This is getting interesting.

Jim Hershman is correct in noting the large increase in the number of free persons of color, as the laws of the time designated them, after the 1790s. That population posed different problems for the white governing class than the much-larger population of enslaved Virginians posed. You can see that clearly in the laws adopted, beginning in 1806, to control or try to remove free blacks from Virginia.

Because Virginia was a very large and very varied state, the conditions under which free blacks lived must have varied quite widely from place to place, even though they all lived under the same laws, and also very likely from decade to decade. It is undoubtedly true, as Jim states, that most free blacks lived in rural areas where they were individually familiar to their near neighbors; but all of the state's cities, which were growing in number and population, had significant numbers of free blacks living in them. Their circumstances of life in each of them probably differed from each of the others as well as from their country cousins.

Because of all that variety of experience and local conditions, I have just about entirely given up trying to think in general terms about free blacks in nineteenth-century Virginia. To my mind, that makes every new, focused, in-depth study of high interest, both in helping us revise what we think those Virginians shared in their different environments but also to learn how and why in each place the conditions were unique.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at http://www.lva.virginia.gov


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