The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860

By John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin has devoted his professional life to the study of African Americans. Originally published in 1943 by UNC Press, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 was his first book on the subject. As Franklin shows, freed slaves in the antebellum South did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. Even in North Carolina, reputedly more liberal than most southern states, discriminatory laws became so harsh that many voluntarily returned to slavery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780807866689

John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin (1915-2009) was James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University. His many books include Racial Equality in America and From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans.

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The Free Negro in North Carolina

The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860

With a New Foreword and Bibliographic Afterword by the Author

John Hope Franklin

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

© 1943 by The University of North Carolina Press

© 1971, 1995 by John Hope Franklin

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Franklin, John Hope, 1915–

The free Negro in North Carolina 1790–1860 / by John Hope Franklin ;

with a new foreword and bibliographic afterword by the author.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-4546-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Free Afro-Americans—North Carolina—History—18th century. 2. Free Afro-Americans—North Carolina—History—19th century. 3. North Carolina—History—1775–1865 I. Title.

E185.93.N6F7 1995

975.6′00496073—dc20 95-35724

CIP

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 original publication of this volume was aided by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies from a fund provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and by a grant from the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

03 02 01 00 99 7 6 5 4 3

TO MY FATHER AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

Contents

Foreword

Preface

I. INTRODUCTION

II. GROWTH OF THE FREE NEGRO POPULATION

Numbers and Distribution

Manumission

Miscegenation

Runaway Slaves and Immigrant Free Negroes

Maintaining the Status of a Free Man

III. LEGAL STATUS OF THE FREE NEGRO

The Problem of Discipline

The Free Negro in Court

Citizenship in the Larger Sense

IV. THE FREE NEGRO IN THE ECONOMIC LIFE OF NORTH CAROLINA

The Free Negro Worker

The Free Negro Property Owner

V. SOCIAL LIFE OF THE FREE NEGRO

Education

Religion

Social Relationships

VI. AN UNWANTED PEOPLE

North Carolina Liberalism

The Colonization Movement

The Growing Hostility to Free Negroes,

VII. CONCLUSIONS

Appendices

Bibliography

Bibliographic Afterword

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

  I The Free Negro Population in 1800 15

 II The Free Negro Population in 1830 16

III The Free Negro Population in 1860 17

IV The Vote to Disfranchise Free Negroes in the Convention of 1835 113

 V The Vote to Equalize Representation in the House of Commons, in the Convention of 1835 114

VI North Carolina in 1860 226

TABLES

  I White Population in North Carolina in 1790 6

 II Population of North Carolina, 1790–1860 18

III Free Negroes in Leading North Carolina Towns in 1860 18

IV Free Negro Apprentices in Craven County, 1800–1860 125

 V Occupations of Free Negroes in North Carolina in 1860 134–135

VI Contributions of Citizens of North Carolina to the American Colonization Society 204

VII Emigrants to Liberia, 1851–1860 209

Foreword

After 1943, when The Free Negro in North Carolina first appeared, writings on free blacks increased enormously. The context for studying free blacks was strange, indeed, in a society whose constitution offered protection to slaves but not to free blacks and whose state laws proscribed them in a dozen different ways. Even so, the study of free blacks gradually became a respectable field of intellectual inquiry, and scholars rushed in to make the most of a relatively virgin field. Studies of free blacks gave attention not only to the South but the North as well. They dealt with urban as well as rural areas. There were studies of the occupational pursuits of free blacks and studies of their social and cultural development. Some were brief articles, while some were lengthy works. They were inevitably uneven in quality, but they covered virtually every aspect of life. They give the subject a place in serious historical study that it was just beginning to have in 1943.

Impetus to this interest in free blacks was doubtless provided in the mid-1920s by Carter G. Woodson, the founder-director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. He published two exceptional monographs on the subject: Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (1924) and Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830 (1925). He also encouraged scholars to submit articles on the subject to the Journal of Negro History, of which he was the editor. Luther P. Jackson, whose work on free blacks in Virginia was already under way, published some of his early findings in Woodson’s Journal. Likewise, Princeton’s Roger W. Shugg won the Journal’s Bancroft Prize for his pathbreaking Negro Voting in the Ante-bellum South. Thus, although so much about free blacks was still unknown in the early 1940s, the way had surely been prepared for the large-scale works on North Carolina and Virginia that appeared in 1943 and 1944, respectively.

