing of the bishop and a dozen exhorters, some to a month's imprisonment or departure from the state, others to ten lashes or ten dollars' fine. The church nevertheless continued in existence until 1822 when in consequence of the discovery of a plot for insurrection among the Charleston negroes the city government had the church building demolished. Morris Brown moved to Philadelphia, where he afterward became bishop of the African Church, and the whole Charleston project was ended.[56] The bulk of the blacks returned to the white congregations, where they soon overflowed the galleries and even the "boxes" which were assigned them at the rear on the main floors. Some of the older negroes by special privilege then took seats forward in the main body of the churches, and others not so esteemed followed their example in such numbers that the whites were cramped for room. After complaints on this score had failed for several years to bring remedy, a crisis came in Bethel Church on a Sunday in 1833 when Dr. Capers was to preach. More whites came than could be seated the forward-sitting negroes refused to vacate their seats for them; and a committee of young white members forcibly ejected these blacks At a "love-feast" shortly afterward one of the preachers criticized the action of the committee thereby giving the younger element of the whites great umbrage. Efforts at reconciliation failing, nine of the young men were expelled from membership, whereupon a hundred and fifty others followed them into a new organization which entered affiliation with the schismatic Methodist Protestant Church.[57] Race relations in the orthodox congregations were doubtless thereafter more placid.

[Footnote 55: E.R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania (Washington, 1911), pp. 134-136.]

[Footnote 56: Charleston Courier, June 9, 1818; Charleston City Gazette, quoted in the Louisiana Gazette (New Orleans), July 10, 1818; J.L.E.W. Shecut, Medical and Philosophical Essays (Charleston, 1819), p. 34; C.F. Deems ed., Annals of Southern Methodism for 1856 (Nashville [1857]), pp. 212-214, 232; H.M. Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina, p. 142.]

[Footnote 57: C.F. Deems ed., Annals of Southern Methodism for 1856, pp. 215-217.]

In most of the permanent segregations the colored preachers were ordained and their congregations instituted under the patronage of the whites. At Savannah as early as 1802 the freedom of the slave Henry Francis was purchased by subscription, and he was ordained by white ministers at the African Baptist Church. After a sermon by the Reverend Jesse Peter of Augusta, the candidate "underwent a public examination respecting his faith in the leading doctrines of Christianity, his call to the sacred ministry and his ideas of church government. Giving entire satisfaction on these important points, he kneeled down, when the ordination prayer with imposition of hands was made by Andrew Bryant The ordained ministers present then gave the right hand of fellowship to Mr. Francis, who was forthwith presented with a Bible and a solemn charge to faithfulness by Mr. Holcombe."[58] The Methodists were probably not far behind the Baptists in this policy. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians, with much smaller numbers of negro co-religionists to care for, followed the same trend in later decades. Thus the presbytery of Charleston provided in 1850, at a cost of $7,700, a separate house of worship for its negro members, the congregation to be identified officially with the Second Presbyterian Church of the city. The building had a T shape, the transepts appropriated to the use of white persons. The Sunday school of about 180 pupils had twenty or thirty white men and women as its teaching staff.[59]

[Footnote 58: Henry Holcombe ed., The Georgia Analytical Repository (a Baptist magazine of Savannah, 1802), I, 20, 21. For further data concerning Francis and other colored Baptists of his time see the Journal of Negro History, I, 60-92.]

[Footnote 59: J.H. Thornwell, D.D., The Rights and Duties of Masters: a sermon preached at the dedication of a church erected at Charleston, S.C. for the benefit and instruction of the colored population (Charleston, 1850).]

Such arrangements were not free from objection, however, as the Episcopalians of Charleston learned about this time. To relieve the congestion of the negro pews in St. Michael's and St. Philip's, a separate congregation was organized with a few whites included in its membership. While it was yet occupying temporary quarters in Temperance Hall, a mob demolished Calvary Church which was being built for its accommodation. When the proprietor of Temperance Hall refused the further use of his premises the congregation dispersed. The mob's action was said to be in protest against the doings of the "bands" or burial societies among the Calvary negroes.[60]

[Footnote 60: Public Proceedings relating to Calvary Church and the Religious Instruction of Slaves (Charleston, 1850).]

The separate religious integration of the negroes both slave and free was obstructed by the recurrent fear of the whites that it might be perverted to insurrectionary purposes. Thus when at Richmond in 1823 ninety-two free negroes petitioned the Virginia legislature on behalf of themselves and several hundred slaves, reciting that the Baptist churches used by the whites had not enough room to permit their attendance and asking sanction for the creation of a "Baptist African Church," the legislature withheld its permission. In 1841, however, this purpose was in effect accomplished when it was found that a negro church would not be in violation of the law provided it had a white pastor. At that time the First Baptist Church of Richmond, having outgrown its quarters, erected a new building to accommodate its white members and left its old one to the negroes. The latter were thereupon organized as the African Church with a white minister and with the choice of its deacons vested in a white committee. In 1855, when this congregation had grown to three thousand members, the Ebenezer church was established as an offshoot, with a similar plan of government.[61]

[Footnote 61: J.B. Earnest, The Religious Development of the Negro in Virginia (Charlottesville, 1914), pp. 72-83. For the similar trend of church segregation in the Northern cities see J.W. Cromwell, The Negro in American History (Washington, 1914). pp. 61-70.]

At Baltimore there were in 1835 ten colored congregations, with slave and free membership intermingled, several of which had colored ministers;[62] and by 1847 the number of churches had increased to thirteen or more, ten of which were Methodist.[63] In 1860 there were two or more colored congregations at Norfolk; at Savannah three colored churches were paying salaries of $800 to $1000 to their colored ministers,[64] and in Atlanta a subscription was in progress for the enlargement of the negro church building to relieve its congestion.[65] By this time a visitor in virtually any Southern city might have witnessed such a scene as William H. Russell described at Montgomery:[66] "As I was walking ... I perceived a crowd of very well-dressed negroes, men and women, in front of a plain brick building which I was informed was their Baptist meeting-house, into which white people rarely or never intrude. These were domestic servants, or persons employed in stores, and their general appearance indicated much comfort and even luxury. I doubted if they all were slaves. One of my companions went up to a woman in a straw hat, with bright red and green ribbon trimmings and artificial flowers, a gaudy Paisley shawl, and a rainbow-like gown blown out over her yellow boots by a prodigious crinoline, and asked her 'Whom do you belong to?' She replied, 'I b'long to Massa Smith, sar.'"

[Footnote 62: Niles' Register, XLIX, 72.]

[Footnote 63: J.R. Brackett, The Negro in Maryland, p. 206.]

[Footnote 64: D.R. Hundley, Social Relations in our Southern States (New York, 1860), pp. 350, 351.]

[Footnote 65: Atlanta Intelligencer, July 13, 1859, editorial commending the purpose.]

