Introduction
I had thought only slavery dreadful, but the state of a free negro appeared to me now equally so at least, and in some respects even worse, for they live in constant alarm for their liberty.
—Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Generations of Freedom is a community study that examines how freedom, movement, and violence were inextricably linked through generations of free people of color in Natchez from Spanish colonial rule (1779–95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.1 This transgenerational approach contextualizes the shifting nature of freedom and maps the complex changes experienced by free communities of color across time and space. In particular, it examines the gendered vulnerabilities free people of color faced that qualified and restricted their basic freedoms, including their ability to own property, find employment, function as parents, lovers, and spouses, and maintain their bodily well-being, among others. Yet that is merely half the story. The most critical aspect of the experiences of free people of color were their efforts to persevere and survive under the most adverse of conditions, precariously balanced on the edge of slavery. Highlighting the coping mechanisms they employed under these conditions and how their lives were affected are essential elements in accurately representing their history. Free people of color staked their claim to freedom through property ownership, court battles, strategies as parents and as partners, and self-definition. In so doing, they etched out lives, families, businesses, and rich traditions. This study explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence informed the experience from one generation to another.
Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. The book grapples with the instability of this boundary by using the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the esteemed work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows me to identify a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed, which could also include parents and their children, as well as grandchildren. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America’s system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding their status at birth as legally free or unfree, each individual’s continued freedom was based upon their compliance with a demanding and often unfair system. Moreover, one’s ability to persist within the vagaries of an ambiguous and often arbitrary freedom was not permanently guaranteed. To highlight the experiences of these various generations, Generations of Freedom analyzes changing demographic structures and the expansion and contraction of individual and collective rights over time.2
By focusing on the role of family in sustaining free Blacks in Natchez, this work adds another layer to the growing historiography of free people of color.3 While some scholarship examines the Johnson family in particular, there is ample space for additional work on courtship, marriage, power dynamics, work, and leisure time among the entire population of free Blacks living in the city and surrounding Adams County. Free people of color experienced a multitude of living arrangements with partners, with those of their own social class, as well as with whites and enslaved Blacks. All of these partnerships were central in shaping the free community of color in valuable ways, whether they were legal marriages or otherwise. Free men and women of color regarded parenthood as one of their most important duties and developed strategies to shelter and strengthen their children and families from the harsh realities of life in a Deep South town constructed around and structured by a clear racial hierarchy. Free mothers and fathers bought their children out of slavery, apprenticed them to learn profitable trades, and arranged for them to be educated in their homes with private tutors or in schools in the North or New Orleans. There were also free men of color in the community who served as surrogate fathers and worked to help single mothers of color find apprenticeships and other protections for their children. Free Black parents developed these critical tactics to navigate the tumultuous environment that surrounded them.
Whether they were parents or not, all free people of color had to contend with a system of social control that was designed to prevent them from exercising full liberty. This was demonstrated in the codified laws established under all Europeans and Americans governing Natchez that conflated free Blacks in the same section with the enslaved and delineated rights and restrictions. The laws stipulating the process of manumission were laid out alongside of those that spelled out practices and occupations they were prohibited from engaging and punishments for transgressing the laws. Not insignificantly, throughout the era, free Blacks were assigned stiff penalties for verbally disrespecting or physically assaulting whites. While presenting the rights and privileges accorded to free people of color, laws reminded them that there was a line of separation between themselves and whites. That line was guarded with physical force.4
Violence as a means of coercion and control, of degradation and humiliation, of privileging one group over another, saturated the lives of all people of African descent in the Americas, including free women and men of color. Violence pervaded Natchez from its founding under the French in 1714 extending through the late antebellum period and beyond. Violence was so endemic to Natchez life that it was normalized and diffused into the slave community and all aspects of society.5 Although free people of color were removed from the context of their persons being legally owned by another and thus afforded some modicum of protection from unlimited exploitation of their bodies and persons, due to the structure of social exclusion and violence, they experienced a limited sort of liberty. The potential for violence was ever-present for this class of men and women. Most times it was directed at them as a distinct class of people, those who existed in a netherworld between the enslaved and the wholly free. On other occasions, the violence was personal, and they experienced it as individuals. Importantly, though, this work acknowledges their roles as perpetrators of violence as well, not merely the victims of it. Some free Black people in Natchez engaged in acts of domestic abuse, owned enslaved people, and inflicted harm on both the enslaved and other free people of color within the community. On many levels, the constant recognition of the ubiquity of violence informed their life choices and affected every decision that they made.