By the 1960s the study of African Americans in general and free blacks in particular had become on of the most important, even fashionable, areas of study in U.S. history. As in virtually all aspects of African American history, numerous historians became involved in the study of free blacks; and some of them produced real gems. In 1958 Leon Litwack wrote a doctoral dissertation that three years later became North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. It was the first systematic study of free blacks in the antebellum North and became a painful reminder of the disesteem in which free blacks were held, whether in the North or the South. In 1961, Larry Gara’s Liberty Line examined the attitudes of Northern free blacks toward the crusading abolitionists.

FREE BLACKS were essentially an urban people. Plantation owners and white farmers did not want them around because they set a poor example for those in thralldom who were not permitted to view freedom as a status to which blacks could aspire or were entitled. Although scholars wrote about urban blacks in the years following the publication of The Free Negro in North Carolina, it was not until 1981 that Leonard P. Curry produced his landmark study, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850. It became clear in Curry’s work that the urban community was the natural home for free blacks, one where they were most likely to secure and maintain their freedom. Curry’s work was a climax to the considerable attention that had been given to free blacks during the previous two decades.

No area of life among free blacks seemed to escape historians working in the field from the 1940s to the late 1960s. It was left to Ira Berlin, however, to provide the synthesis that would be the model for all students in the field. His Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974) provided salient and significant generalizations that were both thoughtful and instructive. He reminded his readers that his work was essentially a study of the slave South, observing that just as the study of any anomalous group, whether they be children, the insane, criminals, or even intellectuals, is a telling indicator of the larger society, so the status of the free Negro is a sensitive measure of Southern attitudes on race and class.

While few studies of free blacks measure up to the majesty of the works by Litwack, Berlin, and Curry, all of them are important in providing new light on an old, important subject. And while Berlin’s claim that the study of the free black is a study of the slave South can hardly be disputed, it is more than that. Free blacks were a group unto themselves. They worked, played, struggled to improve their legal and economic status, and engaged in religious worship in a variety of ways. Many of them emerged from the dim shadows of their anomalous position to become not merely distinct persons but even heroic figures. One cannot learn of William Johnson of Natchez, Marie Metoyer of New Orleans, and John Chavis of Raleigh without realizing that they were, in many ways, larger than life. If they were exceptional—and indeed they were—their high standing in the larger community underscores the danger of making generalizations about even the most precariously placed group in the social order.

John Hope Franklin

July 1995

Preface

In Studying the free Negro in North Carolina before the Civil War, perhaps nothing is more striking than the similarity between the attitude of the ante-bellum community and the attitude of various communities today, including the United States, toward certain smaller groups within their midst. These attitudes, in both cases, interestingly enough, sprang not so much from the belief that the smaller group was inherently incapable of accommodating itself to its environment as from a profound conviction that it was socially and economically undesirable. In the wake of this conviction there followed a train of manifestations and rationalizations—unconscious, subconscious, and conscious—which reflected this undesirability. The larger community, thereupon, was determined to make adjustment for the smaller group impossible. These reactions, in the period before the Civil War, did much to make the free Negro a problem and to create the complexities that make his status so difficult to ascertain and to understand.

My interest in the problem of the free Negro was first aroused while I was working at Fisk University under Professor Theodore S. Currier. Though my early efforts to study the group were meager, I was impressed with the scarcity of thorough studies on the subject and was encouraged by Professor Currier to continue my investigation. As a student of Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, whose wise counsel and historical scholarship were among the greatest inspirations of my educational experience, I began to make definite plans for the present study. Finally, the work was carried to completion largely as a result of the constant encouragement and able criticism of Professor Paul H. Buck, under whose direction it was done. To these individuals I wish to express my most sincere gratitude.

A list of all the institutions and individuals to whom I am indebted for assistance would be unreasonably long. I feel obliged, however, to acknowledge gratefully the kind assistance rendered by staff members of the following libraries: the Widener Library of Harvard University, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Library of the University of North Carolina, the Duke University Library, St. Augustine’s College Library, the Library of the University of Pennsylvania, the North Carolina Supreme Court Library, and the North Carolina State Library. I am also indebted to the North Carolina Historical Commission and the Historical Records Survey of North Carolina.

