1 / Movement and the Community of Free People of Color in Natchez

Oh, what a country we live in.

—William Johnson

Contemporaneous descriptions portray Eleanor Price, or Nelly Price, as she was more commonly known, in 1786 as a forty-six-year-old English Protestant “mulatto” woman living in the Spanish Natchez District. Revealing herself as a multilingual and enterprising individual, Price traded with local Indians, supplied white settlers with necessary goods, and rented out rooms. She labored as a healer, a midwife, a cultivator of the ground, and a housekeeper. Price emerged onto the local scene during the earlier migration of the English to the area, perhaps enslaved and later freed, a member of the foundational generation, or she may have been born free and part of a conditional generation. Whatever the particulars of her origins, she undoubtedly learned the mechanisms of her future entrepreneurialism in this context. It may indeed have been her means out of slavery. The world in which she lived was vastly different than the one later inhabited by free Black people. She emerges out of the pages of Scottish trader John Fitzpatrick’s letter books as a vocal, multifaceted woman who built relationships between herself, the Native American groups with whom she traded rum, blankets, and foodstuffs for animal skins, and the white settlers to whom she rented rooms, pirogues, and provisions. Price actively utilized the courts in several cases in the 1780s, which were primarily to collect debts owed to her by local whites for various services and goods, one of which was to claim her payment for having helped a Native American woman deliver a baby. She is a clear example of how free people could negotiate their space with the white inhabitants and protect their interests in Spanish Natchez, particularly in the earlier days of its settlement when it was located at the interstices of competing international boundaries.¹

For much of its early history, Natchez was a contested and complex frontier that served as a convergence of a rich range of many-hued, multicultured people: Native American groups including the Natchez and Choctaws; Africans and African Americans, both enslaved as well as free, Europeans such as French, Spaniards, English, and white Americans, and individuals like Price who were combinations of two or more of these ethnic backgrounds. The African and African American populations of Natchez grew from a series of migrations into the area. Two of these movements of people were forced, one, a result of the dispersal of African-descended people in the transatlantic slave trade and movements within the Americas. The other, beginning during the short-lived Spanish period of sixteen years, greatly intensified following the transition to American governance, stemmed from the internal domestic slave trade bringing enslaved men, women, and children from the southeastern US states, particularly after the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the termination of the international slave trade (1808). One migration of people into Natchez, although smaller, was surprisingly voluntary and composed largely of free men of color from other states.²

As Natchez developed into one of the wealthiest regional slave societies, free Black people witnessed their rights contract as hostility and suspicion of them grew. Due to tightening restrictions, the community had to constantly adjust and devise new ways to protect their freedom in an often-uncertain political climate. This caused some individuals and families to look outward and consider distant possibilities. Thus, concurrent to the movement to Natchez, there was also an out-migration away from it, as people of African descent traveled up and down the Mississippi River to pursue educational opportunities, to work, to visit loved ones, and sometimes to permanently flee.

Pre-Spanish Natchez

Complex settlement patterns informed the development of the Lower Mississippi Valley, of which Natchez was a part. Natchez’s physical location on the Mississippi River proved a vital factor in its settlement as an ample source of water for people, animals, and vegetation as well as a conduit for transportation, trade, and communication. The fertile soils that characterized the surrounding area sustained the agricultural practices of its inhabitants and supported a rich diversity of flora and fauna. As in all of the Americas, Native Americans predated the Europeans in the region by several thousand years. The Natchez Indians, for whom the District was named, created rich and prosperous societies and solidified their presence in the local environment by the construction of temple mounds and development of trading networks with other indigenous groups. Even one hundred years after Europeans had inserted themselves violently into the local environment, the imprint of Indian people, past and present, was deeply interwoven. As one early traveler observed in 1808: “This country likewise exhibits signs of having formerly cherished a population far exceeding any thing which has been known in our time. A considerable variety of ancient mounds are found here, some of which are round, others oval, but most of them square, with a small platform on the top.”³

In 1712, the French became the first European group to attempt to settle Natchez, as part of the broader area of Louisiana, when Antoine Crozat established a post to trade with the Natchez Indians. This is also the same year for which there is evidence of enslaved Africans the French brought to Mississippi. Violence frequently erupted between the French and the indigenous people in the founding years of the settlement, and extremely tenuous relations existed between the two groups. The king of France ordered the construction of a more substantial fort, Fort Rosalie in 1716, after the Natchez Indians looted the trading post, and in the process killed numerous traders and captured several enslaved persons. The subsequent increased settlement of the area and the reliance on enslaved labor made it possible for exports such as tobacco, indigo, rice, and lumber to be shipped to the mother country.⁴

The growth of the enslaved population in Louisiana in general during this time is reflective of the beginnings of the first wave of movement of African people, a trend that would only keep expanding. Africans were sought for both their labor and agricultural knowledge systems to create a fledgling settlement out of the area, which would have long-lasting consequence, especially in later years, as the colony grew from a society with slaves to a genuine slave society. In 1723, the number of enslaved Africans living in the settlement grew to 111 out of a total population of 303. This number had more than doubled to 280 in a mere four years, by 1727.⁵

