By Warren E. Milteer, Jr.
In my latest book, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South, I explore the lives of persons of color who were free in the period in which slavery was legal in the United States. As part of the process of exploring their lives, I took a deep dive into the body of discriminatory legislation designed to curtail their rights, movements, and political power. By the early national period, white supremacists and proslavery extremists made the free person of color one of the nation’s earliest political bogeymen.
While the population of free people of color in the South only numbered around 250,000 individuals at its height, white supremacists and proslavery extremists across the region designated free people of color as one of the most important threats to southern society. During the colonial period, most legislation targeting free people of color focused on certain segments of the population, such as poor women, recently emancipated people, children born out of wedlock, and individuals who sought to challenge racial boundaries. As the population of free people of color increased following the American Revolution, however, white supremacist and proslavery politicians expanded their discriminatory legal assault.
Advocacy for the expansion of white men’s political influence often came at the cost of decreased political power for free persons of color. Some Revolutionary era state constitutions permitted free men of color to vote if they met age and property qualifications. By the early 1800s, Jeffersonian Republicans had begun to launch attacks against the voting rights of free men of color. They packaged the expansion of white men’s voting rights with the disfranchisement of free men of color as a way to defeat their political opponents. In 1803, Jeffersonian Republicans implemented the disfranchisement of free men of color in Maryland, the state with the largest population of free people of color in the country. By 1835, white supremacist and proslavery delegates to North Carolina’s Constitutional Convention had stripped the vote from the last group of free men of color who still enjoyed voting rights in the South.
Attacking the political rights of free men of color was not the only goal of the proslavery-white supremacist coalition. Members of the coalition also sought to cripple free people of color economically. They used discriminatory tax policy to place undue financial burden on free people of color. By appealing to the worries of white people who feared economic competition, they manufactured support for restrictions on businesses owned by free people of color. In Virginia, legislators curbed the activities of people of color who owned watercraft. Across the South, lawmakers, with the backing of white liquor suppliers, prohibited free people of color from selling spirits.
White supremacists and proslavery extremists ramped up their assaults into the mid-nineteenth century. They enacted or strengthened restrictions on the movements of free people of color across state and territorial borders. Lawmakers encouraged discriminatory punishment by permitting local officials to hire out free people of color convicted of crimes who could not pay their court-assessed fines. White people convicted of the same crimes retained the right to have their penalties discharged by the courts if they could not afford to pay them. At their most extreme, lawmakers devised numerous schemes to enslave free people of color. These ideas largely fell flat against constitutional challenges and opposition from more moderate lawmakers. Yet these attempts demonstrated that some extremists were willing to jeopardize legal freedom itself for political gains.
Some free people of color, indeed, suffered greatly under the regime of discrimination. Free people of color lost their liberties and economic opportunities. At the same time, by the thousands, they navigated through the landmines of politicized hate. They worked with sympathetic white neighbors when possible, and when the Civil War arrived, many of them took up arms against their oppressors. To learn more about the efforts of free people of color to push back against the tide of discrimination, check out Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, 2021).