Drs. Guion Johnson, Albert R. Newsome, and Howard K. Beale of the University of North Carolina made many helpful suggestions, and Dr. C. C. Crittenden and Mr. David L. Corbitt of the North Carolina Historical Commission were always willing to coöperate, suggest, and advise at every stage of the work. Dr. Joseph Houchins of the Bureau of the Census and Professor Roy W. Wilson of Delaware State College were of great assistance to me at the Bureau of the Census. My colleagues, Professors E. H. McClenney, Ivan E. Taylor, C. D. Halliburton, and Paul McStallworth made many suggestions with regard to analysis and style that were of much value, and my assistants, Messrs. Robert L. Clarke and John Blue, Jr., performed a most helpful service in attending to innumerable details.

The major portion of the research for this book was made possible through the generosity of the Julius Rosenwald Fund in awarding me two fellowships and two grants-in-aid between 1937 and 1940, and of Harvard University in granting an Edward Austin Fellowship in 1937 and 1938. The publication of this work has been made possible through the generosity of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. To these institutions I am deeply grateful.

Finally, I am especially grateful to my wife, whose able assistance, good nature, and constant encouragement have been important incentives to the completion of this work.

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN.

Raleigh, North Carolina,

November 12, 1942.

The Free Negro in North Carolina

Chapter I

Introduction

History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.

Tolstoy, War and Peace, second Epilogue.

More Than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the appearance of John H. Russell’s Free Negro in Virginia. This was the first exhaustive study of the subject by a trained historian;¹ and the only other work of similar scope and quality, James M. Wright’s The Free Negro in Maryland, appeared twenty years ago. In addition to these detailed accounts, there have appeared from time to time brief sketches on the free Negro in certain areas and on individual free Negroes; but none has approached the standards set by Professors Russell and Wright in their pioneer efforts.² The enthusiasm and zeal so characteristic of the trained student of American history in the pursuit of knowledge concerning so many problems have been almost entirely lacking in the study of the free Negro.

The reluctance of historians to study the free Negro more seriously is not altogether understandable. Perhaps it is simply one of the several phases of our history that has not appeared especially attractive to students who are engaged in research and writing. The very nature of the problem, however, may serve to explain the preference of many for other tasks. As a group whose status, politically, economically, and socially was as indeterminable as it was unenviable, the free Negro as a subject for historical treatment abounds in elusive and difficult problems. The materials from which the picture must be drawn are scattered in scores of unsuspected places; and no small portion of the story calls for a type of sobriety and skill which emphasize the presumptuousness of undertaking such a task. The results, however, are well worth the effort; for as a distinct, indeed an anomalous, group in the social structure the free Negro presents a picture that is at once fascinating and informative.

For several reasons there seems to be a real need for a more careful study of the free Negro in the ante-bellum South. The story of the section and the period cannot be completely told until there is available an adequate account of these quarter of a million people who often influenced the attitudes and policies of the communities in which they lived to a degree all out of proportion to their numbers. A more adequate story of the free Negro will constitute, moreover, another important step in the direction of understanding the relationship which exists between a minority group—in this instance, caste-like in its attributes—and the larger community. The problems which existed during the pre-Civil War period frequently have important bearings on our social attitudes in contemporary race relations. Many of the problems of the chief minority group in America have their roots not in the period of Reconstruction and after but in the earlier period when there was a large slave population and when the treatment of the free Negro by the whites in the community was conditioned by that fact.

We often get our cues for the present from the past in much the same way that a judge is almost invariably influenced by the principle of stare decisis. Any information concerning the genesis of a particular problem is most valuable in understanding it in its present stage. If many of our problems of racial adjustments had their origins in the difficult atmosphere of slavery, they present certain psychological factors that would have been different had they begun in an atmosphere of freedom, difficult though that also might have been immediately after the Civil War. This study of the free Negro makes no pretense of pointing the way to any satisfactory adjustment of race relations as they exist today. Nor is its primary purpose to show how much of the problem had its origin in the period under observation. It seeks merely to clarify and to explain the status of the free Negro in ante-bellum North Carolina as it was related to the larger community. The fuller understanding and solution of existing problems may be left to those whose wisdom and insight are greater than any claimed by the humble student of history.