Illuminating racial oppression and violence against free Blacks, however, in no way diminishes what they as individuals and as a class of people were able to accomplish. Nor does it define them. However, state-sanctioned repression coupled with the actions of local people could and did put their freedom, livelihoods, property, and families at risk. This reality served as a catalyst in critical ways to move at various levels and employ strategies to resist, much as the enslaved did. Therefore, this book aligns itself with a body of scholarship that emphasizes that African American history is a mixture of victimization as well as perseverance and that one side of the story cannot (and should not) be told without the other.6 This same idea extends to free people of color in that the identical catalyst of violence that motivated resistive actions on the part of the enslaved also moved free Blacks. Thus, there was continuity between slavery and freedom for those of African descent, and this study acknowledges that there was an organic connectedness between the two populations and a permeable boundary between the two. This work also seeks to maintain a balance with overarching themes in the literature of violence and oppression against people of African descent on one hand and with resistance and resilience on the other.
Generations of Freedom has benefited from and adds to the historiography on violence, which has been useful to scholars examining war, genocide, and slavery but has not yet been fully inclusive of the experiences of free African Americans.7 The historiography on free Black people has grown in recent years in relation to the risks associated with their position, including concrete issues like violence, and has revealed much concerning threats to their liberty as in the very real, unsettling practices of kidnapping, imprisonment, and reenslavement in the Deep South. Much of the scholarship on free Blacks privileges individuals who were native to the North and were taken illegally and sold south. My work addresses this geographical imbalance and highlights the risks that free people of color in the South faced and the unsavory practices through which they sometimes lost their tenuous freedom and were recategorized as enslaved. I examine both free people who were indigenous to Natchez and those who settled there after waging battles to claim their freedom in other areas.8
This book defines “violence” directed against free Blacks in the broadest sense to capture the nuanced spectrum ranging from explicit bodily force to psychological threats of it. Some studies have taken a limited view of the finer points of violence and have tended to envision it only as consisting of corporal actions taken against a person. The expanding body of scholarship and activism concerning violence against women and racial and ethnic groups, however, has made great effort to move violence from this short-sighted and simplistic definition. This book thus incorporates the following definition of violence that Mary Jackman has proffered and applies it to the experiences of those not technically enslaved or fully free in Natchez: “Violence: Acts that inflict, threaten, or cause injury. Actions may be corporal, written, or verbal. Injuries may be corporal, psychological, material, or social.”9 By adopting this comprehensive identification of violence, Generations of Freedom critically analyzes its innumerable patterns, including the gendered violence actualized against free men and women of color, and considers the ways in which they experienced it and combated it.
One of the sharpest gender distinctions—if not the sharpest—between the lived experiences of free people of color was the sexual violence to which some enslaved women were subjected that resulted in their freedom and, at times, that of their children. Indeed, a substantial portion of the foundational generation of Natchez’s free community were survivors of this violation along with their mixed-race children. There is a long history of white men sexually exploiting enslaved women for reasons of sexual pleasure, sadism, and, especially, to increase the slave population through any resultant children, who would follow the status of their mothers. The rape of unfree Black women was ubiquitous throughout the South. Women who were manumitted as a consequence of sexual coercion were rarer than those who lived out their lives in enslavement. However, in the Lower South especially, the population of free Black people was literally created on this foundation of sexual violence. Natchez very much fell in line with this practice.10
This project draws upon these two bodies of scholarship—on enslaved and free Black women—by emphasizing women’s passage from one state, bondage, to another, freedom, with the accompanying catalyst of violence.11 By doing so, it acknowledges some tension in the historiography between a scholarly emphasis on the exploitation of enslaved women on the one hand and their agency to choose relationships with white men on the other.12 This same tension carries over to the body of work on free women of color that minimizes the level of violence and coercion on this population. Much of the scholarship has deemphasized the fact that the origin of their freedom had its roots mired in violence. Although most historians of free women of color in the Lower South acknowledge that their emancipation was largely a result of relationships with white men, some of the work tends to downplay the violence that the women underwent prior to becoming emancipated and, instead, has highlighted the ability of women to choose these sorts of relationships or to actively use them to their advantage. In some ways, it is as though historians have worked backward in their mental processing of these women, already having encountered them in the historical record as free and, in many cases, owning property after having been freed with their children, who were the by-products of interracial relationships. However, it was never a foregone conclusion to these women that they or their children would benefit at some future point from the sexual exploitation to which they were subjected. Many of the women suffered in slavery for years, even decades, until they or their offspring were liberated.
