WILLIAM ELLISON’S personal experience was largely confined to the South Carolina upcountry. Nonetheless, the status of Afro-Americans in the Palmetto State and elsewhere throughout the South profoundly altered his life. White laws and white expectations hobbled an Afro-American’s every step toward full freedom. In Ellison’s world, only a few Negroes entirely escaped bondage when they obtained their liberty.
For almost two centuries before Ellison was born, free Negroes lived in North America. They accompanied the early European explorations as adventurers, sailors, and settlers.1 Among the indentured servants who served out their terms in the tobacco fields of the Chesapeake Bay region in the seventeenth century were Negroes who, like their white counterparts, became landowning farmers and participants in the local affairs of society.2 But as the planters of Virginia and Maryland shifted to slave labor in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, freedom for Negroes—like slavery—became a matter of ancestry rather than attainment. Children of the small number of free Negro mothers were allowed by law to retain their freedom. But the vast majority of the thousands of Africans who were brought to the British North American colonies in the eighteenth century were slaves, remained slaves all their lives, and had no choice but to pass that status to their children. Although accurate population figures for the Southern colonies on the eve of the American Revolution are not available, it is certain that free Afro-Americans were few and far between. The tobacco economy of the Chesapeake and the rice and indigo economy of the Carolinas were as firmly committed to slavery as the cotton economy would become in the nineteenth century. The Revolution did nothing to alter that commitment, but it did contribute to an historic increase in the number of slaves who became free.
At the beginning of the revolutionary war in Virginia, the British commander, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to slaves who would leave their masters and aid the royal cause. Hundreds of slaves rallied to the British standard, and thousands more followed them during the war, including some who belonged to Thomas Jefferson.3 The patriots did not make a matching counter-offer, though a number of Negroes served as soldiers in Northern units. A good many slaves substituted for their white masters, with the personal promise of freedom after their term of service. A few other slaves obtained their freedom in recognition of their contributions to the hard-fought military campaigns in the Southern back country.4 By the time of the first federal census in 1790, the year of April Ellison’s birth, there were 32,357 free Negroes in the South’s Afro-American population of over 68o,ooo.5 Some of these individuals were the beneficiaries of grants of freedom for their service during the war, but even more benefited from the influence of revolutionary ideas.
The rights to liberty and property were intimately linked in the natural rights ideology of the Revolution.6 For slaves, the two rights were contradictory. If a slaveowner recognized his slave’s right to liberty, he thereby relinquished his own right to slave property. Predictably, nearly all masters found it easier to honor their own property rights than their slaves’ human rights. Yet for about thirty years after the Revolution, especially in the states of the Upper South, an unprecedented number of slaveholders tipped the balance in favor of liberty. Between 1790 and 1810 the free Negro population of the Upper South more than tripled, a growth rate more than twice that of the slave population.7 Although some masters manumitted their slaves outright, most manumissions were made by will after the master’s death. George Washington’s will freed over 200 slaves upon the death of his wife Martha.8 This practice was a tidy solution to the conflict between the rights of property, which the master retained during his lifetime, and liberty, which the slave received thereafter. The number of wholesale manumissions of this sort was pitifully small compared to the total number of slaves. Probably not many more than one slaveholder in a thousand manumitted his slaves. Nonetheless, many slaves with neither privileged status nor light skin received their freedom, causing the color of the existing free Negro population to darken. By 1860, almost two-thirds of the free Afro-Americans in the Upper South were black, a consequence of liberalized manumissions a half-century earlier.9
Slaves did not passively await their freedom. Thousands simply ran away, and some of them succeeded in slipping into the growing free Negro populations of Baltimore, Richmond, or Charleston. More successful in securing their freedom were the hundreds of slaves who purchased themselves, as April Ellison probably did. As another compromise between property rights and liberty, self-purchase was far preferable to slaves than manumission by will. It may well be that slaves like Ellison who purchased themselves and then bought their family members accounted for the largest portion of the growing free Afro-American population in the Lower South before 1820. However, self-purchase was by its nature restricted to the relatively few slaves who had the skills and ambition necessary to earn extra money, the discipline and self-sacrifice needed to save it, and masters willing to accept it in exchange for freedom. Such slaves were among the slave elite to begin with, and, as the price of all slaves began to climb with the cotton boom after the War of 1812, these slaves became more expensive and their masters less willing to part with them. When Ellison gained his freedom, the era of expanded opportunities for self-purchase was rapidly drawing to a close.
In the Lower South the pace of manumission and self-purchase quickened between 1790 and 1810, but there was little of the wholesale manumission of an entire slave force, blacks and mulattoes, that was common in Virginia and Maryland.10 Instead, slaves who achieved their freedom in the Lower South were usually special in some way. Typically they were mulattoes, like April Ellison. Often they were the children or the concubines of the masters who manumitted them.11 Or, if they were not blood relatives of their master, they were likely to be a domestic servant, a nurse, a skilled craftsman, or an overseer—one of the mulatto elite who had frequent personal contact with the master. In addition, the free mulatto population of the Lower South was supplemented in the 1790s by hundreds of mulatto refugees from the bloody revolution in Santo Domingo.12 Many states refused to allow the refugees to enter, fearing that their slaves were infected with the contagious doctrines of insurrection. Nonetheless, immigrants from Santo Domingo managed to settle in several cities in the Lower South, including Charleston and, especially, New Orleans, where they formed the core of what was by 1860 the largest urban free Negro population in the Lower South.13 With their contribution, the growth rate of the free colored population in the Lower South actually exceeded that in the Upper South between 1790 and 1810, although the color of the free Negro population did not darken as it had in the Upper South. By 1860, more than three out of four free Afro-Americans in the Lower South were mulattoes.14
Soon after 1810 the period of rapid growth of the free Negro population in the South came to an end, brought about by bonanza cotton profits, high slave prices, and the waning influence of revolutionary ideas. The proportion of the Southern Afro-American population that was free reached a peak in 1810 at 8.5 percent; it declined slowly to 8.3 percent by 1830, then slumped more quickly to 6.2 percent by 1860. During the period of slow decline, the free colored population grew at roughly the same rate as the slave population. After 1830 the free Negro growth rate lagged significantly behind the slave growth rate. Few slaves after 1810 could have a glimmer of hope that they might obtain their freedom. Some did, but on the whole the free Afro-American population of the South grew naturally, and even then it did not keep pace with the burgeoning slave population. By 1860, 86 percent of the South’s 261,918 free Negroes lived in the Upper South; the Lower South, after the decades of postrevolutionary manumission and subsequent population growth, contained only 36,955 free persons of color, not many more than the 30,158 that lived in the Upper South seventy years earlier.15
The small but significant beginning of a trend in favor of freedom for Afro-Americans at the turn of the century was decisively reversed after 1830. For most of William Ellison’s life as a free man the trend ran toward slavery, and the pace accelerated with the years. By 1860, all of the quarter-million Negroes in the North were free, but 89 out of every 100 Afro-Americans in the entire nation were slaves. All but 5 percent of the nation’s Afro-Americans lived in the South, where 94 out of 100 were slaves. In South Carolina and the rest of the Lower South, the proportion of the Afro-American population that was free had dropped by 1860 to 1.5 percent, less than half what it had been in 1830. In the Lower South free people of color stood on a tiny borderland between slavery and freedom, bounded on one side by over 98 percent of the Afro-Americans who were slaves and on the other side by all of the white population, who outnumbered free people of color ninety-nine to one.16
The racial prejudice of whites was constantly reinforced by the debased circumstances of slaves’ existence: their utter poverty and dependence on their masters for food, shelter, and—many believed—foresight; the demeaning subservience and unquestioning obedience expected of them by whites; the grinding drudgery of gang labor; and perhaps most damning of all in a nation that celebrated individualism, their irrevocable lifelong sentence to be the property of another person, to be denied virtually everything whites considered their own birthright. As sociologist Orlando Patterson has written, slavery was “social death.”17 During the generation of sectional crisis, Southern politicians boasted mat slaves were better off than white workers in Northern factories, but a far more accurate guide to white perceptions of the realities of slave life were the gnawing fears of slave uprisings.18 Against all odds, slaves managed to create a culture that allowed them more individual expression and collective identity than most whites were even half-aware of. But opportunities for such simple, all-important pleasures as planting a garden, making music with friends,, choosing a spouse, or naming a baby could be ended or drastically restricted at any time by the whim of the master.19 In the context of a society that contained four million slaves, one for every two white Southerners, it is hardly surprising that whites assumed Negroes were inherently inferior and contemptible.
