Contexts: Free People of Color in the Americas, 1492-1830

The history of free people of color in the Americas extends back to the beginning of the Age of Exploration. The crew of Christopher Columbus's first expedition included a free black sailor. Juan Garrido, a black conquistador, traveled with Ponce de Léon and Pánfilo de Narváez in what is now the United States and Mexico, while Juan Valiente, a free black man from Cádiz, helped lead the first Spanish expedition to Chile. Estéban de Dorantes, a negro alárabe ("Arabized black"), saved the shipwrecked explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his men from certain death by posing as a shaman and persuading Native Americans to share their food.

Free people of color played an important role in Spain's New World empire as soldiers, sailors, artisans, and laborers. Manumission, by which slaves were granted or purchased their freedom, had been customary in the Iberian Peninsula as far back as Roman times and was transplanted by the Spanish and Portuguese to their American colonies, giving rise to a large and vibrant population of free people of color.

The Roman Catholic faith, which, at least initially, discouraged the enslavement of anyone who had accepted Christianity, contributed to the relatively liberal attitude of the Spanish and Portuguese toward free people of color.

In some ways, the French had a similar outlook, imagining a society where class was more important than race and in which everyone was entitled to fair treatment, provided they had been baptized into the Catholic Church. For all its harshness, the French Code Noir, adopted in 1685, included articles protecting the rights of freed slaves, which were essentially the same as those of whites, with the exception that they could not vote, hold public office, or marry a white person. While generally, the French, Spanish, and Portuguese codes treated slaves and free blacks less harshly and offered greater legal protection than did Protestant nations, in practice, local conditions such as slave revolts and the distance of the colonies from central administrative control probably more directly affected their experiences.. The French were also more tolerant of racial mixing, especially in sparsely settled frontier societies like Louisiana, where there were significantly fewer white women than men. At the same time, they developed elaborate color categories to define the results of that mixing.

In the British colonies, people of African descent, whether free or not, faced severe social and legal restrictions. Race, for the British, was as important as class. Most of the English colonies in North America and the Caribbean passed formal black codes between the 1670s and 1750s. Slaves there had almost no legal standing, and freed slaves and freeborn Africans had few civil rights. Individuals had to carry "freedom papers" wherever they went, as proof of their status, and those without them ran the risk of being re-enslaved.

Free black communities existed up and down the eastern seaboard of North America. The largest was in Philadelphia, which through the influence of Quaker antislavery activists had opened its doors to black men and women in the mid eighteenth century. Other cities with significant populations of free blacks were Boston, Providence, New York, and Charleston. The first man killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770 was Crispus Attucks, a free mixed-race sailor. Four African Americans fought at the Battle of Lexington in the American Revolution, and some historians have estimated that as much as one-fifth of the rebel army that recaptured Boston from the British was black. Although George Washington discouraged free colored men from enlisting in the Continental Army, they joined anyway.

In the southern colonies during the Revolution, free blacks served in colonial regiments and militias, but were more likely to assist the British. At war's end, almost all black loyalists were transported to Canada, Britain, the West Indies, or Sierra Leone, reducing the South's already small free black population. That said, in 1790, the state with the largest population of free blacks was Virginia.

The era of the Early Republic in the U.S. saw the formal abolition of slavery in most northern states as well as the creation of the Northwest Territory, where slavery was outlawed from the beginning. Even in the Upper South, the number of manumissions rose. The free African-American population of the North grew from about 27,000 in 1790 to 138,000 in 1830; in the Upper South in the same period, it went from 30,000 to 150,000. This rise in population was due for the most part to natural growth. In states like Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, runaway slaves were a contributing factor, though some of the new states of the Midwest, particularly Illinois, enacted severe "Black Laws" to limit African-American migration there.

Free people of color worked in a wide range of professions. In the North, many acquired small farms. Land ownership by free blacks in the South was less common, and those who worked in agriculture were often overseers and occasionally bookkeepers, business managers, and attorneys on the farms of white relatives. Many white planters, in fact, preferred to hire free blacks as managers because they would work for a lower salary than whites and were viewed as being more familiar with slave culture. In cases where the employer and employee were related—white fathers often employed their mixed-race children—there may have been an element of trust beyond what would have existed had the employee been a slave or an unrelated white worker.

Free people of color occasionally became affluent farmers and businesspeople in their own right, especially in Louisiana. The navy and merchant marine were other common career paths for free black men. Some became craftsmen and artisans or worked as unskilled laborers at jobs that white people did not want to do. Others became ministers or, in Catholic areas like Louisiana, took religious orders. Free African-American women in cities typically found work as domestic servants, washerwomen, and seamstresses. A fortunate few owned boarding houses. The least fortunate worked as prostitutes.

The conditions in which free people of color lived varied, but were often deplorable, especially in northern cities, where many could only afford lodging in attics and cellars. Though free, they still suffered from racial prejudice. As historian Donald Wright has written, "Simply because many northern whites condemned slavery did not mean that they cared at all for persons of African descent." Most saw blacks as inferior and as competitors for jobs.

In both North and South, free blacks faced segregation in public places. Mob violence targeted at black citizens occurred in many northern cities in the early 1800s. African-American churches in New York and Philadelphia were regularly vandalized, and in Providence in 1824, a white mob tore down every single building in one of the city's black neighborhoods. A riot in Cincinnati in 1829 resulted in more than 1,000 African Americans leaving the United States altogether and moving to Canada.

The dire social and living conditions of black men and women in Northern society, in fact, were used as an argument against emancipation by slavery's defenders, who sincerely believed that free blacks in northern cities were worse off than slaves on southern plantations.