[Footnote 66: W.H. Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), p. 167.]



CHAPTER XXI

FREE NEGROES

In the colonial period slaves were freed as a rule only when generous masters rated them individually deserving of liberty or when the negroes bought themselves. Typical of the time were the will of Thomas Stanford of New Jersey in 1722 directing that upon the death of the testator's wife his negro man should have his freedom if in the opinion of three neighbors named he had behaved well,[1] and a deed signed by Robert Daniell of South Carolina in 1759 granting freedom to his slave David Wilson in consideration of his faithful service and of L600 currency in hand paid.[2] So long as this condition prevailed, in which the ethics of slaveholding were little questioned, the freed element remained extremely small.

[Footnote 1: New Jersey Archives, XXIII, 438.]

[Footnote 2: MS. among the probate records at Charleston.]

The liberal philosophy of the Revolution, persisting thereafter in spite of reaction, not only wrought the legal disestablishment of slavery throughout the North, but prompted private manumissions far and wide.[3] Thus Philip Graham of Maryland made a deed in 1787 reciting his realization that the holding of his "fellow men in bondage and slavery is repugnant to the golden law of God and the unalienable right of mankind as well as to every principle of the late glorious revolution which has taken place in America," and converting his slaves into servants for terms, the adults to become free at the close of that year and the children as they reached maturity.[4] In the same period, upon his coming of age, Richard Randolph, brother of the famous John, wrote to his guardian: "With regard to the division of the estate, I have only to say that I want not a single negro for any other purpose than his immediate liberation. I consider every individual thus unshackled as the source of future generations, not to say nations, of freemen; and I shudder when I think that so insignificant an animal as I am is invested with this monstrous, this horrid power."[5] The Randolph estate, however, was so cumbered with debts that the desired manumissions could not then be made. At Richard's death in 1796 he left a will of the expected tenor, providing for a wholesale freeing as promptly as it could legally be accomplished by the clearance of the mortgage.[6] In 1795 John Stratton of Norfolk, asserting his "full persuassion that freedom is the natural right of all men," set free his able-bodied slave, Peter Wakefield.[7] Robert K. Moore of Louisville mingled thrift with liberalism by setting free in 1802 two pairs of married slaves because of his conviction that involuntary servitude was wrong, and at the same time binding them by indenture to serve him for some fourteen years longer in consideration of certain small payments in advance and larger ones at the ends of their terms.[8]

[Footnote 3: These were restricted for a time in North Carolina, however, by an act of 1777 which recited the critical and alarming state of public affairs as its occasion.]

[Footnote 4: MS. transcript in the file of powers of attorney, I, 243, among the county records at Louisville, Ky.]

[Footnote 5: H.A. Garland, Life of John Randolph of Roanoke (New York, 1851), I, 63.]

[Footnote 6: DeBow's Review, XXIV, 285-290.]

[Footnote 7: MS. along with many similar documents among the deed files at Norfolk, Va.]

[Footnote 8: MSS. in the powers of attorney files, II, 118, 122, 127, at Louisville, Ky.]

Manumissions were in fact so common in the deeds and wills of the men of '76 that the number of colored freemen in the South exceeded thirty-five thousand in 1790 and was nearly doubled in each of the next two decades. The greater caution of their successors, reinforced by the rise of slave prices, then slackened the rate of increase to twenty-five and finally to ten per cent. per decade. Documents in this later period, reverting to the colonial basis, commonly recited faithful service or self purchase rather than inherent rights as the grounds for manumission. Liberations on a large scale, nevertheless, were not wholly discontinued. John Randolph's will set free nearly four hundred in 1833;[9] Monroe Edwards of Louisiana manumitted 160 by deed in 1840;[10] and George W.P. Custis of Virginia liberated his two or three hundred at his death in 1857.[11]

[Footnote 9: Garland, Life of Randolph, II, 150, 151.]

[Footnote 10: Niles' Register, LXIII, 245.]

Still other large proprietors while not bestowing immediate liberty made provisions to bring it after the lapse of years. Prominent among these were three Louisianians. Julien Poydras, who died in 1824, ordered his executors to sell his six plantations with their respective staffs under contracts to secure the manumission of each slave after twenty-five years of service to the purchaser, together with an annual pension of $25 to each of those above sixty years of age; and years afterward a nephew of the testator procured an injunction from the supreme court of the state estopping the sale of some of the slaves by one of their purchasers in such way as would hazard the fulfilment of the purpose.[12] Stephen Henderson, a Scotch immigrant who had acquired several sugar plantations, provided as follows, by will made in 1837 and upheld by the courts: ten and twenty slaves respectively were to be chosen by lot at periods five and ten years after his death to be freed and sent to Liberia, and at the end of twenty-five years the rest were to fare likewise, but any who refused to be deported were to be kept as apprentices on the plantations.[13] John McDonogh, the most thrifty citizen of New Orleans in his day, made a unique bargain with his whole force of slaves, about 1825, by which they were collectively to earn their freedom and their passage to Liberia by the overtime work of Saturday afternoons. This labor was to be done in McDonogh's own service, and he was to keep account of their earnings. They were entitled to draw upon this fund upon approved occasions; but since the contract was with the whole group of slaves as a unit, when one applied for cash the others must draw theirs pro rata, thereby postponing the common day of liberation. Any slaves violating the rules of good conduct were to be sold by the master, whereupon their accrued earnings would revert to the fund of the rest. The plan was carried to completion on schedule, and after some delay in embarkation they left America in 1842, some eighty in number, with their late master's benediction. In concluding his public narration in the premises McDonogh wrote: "They have now sailed for Liberia, the land of their fathers. I can say with truth and heartfelt satisfaction that a more virtuous people does not exist in any country."[14]

[Footnote 11: Daily True Delta (New Orleans), Dec. 19, 1857.]

[Footnote 12: Poydras vs. Mourrain, in Louisiana Reports, IX, 492. The will is quoted in the decision.]

[Footnote 13: Niles' Register, LXVIII, 361. The original MS. is filed in will book no. 6 in the New Orleans court house.]

[Footnote 14: J.T. Edwards ed., Some Interesting Papers of John McDonogh (McDonoghville, Md., 1898), pp. 49-58.]

Among more romantic liberations was that of Pierre Chastang of Mobile who, in recognition of public services in the war of 1812 and the yellow fever epidemic of 1819 was bought and freed by popular subscription;[15] that of Sam which was provided by a special act of the Georgia legislature in 1834 at a cost of $1,800 in reward for his having saved the state capitol from destruction by fire;[16] and that of Prince which was attained through the good offices of the United States government. Prince, after many years as a Mississippi slave, wrote a letter in Arabic to the American consul at Tangier in which he recounted his early life as a man of rank among the Timboo people and his capture in battle and sale overseas. This led Henry Clay on behalf of the Adams administration to inquire at what cost he might be bought for liberation and return. His master thereupon freed him gratuitously, and the citizens of Natchez raised a fund for the purchase of his wife, with a surplus for a flowing Moorish costume in which Prince was promptly arrayed. The pair then departed, in 1828, for Washington en route for Morocco, Prince avowing that he would soon send back money for the liberation of their nine children.[17]

[Footnote 15: D.W. Mitchell, Ten Years in the United States (London, 1862), p. 235.]

