In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Black, free Negro, and free colored described the legal status of African Americans who were not slaves. The term was applied both to former slaves (freedmen) and to those who had been born free (free people of color), whether of African or mixed descent.
Background Slavery was legal and practiced in every European colony in North America, at various points in history. Not all Africans who came to America were slaves; a few came even in the 17th century as free men, as sailors working on ships. In the early colonial years, some Africans came as indentured servants who were freed after a set period of years, as did many of the immigrants from Europe. Such servants became free when they completed their term of indenture; they were also eligible for headrights for land in the new colony in the Chesapeake Bay region, where indentured servants were more common. As early as 1678, a class of free black people existed in North America.
Various groups contributed to the growth of the free Negro population:
children born to colored free women (see Partus sequitur ventrem) mulatto children born to white indentured or free women mixed-race children born to free Native American women (the emancipation in the 1860s) freed slaves Maroons (or escaped slaves) descendants of free black people who were never slaves
Black people's labor was of economic importance in the export-oriented tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland, and in the rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina.Betty Wood (2013). Slavery in Colonial America, 1619–1776 (link: excerpt and text search). Between 1620 and 1780 about 287,000 slaves were imported into the Thirteen Colonies, or 5 percent of the more than six million slaves brought from Africa. The great majority of transported Africans were shipped to sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and slave numbers had to be continually replenished; this could be done at relatively low costs until the Slave Trade Act 1807.
+ Slaves imported into Colonial America Years NumberSource: Miller and Smith, eds. Dictionary of American Slavery (1988), p . 678. 1620–1700 21,000 1701–1760 189,000 1761–1770 63,000 1771–1780 15,000 Total 287,000
The life expectancy of slaves was much higher in the Thirteen Colonies than in Latin America, the Caribbean or Brazil. This, combined with a very high birth rate, meant that the number of slaves grew rapidly, as the number of births exceeded the number of deaths, reaching nearly 4 million by the time of the 1860 United States census.1860 Census total of the slave population: 3,953,763, p. 595. From 1770 until 1860 the rate of natural population growth among American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of Britain. This was sometimes attributed to very high birth rates: "U.S. slaves, then, reached similar rates of natural increase to whites not because of any special privileges but through a process of great suffering and material deprivation".
The Southern Colonies (Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina) imported more slaves, initially from long-established European colonies in the West Indies. Like them, the mainland colonies rapidly increased restrictions that defined slavery as a racial caste associated with African ethnicity. In 1663 Virginia adopted the principle in slave law of partus sequitur ventrem, according to which children were born into the status of their mother, rather than taking the status of their father, as was then customary for English subjects under common law. Other colonies followed suit. This meant that children of slave mothers in colonial America were also slaves, regardless of their fathers' ethnicity. In some cases, this could result in a person's being legally white under Virginia law of the time, although born into slavery.
According to Paul Heinegg, most of the free black families established in the Thirteen Colonies before the American Revolution of the late 18th century descended from unions between white women (whether indentured servants or free) and African men (whether indentured servant, free, or enslaved). These relationships took place mostly among the working class, reflecting the fluid societies of the time. Because such mixed-race children were born to free women, they were free. Through use of court documents, deeds, wills, and other records, Heinegg traced such families from Virginia as the ancestors of nearly 80 percent of the free black people recorded in the 1790 United States census of North Carolina. In addition, slave owners manumitted slaves for various reasons: to reward long years of service, because heirs did not want to take on slaves, or to free slave concubines and/or their children. Slaves were sometimes allowed to buy their freedom; they might be permitted to save money from fees paid when they were "hired out" to work for other parties.
In the mid-to-late 18th century, Methodist and Baptist evangelists during the period of the First Great Awakening ( 1730–1755) encouraged slave owners to free their slaves, in their belief that all men were equal before God. They converted many slaves to Christianity and approved black leaders as preachers; blacks developed their own strain of Christianity. Before the American Revolutionary War of 1775–1783, few slaves were manumitted; on the eve of the American Revolution, there was an estimated 30,000 free African Americans in Colonial America which accounts for about 5% of the total African American population with most of free African Americans being mixed race. Since the portion of free African Americans were so small and could possibly pass as white, they were not deemed a threat to the White population to warrant anti-black legislation. However, historian Ira Berlin states that this figure could be as high as 25 percent due to errors in census collection, ambiguous status of runaway slaves, white-passing persons, and slaves who lived as if they were free but did not have the papers to prove it.
