Ted Maris-Wolf - Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-Enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia

TED MARIS-WOLF

The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill

2015 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Miller by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Daguerreotype of an unidentified black woman, courtesy of Virginia Historical Society (1977.39)

Complete cataloging information for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4696-2007-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-2008-4 (ebook)

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On a warm Wednesday morning in May 2008, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rounded up thirty-three men and women hired to help construct the new federal district court on Broad Street, two blocks from the capitol in downtown Richmond, Virginia. While authorities booked Dominguez Cano, Juan Perez-Hernandez, and fellow aliens from Central and South America for working and residing in Virginia illegally, I sat across the street, in the silent sanctuary of the manuscript reading room of the Library of Virginia, discovering a roundup that had occurred 150 years earlier in Frederick County. There, the sheriff had arrested Henry Champ and eighteen other free black men and women in 185758 for continuing to live in Virginia. Unlike the operation unfolding across Broad Street, which targeted the likes of Cano and Perez-Hernandez for living in a foreign land, the Frederick County roundup had ensnared Virginia-born noncitizens who lived in violation of a fifty-year-old state law that had, by the late 1850s, made thousands of native free blacks illegals. Like our current immigration laws, the so-called expulsion measure, which required those freed from slavery to leave Virginia within one year, was only sporadically enforced, but when it was, individuals like Champ could find themselves without a home, their lives turned upside down.

In considering both roundupsin 2008 and 185758I found myself wondering why these people were singled out. Why them and why then ? Using records located in the Library of Virginia and more than fifty county courthouses, I began to map the lives of those African Americans who, because of their color and life circumstances, were targeted by their white neighbors before or during the Civil War for not belonging in their communities. The documentary evidence is incomplete, and we see the lives of individual African Americans only through fragments created by white neighbors, lawyers, or newspapers and sifted through time by fire, insect, or water damage and, in one case, even a Union soldiers sword. Though much remains unknown, it is clear from the ink and paper that survive that many African Americans experienced loss, dislocation, and the ineffable horror of family separation, as they were driven from the state, incarcerated, and in a few instances, re-enslaved on the auction block.

Unexpectedly, however, another story emerged alongside the experiences of those targeted by white neighbors and subjected to the brutal machinery of race-based law. It became clear that thousands of free black Virginians openly lived in violation of the expulsion law without any significant legal consequences, as if they believed that the law simply did not apply to them. More surprising still was the fact that of those few cases in which people were prosecuted under the law, most ended in acquittal and dismissal. How could such an important lawone that unequivocally deemed certain men and women unfit for residencyhave been so unevenly applied? How much did the law matter in the everyday lives of free blacks? The occasional but highly visible prosecution of free blacks in their communities signaled an important and less recognized aspect of antebellum Virginia life. Free African Americans, especially those who remained in their communities illegally, quietly challenged prevailing notions of racial restriction and exclusion by weaving themselves into the social and economic fabric of their neighborhoods. In spite of the expulsion law, many successfully claimed a right to residency in how they lived their lives through long-standing social, religious, and economic relations that bound them to their neighbors, and their neighbors to them. In short, they made themselves an essential part of Virginia society. When fragile bonds between neighbors unraveled, African Americans who resided illegally at home engaged white attorneys (often successfully) to appeal to those bonds of freedom that linked them to their white neighborsand their white neighbors to themand to certain basic rights of residency, liberty, and family. Free African Americans felt bound by their freedom; they were subject to laws of the land that specifically circumscribed their liberty in important ways, keeping them off juries, away from polling places, and unable to testify against a white defendant. At the same time, it turns out, many white neighbors, lawyers, and judges felt bound to support a familiar free black neighbors claim for legal residency, to represent a free black client in court, or to follow legal processes identical to those that white defendants or petitioners might encounter, even if such everyday actions contradicted personal racial prejudices and generally held racial stereotypes.

Though the ideas, relationships, and situations I explore in the following pages will likely interest those who follow debates over law, race, and citizenship today, this is the exploration of what it meant to live as a free African American in one section of the upper South from the American Revolution through the Civil War. It is the story of free blacks collective efforts to be accepted as Americans, to pursue life, liberty, and happiness by protecting family bonds, navigating local courts, and securing their hard-earned property.

Sometimes, the best way to see the Big Picture is by examining little ones. I have thus chosen to tell this story as much as possible from the perspective of free African Americans, through interwoven and overlapping minibiographies of those who were threatened with expulsion and hired white attorneys to help them petition local and state authorities for options, even for enslavement to a white owner of their choosing if necessary. I am especially interested in such individuals relationships to the laws of their land, as well as to those individuals responsible for the laws creation and enforcement. In this respect, this is a study of interracial Virginia neighborhoods before the Civil War and the fault lines that found their way onto papers preserved in county courthouses throughout the state. How these documents were made reveals the context of their content and provides a window into their makers minds, leading us past the hands of white lawyers to shared goals of African American clients, acquaintances, and neighbors. Though little known in our day, Henry Champ, Araminta Frances, Mary Elizabeth Roland, and others became well known in their communities. Something had gone terribly wrong in their efforts to belong in their neighborhoods, and as a result the machinery of the law had been set in motion against them. As free people, however, they courageously engaged with the very legal system that threatened them, and they did so in ways they believed they might succeed. For these individuals, their claim to belonging largely hinged on their resourcefulness and longstanding reputation in their neighborhoods.