North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715–1885

Warren Eugene Milteer

• Editore: LSU Press
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780807173787
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: African American History

In North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as "negroes, " "mulattoes, " "mustees, " "Indians, " "mixed-­bloods, " or simply "free people of color." From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful businesspeople and winning the respect of their white neighbors. Milteer's innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included. North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever­-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

CHAPTER 1

Making Race, Remembering Freedom

Constructing Racialized Liberty

As George and Joseph Bennett prepared to leave Gates County, North Carolina, to cross into neighboring Virginia, the two young men met with local justices of the peace to obtain freedom papers. These documents would prove their liberty in the event their free status ever came into question. The justices provided each man with a document dated May 14, 1794, that explained that he was “free born” and the son of “an Injun [sic] and a free woman.” In case someone needed to verify that the papers pertained to the men who possessed them, each freedom document gave a physical description of the holder. George’s free papers described him as “about Twenty five years of age . . . about five feet seven Inches high with a scar over his Left . . . Eye” while Joseph’s pass stated he was “about Twenty four years of age about five feet nine Inches high with a scar over his Right eye.”1 After receiving the free papers, the Bennetts made their way to Norfolk County, Virginia. What happened to Joseph is unclear, but George eventually left Virginia. He returned to Gates County to reside in the community known by locals as “Indian Town.” There, George lived among other descendants of the indigenous Chowan people. When George and Joseph were children, the county clerk had recognized their indigenous heritage and registered them as “Indian” in the court’s minute book.2 The clerk also described them as “Indian” in the 1790s, when they participated in the sale of the last piece of the Chowan reservation.3 Yet when the census enumerator came through the Indian Town neighborhood in 1810, he classified George Bennett along with the other Chowan descendants as “free colored” persons.4

The story of George and Joseph Bennett reveals that a person became a “free person of color” not through something purely biological but through an intellectually complex process of categorization. Therefore, George Bennett could be an “Indian” in one context and “free colored” in another. Other incidents described in this chapter tell a similar story. “Free person of color” was a sociopolitical construct that denoted free status and categorization as not white. Yet this construct only functioned because North Carolinians supposed that through a series of determinations a person could be categorized as “white,” “Indian,” “negro,” “mulatto,” “mustee,” or “of color.” This is what sociologists Sarah Daynes and Orville Lee aptly described as “belief in race.”5

People in early North Carolina had to decide individuals’ racial categorizations through processes of evaluation, even when they believed racial categories corresponded to biology.6 They used a series of schema such as skin color, hair texture, behavior, reputation, and features of one’s ancestors to construct racial categories and organize individuals within their society into those categories. Their evaluations and decisions produced a situation in which people with a spectrum of physical features and various family histories fell into the same categories. The census taker may have categorized George Bennett as a “colored” person because of his physical appearance or based on his understanding that Bennett had non-European ancestry, or in the vernacular of the early nineteenth century, “negro” or “Indian” blood.

Before the end of the Civil War, freedom was something that had to be proven, and public memory through either individual understandings or documentation was the only way people could establish their freedom. Community members recognized a person as free because they recognized aspects of that person’s past that signaled liberty. As in the case of the Bennetts and many others, they were free because their neighbors recalled that their mother was free, a standard designated within the law. Neighbors’ memories of their liberation from enslavement supported others’ freedom. North Carolinians also used documents to reinforce public memory of freedom.

Making Race

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, North Carolinians spoke of and understood racial categorization or a person’s so-called “race” through ancestry. They believed that individuals were free persons of color because of their lineage or “blood.”7 In reality, however, they actually had to rely on schemas to categorize people as “white,” “Indian,” “colored,” “negro,” “mulatto,” or “mustee.” Sociologists have defined schemas as “mental structures in which knowledge is represented.”8 Examples of schemas used to determine racial categorization included skin color, hair texture, behavior, reputation, and memories about an individual’s ancestry. North Carolinians believed that through their sight and memory they could successfully categorize a person as white or not white. They agreed that dark skin made someone “colored” while fair skin made someone “white.” This is the aspect of so-called “race” that is cultural. Yet because schemas such as dark skin and fair skin are mental representations and not actual things in the world, North Carolinians regularly failed to agree on the border between dark skin and fair skin and therefore sometimes struggled to classify people, inconsistently categorized people, or disagreed about individuals’ categorizations.

Legal experts and common people all attempted to define free persons of color by discussing ancestry. In their 1857 opinion for the case State v. Chavers, members of the North Carolina Supreme Court declared, “free persons of colour may be then for all we can see, persons coloured by Indian blood, or persons descended from negro ancestors beyond the fourth degree.”9 The state’s highest jurists provided North Carolinians with what appeared to be a clear definition of who should be categorized as a free person of color. Other North Carolinians offered similar yet less straightforward definitions. Writing in the 1850s, William D. Valentine, an active member of the Whig Party and attorney in eastern North Carolina, explained, “Free negroes are slaves and their descendants emancipated by Quakers and other benevolent whites once owners of them. The mulatto is the offspring between the white and the negro, or between the Indian and the negro, or between the white and the Indian.”10 Recalling the experiences of his antebellum childhood, O. W. Blacknall wrote that free people of color

are almost wholly a hybrid race. . . . Of course the proportion of those with blood more or less mixed was very much larger. Indeed, of all the hundreds of free negroes that I have known from childhood, I cannot now recall a dozen black or very dark ones . . . many, if not the larger part, of the free negroes whose freedom dates back further than this century show traits of mind and body that are unmistakably Indian. In many instances, long, coarse, straight black hair and high cheek-bones are joined with complexions whose duskiness disclaims white blood and with features clearly un-African. True, these extreme types are the exception; but the majority shade up to it more or less closely.11

All of these definitions reveal a complexity of backgrounds, while projecting a simplistic view of the world in which people can be separated into pure “races” and hybrid “races.” All of these nineteenth-century men believed that race was something observable and quantifiable. Yet racial categorization was a more convoluted process.

