Those Who Were Free

Black soldiers in the American revolution

The chapter starts with the involvement of African Americans in the political wars and revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Their captivity and enslavement had inspired the beliefs in liberty and equality that permeated the revolutions of the era. during insurrectionary times, they petitioned legislatures for emancipation and joined revolutionary armies. The revolutionary ideals ultimately ended slavery in the northern regions of the united states. However, in the early nineteenth-century era of the common man, free African Americans still faced segregation, disfranchisement, humiliation, and bodily harms on account of their race. unable to protect themselves as a citizen, free African Americans usually found community self-reliance the best assurance of survival. They embraced racial solidarity as a means of self-preservation. Black soldiers contributed to several revolutionary wars such as the Boston massacre, Great Britain war, French and Indian war, battles like Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. The British recognized the usefulness of the black southerners early on. But in New England, black were more likely to fight for American Independence. Massachusetts formally opened its militia to black men in 1777. In the same year, Rhode Island became the first state to authorize the enlistment of slaves and formed an entire black regiment.

Petitioning for Emancipation and Civil Rights

During the 1770s, black people sent petitions to the Northern legislature and filed suit in Northern courts to demand their emancipation, especially in New England. Black Americans embraced the American ideology of democracy and equality. Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783. followed by New Hampshire and Vermont. Black people in new York and New jersey were not mostly free until the 1830s. The United states Constitution approached the institution of slavery indirectly avoiding the words “slave’ or “slavery” or any racial terminology. The constitution recognized the existence of unfree persons and scrupulously protected the “property rights” of their owners. “Property rights” became a key phrase-- a code for slave ownership-- in the constitutional debate. For purposes of congressional representation, the three-fifths clauses allowed states to count the enslave, mentioned euphemistically as “person held to service or labor”, as three-fifths of a person. When the United States took the first ten-year census in 1790, the 757,208 African Americans represented nearly one-fifth of the population. Only one state-- Vermont-- had never allowed slavery; every other part of the country had to wrestle with issues of slavery and freedom.

Black Abolitionists

As the backbone of the Antislavery movement, which was mostly white, free blacks in the North and West worked on the local and national levels. For the most part, they joined the wing of the abolition movement headed by William Lloyd Garrison. In 1831, he founded the American Anti-slavery society in Boston and edited its organ, The Liberator. Garrisonians not only demanded the immediate abolition of slavery with no compensation for owners; they also supported women’s rights and nonviolence. The text talks about other abolitionists and their work like John Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and John Brown.

Reflecting back on the chapter, I learned that a slave was someone else’s possession. But free person belonged to himself or herself alone. A free person could earn their wages, marry, move out, and organize toward religious or educational ends.Free blacks, North, South, and West relished their freedom, no matter how circumscribed. They also realized their fate was joined by the 91 percent of their people in the slave half of the United states. They were not truly free because a majority of their people remained captive.