Few areas possess the variety of geographical features that have played so important a part in the growth of North Carolina and have contributed so much to the development of a distinctive history. The poor harbor facilities in the East prevented the province from becoming an important center of import and export.³ However, its interior provided accommodations for almost every type of settler. The corn and tobacco planter found in the coastal plain wide stretches of relatively unobstructed land suitable for his crops. In this same area the rich growth of pine forests afforded added wealth in the development of naval store industries. For the less enterprising farmer, or one with fewer means, the piedmont yielded a satisfactory crop of tobacco, wheat, corn, and the like. In the mountainous Appalachian region, sheep and cattle walks were obtained with comparative ease. The western part of the State, moreover, offered an excellent opportunity to those of the East who naturally rebelled against its strait-laced system of law and order.

North Carolina was essentially a rural state during the entire period under observation. Her shifting sand bars and shallow sounds prevented the rise of a Charleston; and, at best, Wilmington and New Bern were hardly satisfactory as ports of entry for a great interior that often looked to cities outside the province to furnish certain necessaries of life. Her lack of navigable rivers and her consequent relative isolation prevented the rise of a Richmond or a Memphis; and Fayetteville became and remained at best a leading village and a serviceable county seat. Thus, North Carolina presents one of the best examples in our history of the extent to which geography may play an important role in the development of an area.

No small factor, however, in the development of North Carolina was the racial and cultural characteristics of the people who lived there. Of the aborigines, the Tuscaroras on the seaboard, the Catawbas in the lower piedmont, and the Cherokees in the west were the most important.⁴ Though these Indians showed marked differences in customs and tribal practices, each group easily manifested a remarkable achievement in accommodation to life in the Carolina wilderness and did a great deal to assist the white population to adjust itself to life in the new world.⁵

The group that constituted the white population of early Carolina represented an even wider variety of racial, national, and cultural backgrounds than did the Indians. There were not only the English, who in 1790 comprised more than 80 per cent of the white population, but there were also the Germans, French, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch. The following table is illuminating on the subject of white population in North Carolina in 1790:

A knowledge of racial and national stock alone is inadequate in an attempt to understand the development of North Carolina in the early period. The white population represented at once a diversity of national stock and a relative economic and social homogeneity. The early and subsequent history of the State seems to uphold the point of view that the majority belonged to the yeomanry and that there were very few who could rank with the Byrds and Lees of Virginia or the Pinckneys and Laurenses of South Carolina. Peopled by a hardworking group of English, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch yeomanry and influenced culturally by Quakerism, Lutheranism, and Moravianism, North Carolina was to present a picture somewhat different from that of her neighbors in her attitude on many public questions and in her treatment of the races and classes of men found in her midst.

Just as there were important variations in the racial, economic, and social pattern of North Carolina, there were also interesting conditions peculiar to the free Negro of North Carolina. The free Negro population in Virginia and in Maryland was numerically greater than that of North Carolina; but the economic and social conditions in those states provided ways of life for the free Negro that differed markedly from conditions in North Carolina. In no State south of North Carolina were there half as many free Negroes as in that State. One can be sure, therefore, that because of these circumstances the problem of the free Negro in North Carolina will be different from that in any of the neighboring states.

A further distinction between the free Negroes of North Carolina and those of other states can be made. The free Negroes in other sections were essentially an urban group. In South Carolina, the majority was in or near Charleston. In Maryland, they lived in Baltimore or other towns. In Virginia, they were in Richmond, Norfolk, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg. In North Carolina, however, there were no such urban centers. The free Negroes of North Carolina, moreover, did not congregate in what urban centers there were. They, like most of the other North Carolinians, were rural and, therefore, agricultural. This condition had a most profound effect on the development of the free Negro in North Carolina. The isolation and general backwardness that were the results of rurality played an important part in the development of the social and economic pattern in which the free Negro had to live. This disadvantage was offset, in part, at least, however, by the protection from the public attack which the rurality afforded.

