Free people of color

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In the history of slavery in the Americas, a free person of color was a person of full or partial African descent who was not enslaved. In the United States, such persons were referred to as "free negroes," though many were, in fact, mulattos. In Caribbean and Latin American slave societies, specific terms were used to refer to such mixed-race groups.

Free people of color were an important part of the history of the Caribbean during the slave period. They were especially wealthy and powerful in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which became independent as Haiti in 1804. In Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and other French Caribbean colonies before slavery was abolished, they were known as gens de couleur, and affranchis. They were also an important part of the population of British Jamaica, Spanish Cuba, Brazil and Puerto Rico.

There were many ways that a slave could become a free person of color. All slave societies allowed masters to free their slaves, although as the population of color became larger and more threatening to the white ruling class, governments put increasing restrictions on manumissions. These usually included taxes, requirements that some socially useful reason be cited for manumission, and requirements that the newly freed person show that he or she had some means of support. Masters might free their slaves for a variety of reasons but the most common was family relationship between master and slave. Throughout the slave societies of the Americas, sexual relations between white men and slave women were common. In some places, especially in Caribbean and South American slave societies where there were few white women, these relationships might even be acknowledged by the white man. In any case, the children of these relationships had a much better chance of gaining their freedom than other slaves. Women who participated in these relationships also had a good chance of being freed. Another common motive for manumission was the payment of ransom, either by the slave him or herself, if they had managed to get ahold of some resources, or by already-free relatives. Sometimes masters, or the government, would free slaves without payment as a reward for some notable service -- revealing slave conspiracies was commonly rewarded in this way.

Of course, many free people of color were born free, and there were flourishing families of free coloreds by the nineteenth century who hadn't been enslaved for generations.

Technically a maroon was also a free person of color, but because maroons lived outside slave society, scholars regard them as a very different group. However, many people who lived within the slave society did not have formal liberty papers. In some cases these were runaways, who just hid in the towns among free people of color and tried to maintain a low profile, and in other cases they were "living as free" with the permission of their master, sometimes in return for payment of rent, but the master had never officially registered their liberty. Like maroons, these people were always at risk of losing their freedom.

Free people of color filled an important niche in the economy of slave societies. In most places, they worked as artisans and small retail merchants in the towns. In many places, especially in British-influenced colonies like the United States, there were restrictions on people of color owning slaves and agricultural land, but nonetheless many free coloreds lived in the countryside. Many lived on or near the plantations where they or their ancestors had been slaves. Masters often used free coloreds for plantation managers, especially if there was a family relationship. Free coloreds also often served the government as rural police, hunting down runaway slaves and keeping order among the slave population. From the point of view of the white master class, this was their most important function and a critical one in places like Haiti or Jamaica where slaves vastly outnumbered whites.

In places where law or social custom permitted it, some free coloreds managed to get ahold of good agricultural land and slaves and become planters themselves. There were free colored-owned plantations in almost all the slave societies of the Americas, even the United States (Louisiana in particular), and in Haiti they owned about a third of the land and about a quarter of the slaves in the colony.

When the end of slavery came, the distinction between former free coloreds and former slaves persisted. Free coloreds often provided much of the leadership for the newly-freed, as in Haiti where Toussaint Louverture, the national liberator, and several of his top generals were former free coloreds, and the United States, where many of the black elected officials during Reconstruction were pre-Civil War freedmen.