Brent and all,
What nobody has yet mentioned here is the American Colonization Society
starting at the end of the War of 1812 (in 1816), and the concerted
(NATIONAL) effort to export free blacks to Liberia.
For a great discussion of this as an overview, see Marie Tyler McGraw's
book, *An African Republic: Black & White Virgians in the Making of
Liberia."
For a detailed case study, see my article, "The Kelly Brothers and the
American Colonization Society: From Northumberland to Liberia" in the
*Bulletin of the Northumberland County Historical Society* 45 (2008), 34-53.
Free blacks were a threat to the White society on several levels.
Emancipation was thorny. An 1838 petition from Northumberland County
requested the General Assembly to continue (and increase) funding for the
ACS for the removal of free blacks, stating that the free blacks of that
county were "the most degraded as well as the most wretched class of our
population."
Craig Kilby
Original email:
-----------------
From: Tarter, Brent (LVA) [log in to unmask]
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2013 19:55:40 +0000
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Free Blacks in the Slave State of Virginia
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
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at
http://www.lva.virginia.gov
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