Free Blacks in the United States

Free Blacks in the United States, African Americans who, during the period of slavery from 1619 to 1860, were not themselves enslaved.

In 1966 black author James Baldwin wrote "To be born in a free society and not be born free is to be born into a lie." Written a century after the Emancipation Proclamation (see Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment), Baldwin's words conveyed the pain and the passion that characterized the lives of free blacks in America between 1619 and 1860. Many scholars suggest that during this period, free blacks in America were "more black than free." As historian Leonard Curry explains, "their educational attainment was limited, their social development was thwarted, occupations were closed to them, housing was denied to them, personal safety eluded them, and basic human dignity was begrudged them." "Because they were black," Curry adds, "freedom was always and everywhere for them cruelly incomplete."

These free Negroes, as they were called at that time, were scattered throughout three distinct regions: the North, the Upper South, and the Lower South. Each region had its own flavor. Many of slavery’s most vociferous critics lived in the Northern region, which comprised Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and the New England states. The Upper South featured large tobacco plantations and included Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Washington, D.C. The Lower South, often referred to as the Deep South, supported rice and cotton plantations and comprised South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Free blacks in America were first documented in Northampton County, Virginia, in 1662. By 1776, 60,000 African Americans—approximately 8 percent of the national black population—were free. The free black population continued to rise steadily, which intimidated many proslavery whites. Between 1800 and 1810 the free black population nearly doubled, from 108,395 to 186,446. By 1810, 4 percent of all African Americans in the Deep South, 10 percent in the Upper South, and 75 percent in the North were free. Most free blacks in the North were concentrated in urban cities, such as Boston, Massachusetts; New York, New York; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Between 1800 and 1850 the free black population in the nation's 15 largest cities increased sixfold, compared to a threefold increase for the entire white population. By 1860 close to 500,000 free blacks lived in the United States, approximately 9 percent of the entire black population. On the eve of the Civil War (1861-1865) there were, at least, half a million stories of freedom.