The French enacted the Code Noir, or Black Code, in 1724, to define the status of people of African descent, enslaved as well as free, in the colony. The Code elucidated the relationship between master and the enslaved, and essentially gave owners absolute control over their enslaved. According to the text of the Code, if an owner of an enslaved person opted to manumit an enslaved person, that person “then assumed the status of a naturalized inhabitant, enjoying the same rights and privileges inherent to Frenchmen.”⁶ Tellingly, however, the preceding article warned that all manumitted enslaved persons were “to show the profoundest respect to their former masters, to their widows and children, and any injury or insult offered by said manumitted slaves to their former masters, their widows or children—shall be punished with more severity than if it had been offered to any other person.”⁷ Certainly, with this pointed language, the fiction of them “enjoying the same rights and privileges” as Frenchmen was laid bare, and their lives were demarcated in significant ways from those of whites. Children of mothers with African heritage and French fathers could not inherit titles of nobility from their fathers, for example, and free Blacks found to be harboring runaways would be punished far more harshly than whites, even risking reenslavement.⁸ Nonetheless, in spite of colonial officials seeking to discourage the growth of the free Black population, owners continued to manumit the enslaved. Methods open to enslavers choosing manumission were by last will and testament or deed. Permission from the Superior Council was necessary to complete the process. Free Black enslavers were granted an additional option; by the act of themselves as owners marrying their enslaved person in the Church, they could thereby automatically emancipate that person and any children of the match.⁹

There is no evidence of free people of color in Natchez until the year 1723, when the French became aware of a free Black man residing among the Natchez Indians. This man, nameless in the written record, threw in his lot with the Indians against the French, making seditious speeches criticizing the colonizing power and apparently incited the Natchez to attack Native American allies of the French. According to Lieutenant Jean-Francois-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, a Frenchman serving in the military, the free Black man also shared his expertise in building fortifications and conducting war parties with the Natchez. Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the leader of the war against the Natchez, brokered a peace treaty calling for this free Black man to be brought in, dead or alive, to the French. The Natchez were unable to capture him alive, but the war chief, “Tattooed Serpent” (le Serpent Piqué), eventually proffered his decapitated head later that year.¹⁰ One of the ironies in this situation is that in French Louisiana, which included Natchez, military service, especially against the indigenous population, was ordinarily a means for enslaved Africans to obtain freedom, which mirrors a larger pattern established in other areas in the Atlantic world. Interestingly, this man decided to align his interests with the Natchez, which the French sought to actively discourage in coming years.¹¹

Other enslaved Africans chose to take advantage of the promise of liberty and fight for the French in hopes of being freed by legislative action for useful services performed for the colony. When tensions again flared up between the Natchez and the French in 1729–30, a number of African slaves fought to subdue the Natchez Indians who had killed or kidnapped hundreds of the French settlers and slaves at Fort Rosalie. At least fifteen enslaved Black men fought alongside the French and were recommended by the French attorney general to be emancipated. One of these was a Senegalese man named Francois Diocou, who gained his freedom as a consequence of his participation in this military engagement. He later worked to purchase his wife, Marie Aram, and presumably set her free as well. Thus, there were a number of ways that enslaved men and women could actuate their freedom. Unfortunately, though, the historical record remains largely silent on the numbers of free Black men and women who resided in French Natchez. The recently manumitted men may have all elected to return to New Orleans, as Diocou seems to have done.¹²

The French, after retaliating against the Natchez Indians by enslaving them or forcing them to flee their homeland, greatly diminished their settlement effort of the Natchez area. The settlers and enslaved Africans had largely been killed during the battle, captured and sold to the British, or enslaved by the Natchez Indians. Those who did not meet one of these fates in all likelihood retired to New Orleans. According to a French traveler in 1751, although the fort was rebuilt in the following years, the bluff was essentially desolate, with the exception of a handful of soldiers. At the French’s defeat in the French and Indian War in 1763, all of their land east of the Mississippi River, with the exception of New Orleans, passed to the British.¹³

The British recognized the agricultural potential of the Natchez area and sought to develop it by granting generous parcels of land to settlers coming from their seaboard colonies. These colonists brought enslaved men and women with them, which represented the beginnings of the second movement of enslaved people forced to pull up their roots and head west, generally three to four per family. Bonds people were thus compelled, alongside their owners, to wrest arable lands from the wilderness in this rough frontier. In 1776, a town consisting of “10 log houses and 2 frame houses, all situated under the bluff” was established.¹⁴ Since the Spanish controlled the mouth of the Mississippi, they did not favor the competition of British cash crops and foodstuffs with their own, so British exports from Natchez were discouraged. In spite of this commercial climate, a number of planters during this time period achieved a measure of success, through illicit river trade of produce and furs. However, the English ruled Natchez only briefly, and they subsequently surrendered it to the Spanish as a consequence of the hostilities between the British and Spanish in 1779. At the time that the Spanish officially took control in 1783, the population of the Lower Mississippi Valley was approximately “sixteen thousand black slaves, thirteen thousand whites, and over one thousand free people of color.”¹⁵