The assumption of black inferiority was so strong that in nearly every Southern state a person whose skin was darker than white was presumed to be a slave, unless the person had documentary proof of free status.20 The South Carolina law under which April Ellison obtained his freedom was not unusual, although it anticipated by a few years similar laws in the other states. In 1800 the state legislature resolved that “the law heretofore enacted for the government of slaves, free negroes, mulattoes and mestizoes, have been found insufficient for keeping them in due subordination” and set about to remedy the situation. The new legislation included restrictions on manumission. A master who wanted to manumit a slave now had to appear with the slave before a magistrate and five local freeholders, as William Ellison and April did in 1816, and answer under oath all their questions about the slave’s character and ability to make an honest living. If the magistrate and freeholders were satisfied, they were authorized to issue a certificate of manumission to the master, who was then required to give a copy of the certificate and of his personal deed of manumission to the slave and to record both documents with the clerk of court. If the master failed to comply with any of these steps, the manumission was void. It was then “lawful for any person whatsoever to seize [an irregularly manumitted slave] and convert [the slave] to his or her own use, and to keep as his or her property.…”21
These provisions were designed to protect the community from being burdened with the care of old or disabled free Negroes and from being harassed by those who did not maintain “due subordination.” Everyg white person was empowered to enforce the law by confronting a free man or woman of color and demanding to see the required documents, with the promise of an extremely high reward if the documents were unsatisfactory. Doubtful cases were to be resolved in favor of slavery for, as an appeals court judge wrote in 1830, “the presumption of our law is against a Negro’s freedom.”22
William Ellison undoubtedly possessed the necessary documents. But whites probably did not often ask him to produce them since he quickly established himself in Stateburg as a reputable, hard-working free person of good character. In 1832, the informal practice of local whites determining the free status of Afro-Americans was formally accepted as a legal test for the freedom of those who were not subject to the 1800 manumission law, either because they were freed earlier or because they were freeborn, like Ellison’s sons Henry, William Jr., and Reuben. In the case of State v. Harden, Justice John Belton O’Neall wrote that “Proof that a negro has been suffered to live in a community for years, as a free man, would, prima facie, establish the fact of freedom.”23 Although O’Neall’s ruling was challenged in subsequent years, it nonetheless illustrates how crucial it was for a free person of color to have a good reputation among his white neighbors. It could mean the difference between freedom and slavery. Legal endorsement of local opinion not only put a premium on free Afro-Americans’ relations with local whites but made travel to other regions of the state hazardous unless whites there knew them and accepted their freedom. In effect, the closer one stayed to home, the more secure one’s freedom.
Shortly after April Ellison was freed, a new law strengthened the connections between freedom and locale. In 1820 South Carolina prohibited manumission, except by a special act of the legislature. Concerned about the “great and rapid increase of free negroes and mulattoes in this State, by migration and emancipation,” the lawmakers also barred all “free negro or mulatto” immigrants from entering.24 The free Afro-American population in the state had indeed increased by 50 percent between 1810 and 1820, from 4,554 to 6,826.25 With the 1820 law the legislature attempted to stopper the passageway to freedom within the state and, by preventing free Negroes from leaking in across state boundaries, to create a free Negro population that was known to white South Carolinians, that understood and conformed to the state’s racial practices, and that was numerically stable or, preferably, shrinking. Although the free Afro-American population in South Carolina did not shrink, it did grow very slowly after 1820. In the next forty years the number of free persons of color in the state increased only 45 percent, less than in the decade before 1820. Similar laws in almost all the other Southern states contributed to the declining growth rate of the free Afro-American population after 1830.26
LIKE Ellison, most free Afro-Americans reached for freedom and security in the society dominated by whites. They took the world as they found it and sought to wring from it whatever they could. Living in a society in which more than nine out of ten Negroes were slaves and in which most whites believed all ten should be, their principal goal was to preserve their freedom. To avoid slipping backward into bondage, they had to give their freedom substance. In the 1820s the free people of color in South Carolina whose success most closely paralleled Ellison’s lived in Charleston. Their strategy, like Ellison’s, was to accommodate to the boundaries of their existence as set by the white majority and to distance themselves from slaves, even to the point of becoming slaveholders.
But accomodation to whites and separation from blacks was not an acceptable strategy to every free person of color in South Carolina. In the same year that Ellison bought the land for his gin shop, a hundred miles away another remarkably gifted free man of color set out on a radically different path to freedom. In the lovely city of Charleston, with its white steeples, beautiful gardens, and shaded mansions, Denmark Vesey plotted a full-scale insurrection against white power. Rather man allying upward with powerful whites, Vesey chose to reach down to the masses of blacks and lead them in a revolution against slavery. At the age of fifty-five this black Moses would take his people out of the land of bondage or die trying. His own status as a free man and his considerable wealth and standing could not overcome his identification with the oppression and humiliation of slaves. He chose to become a revolutionary assassin rather than to remain a privileged, though disadvantaged, member of a tyrannical regime. The only life he aspired to was one in which all blacks were free.27
Until the year 1800, Denmark Vesey was a slave. The first historical record of Vesey dates from 1781, when he was among the human cargo Captain Joseph Vesey transported from St. Thomas to Santo Domingo. This clever fourteen-year-old became a favorite of the crew and was dubbed Telemarque. Captain Vesey sold him, only to have him returned three months later by the purchaser, who declared him unfit. Thereafter Telemarque worked as a seaman on his master’s ship in the Caribbean trade. In 1800, back in Captain Vesey’s home port of Charleston, Telemarque, now Denmark, had an improbable stroke of good fortune. He won $1,500 in the East Bay lottery. With his windfall he bought his freedom and set up a carpenter shop. In time Vesey became a skilled and respected craftsman, amassing property valued at several thousand dollars, including a home on Bull Street. A literate man, he also became a class leader in the African Church of Charleston. The church was founded in 1818 after more than three-quarters of the city’s 6,000 Afro-American Methodists withdrew from the white-led Methodist church to form their own independent congregation under the guidance of Bishop Morris Brown, who for several years had been in contact with the leaders of the new African Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia. Uneasy about the autonomy of these Afro-American Methodists, Charleston authorities harassed the black congregation and finally closed the church in 1821.
The decision of Charleston whites to deny black Charlestonians a church of their own helped precipitate Vesey’s conspiracy, but other influences also contributed. Vesey read newspapers regularly and followed national politics. In 1820 the news columns brimmed with debates on the Missouri question. The political crisis in Washington about the future of slavery in the West convinced Vesey that whites were badly divided on the question of the existence of slavery. He spread the story that Congress had emancipated the slaves but that white Southerners refused to enforce the law. Vesey knew the ringing proclamations of the natural rights of freedom and equality found in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Even more pertinent, he understood the way these ideals had been translated on the island of Santo Domingo into a slave rebellion that evolved into a revolution, ending the institution of slavery and creating the struggling republic of Haiti. As important as any other influence was Vesey’s reading of the Bible, which proved to him that slavery was contrary to God’s will. He was drawn to the story of Israel delivered rather than to St. Paul’s admonitions that servants should obey their masters. Taken together, Vesey’s beliefs convinced him that God’s children were called—by the laws of the nation, of nature, and of God—to battle for justice and freedom. These ideas put Vesey squarely in the tradition of the revered founders of me nation. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison, however, Vesey had no doubts that slaves were among God’s children.
