The Complications of Liberty: Free People of Color in North Carolina from the Colonial Period Through Reconstruction
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THE COMPLICATIONS OF LIBERTY: FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR IN NORTH CAROLINA FROM THE COLONIAL PERIOD THROUGH RECONSTRUCTION Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Kathleen DuVal Malinda Maynor Lowery Theda Perdue Zaragosa Vargas Watson Jennison © 2014 Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr.: The Complications of Liberty: Free People of Color in North Carolina from the Colonial Period through Reconstruction (Under the direction of Kathleen DuVal and Malinda Maynor Lowery) From the colonial period through the Civil War free people of color in North Carolina held a sociopolitical status that firmly placed them legally above slaves and below whites. While the degree to which free people of color were the legal superiors of slaves and inferiors of whites varied across time, this dissertation argues that the legal position of free people of color generally remained closer to that of whites than slaves. In contrast to images of a segregated South strictly bifurcated by racial categorization, this dissertation reveals that North Carolinians’ beliefs and understandings about hierarchies of gender, class, reputation, and occupation worked in tandem with racial categorization and freedom status to shape the experiences of individual free people of color. Both competition among the ideas that supported these hierarchical structures and the situational use of specific hierarchies allowed for a wide variety of life experiences within the legal middle ground occupied by free people of color. Although free people of color were not the most privileged group in the state, a position held by a minority of slaveholding, propertied white men, they still carved out spaces to raise their families, make a living, and sometimes enjoy life’s luxuries. This dissertation also demonstrates that “free people of color” was simply a label of status that denoted a middling position in the sociopolitical hierarchy that ranked the free over the enslaved and the white over the non-white. By the early nineteenth century, North Carolinians lumped within the category of free people of color: free people of African descent, ii free people of Native ancestry whom the state did not recognize as politically autonomous, and a variety of individuals with mixed ancestry. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: THE ORIGINS OF FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR ...................................................16 Introduction ............................................................................................................................16 Defining “Free People of Color” ..........................................................................................17 Creating People of Color in the Law and Society ...............................................................19 Descent from Free Women ...................................................................................................25 From Indians to Colored People ...........................................................................................33 Manumission ..........................................................................................................................40 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................46 CHAPTER 2: FAMILY AND SOCIAL RELATIONS ..................................................................49 Introduction ............................................................................................................................49 Family Relations among Free People of Color ....................................................................50 Family Relations among Free People of Color and Slaves .................................................58 Family Relations among Free People of Color and Whites ................................................64 Single-Parent Families ..........................................................................................................75 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................77 CHAPTER 3: COMPETING COLONIAL HIERARCHIES .........................................................80 Introduction ............................................................................................................................80 Racial Categorization, Gender, and Class in the Law .........................................................82 iv The Lives of Servants and Apprentices ................................................................................88 The Lives of All Other Free Persons ....................................................................................96 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................104 CHAPTER 4: DEBATING THE POSITION OF FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR .........................106 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................106 The Debate during the Early National Period ....................................................................108 The Debate in the Antebellum Era .....................................................................................116 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................144 CHAPTER 5: BEYOND RACIAL COMMUNITY .....................................................................147 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................147 Social Relations and Community .......................................................................................150 Commerce ............................................................................................................................165 A Single System of Law and Politics .................................................................................172 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................182 CHAPTER 6: THE CIVIL WAR ....................................................................................................184 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................184 Life in a Confederate State ..................................................................................................185 The Union Effort ..................................................................................................................197 Victory at Home ..................................................................................................................204 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................206 CHAPTER 7: RECONSTRUCTING SOCIETY...........................................................................209 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................209 The Political Contest ...........................................................................................................210 v Racial Categorization in the Post-War Period ...................................................................216 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................224 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................227 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................229 vi INTRODUCTION In 1902, not long after the publication of a series of now famed works including The Conjure Women, and Other Conjure Tales and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, Charles Waddell Chesnutt sat down to pen a lesser-known article titled “The Free Colored People of North Carolina” for Hampton Institute’s The Southern Workman. Born to parents who were free persons of color before the Civil War, Chesnutt used his intimate knowledge of the population of his study along with other sources to describe briefly the social position and ancestral origins of the free colored people. He wrote that “the status of these people, prior to the Civil War, was anomalous but tenable.” In describing their origins, Chesnutt mentioned mixtures between “Negroes,” “whites,” and “Indians.” He argued that many free people of color, “perhaps most of them, were as we have seen, persons of mixed blood, and received, with their dower of white blood, an intellectual and physical heritage of which social prejudice could not entirely rob them, and which helped them to prosperity in certain walks of life.”1 I have found it difficult to determine the extent to which