Between Slavery and Freedom (5 page)

Apart from those who were legally free, hundreds of other black people existed in the “shadowland” between lifelong servitude and freedom in South Carolina. Slaves whom their owners trusted to take goods to market and return with the proceeds had a remarkable degree of liberty. Enslaved craftsmen sometimes received permission to hire themselves out by the day, the week, or the month, although they had to hand over to their masters most of what they earned. While local laws and ordinances said one thing about
slave mobility, in practice individual slave owners ignored the regulations if it was to their own advantage to do so.

By the 1750s and 1760s there were tens of thousands of black and mixed race people in South Carolina. A very small number had their legal freedom, and some even enjoyed a modest degree of wealth. However, the majority of South Carolinians of African ancestry were condemned to unrelenting toil. Their only hope lay in rebellion or flight.

Unlike South Carolina, Georgia, established in 1732, initially outlawed slavery. The founders hoped to make the colony a place where some of the less fortunate members of English society could start over. The Trustees proposed to ship them and their families to Georgia, give them land so that they could become economically self-sufficient, and rely on them to keep the Spanish in Florida at bay. However, white settlers soon learned what the Trustees did not tell them: working the land in a hot, steamy, disease-inducing climate was far from easy. Before long, Georgians were insisting on having slaves and pressuring the Trustees to lift the ban on slave ownership. It took almost two decades, but eventually the settlers prevailed. By the time of the Revolution Georgia was a slightly poorer and less well-developed replica of South Carolina, with gangs of slaves living short, wretched lives in the swampy lowlands to produce rice, the “white gold” that put the youngest of Britain's North American colonies on the path to becoming one of its richest.

A few of Georgia's slaves succeeded in becoming free. Some did so by fleeing to Florida, just as the Trustees had warned they would. Others took refuge with Native peoples, intermarried with them, and in a few short years transformed themselves culturally and linguistically into Cherokees and Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles. Those who actually remained in the colony and secured their liberty generally did so, as did their counterparts in South Carolina, through ties of affection or blood to white owners. In both colonies, maintaining one's freedom required constant vigilance. Whites assumed that every black man or woman was a slave unless he or she could present overwhelming proof to the contrary.

Slavery was not confined to the South in the colonial period or to those areas where white settlers needed workers to grow staples like tobacco, rice, and indigo. The three Mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York were different in many respects from the colonies of the South, and those differences fundamentally shaped the lives and the expectations of the region's black residents. Not only was the labor they performed different, but so were the chances they had to extricate themselves from bondage. What was not different, though, was that slavery was a fact of
life. Most whites accepted it, and did not have much use for free black people, whom they generally considered troublesome and lazy. Any suggestion that freedom should confer on black people the same fundamental rights that whites enjoyed provoked anger, derisive laughter, or simply disbelief.

In 1664, when the British took over the colony of New Netherland from the Dutch and renamed it New York, they found themselves coping with black people who were neither enslaved nor free. This part of the Dutch legacy was something with which the British were decidedly uncomfortable. The Dutch had been as ready as any of the other European colonizers to use slave labor when they came to North America in the early 1600s. In the first generation of settlement they had shipped thousands of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean to New Netherland. Some they had employed in their households and on their farms, others they had sent to labor on the wharves in the port of New Amsterdam (today's New York City) loading and unloading their trading vessels. By the 1640s, though, they had another use for at least some of their slaves. Violence between the colonists and the Native peoples of the Manhattan area was escalating, which led the Dutch to extend “half-freedom” to some enslaved men. Purely from motives of self-interest they settled those men on land between the white settlement of Manhattan and the Indian lands and modified the conditions of their servitude to give them an incentive to fight the Indians, rather than unite with them. The half-free lived and farmed independently and had the right to keep any money they earned. In return for their privileged position they had to make an annual payment to the ruling Dutch West India Company. These half-free men struggled to secure the freedom of their wives and, despite what the Company said about half-freedom not being hereditary, they explored every avenue to make sure their children were free.

After New Netherland changed hands, the British not only renamed the colony but dispensed with the institution of half-freedom. They instinctively distrusted black people who occupied a position in between slavery and full freedom. They worried about the numbers claiming half-free status. The half-free were much too independent-minded and the authorities suspected that they were sheltering runaway slaves on their small farms. Step by step, the new British regime undermined the position of the half-free, especially their ownership of land. They drew lines of demarcation between themselves and both free and enslaved blacks. For example, after 1697 no person of African descent, regardless of status, could be buried in the same graveyard as whites, hence the origin of New York's long-lost and recently rediscovered African Burial Ground. Whites did not want black people too close to them, even in
death, and they certainly did not want black mourners traipsing across
their
final resting places.

Following the brutal suppression of a slave uprising in New York City in 1712, piecemeal legislation gave way to the wholesale reworking of the laws relating to black people. The new code applied to the free, the half-free, and the enslaved. It had not escaped the notice of the authorities that at least one of those accused of instigating the uprising, “Peter the Doctor,” was a free man. Under the new law, free people could not own any real estate. It also became difficult and expensive for owners to free their slaves because they now had to pay a heavy financial penalty for the privilege of doing so. Blacks in bondage had a place in the grand scheme of things, but those who were free most definitely did not.

The situation was much the same in New Jersey. Slaves were present in appreciable numbers, especially in the eastern part of the colony, by the last decades of the seventeenth century. The growth of New York City resulted in a constant demand for food. East Jersey's farmers made good money keeping the expanding metropolis fed, and they used some of that money to buy slaves. West Jersey had fewer slaves because its farms were smaller and more isolated and the need for labor was less pressing. Generally, though, whites in both sections of New Jersey displayed little reluctance to acquire slaves when they had the means to do so. They did not welcome the creation of a significant free black population. In their minds, freedmen and women posed a continual threat to white authority. New Jersey lawmakers responded to that unease created by the presence of free blacks by placing restrictions on the securing of freedom very similar to those in force in New York.

