Books & Publications > Excerpt from Black Property Owners ¹

Virtually Free Slaves

As suggested by Lotty's tenuous ties to Henry Clay, some self-hired slaves melted into the free Negro population, living and acting as free persons of color and acquiring real estate and other property. Little is known about these "virtually free slaves." This is not surprising, since even the term seems incongruous: how could slaves also be free? In some respects, of course, they could not, and even legally emancipated blacks have been termed by some historians as "Quasi-Free Negroes" and "Slaves without Masters."³³ In addition, as their livelihoods depended upon secrecy or deception or, at the very least, a tacit illegal agreement with a prominent white slaveholder, it is extremely difficult even to identify much less uncover information about such slaves. Owners were reluctant to acknowledge that bondsmen in their charge roamed about unsupervised, undermining the controls to necessary for the slave system to function properly; the unsuspecting foreign traveler or northern visitor or southern defender of slavery believed these blacks to be either slaves or free Negroes; and free slaves themselves refused to admit, much less advertise, their situation. Consequently, the journals of the slaveholding class, descriptions by outside visitors, writings of white southerners, and to a large extent even the narratives, recollections, and autobiographical reminiscences of blacks themselves, contain only fleeting references to slaves who exercised many of the privileges of free men and women. ³⁴

Yet there were slaves in the South who achieved a remarkable degree of self-sufficiency. In the Lower South, they were clustered primarily in towns and cities. In Athens, Georgia, one resident said in 1959 that there were more "free negroes manufactured and made virtually free" than there were "bona fide" free blacks in Clarke and any ten surrounding counties. A visitor to New Orleans noticed "a great many loose negroes about," slaves who seemed to be hiring their own time and earning their own living without supervision from slave owners. City officials in Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and other urban areas told about the presence of "nominal slaves," "quasi f. n.," and "virtually free negroes" who moved about the streets seemingly oblivious to any law or regulation. While the precise number of these masterless slaves remains a matter of speculation, contemporaries in some cities believed they represented a sizable population group, at least as large as the legally free Negro population. Noting that the local courts often disregarded the spirit of an 1831 law requiring special legislative action to manumit slaves, the editor of the Natchez Mississippi Free Trader said that at least fifty legally enslaved bondsmen and women in the area "affect to be free." It was well know by local residents that "a large number of slaves" had been illegally manumitted; and after having "gone up the river, set foot upon the soil of Ohio or some other free or abolition State, received from them certain certificates, which are called 'free papers'; forthwith they return to Mississippi, to reside as 'free people of color.'" A longtime resident of Savannah noted in 1856, "There are, you may say, hundreds of Negroes in this city who go about from house to house -- some carpenters, some house servants, etc. -- who never see their masters except at payday, live out of their yards, hire themselves without written permit, etc." Others were "employed without any expression of the will of the master manifested by written permit." In his estimation, self-hired and quasi-free slaves (they were often lumped together) represented at least 10 percent of the city's total Negro population.³⁵

In the Upper south, increasing numbers of quasi-free bondsmen and women also congregated in urban areas -- Baltimore, the District of Columbia, Norfolk, Richmond, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis. Some earned wages working in tobacco and hemp factories; a few were skilled artisans who contracted with whites as builders, carpenters, coopers, and mechanics; others worked as servants, barbers, and hack drivers. Among the nearly one thousand slaves hired yearly in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, nearly one hundred lived as quasi-free bondsmen and women including nominal slave William Roscoe Davis, who operated a small pleasure boat on Chesapeake Bay. In other cities, virtually free slaves established market stalls, traded produce, fish, and other goods with plantation slaves, and sold various commodities to whites. In the port cities of Baltimore and Wilmington and in smaller river towns, slave fishermen and boatmen, often quasi-free or hiring their time by the year, worked along the river systems, fishing and trading with plantation blacks. In Louisville and St. Louis, nearly free slaves were waiters, servants, barbers, and steamboat stewards.³⁶

