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Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South
Winner of the 2022 Charles S. Sydnor Award, Southern Historical Association
Winner of the 2022 Ragan Old North State Award, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," or simply "free people of color" in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses. These people were both privileged and victimized, both celebrated and despised, in a region characterized by social inconsistency.
Milteer's analysis of the way wealth, gender, and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South's free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.
Winner of the 2022 Ragan Old North State Award, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," or simply "free people of color" in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses. These people were both privileged and victimized, both celebrated and despised, in a region characterized by social inconsistency.
Milteer's analysis of the way wealth, gender, and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South's free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.
- GenresHistoryAmerican History
376 pages, Paperback
First published October 5, 2021
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March 16, 2022
In this ambitious book, Professor Milteer sets out to rethink and substantially challenge the existing historical literature of free people of color in the American South from the colonial era through the end of the Civil War. In a substantial degree, I find he has succeeded in his task
The most revered and most comprehensive synthetic study of the same topic was Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Negro in the Antebellum South (1974). Berlin focused the trend of reduced statutory rights of free African Americans in the antebellum South to argue that the white South refused to accept substantial freedom for African Americans, even when they were not enslaved so that they were being treated less and less like free people, but rather li
Milteer takes on this argument based on his own research and subsequent historians. In so doing, Milteer makes three principal arguments.
First, Professor Milteer argued that free people of color, the common term in the error cannot be understood rightly simply as being African-descended people who were not enslaved. Rather, Milteer showed that free people of color did mean persons who were not slaves and were also not deemed white by local society and/or the law in the various Southern states. Thus, he argued many free people of color were Native American people who were no longer living in Native nations and thus were recategorized, in law and in regard to the understanding of white Southerners as being free people of color. This applied whether the person in question was of totally Native background or if they had ancestors from Europe or otherwise as well. He also mentioned some scattered instances of people who were or claimed to be from India or other sections of southeast Asia who were termed free people of color. This proof and argument will make trying to divide the South in this era and thereafter into a white-black dichotomy much more problematic.
Second, the book asserts that, from the colonial era through the Civil War, those whom he identified as pro-slavery radicals sought to either have free people of color removed entirely from the South, re-enslaved, or at least reduced to as close a station to slavery as possible, but that this rising legal tide (as was shown by Ira Berlin's book noted above) was neither wholly successful a the level of state legislation nor did this legal trend and advocacy reflect the day-to-day lives of all free people of color nor of how most white southerners perceived free people of color in their local community and thus how they were treated even in the court system. Here, I think Milteer is bridging the insights of Berlin with the books and articles studying the relative lack of enforcement of local residency laws and laws formally requiring free African Americans to leave their state of origin right after becoming free, or not returning to their state of origin if they left the state for any reason or for a set period of time.
Third, Milteer looks at the ways in which class/wealth and gender impacted the lives and families of free people of color with substantially greater precision that prior studies. For example, he cited examples of endogamous marriage patterns among various communities of free people of color who sought to separate themselves from association with enslaved African Americans in practice and I suggest in the eyes of white people in their areas, as well as to build and maintain relative wealth. He also focused closely on the ways in which family law's assumption in that era that a woman did not have a definite right to her children impacted free women of color who were not married to the fathers of their children, who could not be legally married to those men because the fathers were white (even if they lived as if a married couple), and the ways in which this mean poorer free women of color stood at great risk of having their children involuntarily bound out as apprentices to white men in particular, thus being unable to keep their children in the family home until adulthood and depriving their birth families of the valuable labor of free children of color once they were old enough to work in an era where that was an expected part of almost all children's lives.
Thus, while I reject as an ideology masquerading as a methodology the notion of intersectionality, I don't disagree that these laws unfairly and inequitably impacted the poor, women, and minorities.
This is an important book and well worth the read. It will require historians to rethink their study of the pre-Civil War South in many regards.
The most revered and most comprehensive synthetic study of the same topic was Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Negro in the Antebellum South (1974). Berlin focused the trend of reduced statutory rights of free African Americans in the antebellum South to argue that the white South refused to accept substantial freedom for African Americans, even when they were not enslaved so that they were being treated less and less like free people, but rather li
Milteer takes on this argument based on his own research and subsequent historians. In so doing, Milteer makes three principal arguments.
First, Professor Milteer argued that free people of color, the common term in the error cannot be understood rightly simply as being African-descended people who were not enslaved. Rather, Milteer showed that free people of color did mean persons who were not slaves and were also not deemed white by local society and/or the law in the various Southern states. Thus, he argued many free people of color were Native American people who were no longer living in Native nations and thus were recategorized, in law and in regard to the understanding of white Southerners as being free people of color. This applied whether the person in question was of totally Native background or if they had ancestors from Europe or otherwise as well. He also mentioned some scattered instances of people who were or claimed to be from India or other sections of southeast Asia who were termed free people of color. This proof and argument will make trying to divide the South in this era and thereafter into a white-black dichotomy much more problematic.
Second, the book asserts that, from the colonial era through the Civil War, those whom he identified as pro-slavery radicals sought to either have free people of color removed entirely from the South, re-enslaved, or at least reduced to as close a station to slavery as possible, but that this rising legal tide (as was shown by Ira Berlin's book noted above) was neither wholly successful a the level of state legislation nor did this legal trend and advocacy reflect the day-to-day lives of all free people of color nor of how most white southerners perceived free people of color in their local community and thus how they were treated even in the court system. Here, I think Milteer is bridging the insights of Berlin with the books and articles studying the relative lack of enforcement of local residency laws and laws formally requiring free African Americans to leave their state of origin right after becoming free, or not returning to their state of origin if they left the state for any reason or for a set period of time.
Third, Milteer looks at the ways in which class/wealth and gender impacted the lives and families of free people of color with substantially greater precision that prior studies. For example, he cited examples of endogamous marriage patterns among various communities of free people of color who sought to separate themselves from association with enslaved African Americans in practice and I suggest in the eyes of white people in their areas, as well as to build and maintain relative wealth. He also focused closely on the ways in which family law's assumption in that era that a woman did not have a definite right to her children impacted free women of color who were not married to the fathers of their children, who could not be legally married to those men because the fathers were white (even if they lived as if a married couple), and the ways in which this mean poorer free women of color stood at great risk of having their children involuntarily bound out as apprentices to white men in particular, thus being unable to keep their children in the family home until adulthood and depriving their birth families of the valuable labor of free children of color once they were old enough to work in an era where that was an expected part of almost all children's lives.
Thus, while I reject as an ideology masquerading as a methodology the notion of intersectionality, I don't disagree that these laws unfairly and inequitably impacted the poor, women, and minorities.
This is an important book and well worth the read. It will require historians to rethink their study of the pre-Civil War South in many regards.
February 8, 2023
Had to read for my US History class. I skimmed. It was a bit dry and felt very dense at times because we were constantly being hit with microscopic vignettes amongst larger ones. Most of the people focused on in this book were also men. The basic thing I got out of this is that Black people today still live like we're in the 1800's and white people have not gotten anymore creative with their efforts at disenfranchisement, intimidation, discriminatory legal practices, etc. Anyway, it was a fine book and cool to learn more about the lives of free people of color-- I definitely didn't learn much (if anything at all) about the nuances of freedom and enslavement in my SC history classes growing up.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews