Douglas Deal wrote, "A final point about VA/NC differences re manumission policies and practices. It may have been more difficult for NC owners to free their slaves than it was for VA owners (in the decades after the Revolution), but there were roughly the same numbers of free blacks (proportionally) in these two states in 1790 and 1810. The census figures presented by Ira Berlin in Many Thousands Gone (p.372) indicate that 5% of all NC blacks were free in 1790 and 6% in 1810, while the comparable VA percentages were 4% in 1790 and 7% in 1810. In absolute terms, the number of NC free blacks had increased in that 20-year period by a factor of a little more than 2, while VA free blacks had increased by a factor of around 2.5. The difference is of some significance, of course, but is not quite as extreme as suggested by Paul Heinegg in his posting." ------- Hi Douglas. Free African Americans in North Carolina were all mixed-race and nearly all came to North Carolina from Virginia during the colonial period when North Carolina was desperate for settlers. The increase was almost all natural. Later, entry of freed slaves from Virginia or any other state was forbidden. Many had left by the Civil War and those that remained, in many cases very light-skinned and culturally white, were not really considered former slaves. Paul