[Footnote 16: Georgia Senate Journal for 1834, p. 25. At a later period the Georgia legislature had occasion to reward another slave, Ransom by name, who while hired from his master by the state had heroically saved the Western and Atlantic Railroad bridge over the Chattahoochee River from destruction by fire. Since official sentiment was now hostile to manumission, it was resolved in 1849 that he be bought by the state and ensured a permanent home; and in 1853 a further resolution directed the chief engineer of the state-owned railroad to pay him just wages during good behavior. Georgia Acts, 1849-1850, pp. 416, 417; 1853-1854, pp. 538, 539. Old citizens relate that a house was built for Ransom on the Western and Atlantic right of way in Atlanta which he continued to occupy until his death many years after the Civil War. For these data I am indebted to Mr. J. Groves Cohen, Secretary of the Western and Atlantic Railroad Commission, Atlanta, Ga.]

[Footnote 17: "Letter from a Gentleman of Natchez to a Lady of Cincinnati," in the Georgia Courier (Augusta), May 22, 1828. For a similar instance in colonial Maryland see the present work, p. 31.]

Most of the negroes who procured freedom remained in the United States, though all of those who gained it by flight and many of those manumitted had to shift their location at the time of changing their status. At least one of the fugitives, however, made known his preference for his native district in a manner which cost him his liberty. After two years in Ohio and Canada he returned to the old plantation in Georgia, where he was welcomed with a command to take up the hoe. Rejecting this implement, he proposed to buy himself if a thousand dollars would suffice. When his master, declining to negotiate, ordered him into custody he stabbed one of the negroes who seized him. At the end of the episode the returned wanderer lay in jail; but where his money was, or whether in truth he had any, is not recorded.[18] Among some of those manumitted and sent out of their original states as by law required, disappointment and homesickness were distressingly keen. A group of them who had been carried to New York in 1852 under the will of a Mr. Cresswell of Louisiana, found themselves in such misery there that they begged the executor to carry them back, saying he might keep them as slaves or sell them—that they had been happy before but were wretched now.[19]

[Footnote 18: Cassville, Ga., Standard, May 31, 1858, reprinted in the Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), June 8, 1858.]

[Footnote 19: DeBow's Review, XIV, 90.]

The slaves manumitted for meritorious service and those who bought themselves formed together an element of substantial worth in the Southern free colored population. Testamentary endorsement like that which Abel P. Upshur gave on freeing his man David Rich—"I recommend him in the strongest manner to the respect, esteem and confidence of any community in which he may live"[20]—are sufficiently eloquent in the premises. Those who bought themselves were similarly endorsed in many instances, and the very fact of their self purchase was usually a voucher of thrift and sobriety. Many of those freed on either of these grounds were of mixed blood; and to them were added the mulatto and quadroon children set free by their white fathers, with particular frequency in Louisiana, who by virtue oftentimes of gifts in lands, goods and moneys were in the propertied class from the time of their manumission. The recruits joining the free colored population through all of these channels tended, together with their descendants, to be industrious, well-mannered and respected members of society.

[Footnote 20: William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, 1855), pp. 215, 216. For a similar item see Garland's Randolph, p. 151.]

Each locality was likely to have some outstanding figure among these. In Georgia the most notable was Austin Dabney, who as a mulatto youth served in the Revolutionary army and attached himself ever afterward to the white family who saved his life when he had been wounded in battle. The Georgia legislature by special act gave him a farm; he was welcomed in the tavern circle of chatting lawyers whenever his favorite Judge Dooly held court at his home village; and once when the formality of drawing his pension carried him to Savannah the governor of the state, seeing him pass, dragged him from his horse and quartered him as a guest in his house.[21] John Eady of the South Carolina lowlands by a like service in the War for Independence earned a somewhat similar recognition which he retained throughout a very long life.[22]

[Footnote 21: George R. Giltner, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia (New York, 1855), pp. 212-215.]

[Footnote 22: Diary of Thomas P. Porcher. MS. in private possession.]

Others were esteemed rather for piety and benevolence than for heroic services. "Such," wrote Bishop Capers of the Southern Methodist Church, "were my old friends Castile Selby and John Bouquet of Charleston, Will Campbell and Harry Myrick of Wilmington, York Cohen of Savannah, and others I might name. These I might call remarkable for their goodness. But I use the word in a broader sense for Henry Evans, who was confessedly the father of the Methodist church, white and black, in Fayetteville, and the best preacher of his time in that quarter." Evans, a free-born full-blooded black, as Capers went on to relate, had been a shoemaker and licensed preacher in Virginia, but while journeying toward Charleston in search of better employment he had been so struck by the lack of religion and morality among the negroes in Fayetteville that he determined upon their conversion as his true mission in life. When the town authorities dispersed his meetings he shifted his rude pulpit into the woods outside their jurisdiction and invited surveillance by the whites to prove his lack of offence. The palpable improvement in the morals of his followers led erelong to his being invited to preach within the town again, where the white people began to be numerous among his hearers. A regular congregation comprising members of both races was organized and a church building erected. But the white attendance grew so large as to threaten the crowding out of the blacks. To provide room for these the side walls of the church were torn off and sheds built on either flank; and these were the conditions when Capers himself succeeded the aged negro in its pulpit in 1810 and found him on his own score an inspiration. Toward the ruling race, Capers records, Evans was unfailingly deferential, "never speaking to a white but with his hat under his arm; never allowing himself to be seated in their houses.... 'The whites are kind to me and come to hear me preach,' he would say, 'but I belong to my own sort and must not spoil them.' And yet Henry Evans was a Boanerges; and in his duty feared not the face of man." [23]

[Footnote 23: W.W. Wightman, Life of William Capers (Nashville, 1858), pp. 124-129.]