He gradually gathered around him a cadre of lieutenants: Gullah Jack Pritchard, Monday Gell, Peter Poyas, Rolla Bennett, Mingo Harth, and others. All were slaves, but several were skilled artisans like Vesey. Most belonged to the banned African Church, and some were African-born, as Vesey himself may have been. Gullah Jack, an Angolan, hoped to draw upon the African traditions of the slaves, thousands of whom had been brought to South Carolina when the state reopened the African slave trade from 1804 through 1807. A conjurer, Gullah Jack empowered parched corn, ground nuts, and crab claws to protect those who joined the revolution. The conspirators’ plan was evidently quite simple. At midnight on July 14, 1822, they planned to attack the city arsenal, capture its weapons, kill all the whites they encountered, and set fire to the city. When the flames lit up the skyline, rural rebels whom Vesey and his followers had recruited in the months of patient preparation were supposed to rush into the city to complete the victory. What the revolutionaries planned to do with their victory is not clear. Bits of testimony, much of it suspect because it was coerced, indicate that Vesey may have planned to sail away, possibly to Haiti, with as many blacks as he could crowd aboard a ship. It is also conceivable that Vesey believed the rebels could not only take Charleston but hold it and establish a black nation modeled after Haiti. About all that is beyond question is that Vesey and the rebels believed that many whites must die if blacks were to be free.
Exactly what Vesey and his allies would have done with their victory will never be known because, as with dozens of other slave conspiracies in the New World, other Negroes—both slave and free—betrayed it. Slowly at first, then with gathering speed, the conspiracy began to unravel. The first arrests came in May when a slave named Peter Desverney informed his master of an effort to recruit him to the insurrection. One arrest led to another as supects, under the threat of death, implicated others. Shaken by each disclosure, Charleston authorities did all in their power to root out every conspirator. After three months of feverish investigations, 131 Afro-Americans stood accused. In the end 35 received death sentences, 37 others banishment from the state. Peter Desverney and George Wilson, another slave whose disclosures foiled the conspiracy, received their freedom and an annuity from the state legislature. The state also gave cash rewards to two free Negroes, William Pencil and a man named Scott, who alerted whites to the plot.
When the presiding magistrate sentenced Denmark Vesey to death he declared, “It is difficult to imagine what infatuation could have prompted you to attempt an enterprise so wild and visionary. You were a free man; were comparatively wealthy; and enjoyed every comfort, compatible with your situation. You had, therefore, much to risk, and little to gain. From your age and experience, you ought to have known, that success was impracticable.”28 Vesey’s behavior baffled the white judge. The judge’s assessment of Vesey’s worldly circumstances was accurate enough; he was comparatively well-off and privileged relative to most of his race. But he was also a visionary. As a free man he could have left the slave society of South Carolina at any time. Instead, he chose to stay and try to bring it down. The practicality of a slave insurrection was not Vesey’s chief concern. The realists’ arguments about matters of power and advantage meant little to this committed revolutionary.
William Ellison was a very different sort of man, despite the resemblances between his biography and Vesey’s. Both men personally experienced slavery, Vesey for thirty-three years, Ellison for twenty-six. Both gained their freedom and succeeded in establishing themselves as prosperous tradesmen. Both were intelligent, resourceful men, and neither had a volatile or spontaneous nature. They were deliberate men, and they deliberately chose different paths. While Ellison worshiped with the planter aristocracy, Vesey attended an independent black church. Ellison lived in a beautiful upcountry village of white slaveholders, while Vesey lived among the poor blacks of Charleston. Ellison bought slaves, owned them, and exploited them, while Vesey worked with slaves in the shops and on me wharves of Charleston, associated with them in the churches, taverns, and alleys of the city, and ultimately conspired with them to overthrow the system of slavery. The only slaves Ellison associated with he owned. Ellison may have shared the judge’s wonderment that a man like Vesey, with “so much to risk” and “so little to gain,” would have attempted what he did. In Ellison we can see the truth of C.L.R. James’s observation that in “a slave society the mere possession of personal freedom is a valuable privilege….”29 Freedom was a privilege Ellison refused to risk. Vesey wanted to remake his world in the name of freedom; Ellison only wanted to make freedom work for him.30
As every slave knew, to avoid revolutionary violence did not necessarily mean slavish submission to white power. Ellison struggled to endow his freedom through hard work and careful accommodation. In 1822 he must have had a growing sense of confidence in his strategy. He had only to look around him to see how far he had come in six years. His scrupulous mix of self-assertion and deference paid handsome dividends in increased wealth and respect. Most importantly, his success had secured the freedom of his family. Denmark Vesey could not say the same. Vesey was married to at least one woman who was a slave, and he had several slave children. Just before he was sentenced to death, Monday Gell mentioned that “Vesey said he was satisfied with his own condition, being free, but as all his children were slaves, he wished to see what could be done for them.”31 Ellison also did what he could for his four free children by submitting to what he thought he could not change and by making every effort on their behalf within society’s constraints. Gradually, with judicious forethought, he enlarged the boundaries of his family’s existence. If Ellison ever had any doubts about the course he was following—and there is no evidence he did—Vesey’s fate must have erased them. Accommodation, compromise, and patience, joined with a keen sense of opportunism and a large measure of simple good luck, paid off; revolutionary violence led to the gallows.
Regardless of where it might have gone, Denmark Vesey’s path had in fact become a dead end. Nonetheless, Vesey had a powerful impact on the life of every free person of color in South Carolina from 1822 to the Civil War. His leadership of a slave conspiracy linked all free Negroes to the uprising, even though elite free people of color in Charleston cooperated with the city’s whites to crush the rebellion. Free people of color became a conspicuous caste, worthy of legislative attention and white watchfulness because they might be tempted to take Vesey’s path. The response of white South Carolinians communicated to all free people of color—including the gin maker in Stateburg—the vulnerability of their freedom, the harsh reality of white power, and the depth of the South’s commitment to slavery.
THE Vesey conspiracy raised the question of the place of all free Afro-Americans in a slave society. Legislatures throughout the South clamped down on manumissions, expressing a collective judgment that freedom should not be available to any slaves, that the free Negro population would not grow by the incorporation of individuals who had personally made the transition from slavery to freedom, that the line separating slavery and freedom should coincide as closely as possible with that separating whites from Negroes. However, the existing free Afro-American population made it difficult to squeeze Southern society into the rigid categories of whites’ racial logic. What should be done with these people? They were free, but they were also Negroes.
As whites came to terms with this question, they defined the extent of freedom for Afro-Americans. The details of the laws governing free Negroes varied from state to state, but the overall pattern was uniform.32 Whites had a divided mind about free Negroes. On the one hand, whites feared them as disciples of Denmark Vesey and thus wanted to separate them as much as possible from association with slaves and from identification with their plight. On the other hand, whites despised free Negroes (except for the few “respectable” individuals they might know personally) because of the inferiority of their race and thus sought to push them down to the status of slaves, where they would not contravene the assumptions of racial inferiority. Whites never resolved these contradictory impulses. Both were visible in the legislation in every Southern state. While the two imperatives existed in uneasy balance throughout the antebellum years, the inclination to collapse the distance between free Negroes and slaves, to allow racial assumptions to degrade free status, carried more weight.
