Family Bonds

Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia

Ted Maris-Wolf

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469620084
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Between 1854 and 1864, more than a hundred free African Americans in Virginia proposed to enslave themselves and, in some cases, their children. Ted Maris-Wolf explains this phenomenon as a response to state legislation that forced free African Americans to make a terrible choice: leave enslaved loved ones behind for freedom elsewhere or seek a way to remain in their communities, even by renouncing legal freedom. Maris-Wolf paints an intimate portrait of these people whose lives, liberty, and use of Virginia law offer new understandings of race and place in the upper South. Maris-Wolf shows how free African Americans quietly challenged prevailing notions of racial restriction and exclusion, weaving themselves into the social and economic fabric of their neighborhoods and claiming, through unconventional or counterintuitive means, certain basic rights of residency and family. Employing records from nearly every Virginia county, he pieces together the remarkable lives of Watkins Love, Jane Payne, and other African Americans who made themselves essential parts of their communities and, in some cases, gave up their legal freedom in order to maintain family and community ties.

CHAPTER ONE

FREEDOM BOUND IN A NEW REPUBLIC

Daniel Hickman was born enslaved, likely in Accomack County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, in 1787, the same year James Madison and other slaveholding Virginians helped to draft the United States Constitution in Philadelphia.1 Hickman, like others born after him, entered a society of contradictions in a new nation whose founding principles professed to “secure the blessings of liberty” to Americans and their posterity, yet which denied his personhood and promised to hold him forever as the property of others. If the Revolution had transformed Americans’ notions of freedom, the foundations of the peculiar institution in Virginia and other southern states proved strong enough to withstand the tremors created by Revolutionary rhetoric and sporadic calls for general emancipation.2

Virginia’s legislature did embrace the Revolutionary spirit in at least a limited way by prohibiting the importation of African slaves into the state and by passing a law that allowed slaveholders to manumit slaves without having to seek special permission from the General Assembly.3 Despite the actions of a few Quakers, Methodists, and other individuals who liberated themselves from their human chattel, however, most Virginians remained committed to the notion of a slaveholding commonwealth and republic.4 In fact, Virginia’s reputedly liberal manumission law of 1782 failed to recognize the inalienable right to freedom, which Thomas Jefferson had so eloquently claimed for himself and his white peers, for the state’s enslaved population. Rather, the manumission law implicitly defined liberty as a privilege that might be bestowed upon slaves by their owners, and it encumbered the legal freedom some black individuals might now receive with a set of social controls designed to maintain white dominance.5 Free blacks traveling outside their home county would be required to carry court-certified proof of their status. In addition, those free blacks who failed to keep up with their taxes could be hired out “for so long a time as will raise the said taxes and levies.”6 Such legal controls would prove difficult to enforce, and they did little to ease the concerns of whites who opposed manumission altogether. Even many emancipators or proponents of the gradual abolition of slavery agreed with Jefferson that blacks, once freed, “should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper.” Deportation, not restrictive legislation, would be the only way to avoid the “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”7 Jefferson’s views on this matter were extreme, but the laws of the new states, from Massachusetts to South Carolina, alienated African Americans—enslaved or free—from most rights due citizens of the new republic.8 On paper they were to be foreigners of sorts, or at best native strangers.9

To the chagrin of Jefferson and many other founders of the nation, free and enslaved blacks in Virginia would continue to recall the Revolution as a struggle to achieve the God-given freedom of all people—and they would do so in the very terms in which patriots had framed their resistance to British authority. For many free people of color in the new nation, Revolutionary notions crystallized in claims to citizenship; either explicitly in petitions to local courts or state legislatures, or less formally in forging lives of quiet dignity in their neighborhoods. Words such as those of Patrick Henry lived on in the hearts and minds of enslaved Virginians, some of whom appropriated the rhetoric of patriots to directly seek “death or Liberty” for themselves, or at least claimed new freedoms within the bounds of bondage.10

