Between Slavery and Freedom (4 page)

Although the
Code Noir
forbade interracial cohabitation and marriage, the authorities in France tacitly admitted that white men were living with black and mixed-race women and that those relationships were producing children whom their fathers might, if they were so inclined, set free. They also acknowledged that slaves were finding other ways to get their freedom. A free population existed and they needed to determine the status of that population.

Not surprisingly, the
Code
Noir
tried to prevent free blacks from aiding and abetting slaves in rebelling or escaping.
Gens de couleur
who sheltered runaway slaves risked heavy fines, and if they could not pay them they could lose their own freedom. The
Code Noir
instructed former slaves always to show great respect to the white family that had been kind and generous enough to free them and warned them that any sign of disrespect would result in harsh punishment. However—and this was a provision unlike that
in any of the other European colonies in North America—the
Code Noir
also declared that the King of France granted “to manumitted slaves the same rights, privileges and immunities . . . enjoyed by free-born persons . . . not only with regard to their persons, but also to their property.”
1
The
Code Noir
at least implied that ex-slaves would enjoy a certain measure of equality with whites once they ceased to be slaves.

It was one thing for the king across the ocean to declare what should and should not happen in his distant colonies. It was quite another to put those declarations into practice. Despite what the
Code Noir
said, one's “rights, privileges and immunities” often depended on the color of one's skin. Full equality did not prevail throughout the Louisiana Territory, although it is fair to say that in some of the French settlements free people of African ancestry did enjoy a higher status than their brothers and sisters in the British colonies. However, it would be incorrect to claim that the situation of free people of color in French North America was better than it was anywhere else or that white racial attitudes were any more benign.

In the colonial era time and place determined just what free black people could do and indeed what opportunities they had to become free. That was not only the case in French and Spanish territories, but in all of the thirteen British colonies. The slaves would have to rely on luck, determination, and courage to gain their liberty, and free blacks would have to be equally resourceful to hold on to it. Slavery took root more quickly in some of Britain's colonies than in others, but within a generation the institution existed in all of them, along with a patchwork of laws and practices that kept most black people from achieving freedom.

The white planters who converged on the wharf of Jamestown, Virginia in the summer of 1619 to inspect an enterprising Dutch captain's human cargo were not personally familiar with slavery. They knew, though, that the Spanish practiced it, and that the Dutch and the Portuguese were competing with one another to keep Spain's colonies throughout the Americas fully stocked with slaves. They also knew that for decades some of their countrymen had been trying to muscle their way into the African trade. A few of the Virginia planters had seen black people because some aristocratic households in England had acquired them as dependents or servants. What exactly those early white Virginians thought about darker-skinned people is a subject that has intrigued historians for decades. Certainly the thought uppermost in the minds of the planters that day in 1619 was that here was an excellent opportunity to solve their most pressing problem, namely the labor shortage. They could never get enough white indentured servants from Britain, or hold on to those they got for long enough to make a profit, and they were
uneasy about the idea of coercing Native Americans into working for them. It was impractical and it was dangerous in a region where Indians vastly outnumbered whites. The Dutch captain offered them a “parcel” of Africans they could purchase and send into the fields to cultivate the tobacco on which the colony's prosperity depended.

Given the economic and social patterns that had developed in Virginia by the mid-eighteenth century, it is tempting to assume that the English planters bought all of the Africans on that unidentified Dutch ship as slaves, that they kept them in lifelong bondage, that they continued buying African slaves as more ships arrived in their ports, and that slavery emerged as a fully developed labor system almost immediately. That is a highly inaccurate picture, though, and represents the dangers of judging one era by the customs and practices of another. The Virginia that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson knew in the 1750s and 1760s was not the Virginia that the planters of the 1620s and 1630s knew or that the colony's earliest black settlers knew.

Laboring long hours without pay was certainly something those first black immigrants to Virginia experienced, but it was not what every one of them endured for the rest of their days. African Anthony Johnson, for instance, arrived on another Dutch ship one year after that first cargo of slaves struggled ashore in Jamestown. He gained his freedom—how we do not know—acquired land, and married a free black woman. Anthony and Mary Johnson raised their children in freedom and purchased black slaves as well as the services of white indentured workers. The Johnsons were not alone. Up and down Virginia's Eastern Shore there were several dozen free black farmers in that first generation or two of settlement who were free because they had bought their way out of bondage, usually by raising their own crops of tobacco on their masters' land and using that tobacco as currency in what was essentially a barter economy.

Those early free African people and their American-born children interacted on many levels with English settlers. They traded with them, fought with them, slept with them, and labored alongside them. However, at least some of the influential white men in the colony were uneasy about their presence. These black people were free, but somehow their blackness made them
different
.
The law codes Virginia's House of Burgesses drew up in the 1660s spelled that out, declaring that free black people “ought not in all respects . . . [to] be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English.”
2
This was very different indeed from the statement in the
Code Noir
about the “privileges and immunities” that all free people were entitled to, regardless of race.

The sons and grandsons of the planters who had come down to the James River in 1619 to inspect the Dutch captain's cargo were hungry for more land and more labor to stay competitive, and they demanded cheap labor from workers they could treat as brutally as they chose. They were far less reluctant than their fathers and grandfathers had been to enslave Native Americans. Increasingly, though, they turned to black slaves, importing thousands each year from Africa and the Caribbean. White Virginians' insatiable appetite for slaves undermined the status of the free black community. New, more restrictive ordinances made it much more difficult for black people to bargain with their masters for their freedom, while the descendants of the Johnsons and other black people in the “founding” generation who were already free found their route to modest prosperity blocked at every turn.

