Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Law ◽  
Freedom Suits ◽  
Free People ◽  
Free African Americans

The Prologue traces African Americans’ experiences with the law and the courts in the antebellum South. It shows the ways in which the law upheld the system of slavery and worked to characterize enslaved men and women as property rather than as people. At times, though, slaves could participate in the legal system as criminal defendants or as they litigated freedom suits. Free people of color, too, appealed to the law to challenge the constraints imposed upon them. The experiences of enslaved and free African Americans in the antebellum South gave them an appreciation of the power of the law, leading them to fight to gain full legal rights after the Civil War.

“Your Views Cross the Atlantic”

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Robert Murray
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Racially Ambiguous ◽  
Free People

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.

scholarly journals Peculiar Quarantines: The Seamen Acts and Regulatory Authority in the Antebellum South

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-586 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schoeppner
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
State Statutes ◽  
Black Immigration ◽  
Free People

In 1824, the American schoonerFoxsailed into Charleston harbor with seasoned mariner and Rhode Island native Amos Daley on board. When officials boarded the ship, they interrogated the captain and crew before cuffing Daley and hauling him off to the Charleston jail, where he remained until theFoxwas set to leave harbor. Daley's detainment occurred because 16 months earlier the South Carolina General Assembly had enacted a statute barring the entrance of all free people of color into the state. Unlike other antebellum state statutes limiting black immigration, this law extended further, stretching to include in its prohibition maritime laborers aboard temporarily docked, commercial vessels. This particular section of the law was passed on the assumption that such sailors inspired slave insurrection and thereby posed a direct threat to the safety and welfare of the citizenry. Over the course of the next four decades, the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas would join South Carolina in passing statutes, commonly referred to as the “Seamen Acts,” which limited the ingress of free black mariners. Amos Daley was only one of ~10,000 sailors directly affected by these particularly Southern regulations.

Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McKee
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Wishful Thinking ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
American Black ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Free People ◽  
Creoles Of Color

This chapter discusses how the free people of color in New Orleans pointed to Edmond Dede as an example of what African Americans could achieve if given opportunities like the ones he found in France. To his death, Creoles of color thought Dede was so unusually accomplished for an American black man that they elevated what little they knew about his life in France to the level of drama. Problems for the historian start with the realization that although the reports about his life were certainly exaggerated by his friends and admirers, some of the enhancements came from Dede himself. For those who seek to understand his opportunities and choices within their historical context, the process of separating fact from wishful thinking awakens a sympathy for the man who risked all and mustered the resources to act on his dreams.

Becoming Mobile in the Age of Segregation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Black People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Access ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
The North ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Free People

Between the 1780s and the 1850s, two separate and interconnected historical developments led to segregation as a method of social control. The first was black emancipation in the North, the result of a prolonged and uneven process that lasted decades. In light of African American freedom, white northerners began to imagine black people as people, although nominally free, in need of regulation. As a result, whites scrutinized the travel of free people of color with a level of suspicion previously reserved for slaves. Thus, a process best thought of as the criminalization of black mobility emerged. This was highly deleterious to African Americans because it fostered antiblack vigilantism in public space. At the same time, advances in technology brought on a “transportation revolution.” As an elite cohort of newly freed African Americans sought equal access to public vehicles, transportation proprietors and white passengers in the North viciously guarded the thresholds of stagecoaches, steamships, and railroads. Colored travelers fought back against exclusion in a variety of ways that highlight the importance of travel in their conceptions of citizenship. The protest strategies of these earliest activists planted the seeds of the nineteenth-century equal rights movement.

The Occupation of Havana

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena A. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Free People ◽  
The Relationship

In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years’ War in North America. The Occupation of Havana offers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba's return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions.

Confederate Citadel

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary A. DeCredico
Keyword(s):  
Revolutionary War ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Union Army ◽  
Confederate States Of America ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Free People ◽  
The City

Richmond, Virginia, became the capital of the Confederate States of America in May 1861. From that point on, it would be the target of multiple Union “On to Richmond” campaigns. Richmond was symbolic: its capitol building bore the imprimatur of the Revolutionary War generation and had been designed by Thomas Jefferson; on its grounds was a famous equestrian statue of George Washington. Nearby was St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry had demanded liberty—or death. But Richmond was an anomaly in the antebellum South. It supported a diverse population of whites, slaves, free people of color, and immigrants. It had modernized during the 1850s. By 1860, it ranked thirteenth nationally in manufacturing and boasted a robust commercial economy. When civil war erupted in 1861, it was only logical to shift the Confederate capital to the city on the James. Richmond became the keystone of the rebellion. Its people would sacrifice until there was literally nothing left. Rather than allow the Union army to take the city in 1865, the Confederacy’s military leaders fired the tobacco housed there, which created a firestorm that nearly destroyed the city. When the Federals entered Richmond on April 3, they could see the detritus that was a testament to the city’s and its citizens’ contributions to the Confederacy.

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