The overwhelming majority of Virginia slaveholders remembered the Revolution differently. Planters and smallholders alike reconciled themselves to the American dream that had long predated their new republic; their freedom and livelihood rested upon the bondage of others and upon a political system designed to protect their interests.11 Though the young state was home to a diverse white population of men and women of English, Welsh, German, Scotch-Irish, and French descent who represented a wide range of interests and socioeconomic levels, public opinion among whites of all classes, it had seemed to Jefferson, “would not yet bear the proposition” that their society could peaceably exist without the institution of slavery, no matter how gradually it might be abolished.12 Virginia Quakers and Methodists who pushed state legislators in the 1780s to recognize liberty as “the birthright of mankind, the right of every rational creature” and to pass a law for general emancipation were in the minority, and the Methodists gradually accommodated themselves to slavery.13 And from the beginning, a minority of citizens petitioned the state government to repeal the manumission law of 1782 altogether and avert the growth of a free black population that, in their view, threatened Virginia’s fragile social stability, already shaken by the war.14

In the quarter century after 1782, an appreciable minority of slaveholding Virginians manumitted slaves under the new law, whether to abide by “the Laws of Religion” and of “Morality,” to encourage discipline among the enslaved by offering emancipation as an incentive for good behavior, or to smooth the financial transition from tobacco to wheat cultivation.15 Enslaved Virginians, too, took the initiative to make a law written by and for white slaveholders work to their own advantage. Nearly one-fifth of those manumitted from 1794 to 1806 either purchased their own freedom or had been purchased by an already-free family member.16 By 1790, within ten years of the manumission law’s passage, the free black population in Virginia had more than quadrupled, to 12,866 people, a population greater than that of any other southern state and more than one-third of all free blacks in the South.17 As a young man, Daniel Hickman saw the population of free blacks in his own Accomack County more than double from 721 in 1790 to 1,541 in 1800, when free African Americans constituted nearly 14 percent of the county’s free population.18

In 1793, legislators in Richmond passed a law that prohibited free blacks or mulattoes from migrating into the state and another that required those already in residence to register with local authorities—concessions to that part of the white electorate who felt most concerned by the potentially growing presence of free blacks.19 Yet at the same time lax enforcement of the laws suggests that a more moderate majority of whites felt ambivalent or even tolerant toward free blacks with whom they worked, socialized, and lived in their neighborhoods.20 As long as the institution of slavery went unchallenged, these whites accepted the presence of a free black minority in their counties.21

By the time Daniel Hickman was in his teens, Revolutionary fervor had largely run its course, and for some whites worries over the presence of free blacks in the state had become inseparable from increasing anxieties over a restive enslaved population. A successful slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) had kept many of Virginia’s whites fearful of rebellions closer to home throughout the 1790s and beyond.22 But it was Gabriel’s failed slave rebellion near Richmond in 1800 that served as tangible proof to those who were looking for it that the state’s racial order was fracturing; although Gabriel himself was a slave, some whites believed that free blacks abetted or inspired subversive activities such as his. For several years after Gabriel’s plot to overthrow the state government, legislators engaged in lively debate over how best to monitor or restrain the state’s free black population.23

A vast range of white opinion emerged. Some wanted to prohibit further manumissions of slaves outright. Others, however, continued to defend the slaveholder’s right to release slaves. Finally, by 1806, the General Assembly arrived at a compromise—a law stating that no person emancipated from slavery in Virginia after that time could “after being twenty-one years of age, remain in this state more than one year without lawful permission.”24 Jefferson’s vision of making deportation a condition of freedom for blacks had become a legal reality. Moreover, the law stated that any free person who claimed freedom through his or her relationship with another who had been freed since 1 May 1806, as a child might through his or her mother, also had to leave the state when he or she reached the age of twenty-one.25 The new expulsion law denied the hard-liners their wish to abolish the right to manumit, but the threat of uprooting newly freed people from their homes, friends, and families gave pause precisely to those whites whose humane impulses might otherwise have led them to liberate slaves; thus the law of 1806 acted as a brake on further manumissions.26 Soon after the law’s passage, however, white Virginians began petitioning the Virginia state legislature for its enforcement—a clear sign that local authorities were proving reluctant to apply the law to free blacks in their neighborhoods. For every petition calling for the expulsion of free blacks from the state, another sought permission for a free man or woman of color to be exempted from the law and to be allowed to remain in Virginia. Thus, observant free blacks might well conclude that their white neighbors were anything but unified in their views toward restrictive state laws.27 Without a systematic analysis of existing court records for all Virginia counties from the years 1807 to 1849, there is no way of knowing the extent to which authorities collectively enforced the expulsion law of 1806 during the first half of the nineteenth century.28 Studies of several Virginia localities suggest, however, that the law, like the earlier free black registration law, was only sporadically enforced, and that its enforcement varied over time.29 As a result, far more free people of color remained in Virginia in flagrant violation of the 1806 law than has been previously appreciated.30 Of Virginia’s free blacks in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Luther Porter Jackson seems to have accurately concluded that “despite the avalanche of laws and abuses, they stayed in the state.”31

