Racial Segregation under Slavery

Social Forces ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Ruef
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
Residential Distribution ◽  
Architectural Survey ◽  
Free People

Abstract Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rendered racial segregation to be both unnecessary and impractical. In this study, I argue that apart from the master–slave relationship, slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period through the residential isolation of slaves and free people of color. To explain this pattern, I draw on racial threat theory to test hypotheses regarding interracial economic competition and fear of slave mobilization using data from the 1850 Census, as well as an architectural survey of antebellum sites. Findings suggest that the residential segregation of free people of color increased with their local prevalence, whereas the segregation of slaves increased with the prevalence of the slave population. These patterns continue to hold after controlling for interracial competition over land or jobs and past slave rebellions or conspiracies.

“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.

Atlantic Passages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Murray
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
The United States ◽  
West African ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Free People

Established by the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century as a settlement for free people of color, the West African colony of Liberia is usually seen as an endpoint in the journeys of those who traveled there. In Atlantic Passages, Robert Murray reveals that many Liberian settlers did not remain in Africa but returned repeatedly to the United States, and he explores the ways this movement shaped the construction of race in the Atlantic world. Tracing the transatlantic crossings of Americo-Liberians between 1820 and 1857, in addition to delving into their experiences on both sides of the ocean, Murray discusses how the African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia recognized significant cultural differences in the newly arrived African Americans and racially categorized them as “whites.” He examines the implications of being perceived as simultaneously white and black, arguing that these settlers acquired an exotic, foreign identity that escaped associations with primitivism and enabled them to claim previously inaccessible privileges and honors in America. Highlighting examples of the ways in which blackness and whiteness have always been contested ideas, as well as how understandings of race can be shaped by geography and cartography, Murray offers many insights into what it meant to be black and white in the space between Africa and America.

Documenting Citizenship

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Travel ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Department Of State ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
Free People ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 4 tells the story of how, between 1834 and the 1860s, the U.S. Department of State refused to grant free people of color official passports for international travel. During a period when passport policy was still nascent, by rejecting black applicants, the federal government illustrated how travel and citizenship were inextricably linked in the United States. At the same time that African Americans could not get passports, state laws and customs required some people of color to carry a series of identification papers best thought of as racialized surveillance documents, including slave passes, black sailors’ passports, and free papers. Demonstrating how fundamentally raced the idea of carrying papers was to white Americans, when white people traveled abroad, they consistently grumbled about having to show their papers. For colored travelers, however, the passport was an object of desire because it denoted U.S. citizenship. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, by pushing the federal government to address racial restrictions for acquiring the U.S. passport, colored travelers rendered the question of black citizenship a matter of national import almost a decade before the 1857 Dred Scott decision did the same.

Beyond Sugar

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane I. Seiter
Keyword(s):  
People Of Color ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Lime Kilns ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Develop Land ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Landscape Survey ◽  
Free People

Much has been written about the “sugar revolution” sweeping the islands of the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Recent work by archaeologists, however, has challenged this overarching narrative. On the island of St. Lucia, a program of landscape survey joined with a close analysis of maps and census records has revealed a very different pattern of landscape development. Underneath the remains of vast sugar estates with their monumental surviving architecture—the curing and boiling houses, lime kilns, windmills and water wheels—lies evidence of an earlier phase of small-scale plantations growing a surprising diversity of crops. Building on a legacy of subsistence agriculture inherited from the Amerindians, European settlers on St. Lucia carved out a patchwork of small holdings cultivating cotton, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, ginger, cassava, indigo, and bananas. The comparative absence of large sugar plantations allowed people without much capital to purchase and develop land, creating new opportunities for free people of color to amass wealth and gain political power. The emergence of this class of free black landowners had a profound impact on St. Lucian society, which in turn greatly affected the larger political struggles that rocked the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century.

Claiborne

2018 ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Jason Berry
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
Free People ◽  
White Elite ◽  
The U.S

In the 1790s, as planters sold off land for faubourgs, or neighborhoods, New Orleans branched out. One such neighborhood was founded by Claude Tremé. Antonio de Sedella clashed with the vicar Rev. Patrick Walsh and his replacement Rev. John Olivier. Sedella became the elected pastor of St. Louis Cathedral, leading the one institution where people voluntarily gathered across the color line. Governor William C.C. Claiborne, a lawyer-turned-politician, governed a divided city. Conflicts arose between the French and American cultures, the black militia and white elite, and between Claiborne himself and his opponents. Faced with an influx of Haitian refugees, including whites, free people of color, and slaves, Claiborne faced the challenge of providing for the refugees deemed free while establishing the status of those the refugees considered as slaves. Many refugees who were legally free in Haiti became slaves in New Orleans. A slave revolt, with an estimated 500 rebels, broke out in 1811. Claiborne sent the local militia to put down the insurrection. Close to 100 of the rebels were killed. Advocates for statehood argued that Louisiana should join the U.S., and by admitting Louisiana in 1812, the U.S. cemented itself to a slave economy.

Contrabandists or Cargo?

2018 ◽  
pp. 239-270
Author(s):  
Jesse Cromwell
Keyword(s):  
Black Market ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Wage Earning ◽  
Free People ◽  
Foreign Merchants

Chapter 7 analyzes Afro-Caribbeans as participants in illicit commerce, but it also discusses smuggling’s impact on slavery in the coastal circum-Caribbean. People of color were involved in smuggling not only as contraband cargo to Venezuela but also often as active workers in the illegal marketplace. This chapter asks how smugglers amalgamated the slavery apparatus of Venezuela and its surrounding foreign colonies into the black market. Furthermore, how did Africans being trafficked illegally and smuggling conducted by the enslaved alter notions of property, criminality, and subjecthood? Venezuelan planters frequently sent their slaves to trade with unlicensed foreign merchants. These traders, in turn, sometimes employed enslaved people as sailors or porters on smuggling ventures. For enslaved and free people of color alike, contraband trade carried the prospects of wage earning and greater autonomy in labor, but also the risks of captivity and enslavement in Spanish dominions. The embargo of foreign contraband vessels produced thorny questions regarding the freedom or bondage of the slaves aboard. Competing legal jurisdictions, temporary manumissions, and opportunities for marronage only compounded these uncertainties.

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