Spanish Natchez, 1779–1798

Although Spain won control of Natchez, there were actually very few Spaniards residing in the District. The bulk of the white inhabitants were either British or American, with a few French families dispersed throughout. The Spanish government proved exceedingly active in attracting settlers to the area. In exchange for signing a loyalty oath to Spain, the former British subjects and Americans seeking new lands west of the Atlantic Seaboard found a fairly tolerant government that enabled them to secure lands to begin producing agricultural products for the market. The benefits of living under the Spanish included practicing Protestantism unhindered, importing goods free of duty, traveling freely on Spanish-constructed highways and roads, and enjoying some military protection. The development of the Natchez District under the Spanish charted its future course as a planter-dominated region. Production of tobacco and indigo continued and was greatly encouraged during Spanish rule. However, one agricultural change took place at this time that would distinguish Natchez in the coming years: the introduction of cotton cultivation.¹⁶

Under the Spanish, the African and African American presence increased significantly and represented two veins of movement into Natchez: that of a continuing growth due to forced migration from Africa as well as the smaller involuntary movement of slaves from the former British American colonies. Spain’s direct connection to Africa caused an infusion of new “salt-water slaves” to steadily arrive in Natchez.¹⁷ By 1784, the African enslaved totaled 498 individuals in the population. A few years later, according to Spain’s 1787 census, there were 22 “mulattoes,” 675 Blacks, and 1,275 whites living in and around the old fort. It is highly probable that the “mulattoes” listed in this census were free people of color. By 1792, a mere five years later, the number of the enslaved had tripled, and Africans outnumbered the smaller African American population. Between 1784 and 1794, the total number of people of African descent, enslaved and free, grew from 505 to 2,060. By 1796, people of African descent composed 40 percent of the population, a demographic change that reflected the growing regional investment in slavery and a reflection of trends in the larger Atlantic world.¹⁸

In tandem with the growth of the enslaved, free people of color, albeit an infinitesimal proportion in comparison, nonetheless became more numerous than in previous eras. One reason is simple—population growth. But another influential explanation for the upward spike relates to the attitude of the Spanish regarding slavery. The 1769 O’Reilly Code, which had been put in place under the British, formed the basis of governance in Natchez. It originated from the 1543 Recopilacion de las Leyes de las Reynos de Indias.¹⁹ Since the original Spanish law codes identified slavery as perversely opposed to the natural order, in general, Natchez’s laws supported the attainment of freedom and did not advocate reenslavement. Under them, free people of color practiced citizenship with fewer threats to their liberty than under the British and French.

Much has been written over the past half century regarding the supposedly more humane treatment that enslaved Africans experienced under French and Spanish laws than those that originated out of the British tradition.²⁰ Notwithstanding the debate, one facet of the “Tannenbaum thesis” that has withstood the test of time is the proof that there was a greater possibility of manumission under the Las Siete Partidas, the set of laws that Alfonso the Wise developed in the medieval Iberian Peninsula. This legal code represented enslavement to be an unnatural condition and underscored that it was “a rule of law that all judges should aid liberty, for the reason that it is a friend of nature, because not only men, but all animals love it.”²¹ Under this system, Spanish governing officials enacted the custom of coartacion, or self-purchase, which was a right that the enslaved enjoyed that permitted them to free themselves (or family members) by deciding on a purchase price mutually with their owners or by involving the courts to set a sum.²² Based on an agreed-upon price, African men and women could buy their freedom with money they amassed through self-hire or gifts. Disinclined owners under this system did not pose an obstacle, as the slave or an agent acting on his or her behalf could obtain a carta de libertad (certificate of manumission).

Therefore, the population of free people of color had more opportunity for growth under the Spanish because this legal guarantee enabled enslaved people to purchase themselves and even their children. Even aside from coartacion, there were other paths to freedom for the enslaved in Spanish-held areas, including manumission after living in a foreign country for twenty years as a free person, or ten years in the country where the owner lived, or by becoming a clergyman. Also, a woman who was placed by her owner in a brothel had the unchallenged right to her liberation. Needless to say, the free Black population in Spanish America had a greater potential for increase than in British-settled regions.²³

