Free Blacks In Antebellum Period

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In 1860, roughly half a million free people of African descent resided in the United States.
Known alternately as free Negroes, free blacks, free people of color, or simply free people (to
distinguish them from post-Civil War freedpeople), they composed less than 2 percent of the
nation's population and about 9 percent of all blacks. Although the free black population was
increasing during the antebellum years, it was growing far more slowly than either the white or
the slave population, so that it was a shrinking proportion of American society.
But free Negroes were important far beyond their numbers. They played a pivotal role in
society during slave times and set precedents for both race relations and relations among black
people when slavery ended. Their status and treatment were harbingers of the postemancipation
world. Often the laws, attitudes, and institutions that victimized free blacks during the slave years
- political proscription, segregation, and various forms of debt peonage - became the dominant
modes of racial oppression once slavery ended. Similarly, their years of liberty profoundly
influenced the pattern of postemancipation black life. They moved in disproportionate numbers
into positions of leadership in black society when slavery ended. For example, nearly half of the
twenty-two black men who served in Congress between 1869 and 1900 had been free before the
Civil War.
Although free Negroes have been described as more black than free, they were not a
monolithic group. They can be best understood from a regional perspective, for by the nineteenth
century three distinctive groups of free Negroes had developed: one in the northern, or free states,
a second in the Upper South, and a third in the Lower South. Each had its own demographic,
economic, social, and somatic characteristics. These differences, in turn, bred different relations
with whites and slaves and, most important, distinctive mode...