In this book, in addition to broadening the definition of “sexual violence” to include any nonconsensual sex acts, I view any interracial sex between white men and enslaved women that occurred during the period of enslavement because of the inherent power imbalance that existed and the social hierarchy that placed African American women squarely at its bottom, with white men at the top. Although certainly there was space for genuine affection and attraction to develop between individuals, legal ownership enabled enslavers to force women into sex without their consent. This is coupled with the fact that for the most part, written records mirror the mind-set of their creators and fail to explicate those behaviors that are currently recognized as forcibly executed sex. Historians have long recognized that in reconstructing the African American past, it is necessary to creatively use documents to wrest the maximum amount of meaning from them. However, some scholars chronicling the spectacles of rape and terror committed upon enslaved African American women have called for a heightened examination of documents “against their grain.”13 In order to do precisely that, it is essential to privilege the “silences” within sources and address what they were not saying.
Although acknowledging the need to balance oppression and agency in the lived experiences of enslaved women who became free, this analysis highlights the violence that was foundational to their freedom. Similarly, it emphasizes the coercion and pressures upon free women of color to define and safeguard their freedom. After all, not all free women of color received their freedom as a consequence of interracial relationships with white men, nor were they exclusively involved with them after manumission. And in the event that both of those latter conditions were true, does that suggest that due to these alliances, they were somehow immune to exploitation? Indeed, Catherine Clinton noted: “The beating, whipping, abuse, and coercion of black women under slavery is . . . underemphasized in historical accounts. Evidence indicates that these practices continued to plague black women following emancipation.”14 Although she wrote this in the context of the Reconstruction South, it has applicability for free women of color who lived during the era of racial slavery because, like Black women in the postbellum South, they continued to endure unwanted physical control of their bodies as well.
An examination of violence against this group of women after their manumission reveals much about the true nature of freedom. Even in freedom, women of color suffered violent acts from both white men and men of color. For example, some free Black women in Natchez chose to engage in sex work. Recent studies of prostitutes shed light on the near universality of contemporary sex workers having histories of child abuse, physically and sexually, and continued abuse by partners as adults. They are also at risk to increased violence at the job site—being envisioned by men as open to any kind of sexual expression—with some acts more dangerous and demeaning than others.15 In light of this, it is fair to assume that prostitution for free women of color most likely represented an amplification of these hazards due to racist beliefs and practices. Further, it forms a continuum from the abuse that some may have suffered as girls and young women in which they may have internalized the sexualization of themselves and into adulthood as they added sex work to their repertoire of lucrative work that put them in danger of continual sexual and physical abuse. It is critical for scholars to acknowledge that both agency and victimization were implicit within women’s experiences during this time period. Highlighting the violence and the exigent circumstances of racism and limitation that no doubt affected free women of color who chose this work enables them to come more clearly into view.
Aside from the sexualized dimension that distinguished free women of color’s experiences from men’s, gendered violence presented itself in a multitude of other ways. As the cases presented in the book demonstrate, acts of violence like physical assaults and beatings were committed on free Blacks as well as by free Blacks. Often white men were the perpetrators, but free Black men also engaged in attacks on one another, on free women of color, and on the enslaved. These types of attacks, aside from the real harm it caused the victims, could also cause free Black men to risk losing their freedom. If free Black men drew too much attention to themselves in becoming “public nuisances,” aside from the “appropriate” consequences of fines and possible jail time, they could be ordered out of Natchez.
Thus, another critical aspect of violence, the loss of freedom for people of African descent, is featured within this volume. Due to the fact that free Black people walked a thin line between enslavement and freedom, their behavior was under special scrutiny by the state and the white populace. This translated into accusations of crime ranging from petty theft to arson to murder. Whether or not they were guilty of transgressions of the law, they were often among the first to be immediately under suspicion and at risk of imprisonment, reenslavement, or deportation from Natchez. This seeming litany of the explicit and implicit violence that saturated the lives and consciousness of free Black people simultaneously made them a vulnerable population, but it propelled them to advocate for themselves and push back against it in a number of ways.
In addition to violence as a central theme, at its heart, this work stresses the fluidity inherent in the lives of free Black people in Natchez and offers the multifarious notion of movement to capture important aspects of it. Movement was expressed in the shifting between legal categories such as “enslaved,” “free,” “imprisoned,” “indentured,” and “reenslaved,” all salient conditions for free Black people. It also entailed the physical movement between geographical spaces whereby people traveled to and from Natchez, carrying their cultural worldviews and practices that diffused along the routes of migration they took. This book considers the metaphysical meaning of movement by which free Black people shifted from one racial identity to another, “passing” to protect their freedom and to succeed in a deeply racialized society.