Although in theory, coartacion and the varied means detailed above allowed enslaved people the method by which to free themselves during Spanish governance, due to the sparse population in general of the Natchez District, it did not result in a large number of free Blacks like the community that developed in Spanish New Orleans. Most of the manumissions for which there is documentation were not self-purchases. Rather, they were enslavers freeing individuals for various reasons. However, there were several cases in which parents bought and liberated their children. For example, the free Black woman Jeannette purchased and soon afterward manumitted her eight-year-old “mulatto” son, Narcisse. An unnamed free Black man also bought his nineteen-year-old daughter, Nanette, for $460 from her owner, William Brocus. Elizabeth Barland, a “mulatto” woman, and her four young children were bought from their owner and subsequently manumitted by William Barland, the white father of her children.²⁴

Another means by which enslaved individuals secured their manumissions was through freedom suits. Three such suits before 1795 involved contested wills with all affected parties having been promised freedom after their owner’s death. Another type of freedom suit that alleged unlawful enslavement also resulted in more free people of color. One such court case detailed the kidnapping of two girls, Betty and Jude, both daughters of a free woman, who had been indentured in their home state of North Carolina and brought to Natchez to serve the terms of their apprenticeship. But before the expiration of their indenture, they were illegally sold into slavery. They were later able to prove their freedom under the Spanish. It was not until after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 that settlers with enslaved persons entered in great numbers into the area. By that time, the Americans had won control of Natchez and coartacion disappeared as a guarantor of freedom.²⁵

Transitioning to a New Governance: American Natchez, 1798–1865

The more liberal Spanish attitude stood in marked contrast to the British tradition that had taken hold in the colonies on the Atlantic Seaboard, which generally frowned upon manumission. For example, in British-settled North America, when manumissions occurred, the newly manumitted were often legally obligated to leave the colony. In Virginia, for example, private manumissions from early on were illegal, and only those that were approved “by the governor and Council for ‘meritorious services’” received their freedom. Varying laws existed in all of the English colonies, which eventually became the United States, but the majority of them made slavery a complicated quagmire to escape. There was a flurry of manumissions during and after the American Revolution in the Upper South, due to the heady rhetoric of liberty and equality that permeated revolutionary America. This greatly increased the free Black population of states like Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Manumission occurred at the owner’s discretion, however, and there was no protection built into the system to coerce the owner into giving up all claims, as in the Spanish system. Under English law, having the purchase money in hand was no guarantee of liberty. And even the revolutionary fervor died out in the years following the period of increased manumission in the Eastern Seaboard states.²⁶

Once freed, according to some scholars, there was still a distinct difference in the treatment meted out to Africans under Spanish and British law.²⁷ Historians have long maintained that British—and by extension, American—laws continued to discriminate against free Blacks after emancipation, whereas “the Spanish government which had ‘accorded them rights in common with other subjects,’” did not. The Spanish sought to maintain this group of people as an intermediary between whites and slaves. They considered them as a class below creolized Spaniards and above the enslaved and Native Americans. Notwithstanding a certain fluidity that allowed enslaved people more ability to cross the line between slavery and freedom and for free people of color to exercise some measure of autonomy and economic opportunity in the colonial period, from the earliest times in Natchez, racialized oppression differentiated them from Europeans.

Indeed, there were some ordinances passed under the Spanish that sustained a visible mark of difference between them and whites. For example, free women of color in urban areas like New Orleans could not adorn themselves in feathers, mantillas, and other accoutrements that white women included in their wardrobes, and they were required to wear a handkerchief turban. In an attempt to impose a limit on the level of finery in which free women of color could dress themselves, lawmakers concerned with maintaining a sumptuary distance between free Blacks and whites only encouraged the development of that symbol of fashion, the tignon, which came to characterize a distinctive way of fashioning one’s hair. There were also efforts to separate free people of color from white people in some public places, such as theaters, which probably did not impact frontier areas like Natchez as much as urban communities during this time period.²⁸

One clear advantage in their treatment under the Spanish, though, was their recourse to use the legal system to uphold their property rights, if threatened, as any white man or woman could; in Natchez, even as small as the free community was, they vigorously did.²⁹ As demonstrated by the confident way that people like Betty, Jude, and Nelly Price sued for their freedom or for money or services due them, they were well aware of their rights under the law and aggressively used the system to their advantage.

Migration: Voluntary and Involuntary

Even before Natchez peacefully transferred into American hands and became part of the newly created Mississippi Territory, planters from the older, more settled states, becoming aware of the rich potential of Natchez’s burgeoning cotton cultivation and convenient access to the Mississippi River, poured into the region. Slavery rapidly expanded during this time and transformed the region into “one of the major producers of slave-grown commodities in the world.”³⁰ After the United States obtained possession of the Natchez District and Natchez became the territorial capital of Mississippi in 1798, the Spanish system of government was abolished. Although planters living in the area of the former Natchez District had embraced the more liberal tenets of Spanish rule for almost two decades, by the time the constitutional convention was held in 1817, the laws changed. All people of African descent, enslaved and free, became increasingly legally constrained. Over time, the flexibility of the frontier that had characterized the society and that extended more freedoms to people of color hardened into a plantation society that severely limited the rights and opportunities open to them. Eventually, as table 1.1 highlights, Natchez had a Black-majority population, and like many other similar areas where this was the case, the fears of the white community concerning being outnumbered heavily by enslaved Africans influenced them to restrict the growth of the free community of color. The numbers in table 1.1 sharply evidence the tiny number of free people of color compared to the other two populations.