In the line of intellectual attainment and the like the principal figures lived in the eighteenth century. One of them was described in a contemporary news item which suggests that some journalists then were akin to their successors of more modern times. "There is a Mr. St. George, a Creole, son to the French governor of St. Domingo, now at Paris, who realizes all the accomplishments attributed by Boyle and others to the Admirable Creighton of the Scotch. He is so superior at the sword that there is an edict of the Parliament of Paris to make his engagement in any duel actual death. He is the first dancer (even before the Irish Singsby) in the world. He plays upon seven instruments of music, beyond any other individual. He speaks twenty-six languages, and maintains public thesises in each. He walks round the various circles of science like the master of each; and strange to be mentioned to white men, this Mr. St. George is a mulatto, the son of an African mother."[24] Less happy was the career of Francis Williams of Jamaica, a plaything of the human gods. Born of negro parents who had earned special privilege in the island, he was used by the Duke of Montague in a test of negro mental capacity and given an education in an English grammar school and at Cambridge University. Upon his return to Jamaica his patron sought his appointment as a member of the governor's council but without success; and he then became a schoolmaster and a poet on occasion in the island capital. Williams described himself with some pertinence as "a white man acting under a black skin." His contempt for his fellow negroes and particularly for the mulattoes made him lonely, eccentric, haughty and morose. A Latin panegyric which is alone available among his writings is rather a language exercise than a poem.[25] On the continent Benjamin Banneker was an almanac maker and somewhat of an astronomer, and Phyllis Wheatley of Boston a writer of verses. Both were doubtless more noted for their sable color than for their positive qualities. The wonder of them lay in their ambition and enterprise, not in their eminence among scientific and literary craftsmen at large.[26] Such careers as these had no equivalent in the nineteenth century until its closing decades when Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. DuBois set new paces in their several courses of endeavor.

[Footnote 24: News item dated Philadelphia, Mch. 28, in the Georgia State Gazette and Independent Register (Augusta), May 19, 1787.]

[Footnote 25: Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London, 1774), II, 447-485; T.H. MacDermott, "Francis Williams," in the Journal of Negro History, II, 147-159. The Latin poem is printed in both of these accounts.]

[Footnote 26: John W. Cromwell, The Negro in American History (Washington, 1914), pp. 77-97.]

Of a more normal but less conspicuous type was Jehu Jones, the colored proprietor of one of Charleston's most popular hotels who lived in the same manner as his white patrons, accumulated property to the value of some forty thousand dollars, and maintained a reputation for high business talent and integrity.[27] At New Orleans men of such a sort were quite numerous. Prominent among them by reason of his wealth and philanthropy was Thomy Lafon, a merchant and money lender who systematically accumulated houses and lots during a lifetime extending both before and after the Civil War and whose possessions when he died at the age of eighty-two were appraised at nearly half a million dollars.[28] Prosperity and good repute, however, did not always go hand in hand. The keeper of the one good tavern in the Louisiana village of Bayou Sara in 1831 was a colored woman of whom Anne Royall wrote: "This nigger or mulatto was rich, owned the tavern and several slaves, to whom she was a great tyrant. She owned other valuable property and a great deal of money, as report said; and doubtless it is true. She was very insolent, and, I think, drank. It seems one Tague [an Irishman], smitten with her charms and her property, made love to her and it was returned, and they live together as man and wife. She was the ugliest wench I ever saw, and, if possible, he was uglier, so they were well matched."[29] One might ascribe the tone of this description to the tartness of Mrs. Royall's pen were it not that she recorded just afterward that a body-servant of General Ripley who was placed at her command in St. Francisville was "certainly the most accomplished servant I ever saw."[30]

[Footnote 27: W.C. Nell, Colored Patriots, pp. 244, 245.]

[Footnote 28: New Orleans Picayune, Dec. 23, 1893. His many charitable bequests are scheduled in the Picayune of a week later.]

[Footnote 29: Anne Royall, Southern Tour (Washington, 1831), pp. 87-89.]

[Footnote 30: Ibid., p. 91.]

The property of colored freemen oftentimes included slaves. Such instances were quite numerous in pre-revolutionary San Domingo; and some in the British West Indies achieved notoriety through the exposure of cruelties.[31] On the continent a negro planter in St. Paul's Parish, South Carolina, was reported before the close of the eighteenth century to have two hundred slaves as well as a white wife and son-in-law, and the returns of the first federal census appear to corroborate it.[32] In Louisiana colored planters on a considerable scale became fairly numerous. Among them were Cyprien Ricard who bought at a sheriff's sale in 1851 an estate in Iberville Parish along with its ninety-one slaves for nearly a quarter of a million dollars; Marie Metoyer of Natchitoches Parish had fifty-eight slaves and more than two thousand acres of land when she died in 1840; Charles Roques of the same parish died in 1854 leaving forty-seven slaves and a thousand acres; and Martin Donato of St. Landry dying in 1848 bequeathed liberty to his slave wife and her seven children and left them eighty-nine slaves and 4,500 arpents of land as well as notes and mortgages to a value of $46,000.[33] In rural Virginia and Maryland also there were free colored slaveholders in considerable numbers.[34]

[Footnote 31: Reverend Charles Peters, Two Sermons Preached at Dominica, with an appendix containing minutes of evidence of three trials (London, 1802), pp. 36-49.]

[Footnote 32: LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels in the United States (London, 1799), p. 602, giving the negro's name as Pindaim. The census returns of 1790 give no such name, but they list James Pendarvis in a group comprising a white man, a free colored person and 123 slaves, and also a Mrs. Persons, free colored, with 136 slaves. She may have been Pindaim's (or Pendarvis') mulatto daughter, while the white man listed in the Pendarvis item was perhaps her husband or an overseer. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States: South Carolina (Washington, 1908), pp. 35, 37.]

[Footnote 33: For these and other data I am indebted to Professor E.P. Puckett of Central College, Fayette, Mo., who has permitted me to use his monograph, "Free Negroes in Louisiana," in manuscript. The arpent was the standard unit of area in the Creole parishes of Louisiana, the acre in the parishes of Anglo-American settlement.]

[Footnote 34: Calvin D. Wilson, "Black Masters," in the North American Review, CLXXXI, 685-698, and "Negroes who owned Slaves," in the Popular Science Monthly, LXXXI, 483-494; John H. Russell, "Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia," in the Journal of Negro History, I, 233-242.]

Slaveholdings by colored townsmen were likewise fairly frequent. Among the 360 colored taxpayers in Charleston in 1860, for example, 130, including nine persons described as of Indian descent, were listed as possessing 390 slaves.[35] The abundance of such holdings at New Orleans is evidenced by the multiplicity of applications from colored proprietors for authority to manumit slaves, with exemption from the legal requirement that the new freedmen must leave the state.[36] A striking example of such petitions was that presented in 1832 by Marie Louise Bitaud, free woman of color, which recited that in the preceding year she had bought her daughter and grandchild at a cost of $700; that a lawyer had now told her that in view of her lack of free relatives to inherit her property, in case of death intestate her slaves would revert to the state; that she had become alarmed at this prospect; and she accordingly begged permission to manumit them without their having to leave Louisiana. The magistrates gave their consent on condition that the petitioner furnish a bond of $500 to insure the support and education of the grandson until his coming of age. This was duly done and the formalities completed.[37]

[Footnote 35: List of the Taxpayers of Charleston for 1860(Charleston, 1861), part 2.]