There was a parallel, albeit smaller migration of free Black people occurring during what scholars have named the “Second Middle Passage” or the “Second Migration.”16 This movement of people involved free Black people who, like the enslaved, were deeply affected by the large-scale manumission of enslaved people in northern states following the Revolutionary War and the growth of slavery and commitment to cotton cultivation after the invention of the cotton gin. Unlike the forced displacement of enslaved people by waterway or overland coffle from the Upper to the Lower South after the 1808 end of the international slave trade, this movement of free Blacks was multidirectional. Geographically, free people of color often migrated to new areas since most southern states legally required them to leave within a few months of manumission. Lawmakers sought to limit the growth of free communities of color because they inherently set a bad example for the enslaved and disrupted the racial logic of “free” (whites) and “enslaved” (Blacks). Most free people of color did not comply with the laws (knowingly or not), which left them vulnerable to prosecution. However, there were those who moved out of the states in which they were emancipated and into other states, regions, and even countries.
Besides the punitive motivation that forced some to move, for free Blacks this movement also represented opportunity: the hope for better employment prospects, educational opportunities, a change of venue, or to find friends or family members living elsewhere. Natchez, on the bluffs of the Mississippi River, was a convenient conduit to a larger world that led south to the cosmopolitan and vibrant New Orleans, with a much larger population of free people of color, or north and eventually connecting to the Ohio River to Cincinnati and beyond. This spatial movement affected the free population into and out of Natchez as it occurred on both ends. The migration of free Blacks resulted in the transmission of cultural norms and practices that free migrants of color brought to the Natchez area. These traditions and sensibilities combined with those of the local free Black people, enslaved people, indigenous people, and whites. As free people of color migrated into the area from other parts of the US, they continuously transformed the culture and values of Natchez people and added layers of complexity to this frontier area. Conversely, some free Black migrants traveled out of Natchez but returned to visit kin and friends that they left behind, bringing back vestiges of their new environs. This is true of Natchez free Blacks who moved away, whether to the North, to New Orleans, or elsewhere. They persisted in thinking of Natchez as their home base, and as they traveled back and forth, so too did cultural practices and beliefs.17
The final aspect of movement this book considers is the metaphysical sliding across the color line and taking on another identity as a mechanism of “escape” in Natchez during the period of racialized slavery. “Race” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had different meanings, as it was understood by Spaniards and Anglos, with much more variation existing under Spanish law in the multifarious distinctions of people who had African, Indian, and European heritage. People of African descent, enslaved as well as free (of the latter, the majority in Natchez were mixed-race), recognized the power that contemporaneous understandings of race had on their lives, perhaps more so during the time of slavery, especially during the period leading up to the Civil War. For a number of free Black people in Natchez, claiming whiteness or Native American heritage enabled them to avoid being deported from Mississippi or sold into slavery.18
My work draws upon and contributes to the historiography on racial passing and the performance of whiteness which, during the pre–Civil War era, has largely focused on enslaved individuals, thus leaving a gap in the literature on free people of color.19 Historians have revealed how enslaved individuals who were suing for freedom in racial determinism cases “performed” their whiteness by their actions, mannerisms, appearances, speech patterns, and the like. Scholars have investigated the role that racialized notions about “whiteness” and “Blackness” coupled with the embodied performance of cultural values associated with these played upon the ability of the enslaved to negotiate their ways through a society that rigorously ascribed racial realities upon all. Studies in this vein have convincingly showcased court cases involving light-skinned enslaved females who “performed” their whiteness to the court to prove that their enslavement was not appropriate. This aligns with what other scholarship has found and demonstrates that free people of color likewise performed whiteness to safeguard and maintain their freedom from enslavement.20
Taken together, by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and indeed, their very bodies, this work argues that free Blacks were vitally active in shaping their own freedom and for generations afterward. It took a heightened level of vigilance and advocacy for themselves to combat challenges, and they responded by adding layers of protection to their lives. In order to accomplish this successfully, they nurtured relationships with allies, Black and white. They often consciously sought to keep a low profile in town by demonstrating values of hard work, adhering to the prevalent social norms, and accruing property. However, as this book shows, as a group that lived in the margins between fully free and enslaved, freedom was not a state to be taken for granted.