Vesey’s conspiracy provoked the South Carolina legislature to confront the explosive relationship between slaves and free Negroes. Instead of tightening the restrictions on slaves, the legislature fettered free people of color. Within months of the execution of the last conspirator in Charleston, legislators erected the basic legal structure of white governance of free Negroes. They localized and particularized the freedom of Afro-Americans. Any free person of color who left the state was prohibited from returning, upon penalty of enslavement. Every male free Negro over fifteen who remained in the state was required to obtain a white guardian, “a respectable freeholder of the district” in which the free man of color resided. The guardian had to appear before the clerk of court in his district, attest in writing to the “good character and correct habits” of the free man of color, and record with the clerk his acceptance of the guardianship.33 The penalty for a free person of color who failed to conform to these provisions was the same as for reentry into the state: enslavement. The clear intent of the legislature was to create a definitive list in every courthouse of each free man of color in the district. If one’s name was not on the list, one was not free. The law provided that a white informant who notified authorities that a certain free man of color was not in compliance with the law would be rewarded with half the proceeds of the sale of the man into slavery.
With the 1822 law the very existence of one’s freedom, whatever the documentary proof for it under previous laws, was now contingent on having a personal relationship with a reputable white man, a relationship that was close enough for the white man to guarantee to the rest of white society one’s “good character and correct habits.” It was in the interest of free men of color to have guardians who were as high up the social ladder as possible. No white man would be willing to assume a guardianship for a stranger, and most would be reluctant to become a guardian unless they trusted the man of color enough to risk the possible embarrassment of having their trust betrayed before the white community. Free men of color had to work constantly to curry favor with whites in the hope that they could eventually prove themselves and obtain a suitable guardian. In the eyes of the law, the guardian was not responsible for the acts of his free colored ward. Instead, he agreed to guarantee to the rest of the white community that the free man of color would behave properly. Although the relationship between guardian and free colored ward was different from that between master and slave, the racial distribution of power was much the same. The guardianship law was colored by the same assumptions about white authority and Negro deference that were implicit in slavery.
Most states in the Lower South enacted guardianship laws.34 Much the same effect was achieved in the other Southern states by laws requiring each free person of color to register with the local court.35 In South Carolina, free Negro registration dated from a 1792 law that required free persons of color between the ages of sixteen and sixty to pay a two-dollar capitation tax each year.36 If one neglected to pay the tax, one could be sold for a term of service long enough to cover the arrears.37 As with the registration laws in the other states, the purpose was not simply to enact a discriminatory tax upon free persons of color. The capitation tax was designed to create an annual accounting of the free colored population in each district. If one’s name did not appear on the list, one’s freedom was subject to challenge. By the same token, appearance on the tax list was prima facie evidence that one was free, without resort to more complicated legal tests. As a practical matter, whites and free persons of color alike tended to refer to the annual registration or tax lists as the pertinent legal evidence for the existence of freedom. In South Carolina, producing the receipt for payment of the annual capitation tax was usually sufficient for a free Negro to convince a skeptical white that he or she was free.
For freedom to be secure from legal challenge, however, a Negro had to be able to prove free birth or manumission before 1820, and each adult male had to have a duly recorded white guardian. Free Afro-American compliance with the guardianship law, unlike that with the capitation tax and annual registration, was irregular. Still, every well-advised free person of color complied with the letter of the law. In Sumter District, where the only list of free Negro guardianships has survived, many free persons of color went beyond the requirements of the law.38 At least 28 of the 100 Sumter free Afro-Americans who obtained guardians between 1823 and 1842 were females, who were not required by the law to do so. Several of the white guardians accepted guardianships of an entire family of free persons of color, as William Ballard did in 1833 for Mary Johnson and her children William, Jim, John, and Martha, or as Jacob Whiting did in 1840 for James, Harriot, Catherine, and Joseph Smiling.
As the 1822 guardianship law slipped farmer into the past, it was not rigorously enforced and many free persons of color were probably entirely unaware of it. In Sumter District, after an initial burst of seventeen guardianships were registered in 1823, only one to four were recorded in subsequent years, fewer than if compliance had been perfect.39 Most likely, many of those who were freeborn neglected to obtain a guardian under the mistaken assumption that they did not need one, either because their father’s guardian was, by extension, theirs or because they simply did not know about the law. So long as they stayed near home, where their freedom was known, they were unlikely to be challenged to prove it; and if they were, they could always show the capitation tax receipt. In general, the security of Afro-Americans’ freedom was greatest among whites who knew them on a personal, face-to-face basis. Although the existence of freedom for persons of color was precisely defined in law, in practice the legal complexities were seldom invoked. Instead, informal acceptance of one’s freedom by local whites was the crucial determinant.
Since local acceptance overrode the law in daily life, masters continued to manumit some slaves, even after the South Carolina law of 1820 made it illegal. These favored Negroes lived as free persons in the neighborhood where their freedom was accepted, despite its illegality. The practice prevailed throughout the South.40 Whites were willing to recognize the will of a master as supreme over the law so long as the peace and security of the neighborhood were not disturbed. Although the exact incidence of illegal manumissions cannot be known, Judge O’Neall wrote in 1848 that the South Carolina prohibition on manumission had “caused evasions without number.”41 The freedom of such persons was extremely insecure. A disgruntled heir, an unscrupulous neighbor, or any other white person could challenge a Negro’s freedom in court and expect to succeed in returning the person to bondage.
To avoid such a precarious existence for favored ex-slaves, masters and their legal advisors devised a more reliable way to evade the law. A master who wanted to manumit a slave would sell or give the slave to another person in trust, specifying that the slave was to be allowed to live as a free person. The trust had the legal advantage of pitting the expressed intent of the master against the 1820 law, a contest masters could expect to win. The test case was Carmille v. Administrator of Carmille, finally settled in 1842.42 The trial judge had held against the freedom given six slaves under a trust on the grounds that it was an “undisguised attempt to evade the law of the State, forbidding emancipation.” On appeal, the trial court was overruled, with Justice O’Neall speaking for a unanimous court in affirming the trust. O’Neall said, “Kindness to slaves … is the true policy…. Nothing will more assuredly defeat our institution of slavery, than harsh legislation rigorously enforced.” The problem, as O’Neall wrote six years later, was that, “All laws unnecessarily restraining the rights of owners are unwise.”43 “The State has nothing to fear from emancipation” under the old law of 1820, he wrote. “Many a master knows that he has a slave or slaves, for whom he feels it to be his duty to provide. As the law now stands, that cannot be done. In a slave country, the good should be especially rewarded. Who are to judge of this, but the master? Give him the power of emancipation, under well regulated guards, and he can dispense the only reward, which either he, or his slave appreciates.”
Despite the opposition of O’Neall and others, the state legislature declared in 1841 that “a trust or confidence, either secret or expressed, that such slave or slaves shall be held in nominal servitude only, shall be void.”44 The new law did not apply to trusts effected before its passage, but after 1841 the trust loophole to freedom was closed. Some masters continued to slip around the law and allow a few slaves to live as if they were free. But after 1841 the freedom of these individuals was no more secure than those who were manumitted without the provision of a trustee. Their freedom was totally dependent on local acceptance or indifference, which usually was available simply because so few slaves were thus “freed.”