After the revolution The war greatly disrupted slave societies. Beginning with the 1775 proclamation of Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, the British recruited slaves of American revolutionaries to their armed forces and promised them freedom in return. The Continental Army gradually also began to allow blacks to fight, giving them promises of freedom in return for their service. Tens of thousands of slaves escaped from plantations or from other venues during the war, especially in the South.Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1865, 1993. Some joined British lines or disappeared in the disruption of war. After the war, when the British evacuated New York in November 1783, they transported more than 3,000 Black Loyalists and thousands of other American Loyalists to resettle in Nova Scotia and in what became Upper Canada (part of present-day Ontario). A total of more than 29,000 Loyalist refugees eventually departed from New York City alone. The British evacuated thousands of other slaves when they left Southern ports, resettling many in the Caribbean and others in England.
In the first two decades after the war, the number and proportion of free Negroes in the United States rose dramatically: northern states abolished slavery, almost all gradually. But also many slave owners, in the Upper South especially, inspired by the war's ideals, manumitted their slaves. From 1790 to 1810, the proportion of free blacks in the Upper South rose from less than 1% to overall, and nationally, the proportion of free blacks among blacks rose to 13%. The spread of cotton cultivation in the Deep South drove up the demand for slaves after 1810, and the number of manumissions dropped after this period. In the antebellum period many slaves escaped to freedom in the North and in Canada by running away, assisted by the Underground Railroad, staffed by former slaves and by abolitionist sympathizers. Census enumeration found a total of 488,070 "free colored" persons in the United States in 1860.1860 Census totals of the free colored population, p. 595.
Abolitionism Most organized political and social movements to end slavery did not begin until the mid-18th century. The sentiments of the American Revolution and the equality evoked by the Declaration of Independence rallied many black Americans toward the revolutionary cause and their own hopes of emancipation; both enslaved and free black men fought in the Revolution on both sides. In the North, slaves ran away from their owners in the confusion of war, while in the South, some slaves declared themselves free and abandoned their slave work to join the British.
After the revolution In the 1770s, Black people throughout New England began sending petitions to northern legislatures demanding freedom; by 1800, all of the northern states had abolished slavery or set measures in place to gradually reduce it.Wilson, Black Codes (1965), p. 15. "By 1775, inspired by those 'self-evident' truths which were to be expressed by the Declaration of Independence, a considerable number of colonists felt that the time had come to end slavery and give the free Negroes some fruits of liberty. This sentiment, added to economic considerations, led to the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery in six northern states, while there was a swelling flood of private manumissions in the South. Little actual gain was made by the free Negro even in this period, and by the turn of the century, the downward trend had begun again. Thereafter the only important change in that trend before the Civil War was that after 1831 the decline in the status of the free Negro became more precipitate." While free, black people often had to struggle with reduced civil rights, such as restrictions on voting, as well as racism, segregation, or physical violence. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, while it was still independent, and when it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791 it was the first state to have done so. All the other Northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, leaving the slave states of the South as defenders of the "peculiar institution". Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1780, and several other Northern states adopted gradual emancipation. In 1804, New Jersey became the last original Northern state to embark on gradual emancipation. Slavery was prohibited in the federal Northwest Territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed just before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The free black population increased from 8% to 13.5% from 1790 to 1810; most of whom lived in the Mid-Atlantic States, New England, and the Upper South, where most of the slave population lived at the time.
The rights of free blacks fluctuated and waned with the gradual rise in power among poor white men during the late 1820s and early 1830s. The National Negro Convention movement began in 1830, with black men holding regular meetings to discuss the future of the black "race" in America; some women such as Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth made their voices heard through public lecturing. The National Negro Convention encouraged a boycott of slave-produced goods. These efforts were met with resistance, however, as the early 19th century brought renewed anti-black sentiment after the spirit of the Revolution began to die down.