White opinion in Virginia had long deplored the rapid increase in the state’s free black population, at least in the abstract, and the census returns for 1810 and 1820 seemed to confirm whites’ worst fears; by 1820 nearly thirty-seven thousand free blacks appeared on the state’s census rolls, almost twice the number of the free black population in the entire Deep South.32 Moreover, some would-be emancipators were loath to subject such blacks as they might set free to the discrimination that would face them in a white supremacist society, including the possibility, however remote, of expulsion from the state under the law of 1806. For these reasons, some emancipators now included an important provision in their wills requiring freed people to leave the state as a condition of their liberty. More than a few whites, including then-president and former Virginia governor James Monroe, enthusiastically supported the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization founded in 1816 with the goal of encouraging the nation’s free blacks to emigrate to Africa.33 The ACS had its own Virginia chapter, which helped fund the passage of free blacks to Liberia and provided them with limited support and land upon arrival. Historians continue to debate the intentions and goals of ACS officials, of those who manumitted blacks and sent them to Liberia, and of free black settlers themselves. What is clear is that the organization attracted various black and white Virginians and repelled others (mostly blacks). Some viewed its mission as benevolent—to establish a colony for free blacks in a place where they could thrive as free people, far from the restrictive laws and repression they experienced in Virginia. Others saw ACS objectives as pernicious—to rid Virginia of an unwanted population perceived by prejudiced whites to be unfit for freedom and dangerous to the institution of slavery. Between 1820 and 1865, the ACS succeeded in relocating about thirty-seven hundred free Virginians to Liberia, more than emigrated from any other state, many of whom later died from disease.34 For most free blacks in Virginia, however, attachment to home and limited enforcement of the law of 1806 made a move to Liberia (or even to some free state or territory within the United States) unappealing and unnecessary.

The expulsion law of 1806, like other repressive laws on Virginia’s books, did matter to free people of color, even if it was rarely enforced; the law remained at the disposal of local authorities and could be applied to free black individuals, especially during times of crisis, stress, or heightened racial tension. Ever since the expulsion law took effect, a few free blacks in Virginia had attempted to avoid the threat of expulsion not by moving to the North or to Liberia, but rather by seeking legal re-enslavement. One Lucinda in King George County in 1815 formally petitioned the state legislature for permission “to become a slave to the owner of her husband.”35 Lucy Boomer of Lunenburg County asked the state for permission to “make choice of a Master” in 1835 so that she could remain in the state.36 Rachel Cox of Powhatan County renounced her freedom during a session of the county court in 1851 after being prosecuted for violating the 1806 law, becoming once again the property of her former mistress’s estate.37 Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a handful of free Virginians found creative ways to enslave themselves in order to remain at home in their communities, either by offering themselves for sale for a nominal fee (as did one seventy-year-old woman in Norfolk, who sold herself into slavery for $1 in 1837) or, in contrast, by publicly selling themselves to the highest bidder (as Peter, a resident of Fauquier County, did in 1850).38

By New Year’s Day, 1831, Daniel Hickman, of “light Black” complexion, now forty-three years old and standing five feet nine inches tall, found himself a free man in Accomack County, his owner Elijah Hickman having emancipated him in his will.39 Though Hickman left no known record of his feelings or expectations at the time of his liberation, the experience of the more than twenty-five hundred free blacks who lived in Accomack County—and their use of, and treatment by, local courts—suggests th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 / Freedom Bound in a New Republic
• 2 / Black Clients, White Attorneys
• 3 / The Doswell Brothers Demand a Law
• 4 / Family and Freedom in the Neighborhood
• 5 / To Liberia and Back
• 6 / Family Bonds and Civil War
• 7 / The Barber of Boydton
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index