The labor situation in the neighboring colony of Maryland was very similar to that in Virginia. Maryland's tobacco planters moved quickly from using white indentured servants, who were always in short supply, to buying slaves. They could not afford to buy many in the early days of settlement, and they often worked their farms with a mix of white bound servants and black and Native American slaves. As they grew wealthier, though, they opted for slaves, and increasingly they chose black slaves over captive Indians.

Gaining one's freedom in Maryland and Virginia was never easy, but it became much more difficult as time wore on. Nothing obliged an owner to free a slave, not conversion to Christianity, mastery of the English language, or even ties of kinship. In both colonies a child followed the condition of his or her mother. If a white man fathered children with a slave, those children became slaves. It was a different story when a child was born to a white woman and an enslaved black man. Although both colonies passed laws to try to prevent such relationships, they did occur. Initially Maryland's lawmakers took a tougher stance than their counterparts in Virginia, decreeing in 1664 that if any “free borne woman shall inter marry with any slave . . . [she] shall Serve the master of such slave dureing [
sic
]
the life of her husband.”
3
That is what happened to at least one white woman, Eleanor Butler. When “Irish Nell” wed a slave, Charles, she joined him in servitude. Their children were slaves from birth. Then Maryland changed the law and made the status of the mother the status of her child. Ultimately, Eleanor and Charles's descendants sued for their freedom and won. Not only in Maryland and Virginia but throughout British North America descent from a white woman generally resulted in freedom, although proving one's ancestry to the satisfaction of the courts presented enormous difficulties. And freedom came with a hefty price. The courts might declare that a child was free, but then order that child bound
out to service for many years and the mother whipped or fined for, in the words of a Virginia law, engaging in “abominable” behavior that resulted in the creation of a “spurious issue.”
4

Several factors determined the situation of people of African descent in the region to the south of Maryland and Virginia. What are today North and South Carolina were originally two halves of one huge colony that King Charles II granted to a powerful group of Englishmen in 1663. They named it Carolina,
Carolus
being the Latin for Charles, in his honor. From the beginning, the Proprietors of Carolina were committed to African slavery. Several invested heavily in Britain's Royal African Company and engaged in battling the Dutch and the French for control of the major West African slaving ports. At least a couple had financial interests in the emerging plantation systems in Britain's West Indian colonies.

The English who settled in what became North Carolina were happy to purchase black people as slaves. But because the economy took time to flourish, they simply lacked the means to acquire as many as they would have liked. Eventually, the settlers grew wealthy from growing tobacco, raising cattle, and supplying the Royal Navy and private shipyards with hemp, pitch, turpentine, and timber. Before long, the wealthier settlers were expanding the size of their workforce by buying additional slaves, generally from planters and traders in Virginia. The enslaved used every strategy they could to gain their freedom. They fled to the Indian tribes of the region, or took refuge with poor backcountry farmers who, so they hoped, might shelter anyone willing to work for little more than their keep. Others cultivated small patches of land and sold the produce or worked at a skilled trade, while bargaining with their owners to purchase themselves. Every strategy had its perils. An owner might cheat a slave out of his money and refuse to free him. A backcountry farmer might exploit and enslave a desperate runaway. Even adoption into an Indian tribe might not lead to lifelong freedom. When tribes made treaties with the British they often had to agree to hand back fugitive slaves. Whatever the risks, though, the enslaved were willing to take them. Some did succeed in gaining their liberty, and although it came with restrictions, it was vastly preferable to lifelong enslavement.

Many of the earliest white immigrants to South Carolina came not directly from Britain but from Britain's Caribbean colonies, principally Barbados. The Proprietors lured them with offers of free land, and they came in considerable numbers, bringing with them the black slaves they already owned. They were eager to get more slaves, and when the chance arose, they bought Indians. In South Carolina, at least until the early 1700s, enslaved Africans and Indians toiled on the same plantations. Within a generation,
racial lines became blurred as Englishmen fathered children with their African- and Native-American slaves, and the enslaved themselves formed unions that produced offspring who shared the heritage of both parents.

White South Carolinians put their slaves to all kinds of work, from felling trees to raising cattle and cultivating sugar cane. Some planters did well, but timber, sugar, and livestock did not earn enough to make the colony as a whole economically successful. They turned to rice and indigo, staple crops that provided profits to buy more African slaves, whom they considered best suited to the backbreaking labor these crops required. The port of Charleston became a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade. By 1710, black people, the overwhelming majority of them enslaved, far outnumbered whites in South Carolina.

Despite the pervasiveness of slavery, through the first century of South Carolina's existence some Africans and African Americans gained their freedom. Hundreds escaped, either alone or in small groups. A prime destination was Florida, where the Spanish welcomed them and let them settle in freedom, not because Spanish officials opposed slavery but because they saw this as a tactic to weaken their British enemies. They even encouraged the men to become soldiers, knowing they would fight courageously in the event of an English attack because their own liberty and that of their families was at stake.

While some slaves fled to Spanish territory to gain their freedom, others created independent “maroon” communities in parts of the colony they hoped were too remote for whites to find. Still others opted not for flight but for negotiation, seeing what an owner might accept in return for their liberty. Generally, though, the people who gained their liberty in South Carolina did so because of their close personal ties to whites. Many white men kept slave concubines, and while the law gave female slaves no rights, some masters did free their sexual partners and the children the women bore them. Occasionally they gave their “housekeepers” and their biracial progeny money, land, and even slaves. By the early 1700s, in and around Charleston, and less frequently on the plantations, a small class of mixed-race free people began to emerge.