[Footnote 36: Many of these are filed in the record books of manumissions in the archive rooms of the New Orleans city hall. Some were denied on the ground that proof was lacking that the slaves concerned were natives of the state or that they would be self-supporting in freedom; others were granted.]

[Footnote 37: For the use of this MS. petition with its accompanying certificates I am indebted to Mr. J.F. Schindler of New York.]

Evidence of slaveholdings by colored freemen occurs also in the bills of sale filed in various public archives. One of these records that a citizen of Charleston sold in 1828 a man slave to the latter's free colored sister at a price of one dollar, "provided he is kindly treated and is never sold, he being an unfortunate individual and requiring much attention." In the same city a free colored man bought a slave sailmaker for $200.[38] At Savannah in 1818 Richard Richardson sold a slave woman and child for $800 to Alex Hunter, guardian of the colored freeman Louis Mirault, in trust for him; and in 1833 Anthony Ordingsell, free colored, having obtained through his guardian an order of court, sold a slave woman to the highest bidder for $385.[39]

[Footnote 38: MSS. in the files of slave sales in the South Carolina archives at Columbia.]

[Footnote 39: MSS. among the county archives at Savannah, Ga.]

It is clear that aside from the practice of holding slave relatives as a means of giving them virtual freedom, an appreciable number of colored proprietors owned slaves purely as a productive investment. It was doubtless a group of these who sent a joint communication to a New Orleans newspaper when secession and war were impending: "The free colored population (native) of Louisiana ... own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land, ... and they are ready to shed their blood for her defence. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana.... They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought in 1814-'15.... If they have made no demonstration it is because they have no right to meddle with politics, but not because they are not well disposed. All they ask is to have a chance, and they will be worthy sons of Louisiana."[40] Oral testimony gathered by the present writer from old residents in various quarters of the South supports the suggestion of this letter that many of the well-to-do colored freemen tended to prize their distinctive position so strongly as to deplore any prospect of a general emancipation for fear it would submerge them in the great black mass.

[Footnote 40: Letter to the editor, signed "A large number of them," in the New Orleans Daily Delta, Dec. 28, 1860. Men of this element had indeed rendered service under Jackson in the defence of the city against Pakenham, as Louisianians well knew.]

The types discussed thus far were exceptional. The main body of the free negroes were those who whether in person or through their mothers had been liberated purely from sentiment and possessed no particular qualifications for self-directed careers. The former slaves of Richard Randolph who were colonized in accordance with his will as petty landed proprietors near Farmville, Virginia, proved commonly thriftless for half a century afterward;[41] and Olmsted observed of the Virginia free negroes in general that their poverty was not due to the lack of industrial opportunity.[42] Many of those in the country were tenants. George Washington found one of them unprofitable as such;[43] and Robert Carter in 1792 rented farms to several in spite of his overseer's remonstrance that they had no adequate outfit of tools and teams, and against his neighbors' protests.[44] Not a few indeed were mere squatters on waste lands. A Georgia overseer reported in 1840 that several such families had made clearings in the woods of the plantation under his charge, and proposed that rent be required of them;[45] and travellers occasionally came upon negro cabins in fields which had been abandoned by their proprietors.[46] The typical rural family appears to have tilled a few acres on its own account, and to have been willing to lend a hand to the whites for wages when they needed service. It was this readiness which made their presence in many cases welcome in a neighborhood. A memorial signed by thirty-eight citizens of Essex County, Virginia, in 1842 in behalf of a freedman might be paralleled from the records of many another community: "We would be glad if he could be permitted to remain with us and have his freedom, as he is a well disposed person and a very useful man in many respects. He is a good carpenter, a good cooper, a coarse shoemaker, a good hand at almost everything that is useful to us farmers."[47] Among the free negroes on the seaboard there was a special proclivity toward the water pursuits of boating, oystering and the like.[48] In general they found a niche in industrial society much on a level with the slaves but as free as might be from the pressure of systematic competition.

[Footnote 41: F.N. Watkins, "The Randolph Emancipated Slaves," in DeBow's Review, XXIV, 285-290.]

[Footnote 42: Seaboard Slave States, p. 126.]

[Footnote 43: S.M. Hamilton ed., Letters to Washington, IV, 239.]

[Footnote 44: Carter MSS. in the Virginia Historical Society.]

[Footnote 45: Plantation and Frontier, II, 155.]

[Footnote 46: E. g., F. Cumming, Tour to the West, reprinted in Thwaites ed., Early Western Travels, IV, 336.]

[Footnote 47: J.H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, p. 153.]

[Footnote 48: Ibid., p. 150.]

Urban freemen had on the average a somewhat higher level of attainment than their rural fellows, for among them was commonly a larger proportion of mulattoes and quadroons and of those who had demonstrated their capacity for self direction by having bought their own freedom. Recruits of some skill in the crafts, furthermore, came in from the country, because of the advantages which town industry, in sharp contrast with that of the plantations, gave to free labor. A characteristic state of affairs is shown by the official register of free persons of color in Richmond County, Georgia, wherein lay the city of Augusta, for the year 1819[49]. Of the fifty-three men listed, including a planter and a steamboat pilot, only seven were classed as common laborers, while all the rest had specific trades or employments. The prosperity of the group must have been but moderate, nevertheless, for virtually all its women were listed as workers at washing, sewing, cooking, spinning, weaving or market vending; and although an African church in the town had an aged sexton, its minister must have drawn most of his livelihood from some week-day trade, for no designation of a preacher appears in the list. At Charleston, likewise, according to the city census of 1848, only 19 free colored men in a total of 239 listed in manual occupations were unclassified laborers, while the great majority were engaged in the shop and building trades. The women again were very numerous in sewing and washing employments, and an appreciable number of them were domestic servants outright.[50]

[Footnote 49: Augusta Chronicle, Mch. 13, 1819, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 143-147.]

[Footnote 50: Dawson and DeSaussure, Census of Charleston for 1848, summarized in the table given on p. 403 of the present work.]

In the compendium of the United States census of 1850 there are printed in parallel columns the statistics of occupations among the free colored males above fifteen years of age in the cities of New York and New Orleans. In the Northern metropolis there were 3337 enumerated, and in the Southern 1792. The former had 4 colored lawyers and 3 colored druggists while the latter had none of either; and the colored preachers and doctors were 21 to 1 and 9 to 4 in New York's favor. But New Orleans had 4 colored capitalists, 2 planters, 11 overseers, 9 brokers and 2 collectors, with none of any of these at New York; and 64 merchants, 5 jewelers and 61 clerks to New York's 3, 3 and 7 respectively, and 12 colored teachers to 8. New York had thrice New Orleans' number of colored barbers, and twice as many butchers; but her twelve carpenters and no masons were contrasted with 355 and 278 in these two trades at New Orleans, and her cigar makers, tailors, painters, coopers, blacksmiths and general mechanics were not in much better proportion. One-third of all New York's colored men, indeed, were unskilled laborers and another quarter were domestic servants, not to mention the many cooks, coachmen and other semi-domestic employees, whereas at New Orleans the unskilled were but a tenth part of the whole and no male domestics were listed. This showing, which on the whole is highly favorable to New Orleans, is partly attributable to the more than fourfold excess of mulattoes over the blacks in its free population, in contrast with a reversed proportion at New York; for the men of mixed blood filled all the places above the rank of artisan at New Orleans, and heavily preponderated in virtually all the classes but that of unskilled laborers. New York's poor showing as regards colored craftsmen, however, was mainly due to the greater discrimination which its white people applied against all who had a strain of negro blood.