Free Negroes with impeccable legal credentials were still subject to many of the same laws as slaves. In South Carolina they were tried for all criminal offenses before a magistrate’s and freeholders’ court, a tribunal that only heard cases involving slaves and free Negroes. Their testimony, like that of slaves, was acceptable in this court but never under oath. In the courts that heard cases involving whites, the testimony of free persons of color and slaves was not admissible. Free Afro-Americans could not serve on a jury, nor could they qualify as a freeholder to be included on a magistrate’s and freeholders’ court. They could be sentenced to the same punishments as slaves, including hanging for capital offenses and, for lesser crimes, whipping, confinement to stocks, imprisonment, and the treadmill. In addition, they could be fined, a punishment slaves could not suffer since they could not own property.45
The quality of justice handed down by the magistrate’s and freeholders’ courts was mixed at best. As an appeals court judge, Justice O’Neall reviewed numerous verdicts against slaves and free Negroes, which led him to conclude that the courts were “the worst system which could be devised … [since] the passions and prejudices of the neighborhood, arising from a recent offense, enter into the trial, and often lead to the condemnation of the innocent.”46 The presiding magistrates often did not know or understand the law, resulting in many “errors and abuses of power.” O’Neall censured the “whippings inflicted” by the courts as “most enormous—utterly disproportionate to [the] offenses.”47 Despite O’Neall’s scathing criticisms, the system was not reformed. Instead, O’Neall was attacked bitterly for publishing his views, which his enemies considered to be both incorrect and impolitic.48 In a careful study of free Negroes’ encounters with the law in Spartanburg District between 1830 and 1860, historian Michael Hindus found that free people of color were prosecuted at six times the rate of slaves. Hindus attributes part of the differential to masters avoiding the courts and dispensing their own version of justice on the plantation, and part to simple harassment of free Negroes. One free Afro-American couple in Spartanburg was prosecuted thirteen times in nineteen years and acquitted each time.49
The summary proceedings, harsh sentences, and frequently erroneous verdicts were perfectly acceptable to most whites because they assumed that free Negroes, like slaves, had to be kept completely subordinate. Furthermore, the courts gave the force of law to the notion that just as each slave was subject to his master, so each free person of color was subject to the white community in general. Like the power of masters over their slaves, legal power over free people of color was decentralized to each courthouse where the fate of an accused was decided by six of his white neighbors. There were no well-defined rights of appeal from these courts, except after 1833 in capital cases.50 Thus the administration of justice for free Afro-Americans, like that for slaves, was firmly in the hands of local whites.
Important as the court system was in linking free Afro-Americans with slaves and separating them from whites, still more important was the strict requirement of racial subordination that suffused the entire society. Like slaves, free persons of color were forbidden to strike a white person under any circumstances. “They cannot repel force by force; that is, they cannot strike a white man, who may strike any of them,” Justice O’Neall wrote in 1848.51 In a case sixteen years earlier, a white man was convicted of cruelly beating a free Negro man named Tom Archer without provocation. O’Neall refused to overturn the conviction on appeal, concluding that “to no white man does the right belong of correcting, at pleasure, a free negro.” However, for O’Neall—who was a moderate man in such matters—the problem in this case was not the beating but the absence of provocation. “Free negroes belong to a degraded caste of society,” he wrote; “they are, in no respect, on a perfect equality with the white man … they ought, by law, to be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors … [and] words of impertinence or insolence addressed by a free negro to a white man would justify an assault and battery.”52 Even by this strict standard, O’Neall concluded, Tom Archer did not deserve to be beaten.
In the daily round of life, every free person of color had to be constantly on guard against committing some act that a white person might consider an act of insolence: a sharp word, a careless boast, failure to remove one’s hat, or neglecting to give a passing white man proper deference on the street. Any of these and dozens of other acts might be interpreted as insolence and justify a white man in “correcting” a free person of color. Of course, not every encounter between a white person and a free Negro was tense and verging on explosion. In a quantitative sense, by far most were calm and unexceptional, primarily because free people of color knew so well the high risks of not conforming to white expectations. In every encounter with a white person, the person of color had to exercise restraint, to discipline spontaneity, to scrutinize each statement and every gesture for anything potentially offensive. The legal definition of insolence was intentionally vague. O’Neall recommended that “As a general rule … whatever in the opinion of the jury, would induce them, as reasonable men, to strike a free negro, should, in all cases, be regarded as a legal justification in an indictment….”53 Slaves were somewhat less subject to this charge since, if a white person corrected them for failure to demean themselves properly, the white person had to answer to the slave’s master. If the white person corrected a free Negro, he had no other person to account to, unless, as in the case of Tom Archer, the correction was so outrageous that it aroused whites’ sympathy. Each day free Afro-Americans had to convince the whites they saw that they were sufficiently inferior. Each day they had to be prepared to act instinctively toward whites as if they were as subordinate as slaves.
Informal enforcement of racial subordination was supplemented by the formal institution of the patrol. In South Carolina every adult white man was required to participate in (or send a substitute to) the patrol, a group of men charged with riding the local beat several times a month looking for Negroes engaged in suspicious activity. The patrol was primarily designed to police slaves, to prevent them from leaving their home plantation without permission, from stealing crops and livestock, from assembling together secretly for any purpose, and from running away. But any free Negro on the road, especially at night, was likely to be stopped and interrogated by the patrol. If the free person of color could not supply the patrol with proof of freedom, he or she was assumed to be a slave and treated accordingly. In addition, the patrol had the authority to break into any dwelling they suspected of harboring a Negro in violation of the law. In effect, they had no-knock power to harass and intimidate any free colored family. Privacy for every free Afro-American family depended on being above reproach in the eyes of whites, on never being suspected of aiding a runaway, of trading with slaves, or of meeting secretly with slaves for any purpose. The patrol was also required to look for violations of laws that prohibited free Negroes from carrying a firearm without the written permission of their guardian; from meeting together for any purpose behind closed doors that were locked or barred to prevent quick and easy access to the patrol or any other white person; from keeping a still or selling liquor to slaves; and, after 1834, from keeping a school to teach slave or free colored children to read and write.54
All these prohibitions were extensions of restrictions on slave behavior. They reflected the persistent fear of whites that free Afro-Americans might exploit thir freedom to aid slaves to strike against their masters. At the same time, the absolute insistence on racial subordination and the pervasive assumption of racial inferiority pushed free Negroes to the edge of slave status, giving them what a late twentieth-century observer might think were ample reasons to sympathize and identify with the plight of slaves. Thousands did, especially with slaves who were members of their families. But for every free person of color who, like Denmark Vesey, conspired with slaves to undermine slavery, there were thousands of free Afro-Americans throughout the South who saw their fate as separate and distinct from that of slaves as a group, whatever they might think about individual slaves who were their kinfolk. The risks of cooperating in an attempt at insurrection were so great as to be suicidal; whites had most of the people and all of the guns. A less dramatic but much more important risk for free people of color was associating with slaves in their daily lives in any way that raised white suspicions. Suspicions could bring down on free Negroes all the repressive consequences of the mistrust of local white people. Free people of color understood that slaves were the source of their own problem with whites, that their skin color was debased by that of slaves. Thus most free Afro-Americans put what distance they could between themselves and slaves.
FREE Afro-Americans were able to distance themselves from slaves because, despite all the ways the law assimilated them to near-slave status, it also gave invaluable protection to their life, liberty, and property. A white man who murdered a free Negro was guilty in the eyes of the law of the same crime as the murder of a white person. Of greater moment to free Afro-Americans was the possibility of being kidnaped and sold into slavery. Kidnapings were not uncommon, especially in cities where the absence of an individual free person of color was less likely to be noticed quickly. However, most whites deplored kidnapings, and in South Carolina after 1837, the crime was punishable by a fine of not less than $1,000 and imprisonment of not less than one year.55 Countless guardians filed suits for “ravishment” of their free Negro wards; in other words, they accused another white person of reducing their ward to servitude, a form of kidnaping.56 Free Negroes could protect themselves from unprovoked assaults by court actions and indictments, including bringing suit against white persons for assault and battery and filing writs of habeas corpus.57 These protections were sorely limited by the prohibition against free persons of color serving on juries or testifying against whites. Thus an assault upon a free Afro-American that was not witnessed by another white person was unlikely ever to be tried because, even if it had been witnessed by dozens of other free Negroes or slaves, none of them could testify in court. Nonetheless, the legal protections against assaults on life and liberty were invoked numerous times during the antebellum years, and the courts often punished the guilty parties.