This process continued as slavery expanded and more African Americans were forcibly brought by planters coming from places like Virginia, South Carolina, and Kentucky, and even illegally smuggled in from Africa after the abolition of US participation in the international slave trade in 1808. Not all of these people were legally enslaved; many were kidnapped from their northern communities, where some had been free for generations. Even free Blacks who were imprisoned in areas like Washington, DC, were sold into slavery for various crimes and misdemeanors and transported to the Deep South to feed the insatiable hunger for slave labor. This represents one of the biggest changes in slavery under the Spanish to the new American rule. Prior to this development, Spanish law protected the free status of people of African descent and viewed reenslavement as unnatural to the human condition. However, there are numerous cases of people who were thus unlawfully pressed into slavery from the North and luckily were able to successfully plead their cases.³¹

One such man, John Roach, experienced a harrowing life trauma that unfolded in the court system of New Orleans. Born a free man in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Roach was kidnapped as a boy and sold into slavery, first in Kentucky and eventually to a couple in Louisiana, where they “did put our petitioner and respondent to hard labor, did ill treat and misuse him by oftimes beating him cruelly and punishing him by cutting off one of his ears, marking & scarifying his body in divers places with a whip and other unlawful means and by branding him on the breast with an hot iron with the letters S.Z.R [the owner’s initials].”³² He escaped from his captors but was imprisoned as a runaway, and during the period of incarceration, he fortuitously encountered a seaman he knew from his days in Philadelphia. This man was able to vouch that he had also known Roach’s free mother, who labored as a laundress for his ship’s crew when they were in port for a couple months during the Embargo of 1807 and that Roach had helped to deliver the loads of laundered clothes for his mother. He was eventually freed and later recorded his freedom in Natchez’s Chancery Court, perhaps heading back to his family, friends, and disrupted life in the North.

Concurrent to this forced migration, legal and illegal, a voluntary migration of free people of color, primarily male, trickled into Natchez from both North and South, as table 1.2 reveals. Much as the mass movement from east to southwest brought enslaved people to the newly established cotton plantations and towns, free people of color also chose to follow the westward expansion. Surprisingly, in spite of the fact that Natchez was in the Deep South, or perhaps precisely because it was, some willingly migrated. The reasons why some ventured there are obvious. In 1800, David, a free forty-five-year-old free Black man, “came from Maryland to accompany his Wife & Children who were purchased of Henry Haggaman” of Sommerset County.”³³ Natchez’s proximity to the Mississippi River made it a convenient place to travel to and from, and earlier in its settlement, especially in the period prior to the 1830s, it was a moderately tolerant place for free people of color, albeit on a smaller scale than bustling New Orleans.³⁴ At least sixty-three free people of color willingly migrated to Natchez between 1800 and the 1830s. Most of them (fifty-four) were men, substantially outnumbering the nine women, representing about 84 percent of the total number of voluntary migrants. It is likely that they were part of the southwestward push as the US expanded its borders after the Louisiana Purchase, no doubt looking for better work opportunities, sometimes following family members sold to the area, or pushed out of other states by increasing restrictions on free people of color. Many of these free men of color had farming, carpentering, blacksmithing, and barbering skills.³⁵

Barbering was a profession that was particularly lucrative to free men in urban areas, especially in places like Natchez, where there was a concentration of wealthy, style-conscious planters, and a fair number of travelers who frequented the area. For freeborn James Miller, it was a combination of the personal and the professional. He ventured to Natchez from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, shortly after he met Adelia Johnson, Amy Johnson’s daughter and sister to William Johnson, when she was taken to that city to be manumitted. They married in 1820, and for most of that decade he ran one of the most successful and popular barber shops in Natchez. Indeed, it was he who trained young William and sold him his business in 1830, when the couple and the first members of their growing family moved to New Orleans, where they would settle, remaining close to the Johnson family through frequent letters and visits.³⁶ In the case of Bill Hayden, a free barber of color from Virginia, love and marriage did not draw him to Natchez; it seemed a safe haven for him after a protracted battle to become emancipated. After struggling for his freedom for nine years past the date he was promised it, he decided to settle in Natchez after getting assurance from a resident, Major Minor, that “if I would come to Natchez and become a citizen of the place, I might depend on any assistance which lay in his power to render me.”³⁷ He and his family lived in the area with the support of the local community for a number of years.

Some of the newly arrived free people of color like Hayden used relationships with influential local whites to their advantage in securing protection for themselves in Natchez. Although there were economic opportunities available to both men and women of color in the city of Natchez, financial independence was not assured. The predominance of free people of color residing within or attached to white households is not surprising during this time. Many of the free Black people had recently been emancipated. It took time to become economically secure. In more than a few cases, the newly freed people were family members of the whites to whose household they were attached or favored servants who continued to serve the family.