This antipathy and its consequent industrial repression was palpably more severe at the North in general than in the South. De Tocqueville remarked that "the prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated." Fanny Kemble, in her more vehement style, wrote of the negroes in the North: "They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own despised race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free certainly, but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society.... All hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues, the most vulgar as well as the self-styled most refined, have learned to turn the very name of their race into an insult and a reproach."[51] Marshall Hall expressed himself as "utterly at a loss to imagine the source of that prejudice which subsists against him [the negro] in the Northern states, a prejudice unknown in the South, where the domestic relations between the African and the European are so much more intimate."[52] Olmsted recorded a conversation which he had with a free colored barber on a Red River steamboat who had been at school for a year at West Troy, New York: "He said that colored people could associate with whites much more easily and comfortably at the South than at the North; this was one reason he preferred to live at the South. He was kept at a greater distance from white people, and more insulted on account of his color, at the North than in Louisiana."[53] And at Richmond Olmsted learned of a negro who after buying his freedom had gone to Philadelphia to join his brother, but had promptly returned. When questioned by his former owner this man said: "Oh, I don't like dat Philadelphy, massa; an't no chance for colored folks dere. Spec' if I'd been a runaway de wite folks dere take care o' me; but I couldn't git anythin' to do, so I jis borrow ten dollar of my broder an' cum back to old Virginny."[54] In Ohio, John Randolph's freedmen were prevented by the populace from colonizing the tract which his executors had bought for them in Mercer County and had to be scattered elsewhere in the state;[55] in Connecticut the citizens of New Haven resolved in a public meeting in 1831 that a projected college for negroes in that place would not be tolerated, and shortly afterward the townsmen of Canterbury broke up the school which Prudence Crandall attempted to establish there for colored girls. The legislatures of various Northern states, furthermore, excluded free immigrants as well as discriminating sharply against those who were already inhabitants. Wherever the negroes clustered numerously, from Boston to Philadelphia and Cincinnati, they were not only brow-beaten and excluded from the trades but were occasionally the victims of brutal outrage whether from mobs or individual persecutors.[56]

[Footnote 51: Frances Anne Kemble, Journal (London, 1863), p. 7.]

[Footnote 52: Marshall Hall, The Two-fold Slavery of the United States (London, 1854), p. 17.]

[Footnote 53: Seaboard Slave States, p. 636.]

[Footnote 54: Ibid., p. 104.]

[Footnote 55: F.U. Quillin, The Color Line in Ohio (Ann Arbor, Mich.), p. 20; Plantation and Frontier, II, 143.]

[Footnote 56: J.P. Gordy, Political History of the United States (New York, 1902), II, 404, 405; John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace (Boston, 1914), pp. 25-29; E.R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania (Washington, 1911), pp. 143-168, 195-204, containing many details; F.U. Quillin, The Color Line in Ohio, pp. 11-87; C.G. Woodson, "The Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War," in the Journal of Negro History, I, 1-22; N.D. Harris, Negro Slavery in Illinois (Chicago, 1906), pp. 226-240.]

In the South, on the other hand, the laws were still more severe but the practice of the white people was much more kindly. Racial antipathy was there mitigated by the sympathetic tie of slavery which promoted an attitude of amiable patronage even toward the freedmen and their descendants.[57] The tone of the memorials in which many Southern townsmen petitioned for legal exemptions to permit specified free negroes to remain in their communities[58] found no echo from the corresponding type of commonplace unromantic citizens of the North. A few Southern petitions were of a contrasting tenor, it is true, one for example presented to the city council of Atlanta in 1859: "We feel aggrieved as Southern citizens that your honorable body tolerates a negro dentist (Roderick Badger) in our midst; and in justice to ourselves and the community it ought to be abated. We, the residents of Atlanta, appeal to you for justice."[59] But it may readily be guessed that these petitioners were more moved by the interest of rival dentists than by their concern as Southern citizens. Southern protests of another class, to be discussed below, against the toleration of colored freedmen in general, were prompted by considerations of public security, not by personal dislike.

[Footnote 57: Cf. N.S. Shaler, The Neighbor (Boston, 1904), pp. 166, 186-191.]

[Footnote 58: E. g., J.H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, pp. 152-155.]

[Footnote 59: J.H. Martin, Atlanta and its Builders ([Atlanta,] 1902), I, 145.]

Although the free colored numbers varied greatly from state to state, their distribution on the two sides of Mason and Dixon's line maintained a remarkable equality throughout the antebellum period. The chief concentration was in the border states of either section. At the one extreme they were kept few by the chill of the climate; at the other by stringency of the law and by the high prices of slave labor which restrained the practice of manumission. Wherever they dwelt, they lived somewhat precariously upon the sufferance of the whites, and in a more or less palpable danger of losing their liberty.

Not only were escaped slaves liable to recapture anywhere within the United States, but those who were legally free might be seized on fraudulent claims and enslaved in circumvention of the law, or they might be kidnapped outright. One of those taken by fraud described his experience and predicament as follows in a letter from "Boonvill Missouria" to the governor of Georgia: "Mr. Coob Dear Sir I have Embrast this oppertuniny of Riting a few Lines to you to inform you that I am sold as a Slave for 14 hundard dolars By the man that came to you Last may and told you a Pack of lies to get you to Sine the warrant that he Brought that warrant was a forged as I have heard them say when I was Coming on to this Countrey and Sir I thought that I would write and see if I could get you to do any thing for me in the way of Getting me my freedom Back a Gain if I had some Papers from the Clarkes office in the City of Milledgeville and a little Good addvice in a Letter from you or any kind friend that I could get my freedom a Gain and my name can Be found on the Books of the Clarkes office Mr Bozal Stulers was Clarke when I was thear last and Sir a most any man can City that I Charles Covey is lawfuley a free man ... But at the same time I do not want you to say any thing about this to any one that may acquaint my Preseant mastear of these things as he would quickly sell me and there fore I do not want this known and the men that came after me Carried me to Mempears tenessee and after whiping me untill my Back was Raw from my rump to the Back of my neck sent me to this Place and sold me Pleas to ancer this as soon as you Can and Sir as soon as I can Get my time Back I will pay you all charges if you will Except of it yours in beast Charles Covey Borned and Raized in the City of Milledgeville and a Blacksmith by trade and James Rethearfurd in the City of Macon is my Laller [lawyer?] and can tell you all about these things."[60]

[Footnote 60: Letter of Charles Covey to Howell Cobb, Nov. 30, 1853. MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga., for the use of which I am indebted to Professor R.P. Brooks of the University of Georgia. For another instance in which Cobb's aid was asked see the American Historical Association Report for 1911, II, 331-334.]

In a few cases claims of ownership were resurrected after a long lapse. That of Alexander Pierre, a New Orleans negro who had always passed as free-born, was the consequence of an affray in which he had worsted another black. In revenge the defeated combatant made the fact known that Pierre was the son of a blind girl who because of her lack of market value had been left by her master many years before to shift for herself when he had sold his other slaves and gone to France. Thereupon George Heno, the heir of the departed and now deceased proprietor, laid claim to the whole Pierre group, comprising the blind mother, Alexander himself, his sister, and that sister's two children. Whether Heno's proceedings at law to procure possession succeeded or failed is not told in the available record.[61] In a kindred case not long afterward, however, the cause of liberty triumphed. About 1807 Simon Porche of Point Coupee Parish had permitted his slave Eulalie to marry his wife's illegitimate mulatto half-brother; and thereafter she and her children and grand-children dwelt in virtual freedom. After Porche's death his widow, failing in an attempt to get official sanction for the manumission of Eulalie and her offspring and desiring the effort to be renewed in case of her own death, made a nominal sale of them to a relative under pledge of emancipation. When this man proved recreant and sold the group, now numbering seventeen souls, and the purchasers undertook possession, the case was litigated as a suit for freedom. Decision was rendered for the plaintiff, after appeal to the state supreme court, on the ground of prescriptive right. This outcome was in strict accord with the law of Louisiana providing that "If a master shall suffer a slave to enjoy his liberty for ten years during his residence in this state, or for twenty years while out of it, he shall lose all right of action to recover possession of the said slave, unless said slave shall be a runaway or fugitive."[62]

[Footnote 61: New Orleans Daily Delta, May 25, 1849.]

[Footnote 62: E.P. Puckett, "The Free Negro in Louisiana" (MS.), citing the New Orleans True Delta, Dec. 16, 1854.]

Kidnappings without pretense of legal claim were done so furtively that they seldom attained record unless the victims had recourse to the courts; and this was made rare by the helplessness of childhood in some cases and in others by the fear of lashes. Indeed when complexion gave presumption of slave status, as it did, and custody gave color of ownership, the prospect of redress through the law was faint unless the services of some white friend could be enlisted. Two cases made conspicuous by the publication of elaborate narratives were those of Peter Still and Solomon Northrup. The former, kidnapped in childhood near Philadelphia, served as a slave some forty years in Kentucky and northern Alabama, until with his own savings he bought his freedom and returned to his boyhood home. The problem which he then faced of liberating his wife and three children was taken off his hands for a time by Seth Concklin, a freelance white abolitionist who volunteered to abduct them. This daring emancipator duly went to Alabama in 1851, embarked the four negroes on a skiff and carried them down the Tennessee and up the Ohio and the Wabash until weariness at the oars drove the company to take the road for further travel. They were now captured and the slaves were escorted by their master back to the plantation; but Concklin dropped off the steamboat by night only to be drowned in the Ohio by the weight of his fetters. Adopting a safer plan, Peter now procured endorsements from leading abolitionists and made a soliciting tour of New York and New England by which he raised funds enough to buy his family's freedom. At the conclusion of the narrative of their lives Peter and his wife were domestics in a New Jersey boardinghouse, one of their two sons was a blacksmith's apprentice in a neighboring town, the other had employment in a Pennsylvania village, and the daughter was at school in Philadelphia.[63]

[Footnote 63: Kate E.R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, being the personal recollections of Peter Still and his wife Vina after forty years of slavery (Syracuse, 1856). The dialogue in which the book abounds is, of course, fictitious, but the outlines of the narrative and the documents quoted are presumably authentic.]

Solomon Northrup had been a raftsman and farmer about Lake Champlain until in 1841 when on the ground of his talent with the fiddle two strangers offered him employment in a circus which they said was then at Washington. Going thither with them, he was drugged, shackled, despoiled of his free papers, and delivered to a slave trader who shipped him to New Orleans. Then followed a checkered experience as a plantation hand on the Red River, lasting for a dozen years until a letter which a friendly white carpenter had written for him brought one of his former patrons with an agent's commission from the governor of New York. With the assistance of the local authorities Northrup's identity was promptly established, his liberty procured, and the journey accomplished which carried him back again to his wife and children at Saratoga.[64]

[Footnote 64: [David Wilson ed.], Narrative of Solomon Northrup (New York, 1853). Though the books of this class are generally of dubious value this one has a tone which engages confidence. Its pictures of plantation life and labor are of particular interest.]

A third instance, but of merely local notoriety, was that of William Houston, who, according to his own account was a British subject who had come from Liverpool as a ship steward in 1840 and while at New Orleans had been offered passage back to England by way of New York by one Espagne de Blanc. But upon reaching Martinsville on the up-river voyage de Blanc had ordered him off the boat, set him to work in his kitchen, taken away his papers and treated him as his slave. After five years there Houston was sold to a New Orleans barkeeper who shortly sold him to a neighboring merchant, George Lynch, who hired him out. In the Mexican war Houston accompanied the American army, and upon returning to New Orleans was sold to one Richardson. But this purchaser, suspecting a fault of title, refused payment, whereupon in 1850 Richardson sold Houston at auction to J.F. Lapice, against whom the negro now brought suit under the aegis of the British consul. While the trial was yet pending a local newspaper printed his whole narrative that it might "assist the plaintiff to prove his freedom, or the defendant to prove he is a slave."[65]

[Footnote 65: New Orleans Daily Delta, June 1, 1850.]

Societies were established here and there for the prevention of kidnapping and other illegal practices in reducing negroes to slavery, notable among which for its long and active career was the one at Alexandria.[66] Kidnapping was, of course, a crime under the laws of the states generally; but in view of the seeming ease of its accomplishment and the potential value of the victims it may well be thought remarkable that so many thousands of free negroes were able to keep their liberty. In 1860 there were 83,942 of this class in Maryland, 58,042 in Virginia, 30,463 in North Carolina, 18,467 in Louisiana, and 250,787 in the South at large.

[Footnote 66: Alexandria, Va., Advertiser, Feb. 22, 1798, notice of the society's quarterly meeting; J.D. Paxton, Letters on Slavery (Lexington, Ky., 1833), p. 30, note.]