In Nashville, several hundred virtually free slaves found employment as hackmen, wagoners, hostlers, confectioners, masons, builders, barbers, and laborers. Among them during the early years of the nineteenth century was a mulatto boy named John, whose activities as a self-hired slave illustrate how some Negroes managed to move into the middle ground between slavery and freedom. Taken by his owner from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Nashville, John was allowed to hire out to barge captain Richard Rapier, who transported tobacco down the Cumberland, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, carrying back to Nashville, sugar, tea coffee, raisins, molasses, rum, brandy, wines, logwood, nails, tin, glass, and other commodities. Following his owner's death, John reverted to the estate of Charles Thomas, a Virginia slave owner, but the quasi-free slave remained with Rapier and accompanied his employer to Florence, Alabama, in 1819, where he continued to work as a self-hired waiter and pole boy for a full decade, before obtaining his legal freedom (with a bequest from the barge master's estate), taking the surname Rapier, and establishing a barbershop. During the antebellum period, the number of nominal slaves grew steadily in Nashville and other cities, until by the 1850s according to some observers, they had become "a sizable Negro population."³⁷

Although quasi-free bondsmen and women tended to congregate in towns and cities, where there were better opportunities for employment and escaping detection, some remained in rural areas as farm laborers and in a few instances as farm "owners." Usually those who became farmers did so with the acquiescence of whites since land "possession" was involved. In North Carolina, Martin County black Ned Hyman, a slaved owned by John and Samuel Hyman, accumulated an estate "consisting of Lands chiefly, Live Stock, Negroes, and money," worth between $5,000 and $6,000. Most of this property was listed in his free Negro wife's name. He was a "remarkably uncommon and extraordinary Negro," a group of nearly one hundred whites in his neighborhood said, and had acquired his holdings because he was "remarkably industrious, frugal & prudent." "In a word, his character stands as fair and as good -- for honesty, truth, industry, humility, sobriety & fidelity[--]as any Negro they (your memorialists) have ever seen or heard of" (see appendix 2). In a sparsely settled rural area of Sullivan County, Tennessee, near the Virginia border, one white farmer noted the presence of a large family of quasi-free black farmers. "Although they are Slaves yet they have been living to support themselves for about 20 years," Samuel Rhea explained. "They have supported themselves on land of their masters and are tolerable farmers." William Weston, a lifelong resident of Craven County, North Carolina, recalled on the eve of the Civil War that Rebecca Sutton and her five children had taken up residence on a deserted farm near Pamlico Sound in 1818. Although a slave, "she always lived as a free woman and acted for herself," Weston testified. "She lived on my Father's Land for Several years & then lived on John Benston[']s Land. She acted for herself there also until she died."³⁸

Few, nominal slaves could boast of an estate as large as Ned Hyman's, but a number entered the property-owning class. Posing as free persons of color some purchased real estate or, acting through a white protector, acquired a member of their family, even though they themselves remained legally enslaved. Other quasi-free bondsmen and women rented houses, buildings, and other property, establishing small businesses. One Nashville woman ran a laundry from her rented house in the heart of the central business district. Over the years, she saved a considerable amount of money, including $350 in Mexican gold coins, and eventually bought one of her three slave children out of bondage. Virginia slave Billy Brown, who had purchased his freedom and found a job at Hampden-Sidney College, was required by law to leave the state. Seeking to remain near his slave family, he petitioned the General Assembly: "By the course of honest industry, and careful economy," he had "acquired property, sufficient probably, with ordinary labor," to support his family for many years to come; he prayed to remain in Virginia. When his plea was rejected, Brown was forced once again to become "the property of a gentleman," although he continued to support himself "by honest industry and prudent economy."³⁹ South Carolina slave Sally Patterson, the wife of a free Negro carpenter in Columbia, was listed in 1850 as a free Negro possessing $1,200 worth of real estate. In Charleston, quasi-free carpenter Joseph Elwig, who was actually owned by his father, purchased a house on Coming Street, where a number of affluent free Negroes owned homes, and was listed on the tax rolls in 1836 as a free black. Even though few of his neighbors realized that he was in reality a slave, when his father became seriously ill in 1843 Elwig was sold for $1 to his own free Negro wife so that he would not be confiscated to pay any of his father's debts. Perhaps no other act could more poignantly illustrate the anomalous condition of quasi-free bondsmen and women than a father selling his own son to ensure the son's freedom.⁴⁰

¹Schweninger, Loren. Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990; Illini. Paperback Edition, 1997), 44-47.