Freedom’s Origins

As demonstrated in table 1.3, the free Black community’s origins overwhelmingly are due to manumissions by white former owners and others. The reasons for this are varied. Some owners like Abner Green indicated that release from slavery was due to personal platonic relationships: “to reward that fidelity and honesty, which I have found in so great a degree, in my Negro fellow Belile, whom I have owned twenty five years. I do will and decree that he, Belile, and his wife Bess be free.”³⁸ Owners like John Forsyth related that enslaved people like Hannah were deserving of freedom for notable actions performed. As he noted in his petition to the legislature, she was “’Verry faithfull, honest, and dilegent,’ a nurse who tended to family and friends during the ‘malignant fevers’ in 1817 and 1819. She also saved her former master’s property when his house was going up in flames.”³⁹ Taken at face value, this manumission may have been precisely for the reason offered. It could also have been given as subterfuge to mask a sexual relationship between Forsyth and Hannah. As chapter 2 will detail, these types of manumissions composed the bulk of those actuated by whites.

Aside from white people manumitting enslaved people, Natchez’s Black community took matters into their own hands. A number of men and women, many of them with demonstrable skills in blacksmithing, laundering, or barbering, saved up the money to offer for themselves. It was often a strategy to purchase oneself, with the cooperation of a willing owner, and then tirelessly labor to save money to buy other family members from slavery. Thus, purchase by the members of one’s family opened another path to freedom. As mentioned, this practice dates back to the earliest times in Natchez. Free Black men and women expended much time, money, and determination to free their loved ones from bondage, as the case of Jeanette buying and emancipating her son, Narcisse, during the Spanish period clearly demonstrated. After the American acquisition, this option to purchase disappeared as a right for people of African descent. However, if the owner could be persuaded, it was a strategy for people who could afford to do it.

Free Black men and women in roughly equal numbers did free their children. One man, Limerick Higdon, after purchasing himself for $600 in 1822, worked and saved for five years to muster the $550 to buy his wife, Sukey, and son Orville from his former white owner, Ezekial Newman. After making this most valuable purchase of his family in 1827, in the following year he paid another large amount of money, $500, to secure 100 acres, no doubt to become even more financially stable and to ensure the future enjoyment of liberty by himself and his family.⁴⁰ Manumitting one’s family took time and much effort and could be complicated, as illustrated by the case of Milly Sterne. She, along with her three children Washington, Walton, and Adaline, were emancipated by her white owner and their father, Peyton Sterne, in 1818. However, the manumission did not include her three other children, twins Nathanial and Ann, and their younger brother Seaton, evidently from a different father than her owner.⁴¹ Five years later, though, in 1823, she purchased them from the executor of Peyton Sterne’s estate, perhaps with some of the money that was left to the children to cover their educational and living expenses. In 1827, she and all her children traveled up the Mississippi River to Cincinnati, where she had her first three children’s freedom recorded and then she freed her younger three children “in consideration of the maternal love and affection which I bear them.”⁴²

This act of love and freedom was not limited to spouses and parents. There are a few cases in Natchez of siblings and grandparents freeing family members. For example, Hester Cummins, who owned slaves for economic reasons, also purchased members of her family, but with the intent to free them at a later date. She bought her sister, Hannah, and her niece for $1,000 in 1835, borrowing at least part of the money from her friend and local business owner William Johnson. She was still paying for them at least until the 1840s and subsequently manumitted them.⁴³ Cases like these, although not as numerous as the aforementioned method of manumission—sexual and family relationships with white men—nonetheless demonstrate the tenacity and will of people to persevere in the effort needed to secure the freedom of their loved ones.

Thus, Natchez’s free Black community was an amalgamation of people who became freed in a host of ways, most often as a consequence of sexual relationships, hard work, and those who migrated there voluntarily. The bulk of the community was comprised of people who were locally born, as table 1.5 shows. However, the waves of people attracted to the Southwest by the opening of the lands of the Louisiana Purchase brought enslaved people with them most commonly from Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. This was mirrored in a smaller trickle of free people of color migrating to Natchez as well. Becoming free was an arduous task, and it took time. Maintaining freedom was also an effort and the subsequent section details challenges associated with it, particularly during the trying times of societal fear toward them in the aftermath of well-publicized slave uprisings in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s.⁴⁴