While these legal safeguards provided a certain security to those persons of color whose free status was unimpeachable, nothing gave more positive content to freedom than the legal protection of contracts. Free persons of color could make contracts between themselves and with whites. The law stood behind the contracts in every way as if they were between two whites.58 Above all, protection of contracts meant that the marriage of free Negroes was legal. While slave marriages had no legal status, free persons of color could pass on their precious heritage of freedom. Unlike slaves, free persons of color could protect their families against arbitrary disruption by whites. They could provide for them, shelter them, teach them, and bequeath to them any property they had accumulated, none of which slaves were allowed to do.
Perhaps the single most impressive achievement of free Afro-Americans was keeping their families remarkably intact. In this respect, William Ellison was no exception. In South Carolina in 1860 (outside the city of Charleston), two-thirds of the free Negro households were headed by men.59 Almost three out of four of these men lived with their wives, and more than eight out of ten of these couples had co-residing children. In the entire state two-thirds of all children were in male-headed households, and 60 percent of all children were in households with both a mother and father present. These statistics are remarkable because they demonstrate how common it was for free Afro-Americans to succeed in maintaining and protecting their families, despite the odds against them.
In addition to the discriminatory laws and social practices, free colored families faced other unique pressures. Masters’ policy of selective manumission of only a favored few slaves tended to separate the manumitted from their kinfolk who remained slaves. Like William Ellison, many freed slaves purchased the freedom of a spouse and children. Many other free persons of color had a spouse or children who remained slaves. Few freed slaves could afford to purchase an enslaved family member. Ellison’s skill as a gin maker and his ability to generate a considerable income soon after his manumission were rare. The earning potential of freed women was especially low, which helps account for the third of free colored households in South Carolina that were headed by women without a co-residing spouse. Only about half as many male-headed households did not have a spouse.60 Almost three-quarters of these women had co-residing children, and on the average they had almost as many children as in households with both parents present (3.3 children versus 3.6). Some of these women were undoubtedly widows of free Negro men. But many of them probably had slave husbands. Even if the women had been financially able to purchase their husbands, they were prohibited from freeing them after 1820. Perhaps a few of these women owned their husbands as slaves. If so, the women were still managing to pass along their freedom to their children.
Others among the women without co-residing spouses were concubines of white men. Some of the white men who fathered these women’s children were their former masters. Others were white men who chose not to reside with the women who bore their children. In the racial climate of antebellum South Carolina, most white men would not want to acknowledge their mulatto children or their Negro concubine. Although the exact proportion of concubines among the free Afro-American women without co-residing spouses cannot be known, a rough estimate is that they numbered about a third of these women, or about one free colored household in ten.61 In South Carolina, unlike many other Southern states, a marriage between a free person of color and a white person was perfectly legal.62
In 1860 there were just a few co-residing interracial couples in the entire state. About one family in a thousand in South Carolina, some seventy-one in all, was composed of one or more free persons of color and one or more white persons with the same surname.63 Forty-four of these families were headed by Negro men with white wives; all but two of the men were mulattoes. Seventeen families were headed by a white man with a Negro wife, all but two of whom were mulattoes. Two other families were composed of a white man without a co-residing spouse but with mulatto children. Eight households were headed by a woman; in four instances, a mulatto woman with white children, and in the other four cases, vice versa.
Although these interracial families were found throughout the state, a disproportionate number of white-headed families were in the low country; 27 percent of all free Negro households were in the low country compared to 53 percent of the white-headed interracial families. Typically, the white men were poor farmers, like John Andress, a fifty-one-year-old farmer with $150 in real estate who lived with his mulatto wife Rosanna and one mulatto child in Beaufort District.64 This regional distribution of the white-headed households is probably the result of the relative scarcity of white women in the densely slave-populated tidewater.
Interracial families headed by free Afro-American men were somewhat underrepresented in the low country and correspondingly overrepresented in the middle districts of the state, in part because of the relatively greater availability of poor white women who were willing to marry a Negro man. More importantly, these women may have been of mixed white and Afro-American ancestry, even though they appeared white. There is no way to be certain whether the census enumerators connoted both ancestry and color by the designation “white.” Was Martha Bells, the wife of the propertyless thirty-five-year-old mulatto laborer Henry Bells, of unmixed ancestry, or was she only white in appearance?65 Evidence that many of the enumerators were guided by color alone is that two of Martha Bells’s children, Selena and Ellen, were listed as whites, while William, Zachariah, and Mary—her other three children—were listed as mulattoes. In all of the interracial households headed by Negro men, 65 of the 155 children were listed as whites, strong evidence that appearance, not ancestry, was what counted with many enumerators. Many of these children, their white mothers, and the white men with mulatto wives may have been passing over the racial line, even though they remained part of an identifiably Negro household. At least these households are evidence that as late as the 1850s the color line in South Carolina was not absolutely impenetrable.
Passing was undoubtedly more common than these few families suggest.66 Unlike most other Southern states, South Carolina never defined precisely who was white. Most other slave states required a “white” person to have no Negro ancestor in the previous two generations, regardless of the person’s white appearance.67 In South Carolina, the determination of whether a person was white was left, as was so much else, to the judgment of the local white community. The question frequently arose in the courts during the antebellum years.68 It was important because if one were adjudged a free Negro, one could not testify against whites, one was tried in magistrate’s and freeholders’ courts, and one was subject to the special taxes and harsh restrictions, in addition to the blot on the family name, with all that implied for one’s standing in white society. For one white person to accuse another of being a mulatto was an actionable offense. The response was often quick and violent, but if a false accusation reached the courts, it could be punished by awards of up to $500 to the slandered.69
But how, exactly, was the crucial determination to be made? If the person in question had, Judge William Harper wrote in 1835, “a visible admixture [of races] evidenced by the color … the hair or [other] features, the person is to be regarded as of the degraded class.” On the other hand, if the person “exhibited none of the distinctive marks of the African race,” Harper wrote, then he or she was qualified to be considered officially white. In the case Harper was deciding, the individuals whose race was questioned were proven to have had one-sixteenth Negro blood. Yet, Harper wrote, the grandfather of these persons, “although of dark complexion, had been recognized as a white man, received into society, and exercised political privileges as such; their mother was uniformly treated as a white woman; their relations of the same admixture have married into respectable families, and one of them had been a candidate for the legislature.” What counted was acceptance by the local white community. Harper thus found the persons in this case to be white. He recommended that “a man of worth … should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of admixture should be confined to the inferior caste.”70 The decision in each case was up to the jury. As Judge O’Neall wrote in 1848, “Whenever the African taint is so far removed, that upon inspection a party may be fairly pronounced to be white, and such has been his or her previous reception into society, and enjoyments of the privileges usually enjoyed by white people, the Jury may rate and regard the person as white.”71 Although William Ellison was regarded by Stateburg whites as a “man of worm,” he was not accepted as white because he was clearly a man of color, a “yellow man,” as he put it in his petition to change his name. His children were also recognizably persons of color. Even if Ellison’s color had been white, however, local white people always had the last word. As a practical matter, white appearance counted for more when the color of one’s ancestors was not common knowledge. That meant South Carolina had quite a few individuals known as white colored persons.
