A free Negro or free black is the term used prior to the abolition of slavery in the United States to describe African Americans who were not slaves. Almost all African Americans came to the United States as slaves, but from the earliest days of American slavery, slaveholders set men and women free for various reasons. Sometimes an owner died and the heirs did not want slaves, or a slave was freed as reward for his or her good service, or the slave was able to pay in order to be freed.[1] Free blacks in the antebellum period—those years from the formation of the Union until the Civil War—were quite outspoken about the injustice of slavery.[2]
Free blacks in America were first documented in Northampton County, Virginia, in 1662. By 1776, approximately 8 percent of African Americans were free.
In the two decades after the Revolution, many slaveholders in the Chesapeake Bay area freed slaves. For instance, in Virginia, the number of free blacks increased from a few thousand before the war to 13,000 by 1790 and 20,000 by 1800.[3] The numbers were more dramatic in Delaware and Maryland, where a higher percentage of slaves were freed, in part because of changing economies that decreased the need for slave labor and immigration by free blacks to Delaware from Maryland and Virginia. By 1810, 75 percent of blacks in Delaware were free, compared to 7.2 percent of the blacks in Virginia.[4]
By 1810, 4 percent of blacks in the South (10 percent in the Upper South), and 75 percent of blacks in the North were free. On the eve of the American Civil War, 10 percent of African Americans nationwide, close to half a million people, were free.[5]
Black men enlisted as soldiers and fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Some owned land, homes, businesses, and paid taxes. In some Northern cities blacks voted. Blacks were also outspoken in print. Freedom's Journal, the first black-owned newspaper, appeared in 1827. This paper and other early writings by blacks fueled the attack against slavery and racist conceptions about the intellectual inferiority of African Americans.[2]
Free blacks were often mixed-race people; many were born in North America. A half-black/half-white person was called a mulatto (male) or a mulatress (female). Negro is a Portuguese and Spanish term that means "black". The term colored was ubiquitously employed by 1820 to describe mixed-race free Negroes.
In Virginia and North Carolina in 1790, most free negro families were the descendants of colonial-era families of white servant women who had children by slaves or free African Americans.[6] At that time, few families that were free, perhaps as low as 1 percent of the total, were descended from white slave owners who had children by their slaves. Under the law of partus sequitur ventrum, male slaveholders were not required to free their children by their slaves.
Many free African American families in colonial North Carolina and Virginia became landowners.[6] Some of them also became slave owners. In some cases, this was in order to protect members of their own families, whom they purchased from other owners. In other cases, they participated in the full slave economy. For example, a freedman named Cyprian Ricard purchased an estate in Louisiana that included 100 slaves.[7][8]
Planters who had mixed-race children sometimes arranged for their education, even in schools in the North, or as apprentices in crafts. Others settled property on them. Some freed the children and their mothers. While fewer in number than in the Upper South, free blacks in the Deep South were more often mixed-race children of wealthy planters, especially in Louisiana and Charleston. They had more opportunities to accumulate wealth. Sometimes they were the recipients of transfers of property and social capital. For instance, Wilberforce University, founded by Methodist and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) representatives in Ohio in 1856 for the education of African-American youth, was in its first years largely supported by wealthy southern planters who paid for the education of their mixed-race children. When the war broke out, the school lost most of its 200 students.[9] The college closed for a couple of years before the AME Church bought it and began to operate it.
The historian John D. Winters, in his The Civil War in Louisiana. estimates that three thousand free blacks volunteered for militia duty in Louisiana by 1862, but two others historians, Lawrence L. Hewitt and Arthur W. Bergeron, in their Louisianians in the Civil War claim his number is too high, that no more than two thousand participated. Fifteen free blacks are documented by Hewitt and Bergeron as having joined the Confederate Army as privates.The three most prominent instances of such volunteers were in St. Landry Parish in south Louisiana, the most notable being Charles F. Lutz.[10][11]