People believed that ancestry could be connected to racial categorization largely because the schemas they associated with certain types of ancestry aligned with the assumed ancestry or race of an individual. North Carolinians could be certain that Sam Bailem was a person of color because his skin was “very black.”12 Even Tom Mitchell’s “yellow complexion” unambiguously fell within their definition of a person of color.13 Thomas Bowser’s “bushy head” of hair along with his “very dark complexion” supported his categorization as a colored person.14 J. M. Harris, however, had to know something about William Revills’s family background in order to recognize him as a person of color because Revills’s “nearly white” complexion allowed him to “pass as a white boy” potentially.15 A stranger might have considered Revills to be “white,” but the public memory shared among those who knew him best allowed them to classify him as “colored.”

The case of William P. Waters, however, reveals that North Carolinians’ assumptions about the essential nature of race in their society were flawed. Racial categorization was not something fixed in biology, but something to be determined through a process of evaluation. Generally, these evaluations were unconscious, but in the courtroom the role of schemas in determining racial categorization became clear. In the case of William P. Waters, his neighbors determined that he was a person of color through memories of his ancestors and their physical attributes. In the winter of 1842, William P. Waters and Zilpha Thompson appeared at the Ashe County Superior Court session charged with the crime of fornication and adultery. The couple stood charged with this crime not because one of the parties was married to another person or because they failed to participate in a marriage ceremony or post a marriage bond. William and Zilpha landed in the courtroom because someone in their neighborhood believed William was a “man of color” and Zilpha was a “white woman.” According to North Carolina law, free people of color and whites could not marry, and any marriage performed on their behalf was void. Yet when the court asked William and Zilpha to answer the charges, William pled innocent and declared that he was not a man of color with “negro or Indian ancestors” but “descended from Portuguese.”

In order to decide the validity of the charges against William and Zilpha, the court listened to numerous witnesses recount their memories of William’s ancestors. One declared that William’s grandmother was “not as black as some negroes,” while another witness bemoaned that William’s grandparents were “coal black negroes,” and yet another stated that William’s grandfather was “white.” The case ended with a guilty verdict. According to the court, William P. Waters was a “man of color.”16 Waters’s community did not classify him as person of color because of something observable or quantifiable but because the public remembered his ancestors to have certain traits. The trial of William P. Waters is just one of many examples that demonstrate that people cognitively constructed racial categories. Some evaluations of racial categorization required trials while others needed only a simple glance. Nevertheless, racial categorization had to be determined through a process of evaluations. Sometimes, this process of evaluation was conscious, while in other instances categorization took place without effort.

Racial categorization was ultimately a product constructed in the minds of people who used “race” as a way to frame their world. These people believed that nature and not their minds divided the human species into “whites,” “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “Indians,” “mustees,” and “colored people.” Yet the failure of individuals to classify the people around them consistently exposes the cognitive origins of racial categories. Various North Carolina court records document the inconsistent use of racial categories. In 1771, the Edenton District court clerk referred to Philip Chavis of Anson County as a “negro,” “mulatto,” and “mustee” within the same set of documents for a single civil case.17 In another example, from 1795, a clerk simply referred to a man from Bertie County called “John” as a “mulatto or Indian.” In a statement written by his attorney, this same John is labeled “a free man of colour.”18 In theory, Negroes, mulattoes, mustees, and Indians were supposed to be different types of people. Even eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dictionaries provided the public with specific definitions of these racial terms. These examples, however, show that lines between categories in practice were poorly defined and ambiguous.19

Nowhere were the issues of inconsistent classification and the construction of racial categories more problematic than in the case of North Carolina’s indigenous people. By the early nineteenth century, most of North Carolina’s indigenous population east of the Appalachians became subject to shifting categorization, which has led some scholars and lay people alike to believe that Native populations of the region had disappeared. In reality, they were simply recategorized from “Indians” to “colored persons,” “mulattoes,” or “negroes.” From the colonial period into the early national era, whites began a slow process of reclassifying Native peoples from “Indians” into ambiguous others, thereby eliminating the legal distinctions between a diversity of Native peoples and other people classified as persons of color. From their arrival in the Americas, colonists bound Native peoples to certain areas of land just as they associated their neighbors in Europe to certain territories. The earliest maps of North Carolina show territorial boundaries for each Native nation that inhabited a particular area. From this point on, the colonists would associate certain land masses with particular Native people. Colonization itself, however, threatened to destroy the colonizers’ system of organizing Native people. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonizers appropriated thousands of acres of Native land for their own use and thus pushed Native peo...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Making Race, Remembering Freedom: Constructing Racialized Liberty
• 2. Colonial Liberties, Colonial Constraints: Defining Freedom in Early North Carolina
• 3. Debating Freedom: The Radical War against Free People of Color
• 4. Community and Conflict: Free People of Color in Society
• 5. Freedom and Family: Relations with the Free and Enslaved
• 6. Liberty Intersected: Race, Gender, and Wealth
• 7. Guilty or Innocent? Free People of Color in the Courts
• 8. The Fight for Liberty: Civil War and Reconstruction
• Epilogue: Remaking Race
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index