A portrait of surprising harmony

Nearly a century and a half after the abolition of slavery, the Old South remains a source of fascination and controversy. Heated debates over issues like reparations, the public display of the Confederate flag, even the nature of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, suggest that Americans have yet to arrive at a commonly agreed-upon memory of slavery. But the work of historians of the last 40 years has made clear the centrality of slavery to American history.

Far less attention has been paid to the nearly half-million free blacks who lived in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, a majority in the slave states. In a society that equated “black” and “slave,” free blacks were seen as an anomaly. They had the right to enter into legally recognized marriages and own property (including, on occasion, slaves). But in nearly all the states, North and South, they could not vote, serve on juries, testify in court against white people or attend public schools. “Free negroes,” a South Carolina judge declared in 1848, “belong to a degraded caste of society” and must conduct themselves “as inferiors.”

Previous historians have described the limits of free blacks’ freedom. But none has examined the quality of their lives in the detail or with the sophistication of Melvin Patrick Ely in “Israel on the Appomattox.” Ely, who teaches at the College of William and Mary, takes as his subject free black life in Prince Edward County, in the Virginia Piedmont southwest of Richmond. Best known today for having closed its public schools in the early 1960s for five years rather than accept integration, Prince Edward before the Civil War was the site of a remarkable experiment in race relations initiated by Richard Randolph, a member of one of the state’s most prominent families.

Like many aristocratic Virginians of the Revolutionary era, Randolph became convinced that slavery contradicted the ideals that inspired American independence. In 1796, shortly before his death at 26, Randolph drafted a will that condemned slavery as an “infamous practice,” provided for the freeing of his slaves and set aside part of his land for them. Because Randolph died in debt, it took 14 years for his plan to be implemented. But in 1810 his widow gave some 90 men, women and children their freedom and divided 350 acres of land among their families. Steeped in the biblical story of Exodus, they called their settlement Israel Hill.

By 1860, the county’s free black population had risen to nearly 500, a number small enough to enable Ely to trace out their experiences family by family. He does this with remarkable energy and ingenuity. Ely has immersed himself in local documents -- tax lists, road repair orders, census figures and especially court records. From them he develops a striking portrait of free black life as a day-to-day social reality, rather than simply a legal category.

Ely insists that despite the legal disabilities under which they suffered and their complete exclusion from political participation, free blacks effectively used local institutions to assert their rights and defend their interests. Local courts and public officials treated them pretty much the same as they did white Virginians. Free blacks accused of crimes were acquitted at the same rate as white defendants and frequently won judgments against whites who owed them money. A landless free black man sued a white employer for unpaid wages and won in court. An all-white jury awarded damages to a free black plaintiff whose hogs were shot by a white farmer after they trampled his crops, since the law required land owners to maintain adequate fences. Meanwhile, state laws such as the requirement that free black tax delinquents be hired out for involuntary labor remained unenforced in Prince Edward.

As the defense of slavery solidified after 1830, articles appeared in the Southern press claiming that the residents of Israel Hill had degenerated since becoming free. Ely shows that this picture grossly distorted reality. Free blacks were hard-working, ambitious and economically successful. Many worked as skilled craftsmen -- carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers and boatmen who transported goods to market for both black and white neighbors. Some employed whites to work for them, and a few seem to have owned or hired slaves.

Ely’s portrait is of a society of “live and let live” rather than onerous repression. Free blacks shared with their white neighbors, including slave owners, common values -- evangelical religion, devotion to their families, the quest for economic independence. The county even witnessed interracial marriages, which did not seem to stir up much resentment. Ely offers persuasive evidence that in Prince Edward County at least, free blacks were a successful and widely accepted part of the social fabric.

Ely has done a remarkable job of examining how a complex system of race relations operated on the local level. Unfortunately, he sometimes caricatures the views of others to exaggerate the originality of his own findings. He persistently attributes misconceptions to unnamed “modern observers.” He singles out for frequent criticism Ira Berlin, whose “Slaves Without Masters,” published in 1974, remains the standard account of the free black experience in the antebellum South.

Ely chides Berlin for assuming that repressive laws accurately reflected day-to-day social reality. Yet the broad compass of Berlin’s account, which covers free blacks in the entire South from 1790 to 1860, allows far more scope for generalizations, regional comparisons and examination of change over time than Ely’s investigation of a single county, especially one where their connections with the prominent Randolph family may well have affected the overall treatment of Israel Hill’s residents.

Local histories, so valuable in bringing into sharp relief the details of daily life, seem to have an inherent bias toward continuity as opposed to historical change. The rhythms of life in agricultural societies change slowly, and national events seem remote. Indeed, Ely insists that the momentous events of that era -- Nat Turner’s rebellion, the growing slavery controversy, even the Civil War itself -- had “astoundingly little effect” on day-to-day race relations. His treatment of the effect of the Civil War and emancipation on free blacks is cursory, to say the least. He notes, for example, that in Prince Edward, unlike other parts of the South, formerly free blacks did not step forward during Reconstruction to take positions of political leadership. But he fails to offer an explanation or to consider whether this reticence may have reflected a dependence on white goodwill fostered by the very racial closeness that his book depicts.

“Israel on the Appomattox” presents a valuable account of free black life. But Ely has a larger ambition -- to recast our understanding of slavery itself as a living institution. In this, his reach far exceeds his grasp. He insists that master-slave relations were marked by the same “human empathy” he finds operated with regard to free blacks. This conclusion cannot be sustained by the evidence he offers.

The court records and other public documents on which Ely relies do not reveal the texture of slavery as a lived experience. Nearly all discipline and punishment took place on the plantation, at the whim of individual owners. Ely’s local focus, moreover, makes it impossible for him to place slave life in its full context. He never tells us how many of the county’s slaves were sold. As slave trading became a more central element in Virginia’s economy, the number surely reached into the thousands.

The constant threat and frequent reality of sale undercuts Ely’s conclusion that “at its core,” slavery “revolved around personal bonds between individual blacks and whites.” Moreover, since so many free blacks married slaves or in other ways enjoyed close ties to the slave community, the buying and selling of slaves affected them as well. This was why Willis A. Hodges, a free black Virginian whose brother was jailed for assisting fugitive bondsmen, later described slaves and free blacks as “one man of sorrow.”

Scholars who study laboring people often find themselves torn between emphasizing the repressiveness of the social system and making their subjects active historical agents. Too much stress on oppression makes the lower classes appear simply as victims rather than actors on the stage of history. Too much attention to resiliency and accomplishment may obscure the system’s inhumanity. Ely hopes to shift the emphasis in the study of free blacks from disempowerment to accomplishment, and he goes a long way toward reaching this goal. Where he falters is precisely where Edward P. Jones succeeded in his fine recent novel about free black life, “The Known World.” For Jones makes clear the system’s capriciousness with regard to free blacks’ privileges and delineates the overall structure of power, the “known world” within which people lived their lives and which determined the limits of the possible for white and black alike. *