Periods of Hysteria: Restrictions on Free People of Color

Although Natchez had its roots in a relatively open frontier society, a borderland that offered space to free people of color with few restrictions on their liberty, this tolerance changed ever more quickly after Mississippi joined the United States. Manumission of slaves became more complicated during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1822, white paranoia about a homegrown version of the Denmark Vesey plot in South Carolina in which a free man of color was accused of concocting a revolt to attack enslavers influenced Mississippi lawmakers to clamp down on free Blacks. Some of these measures included outlawing migration of free Blacks into the state, with the consequence of breaking the law being sale at public auction and being indentured for up to a year. The lawmakers also sought to control the population from within by passing a law requiring a legislative act to emancipate a slave for “some meritorious act [that] had been done by the slave for the owner or for the state.”⁴⁵ This meant the investment of time, money, and effort to prove to the satisfaction of the state that the enslaved person was worthy of liberty based on their performance. Between 1823 and 1831, twenty-eight such petitions went before the legislature. Only three cases were successful, which speaks to the reluctance of the state lawmakers to free enslaved people during this time period.⁴⁶

One way that Natchez owners used to get around the law was to take enslaved persons out of Mississippi to a free state and manumit them, the so-called “Natchez method,” apparently so dubbed because of its popularity. Numerous owners personally escorted their slaves to travel to another state for emancipation or hired an agent to do so. The newly freed man or woman then returned to Mississippi. Cincinnati, Ohio, was a popular choice for many, as was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as well as Vidalia, Louisiana, which was literally across the Mississippi River from Natchez. The state made it illegal for these sorts of manumissions to take place in 1831, therefore, it was a risky business for both parties. For the enslaved, it meant freedom for a period of time and then, if detected and prosecuted, sale back into slavery. For white enslavers, oftentimes the parent of the slave, it was ideal to free the person and allow them to return to their hometown, where they had protection from themselves and other family members, connections, and sometimes property. There was a provision in this law that allowed whites who were willing to attest to the good reputations of free people of color so that they could remain in the state.⁴⁷ The case of the McCarys is a good example of the quandary that both parties faced. In 1813, white property owner Robert McCary willed the freedom of some of his slaves, including a woman named Franky and her two children whom he fathered, Kitty and Bob. In addition to their freedom, he left them all of his property in Mississippi:

If the manumission was not legal in Mississippi, then he gave specific instructions to emancipate them in Pennsylvania, but they had to return to Mississippi to claim their property, which left them in the precarious position of remaining illegally in the state as free people. The townspeople of Natchez by and large may have been uninformed about the finer points of emancipation and therefore not given Kitty and Bob much thought. Or they were willing to turn a blind eye to free people of color whom they felt to be reputable and productive members of Natchez society. But there were those who were not always supported by the greater community, or those who fell out of favor over time, so it was an uncertain space in which to be.

Paranoia and fear felt at the regional level continued to influence manumission restrictions passed concerning free Blacks across the South and in Mississippi. After the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion, many historians have documented the white fears of the possibility that people of African descent might mutiny against the white power structure. Although there was very little involvement of free Blacks in most rebellions that occurred in American history, they were looked upon with suspicion and mistrust, and there was a concerted effort across the South to limit their freedom and restrict their activities.⁴⁹ An editorial from The Virginian, which was reprinted in a local paper, The Natchez, showcases how easily attitudes from other slaveholding areas could influence local prejudices. As it reasoned, although free Blacks did not prove a major force in the Turner uprising, their presence alone “is sufficient, of itself, to excite in the bosoms of the latter [the enslaved] a feeling of dissatisfaction with their own condition.” And further, by providing the example of their freedom, it caused the enslaved to “sometimes indulge the delusive dream of effecting his own emancipation by the murder of those who hold him in bondage.”⁵⁰ However, there was still strong support among the planter class for some in the free community of color, so in 1831, there a clause was added to permit those free people who came before the Police Board and satisfied “the court of his [or her] good character and honest deportment” to be licensed to remain in the state.⁵¹

In 1841, another panic on the part of legislators and the general public instigated by reports of a nearby Bayou Sara uprising influenced policy decision toward free people of color. Free barber and diarist William Johnson described a situation that he termed the “Inquisition.” A vigilance committee formed in Natchez that was mirrored by whites in other places like Vicksburg and Holly Springs. They, along with editors of local newspapers, sounded the alarm to rid Natchez of all who did not have licenses and even revoked those of some who did. In one Mississippi Free Trader article, people were encouraged “’to strike a severe blow against the practices of the rogue, the incendiary, and the abolitionist,’ by regulating slave conduct and by ‘the immediate removal of every free Negro, who has intruded upon our society.’”⁵² Johnson chronicles the frenzied activities of free Black people soliciting whites for their names on petitions that would enable them to stay in town. Some men, women, and children were unlucky in this pursuit and were deported from the state.⁵³

One group of people was particularly vulnerable in this period of community policing: those who were informally set free by their owners but lacked the documentary proof, the so-called “quasi-slaves.” As one letter to the Natchez newspaper Mississippi Free Trader related in 1841, there were “at least fifty Negroes and mulattoes now in Adams County, who affect to be free.”⁵⁴ In response to the difficulties involved in legally freeing slaves, many owners disregarded the law and unofficially gave up all claims to them. These people were free to find employment and accumulate goods and property on their own. It is virtually impossible to give an accurate accounting of their numbers in any southern city, including Natchez, due to their efforts to remain undetected. Ira Berlin reported “the largest number of quasi-free Negroes resided in the Lower South, where the obstacles to manumission remained the highest. Illegally freed blacks may have composed more than half the free Negro population in some parts of the Lower South.”⁵⁵ In many cases, it was simply too much trouble, too expensive, or next to impossible to navigate through the legal waters to manumit people. Although they were able to exercise their liberty for the most part, they were vulnerable especially during these periodic sweeps.