SECOND only to the freedom to marry and maintain a family was the freedom to choose an occupation and own property. Again, the legal protection afforded contracts made by free persons of color made it possible for a free Negro to contract for work or payment with any other free person and, if necessary, to resort to the courts for the enforcement of the terms of the agreement, just as William Ellison did.72 This legal protection did not mean that free Afro-Americans could make contracts as if they were white persons. As members of a degraded caste, they were almost always at a disadvantage in negotiations over wages and prices. Any sharp dealing would test one’s respectability and might diminish one’s standing in the eyes of some whites. The market for goods and services was never free or unconstrained. It was always conditioned by free Negroes’ dependence on local whites.
The economy also put free Afro-Americans at the mercy of local whites. There were simply too few free persons of color for them to trade principally among themselves. They were scattered too widely across the state (with the exception of Charleston) to make extensive trading practical. By necessity they depended on white patronage for what they had to sell, just as they depended on whites to supply them with much of what they needed to buy, from household items to agricultural tools, credit, and, in the case of persons like William Ellison, such specialized services as factoring and banking. Whites, on the other hand, were rarely dependent on free Negroes. In most cases whites had the option to get from other whites in the neighborhood the labor, skills, or products they bought from free persons of color. Ellison’s highly prized gins made him an exception. But few other free Afro-Americans enjoyed a position at a critical juncture in the economy. The economic relationship between most free people of color and whites was far from reciprocal. Despite the law’s equal protection of contracts, the agreements were always heavily weighted in favor of whites.
Laborers were at the greatest disadvantage in reaching agreements on wages or other compensation. They competed not only with white laborers but also with slaves. As a general rule, free colored laborers were probably employed by whites who could not afford slaves or who had some jobs for which they temporarily needed extra labor. The great majority of South Carolina’s free Negroes whose occupations were listed in the 1860 federal census were laborers of one variety or another, some 60 percent in all.73 One in five free Negro men was a farm laborer; another 23 percent simply listed themselves as laborers or day laborers, although many of them undoubtedly did agricultural work. A few others had somewhat more specialized laboring jobs: six ditchers, four railroad hands, two timber cutters, two boatmen, two teamsters, and one ostler, waterman, fisherman, miner, gardener, huckster, and sawmill hand. In addition to these laborers, another 12 percent of free Afro-American men were landless farmers. Many of them may have been farm laborers; others may have been tenants. Although tenants probably had more day-to-day control over their labor than the typical free Negro laborer, they, like all the others, depended on being hired.
Women were even more concentrated than men at the lowest occupational levels. Three out of four women were laborers, compared to 55 percent of the men. One-fifth of the women were simply called laborers; another 16 percent were farm laborers. The largest group was composed of servant women, who accounted for one woman in three. In addition to the thirty-five undifferentiated servants, there were fifty-nine washers, thirty-two domestics, thirteen cooks, and three stewardesses. Landless farmers made up another 6 percent. Servants typically worked around their employers’ households, but all the other women laborers probably did agricultural work that was not much different—if it differed at all—from slave labor. Free colored laborers of both sexes probably worked side-by-side with slaves much of the time. In many instances, the census listing of a laboring occupation was a euphemism for what amounted to a hired field hand.
Artisans enjoyed more control over their work and, because they possessed a specialized skill, more leverage than laborers in negotiations for hire. But like laborers, they depended for their sustenance on being employed by someone else, typically whites. Although they too competed with slave labor, it was only with the small minority of slaves who were craftsmen. More frequently they competed with white tradesmen. The 190 free Negro carpenters, for example, competed for work with 1,515 white carpenters, as well as with the numerous slave carpenters. To compete effectively and to insure the patronage of their white customers, free Negroes needed to be more reliable, more available, and usually cheaper than their white counterparts. Color had its cost, although it cannot be calculated precisely.
Like William Ellison, almost a third (31 percent) of free Afro-American men were craftsmen. Unlike Ellison, his three sons, and his first grandson, none of the others was a gin maker. Almost half (47 percent) were carpenters; another 11 percent were blacksmiths. The other tradesmen included twenty-four mechanics, twenty-three shoemakers, twenty-three masons, nineteen tailors, nineteen apprentices, nine wheelwrights, eight painters, four millers, three each of bakers, cabinetmakers, tanners, and millwrights, two each of harness makers and engineers, and a cooper, a carriage maker, a basketmaker, a tinner, a collar maker, a coachmaker, a plasterer, a chairmaker, and a wagonmaker. Among free Negro women, about one in six did artisanal work. Most of them worked with needle and thread, including forty-six seamstresses, eleven mantua makers, and one milliner. Five others worked as weavers, two as bakers, one as a spinner, and another as an apprentice. Although the free colored artisans possessed the autonomy in their work that accompanied their skill, they were no more independent of whites than were laborers. One had to do good work and be compliant to get a job, and to be even more so to keep one. Like laborers, most free colored artisans were easy to replace.
Farmers who owned their land had the greatest independence from whites.74 They could plant what they chose and dispose of it however they decided. They could provide for most of their families’ necessities and some of their desires. While they had to trade with whites and thus suffered from the same white prejudice that afflicted other free Afro-Americans, they did not depend completely on whites for their sustenance. However, only one free person of color in ten was a farmer who owned any real estate. Many of the skilled craftsmen saved enough to acquire some real estate, but often it was no more than a small lot for a home and a garden plot. In the entire state only 29 percent of all free persons of color owned any real estate. The mean value of the real property of these individuals was $824. However, 80 percent of them owned less than $2,000 worth of real estate, and their mean property value was $185, no more than a few acres at best. Only fifty-five free Negroes, 4 percent of all free colored households, owned real estate worth between $2,000 and $5,000. Those who owned property worth more than $5,000 numbered twenty-seven, 2 percent of the total population. If ownership of real estate is taken as a rough measure of the relative security of the free Afro-American population, then the 71 percent who owned no real estate had the least security, followed by 24 percent who owned an average of $185. In all, 94 percent of the population owned either no land or very little. Only 6 percent owned enough real estate to have at least a small farm and the security and independence it might make possible. In the nation as a whole in 1860, 18 percent of all white men owned real estate worth $2,000 or more, three times as many as among South Carolina’s free persons of color.75 Likewise, me mean value of property owned by white men nationwide in 1860 was more than three times greater than the mean for South Carolina’s free Afro-Americans.76 Clearly, most free persons of color in every occupation, including farming, received little security from the ownership of real estate.
A few free Afro-Americans in South Carolina had occupations that might be termed petty enterprise or nonmanual. Among the women engaged in nonmanual labor were five nurses, five midwives, one governess, and one “Doctress,” Mary Rials, a fifty-year-old poor black woman who lived in Marlboro District. Men with nonmanual occupations included four Methodist Protestant ministers in Chesterfield District—John Stephens, a seventy-five-year-old mulatto man and his three sons, J. J., J. W., and Reuben; a prosperous merchant in Barnwell District—Henry Lease, who reported wealth of $7,700; two musicians, a bartender, a trader, an overseer, and H. Simons, a forty-eight-year-old propertyless native-born black man who lived in Georgetown District and was a “Root Doctor.” The dependent character of all these occupations suggests that they were concentrated at the bottom of the pyramid in free society. Ninety-eight out of one hundred free Afro-Americans in South Carolina did manual labor of one sort or another. A middle class, defined as those who hired rather than were hired, was virtually nonexistent.