Those blacks in New Jersey who succeeded in extricating themselves from slavery faced a daily battle simply to survive. By law, they could not own land. It was impossible, though, to prevent them from trying to find some small patch on which they could plant crops and raise livestock, even if they had to resort to squatting on land that no one else seemed to want. In coastal areas and along the rivers they fished. Away from the water they hunted small game. Those who had trades tried to practice them. Generally, however, they were condemned to poverty, and they confronted the unpalatable truth that whites assumed they were slaves unless they could prove otherwise. New Jersey had one of the harshest slave codes of any of the northern colonies for the simple reason that it had so many slaves—almost 12 percent of its overall population by the 1770s. Free people lived on the margins in colonial New Jersey, literally and figuratively. One false step and they could find themselves back in bondage.

To the south of New Jersey, most of Pennsylvania's Quaker colonists had no misgivings whatsoever about importing Africans and profiting from their unpaid labor. The colony's founder, William Penn, was at first perturbed about the morality of slave ownership. However, he soon gave way, and even acquired several slaves himself. In 1684, just three years after Pennsylvania received its royal charter, the slaver
Isabella
docked in the Delaware River with 150 Africans on board, and white settlers vied with one another to buy them. Further shipments soon followed. Within a generation, black slaves were a common sight on the streets of Philadelphia. Although a few whites condemned human bondage as a sin, most were happy to purchase a slave or two. Slaves did almost every conceivable type of labor. In the countryside they worked on farms, in homes, and in all kinds of rural industries, most notably the iron foundries that sprang up to exploit Pennsylvania's mineral wealth. Slaves moved back and forth between the countryside and the city. Philadelphia newspapers often carried advertisements describing a particular woman or man as “fit for all manner of Town or Country Work.”
5
Pennsylvania's slaves were expected to be versatile, and many of them were.

Pennsylvania did not lag far behind her sister colonies when it came to regulating the status of free blacks—and over the years some slaves did succeed in becoming free, most through self-purchase. The colony's “black codes” told those people with whom they could trade and whom they could welcome into their homes. Aiding a suspected runaway, buying goods from a slave (which he or she was presumed to have stolen), or selling alcohol to a slave could put a free person's own liberty in jeopardy. Most white Pennsylvanians wished the colony did not have a single free black inhabitant. They believed they were, in the words of the preamble to a 1751 law, an “idle and slothful people.” There were too many of them, and they had a worrisome tendency to congregate in Philadelphia, where (so lawmakers alleged) they rented small hovels and shacks and generally annoyed white people by their presence.
6
Whatever whites thought and feared, though, there were only about fifty free black families in Philadelphia by the 1770s, and perhaps the same number scattered throughout the counties adjoining the city—some 500–600 individuals in all. They took whatever employment they could, struggled to keep their heads above water financially, and tried not to fall foul of the law. It was a tough existence, made tougher by the knowledge that they and their children could be bound out to labor if the authorities judged them to be vagrants or paupers.

Just as slavery flourished in the Mid-Atlantic colonies, so it took root in New England. The tendency of masters throughout the region to refer to both hired hands and slaves as “servants” makes it difficult to determine
precisely how many slaves there were in any neighborhood at any point in time. It also hides the presence of black people who were free, who earned wages, and were indeed “servants.”

The Puritans of Massachusetts gave legal sanction to slavery early in the colony's history. The 1641 Body of Liberties ruled that it was lawful to hold as property “Captives taken in just warres,” those who voluntarily sold themselves into bondage, and those who were sold into slavery by others.
7
Obviously that covered every category of individuals the Puritans might lay claim to. Within fifty years black slaves were “fixtures” not only in port towns like Boston but in rural areas. Some came directly from West Africa and others from the British colonies in the West Indies. Massachusetts never had the large gangs of slaves one would see in the South or even in the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and there were plenty of white householders who could simply not justify the purchase of a single slave. Nevertheless, black slavery emerged as part of the fabric of social and economic life in colonial Massachusetts. Black freedom, however, did not.

Rhode Islanders were even more eager than their Massachusetts neighbors to acquire slaves. There was a fleeting attempt in the 1650s to limit the period of servitude to ten years, but it went nowhere. The pressure for cheap labor on farms, in private homes, and in the bustling town of Newport was simply too great, and the town's merchants soon enmeshed themselves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By 1770, Rhode Island, the smallest of the New England colonies, had the highest percentage of slaves. Its free black population, by contrast, numbered just a few hundred individuals, and the colony's laws, combined with prevailing white assumptions about people of color, left them struggling to maintain their freedom.

Slavery also flourished in Connecticut. Thriving coastal communities were hungry for labor, and slaves supplied it. Slaves accounted for a significant percentage of farmhands, especially in the eastern part of the colony. They did other kinds of work as well. Depending on age and gender, they were blacksmiths and wheelwrights, dairymaids and household drudges. They planted and wormed tobacco, and enslaved black men built, maintained, loaded and helped crew every kind of vessel that sailed out of Connecticut's ports, from small coasting skiffs, to brigs and schooners in the West Indian trade, and much larger square-riggers plying the trans-Atlantic routes. Although by the end of the colonial period Rhode Island had the highest ratio of slaves to whites, Connecticut had the largest number slaves in New England—nearly 6,500. Its free black population was very small in comparison to the number of enslaved blacks—perhaps 300 people in all.