By the 1840s, thus, the Natchez environment became decidedly unsupportive of free African Americans. In early 1842, for example, Mississippi tightened up on its manumission laws and prohibited private manumissions and made it unlawful “for any person, by last will or testament, to make any device or bequest of any slave or slaves for the purpose of emancipation, or to direct that any slave or slaves shall be removed from this state for the purpose of emancipation anywhere.”⁵⁶ Certain economic avenues were blocked to free Black people. Some of these included the inability to sell liquor or groceries, and to run houses of entertainment. They were not allowed to sell items other than in incorporated towns in the state in a further effort to separate their activities from those of the enslaved. Death was prescribed to any free Black who published pamphlets or newspapers designed to promote rebellion or dissension within the ranks of the enslaved, thus they were barred from the profession of printing literature.⁵⁷

This process of expanded limitations placed on them had been steadily expanding since the 1820s. By the 1840s, “Free blacks could not vote, hold public office, testify against whites, serve on juries in litigation involving whites, move around without written and certified proof of their freedom on their persons . . . or carry and keep weapons without a license.”⁵⁸ Their travel accommodations were often curtailed, and they were not allowed the same privileges as white passengers on public transportation. Mississippi legislation contained provisions that prohibited people of color from insulting white people; thus, from an early age, much like in the later period of the Jim Crow South, young African American children had to learn the bitter lesson of swallowing words that protested injustice and discrimination. One point especially exemplified the disparity between Black and white behavior: “If a free black subjected a white to verbal abuse or physical violence, however slight, the black became liable to punishment not to exceed 39 lashes on bare back.”⁵⁹ Although technically free, even with papers attesting to this in hand, because of their racial heritage and living in a society in which “the laws . . . presume a Negro prima facie evidence to be a slave,” there was a vast difference between freedom for whites and people of African heritage. ⁶⁰

The population of free people of color reached its zenith in the census of 1840. After that date, due to the increasingly restrictive measures directed against free Blacks, the population declined significantly from its high of 283 to 258 in 1850 and finally to 225 in 1860. Public sentiment and condemning newspaper editorials more fervently insinuated the villainous character of free people of color across the South and in Mississippi, especially in the divisive years leading up to the Civil War. This continued to be a struggle while private individuals continued to support them in petitions to allow them to remain in the state. For instance, the petition was put forth to the state legislature in 1859 that, we “The undersigned legal voters of Adams County observe that there are certainly ‘vicious and evil disposed’ free people of color, but there are also those ‘who have spent a life here free from reproval, or even the suspicions of improper conduct.’ Any law that may be passed to expel free black people should take this into account. The city’s Board of Police should be given the authority to discriminate between the loyal and disloyal, and remove only the ‘unworthy.’”⁶¹ It was not a wholly unexpected development to have individuals at the local level banding together in support of free people of color, which was thus the contradiction in Natchez and even some other areas. There were often tensions between the legislators in Jackson, particularly during the heated debates regarding contested national issues like slavery and abolition, which raised concerns about the ambiguous positions occupied by free Blacks and caused whites to question their loyalty to the southern social system and fear them as potential subversives. In choosing not to enforce laws requiring free people of color to leave and in supporting individuals or families of color, many times, individual white citizens of Natchez found themselves in opposition to neighbors who supported the removal of free Blacks. The following year, in 1860, the Mississippi General Assembly passed a law “remanding free Negroes to slavery or requiring them to leave the state.”⁶² Across the state, there were at least eleven cases of free people of color willingly placing themselves under an owner, likely in an effort to stay in close proximity to family and friends and thus taking their chances with a system they knew intimately. Other free people of color maintained their way of life as they had and hoped to go unchallenged. There were also some who slipped across the color line in an effort to retain their liberty.

Thus, the theme of movement continued to ebb and flow as it had since the early days of settlement in Natchez, with enslaved being brought from Africa and from the Atlantic Seaboard, free people migrating in from other places and making Natchez their homes—sometimes temporarily. The movement could also be a movement between states of slavery to freedom, illustrated by men and women gaining their freedom in the days of the Spanish and through the American period. Natchez under the Americans was quite different than it had been under the Spanish for free men and women of color. Although they continued to accrue property and build families and lives for themselves, they felt the chokehold of repression upon them. Violence undergirded the free Black experience, from the foundational generation and continuing through the conditional generations that followed, and this is showcased most obviously in the very creation of the community of color.