MOST free persons of color in South Carolina were poor. In 1860 the mean total wealth per free Negro household was $644, one-fifteenth the mean wealth of white families, which was over $10,000.77 However, most free Negroes were even poorer than the mean value suggests. One-third of all free colored households reported no wealth whatever. Just above the propertyless were another 61 percent of the population who had wealth of less than $2,000; their mean wealth was $414. The overall mean for this bottom 94 percent of all free Negroes was $270. In other words, all but six out of a hundred free Afro-Americans were desperately poor. They owned some clothing, a few household items, some farm tools, rarely a horse, or mule, or cow, and some of them had a little money under the mattress. Their poverty made them all the more dependent on wages. Although they might fish or hunt and raise vegetables, they needed cash to pay the rent, since seven out of ten owned no real estate. In addition, they had to pay the annual capitation tax or risk being sold into servitude for back taxes.
For most, life was a never-ending struggle to make ends meet. William Bing, a fifty-year-old mulatto farmer in Barnwell District, owned no real estate but reported personal property valued at $500. By comparison to most other free Negroes, Bing, his wife Frances, and their seven children were well off. Sarah Callahan, a sixty-seven-year-old black farmer, and her two farm laborer sons in Abbeville District had $60 in personal property. Morgan Collins, a twenty-eight-year-old mulatto laborer in Darlington District, was propertyless. Perlina Morris, a thirty-two-year-old domestic in York District, had $20 worth of personal property. To these individuals and the thousands of others like them, Bing was in an enviable position. He did not have to worry about having enough cash to pay the capitation taxes for himself and his family. Although he was a tenant, he may well have owned his tools and thus have brought to his agreement with his landlord more than just his labor. None of these things was true of people like Callahan, Collins, and Morris. The economic margin that separated them and most other free persons of color from slaves was extremely small, and for many it did not exist. Unlike slaves, they lacked a white master who had an economic interest in their survival and well-being. A white guardian was not a provider. Economic security, autonomy, and independence were hopes and prayers, not realities. Under these conditions, maintaining one’s freedom and providing for one’s family required hard work, endurance, self-denial, and the ability to improvise constantly—actions that over the course of a lifetime assumed heroic proportions, the heroism of survival.
Color made a difference in the economic welfare of free Afro-Americans. On the average, mulattoes were better off than blacks. The mean wealth of mulattoes was $525, more than twice the mean for blacks, $233. Although blacks made up 35 percent of the potential wealth holders, they owned only 19 percent of all the wealth of free Negroes. Black women were the worst off. They made up 14 percent of the potential wealth holders, but they had only 5 percent of the wealth, a mean of $154. The mean wealth of black men was considerably more, $283, although still pathetically small. The mean wealth of mulatto women was $464, more than three times greater than that of black women. Mulatto men, who made up 47 percent of the potential wealth holders and owned 61 percent of the wealth, had a mean wealth of $549. The difference between mulattoes and blacks was greater than that between the sexes. Women made up 32 percent of all wealth holders and had 25 percent of the wealth, with a mean of $332, while the mean for men was $467.
The major reason for the economic differences between mulattoes and blacks was evidently that whites preferred to deal with mulattoes. The differences cannot be accounted for by mulattoes having a significantly higher proportion of skilled artisans than blacks. The distribution of occupations among black and mulatto men was almost identical: 33 percent of mulatto men were craftsmen, compared to 29 percent of black men; 46 percent of black men were laborers, compared to 43 percent of mulatto men. The largest difference between the occupations of blacks and mulattoes was among women who worked at skilled needlecrafts; 21 percent of mulatto women did such work, compared to 10 percent of black women. The differences between the wealth of mulattoes and blacks also cannot be attributed to more mulattoes being farmers: 23 percent of black men were farmers compared to 25 percent of mulatto men; more black women than mulatto women were farmers, 14 percent to 10 percent. Among the 6 percent of all free Negroes who owned $2,000 or more, however, blacks were significantly underrepresented. While 35 percent of all potential wealth holders were black, blacks made up only 19 percent of the top 6 percent. Furthermore, the wealth owned by these relatively prosperous blacks was less than that owned by mulattoes in the same group. Blacks owned 11 percent of the total wealth owned by those with $2,000 or more; their mean wealth was $3,508, just over half that of mulattoes’ $6,544.
Some of the mulatto advantage must have come from favors given by white parents: some cash, some land, some credit, or perhaps most valuable of all, some contacts among white neighbors. This sort of head start undoubtedly aided mulattoes more frequently than blacks. But probably more significant than what mulattoes were given by their white parents or patrons was what they were able to earn for themselves because whites preferred to deal with them rather than with blacks. White prejudice acted as a filter that selectively allowed a few mulattoes to achieve a measure of economic security, while blacks were held back. Among the twenty-nine richest free Negroes, only two were blacks. The richest black man in 1860 was Wade Saunders, a fifty-four-year-old farmer who lived in Newberry District with his eight children. He owned real and personal property worth $12,000.
The top 6 percent of free Afro-American wealth holders—eight out of ten of them mulattoes—owned more than ten times their share of all the wealth owned by free persons of color, 61 percent. Their mean wealth was $5,977, twenty-two times greater than the mean wealth of the bottom 94 percent of the population. At the apex of the economic hierarchy were 2 percent of the population who possessed 41 percent of the wealth; these twenty-nine individuals had a mean wealth of $12,696, which compared favorably with that of whites. Included in this economic elite were ten individuals who owned $10,000 or more. Seven of the ten were farmers, although two of the men also worked as carpenters. The two women, Susan Moore in Edgefield District and Margaret Harris in Georgetown District, were probably widows. Curiously, they owned no real estate. Each of them reported personal property worth $35,000, which made them, after William Ellison, the wealthiest free persons of color in the state outside Charleston. All of the men reported some real estate, but in every instance it was equaled or exceeded by the value of their personal property. The largest real estate holder was Robert Collins, a sixty-year-old mulatto farmer in Georgetown District who owned $10,000 worth.
Members of the economic elite had a disproportionate share of their wealth in personal property. Among the top 2 percent of wealth holders, real estate accounted for only a little over a quarter (28 percent) of their total assets. The next 4 percent of wealth holders had over half (54 percent) of their wealth in real estate. These less prosperous individuals were still concerned with establishing an economic foothold by the purchase of land. The members of the top group were able to divert a large fraction of their wealth to the purchase of slaves. The sixty-five-year-old farmer Lewis Kinsey in Barnwell District, for example, owned nineteen slaves. Another Barnwell farmer, a thirty-eight-year-old mulatto named John Berry, owned ten slaves. The exact number of slaveowners among the free Negro population outside the city of Charleston is not known, but it probably did not exceed one hundred individuals and may have been closer to fifty, most of them among the top 6 percent of wealth holders. In the entire state of North Carolina in 1860 there were only eight free Negro slaveowners.78 In South Carolina it was certainly true that the ownership of more than two or three slaves was confined to the economic elite. Whatever their desires, very few free Negroes could afford to own slaves.
Thirty years earlier, when slaveownership among free persons of color may have been near its peak, only sixty-nine individuals outside the city of Charleston owned any slaves.79 Almost two out of three of these individuals owned only one to four slaves, and some of the slaves may have been family members. Ex-slaves like April Ellison who had been freed before the 1820 prohibition on manumission were probably never in a better position to buy family members who were slaves. The price of slaves continued to rise with the demand for cotton, while the economic fortunes of most free Afro-Americans did not rise accordingly. Soon after Ellison purchased his wife Matilda and his daughter Eliza Ann and immediately freed them, as the law then allowed, he also purchased other slaves and used them in the same ways white slaveholders did, for their labor. Ellison was not alone. In 1830 one-quarter of the free colored slaveholders owned more than ten slaves; eight of them owned thirty or more. The two largest slaveholders, Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, both of Colleton District, each owned eighty-four slaves. For these free Negro planters, slaveholding was neither a philanthropic gesture nor a strategy for uniting family members. It was instead a way to get ahead economically. By 1860 none of them had done as well as Ellison.