The chapters are thematically, rather than chronologically, organized within these broad frameworks. Chapter 1 locates free people of color within colonial Natchez under the French, British, Spanish, and American governments. It maps out the expansion and contraction of Natchez free Black society and analyzes the increasing restrictions placed upon it by increasingly leery government officials and legislators and highlights the various pathways to freedom. Manumission in Natchez was a gendered process in that the most common reason for it in Natchez was sexual and familial relationships with white men, which will be discussed in much greater detail in chapter 2. Before that, however, it is useful to provide a historical backdrop of the area and its settlement patterns. Movement is a critical theme in that it brought diverse people and cultural elements to Natchez, including a trickle of free people from other geographical regions, predominantly men. Due to tightening restrictions against free people of color as a distinct group, there were adjustments the community had to constantly make to adapt to uncertainty regarding their status. This caused some individuals and families to move away from Natchez and search opportunities elsewhere, and at times, to protect their freedom in an often-uncertain political climate.
Chapter 2 examines sexual violence between enslaved women and white men in Natchez as an important precipitating factor for manumission that formed the bedrock of this community. The chapter takes the position that all sexual interactions that occurred between these two groups as violence due to the power differential and use of coercion, whether it was physical or psychological, were sexually exploitative. Not only was sexual abuse traumatic when it occurred, but there were long-lasting mental health implications for the victims. Further, there was no guarantee it would result in the freedom of women or their children. The chapter discusses some critical demographics of women manumitted in this way including age, race, and other factors. It teases out the relationship between the fetishization of light-skinned enslaved women as a sizable portion of the enslaved women who did become free were multiracial.
Chapter 3 details the gendered forms of violence leveled against people of color in Natchez. Although there were specific moments in time during which violence may have been heightened, it was an epidemic to which free people of color were always disproportionately exposed in Natchez’s history. Sexual violence was actuated most heavily against women and sharply differentiated their experience of freedom from men’s. This chapter interrogates the threat and actualization of rape. As many of the women were born enslaved and later emancipated, often as a result of sexual coercion or outright rape, these episodes of violence continued to affect their lives and inform their major life decisions in relationships, childrearing, work, and a host of other areas. Following their emancipation, women remained vulnerable to sexual exploitation and subject to violence based upon not only their gender but also their race. Although not all episodes of violence were overtly sexual in nature, they remained gendered. Men and women who transgressed from the racial expectations of the community often suffered negative consequences; people who did not conform to dominant gender ideologies found themselves open to physical “correction.” Free people of color often did not survive this physical menace of violence and were victims of its brutality. This chapter examines strategies that they employed in resisting the overwhelming challenges to their bodily well-being.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine threats to the property of free Black people, including real estate, personal possessions, slaves that they owned, as well as the most precious, the right to own themselves, free from white control. Both chapters trace periods of local, statewide, and national trends of public anti–free Black rhetoric leveled against this population of people and how it affected them. Throughout the periodic attacks on the community of free people of color, the many people who were subjected to police detainment, imprisonment, and deportment from the state, frequently without their property and cut off from connections of family and friends, became casualties of the threat of violence that constantly hung over their heads. Free people of color initiated freedom suits to protect their free status and resist external efforts to reenslave them. Moreover, this section expounds upon how free people of color reacted to negative public perception and circumvented actions designed to defraud them out of their property. Finally, the chapter ends with discussion of free men and women’s constant vigilance to defend themselves against the diminishment of their social and economic positions.
Chapter 6 discusses relationship dynamics, romantic and otherwise, between free people of color as well as with those who were not part of the community. Some of the critical considerations of this chapter are friendships, courtship, marriage, power dynamics, work, and leisure time. It also closely examines the practices of free men and women of color to prepare themselves mentally and physically for parenthood and the strategies they employed to protect their children and families from the harsh realities of life in a racist, slave-based, Deep South town.
Chapter 7 examines concrete cases of racial passing in Natchez. Light-skinned free people of color had a weapon available to them: passing as white and/or Native American. This seemingly contradictory behavior could be viewed as an act of resistance. Since free people of African descent were the most vulnerable population to acts of violence, being absorbed into the white population and becoming accepted as an undiscovered component of a racist society simultaneously subverted the system as well as afforded them another layer of protection. Similar to other aspects of freedom in Natchez, this chapter explores the gendered ways in which free people of color performed white femininity and masculinity and how the increasingly racialized Mississippi society increasingly placed more emphasis on racial ancestry than it had during the Spanish period. Examining the act of passing among people of African descent offers the possibility of considering it as an act of resistance. The book concludes with a brief consideration of the end of the Civil War when the legal distinction disappears between enslaved and free people of African descent.
The following pages tell the stories of people who escaped the confines of slavery, the foundational generation, and those who had been born outside of it, the conditional generations, all of whom collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. African Africans had to be mindful of the permeable line between enslavement and freedom, both systems of racialized control that were undergirded by violence. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent upon them utilizing all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including the most precious, themselves.