A few free negroes were reduced by public authority to private servitude, whether for terms or for life, in punishment for crime. In Maryland under an act of 1858 eighty-nine were sold by the state in the following two years, four of them for life and the rest for terms, after convictions ranging from arson to petty larceny.[67] Some others were sold in various states under laws applying to negro vagrancy, illegal residence, or even to default of jail fees during imprisonment as fugitive suspects.

[Footnote 67: J.R. Brackett, The Negro in Maryland, pp. 231, 232.]

A few others voluntarily converted themselves into slaves. Thus Lucinda who had been manumitted under a will requiring her removal to another state petitioned the Virginia legislature in 1815 for permission, which was doubtless granted, to become the slave of the master of her slave husband "from whom the benefits and privileges of freedom, dear and flattering as they are, could not induce her to be separated."[68] On other grounds William Bass petitioned the South Carolina general assembly in 1859, reciting "That as a free negro he is preyed upon by every sharper with whom he comes in contact, and that he is very poor though an able-bodied man, and is charged with and punished for every offence, guilty or not, committed in his neighborhood; that he is without house or home, and lives a thousand times harder and in more destitution than the slaves of many planters in this district." He accordingly asked permission by special act to become the slave of Philip W. Pledger who had consented to receive him if he could lawfully do so.[69] To provide systematically for such occasions the legislatures of several states from Maryland to Texas enacted laws in the middle and late fifties authorizing free persons of color at their own instance and with the approval of magistrates in each case to enslave themselves to such masters as they might select.[70] The Virginia law, enacted at the beginning of 1856, safeguarded the claims of any creditors against the negro by requiring a month's notice during which protests might be entered, and it also required the prospective master to pay to the state half the negro's appraised value. Among the Virginia archives vouchers are filed for sixteen such enslavements, in widely scattered localities.[71] Most of the appraisals in these cases ranged from $300 to $1200, indicating substantial earning capacity; but the valuations of $5 for one of the women and of $10 for a man upwards of seventy years old suggest that some of these undertakings were of a charitable nature. An instance in the general premises occurred in Georgia, as late as July, 1864, when a negro freeman in dearth of livelihood sold himself for five hundred dollars, in Confederate currency of course, to be paid to his free wife.[72] Occasionally a free man of color would seek a swifter and surer escape from his tribulations by taking his own life;[73] but there appears to be no reason to believe that suicides among them were in greater ratio than among the whites.

[Footnote 68: Plantation and Frontier, II, 161, 162.]

[Footnote 69: Ibid., II, 163, 164.]

[Footnote 70: In the absence of permissive laws the self-enslavement of negroes was invalid. Texas Supreme Court Reports, XXIV, 560. And a negro who had deeded his services for ninety-nine years was adjudged to retain his free status, though the contract between him and his employer was not thereby voided. North Carolina Supreme Court Reports, LX, 434.]

[Footnote 71: MSS. in the Virginia State Library.]

[Footnote 72: American Historical Association Report for 1904, p. 577.]

[Footnote 73: An instance is given in the Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), Aug. 26, 1830, and another in the New Orleans Commercial Advertiser, Oct. 25, 1831. The motives are not stated.]

Invitations to American free negroes to try their fortunes in other lands were not lacking. Facilities for emigration to Liberia were steadily maintained by the Colonization Society from 1819 onward;[74] the Haytian government under President Boyer offered special inducements from that republic in 1824;[75] in 1840 an immigration society in British Guiana proffered free transportation for such as would remove thither;[76] and in 1859 Hayti once more sent overtures, particularly to the French-speaking colored people of Louisiana, promising free lands to all who would come as well as free transportation to such as could not pay their passage.[77] But these opportunities were seldom embraced. With the great bulk of those to whom they were addressed the dread of an undiscovered country from whose bourne few travellers had returned puzzled their wills, as it had done Hamlet's, and made them rather bear those ills they had than to fly to others that they knew not of.

[Footnote 74: J.H.T. McPherson, History of Liberia (Johns Hopkins University Studies, IX, no. 10).]

[Footnote 75: Correspondence relative to the Emigration to Hayti of the Free People of Colour in the United States, together with the instructions to the agent sent out by President Boyer (New York, 1824); Plantation and Frontier, II, 155-157.]

[Footnote 76: Inducements to the Colored People of the United States to Emigrate to British Guiana, compiled from statements and documents furnished by Mr. Edward Carberry, agent of the immigration society of British Guiana and a proprietor in that colony. By "A friend to the Colored People" (Boston, 1840); The Liberator (Boston), Feb. 28, 1840, advertisement.]

[Footnote 77: E.P. Puckett, "The Free Negro in Louisiana" (MS.), citing the New Orleans Picayune, July 16, 1859, and Oct. 21 and 23, 1860.]

Their caste, it is true, was discriminated against with severity. Generally at the North and wholly at the South their children were debarred from the white schools and poorly provided with schools of their own.[78] Exclusion of the adults from the militia became the general rule after the close of the war of 1812. Deprivation of the suffrage at the South, which was made complete by the action of the constitutional convention of North Carolina in 1835 and which was imposed by numerous Northern states between 1807 and 1838,[79] was a more palpable grievance against which a convention of colored freemen at Philadelphia in 1831 ineffectually protested.[80] Exclusion from the jury boxes and from giving testimony against whites was likewise not only general in the South but more or less prevalent in the North as well. Many of the Southern states, furthermore, required license and registration as a condition of residence and imposed restrictions upon movement, education and occupations; and several of them required the procurement of individual white guardians or bondsmen in security for good behavior.

[Footnote 78: The schooling facilities are elaborately and excellently described and discussed in C.G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (New York, 1915).]

[Footnote 79: Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment for Negro Suffrage to 1860 (University of Wisconsin Bulletin, Historical Series, III, no, I).]

[Footnote 80: Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour, held in Philadelphia from the sixth to the eleventh of June, 1831 (Philadelphia, 1831).]

These discriminations, along with the many private rebuffs and oppressions which they met, greatly complicated the problem of social adjustment which colored freemen everywhere encountered. It is not to be wondered that some of them developed criminal tendencies in reaction and revolt, particularly when white agitators made it their business to stimulate discontent. Convictions for crimes, however, were in greatest proportionate excess among the free negroes of the North. In 1850, for example, the colored inmates in the Southern penitentiaries, including slaves, bore a ratio to the free colored population but half as high as did the corresponding prisoners in the North to the similar population there. These ratios were about six and eleven times those prevalent among the Southern and Northern whites respectively.[81] This nevertheless does not prove an excess of actual depravity or criminal disposition in any of the premises, for the discriminative character of the laws and the prejudice of constables, magistrates and jurors were strong contributing factors. Many a free negro was doubtless arrested and convicted in virtually every commonwealth under circumstances in which white men went free. The more severe industrial discrimination at the North, which drove large numbers to an alternative of destitution or crime, was furthermore contributive to the special excess of negro criminality there.