The year 1790 has been chosen as a starting point for several reasons. In the first place, the information concerning the free Negro in the earlier period is wholly inadequate for any kind of detailed treatment of the subject. It is impossible, for example, to obtain even a satisfactory estimate of the number of free Negroes before the first decennial census. In the second place, the year seems to coincide, roughly at least, with the period in which North Carolina was developing a policy toward free Negroes that reflected the point of view of the people, rather than that of the Crown, Council, and Assembly. Finally, North Carolina was by that time beginning to develop the way of life and approach to its problems that were to distinguish it from its neighbors in later years.

Very early in the history of North Carolina, Negroes came to be looked upon as a permanent element in the population. Indeed, in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, drawn up by John Locke in 1669, the English philosopher and political theorist showed that he expected Negroes to constitute a part of the population of the Ashley colony by remarking that, Every freeman of Carolina, shall have absolute authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.⁷ Already the Lords Proprietors had made the generous offer of fifty acres of land for every slave over fourteen years old imported into the colony.⁸ As immigrants came into North Carolina, a number of those from Virginia and South Carolina brought slaves with them, recognizing, as did the proprietors, the value of slaves in settling the lands.

Into the northeastern part of the colony, before the end of the seventeenth century, a large number of younger members of Virginia’s leading families came to build fortunes for themselves where the land was cheaper. Having seen how invaluable the slave had been in the development of their native colony, they brought a large number of black men with them, in the hope that their wealth and prosperity would come more easily.⁹ In this way, the northeastern part of the colony was gradually peopled with blacks and whites who slowly moved southward into the rich stretches of land in Brunswick, Anson, Bladen, and Cumberland counties. The Scotch-Irish, Germans, and Dutch who moved into the piedmont section and into western North Carolina brought almost no slaves with them and constituted the group that in many instances resisted, though not altogether successfully, the movement of slavery westward.

The number of slaves in North Carolina grew very slowly in the early period, as did the population in general. The desirability of slaves to clear the lands and later to till the soil on the tobacco and rice plantations of the coastal plains, however, caused a steady growth in numbers, which Professor Bassett estimates at between 800 and 1,000 by 1700.¹⁰ The strong resistance of the Indians in the early years of the eighteenth century, the economic impracticability of the plantation system in some portions of North Carolina, and the strong resistance offered by some groups having religious scruples against it were factors which tended to check the development of slavery. The growth of the number of slaves in the colony, however, can be seen clearly by the fact that there were 22,600 black taxables in 1767, over against 29,000 white taxables.¹¹ In the preceding decade, in 1755, the eastern counties were found to be far ahead of the rest of the province in slave population. New Hanover had 1,374 slaves; Craven, 934; Edgecombe, 924; Northampton, 834; and Beaufort, 567.¹²

The greatest increase in the slave population was from 1790 to 1800, when the foreign slave trade was still allowed. (See Table II.) After the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a decided decrease in the growth of the slave population. The movement of large numbers of slaveholders into the cotton kingdom and the demand for slaves in that area constituted a drain on the slave population of the older regions.¹³

Slavery in North Carolina never achieved the degree of importance that it did in Virginia,¹⁴ or in South Carolina.¹⁵ Seventy-three per cent of the families in North Carolina had no slaves in 1850, and more than half the slaveholders had less than ten slaves.¹⁶ Although the slaves constituted about one third of the total population in North Carolina in 1860 (see Table II), it cannot be said that slavery was a growing institution. The rate of increase had steadily fallen off during the ante-bellum period, and the lack of profits, apparent even to the most rabid proslavery spokesman, heralded its demise as a constructive factor in the economic life of the State.¹⁷

It is impossible to indicate the date on which free Negroes first appeared in the colony of North Carolina. Some free Negroes, few though they may have been, were present by the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the March term of the General Court in 1703, it was ordered that Tho. Symons pay unto ye petitionr ye sum of five pounds, as he being Executor of Charles Jones Deced itt being for ye bringing up a negro boy.¹⁸ It may be that the Negro boy was free, for it would have been quite unusual for such a disposition to have been made of a slave, who would, in all probability, have passed by law to the nearest heirs or assigns. A complaint lodged by North Carolinians with the Lords Proprietors of Carolina in 1705 leaves no doubt as to the presence of free Negroes in the colony as early as 1701:

We . . . humbly represent to your lordships . . . That it is one of the fundamental Rights and unquestionable Privileges belonging to Englishmen That all Elections of their Representatives to serve in Parliament ought to be free and indifferent and that no Alien born out of allegiance to the Crown of England, unless he be otherwise especially qualif’d ought to Elect for, or be elected to serve as a member of Assembly. But in 1701 the votes of many unqualify’d Aliens were taken . . . and also several free Negroes were Receiv’d, and taken for as good Electors as the best freeholders in the Province.¹⁹

From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the colonial period, the presence of free Negroes in North Carolina was acknowledged; and the growing concern of the Colonial Assembly as well as that of the public officials seems to suggest that the number of free Negroes was increasing as the other groups in the colony increased. In the laws enacted in 1715, free Negroes were prevented from voting²⁰ and from intermarrying with whites.²¹ The latter law carried with it a fine of fifty pounds on any white man or woman who violated it and a similar fine qn any cleric celebrating such a marriage. The laws of 1723 regulating manumission,²² and the subsequent laws of the colonial period seeking to regulate every aspect of life for the free Negro simply bear witness to the growing concern of the whites for this group that was increasing in numbers. Added to this was the growing realization that free Negroes in a slave society must be carefully regulated lest their very presence serve to overturn the system.

Perhaps there is no definite connection between the end of the French and Indian War (there could hardly be) and the beginning of a more liberal attitude toward Negroes in North Carolina; but it is interesting to observe that the two coincided. In 1763, thirty-one men of Granville County signed a petition asking that the law of 1723²³ which heavily taxed free Negroes upon marriage be repealed. The petitioners humbly shewed

That many Inhabitants of the sd Counties [of Northampton, Edgecombe, and Granville] who are Free Negroes and Mulattoes and persons of Probity and good Demeanor and cheerfully contribute towards the discharge of every public Duty injoined them by Law. But by reason of being obliged by the said Act of Assembly to pay Levies for their wives and Daughters . . . are greatly Impoverished and many of them rendered unable to support themselves and families with the Common Necessaries of Life.²⁴

This petition by the citizens of Granville is the first of a series of manifestations of a more liberal attitude toward free Negroes that culminated in the period of the American Revolution and immediately after. In the proceedings of the Safety Committee in Wilmington in July, 1775, it was brought out that John Collet, Commander at Fort Johnston, had given encouragement to Negroes to run away from their masters and promised to protect them.²⁵ While this greatly inflamed the people of Wilmington, they were careful to contain themselves, since they also were fighting for freedom.

It was in the following year that the liberal attitude was revealed by an increase in the number of Negroes manumitted. In 1776, the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends appointed a committee to aid Friends in emancipating their slaves. The forty slaves thus set free were declared by the courts still to be slaves and were resold under a statute of 1777, passed after the slaves had been set free.²⁶ The action of the courts in this instance could not thwart a movement that was well under way and that gave many Carolinians an opportunity to square their revolutionary philosophy with their own consciences. In 1778, the Moravians began to manumit Negroes;²⁷ and about the same time numbers of individuals began to emancipate their slaves.²⁸ So extensively had the Jeffersonian philosophy been practiced by those who desired consistency that the Assembly passed the following act in 1787:

Whereas divers persons from religious motives, in violation of the law that slaves are to be set free for meritorious services only continue to liberate their slaves, who are now going at large to the terror of the people of this State. . . .

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of . . . North Carolina . . . That if any slave hath been liberated contrary to the before recited Act (and is known to be lurking about) the Justice of the Peace is impowered and required immediately to issue his warrant . . . to the Sheriff, commanding him to make diligent search and apprehend all such slave or slaves and to commit him, her, or them to the gaol of the county. . . .²⁹

It is interesting to observe, however, that the same Assembly that was exhibiting so much concern over the increasing number of free Negroes was contributing in a real way to the growth of this group. Just before the passage of the act mentioned above, the Assembly had passed five acts of emancipation in which seven slaves were set free. Various circumstances prompted the passage of these acts: Four slaves were emancipated in compliance with the wills of deceased slaveholders;³⁰another was set free upon the request of Richard Dobbs Spaight, noted Revolutionary leader in North Carolina;³¹ and a mother and daughter were set free upon the request of the free Negro husband and father.³² The spirit of the Revolution had made itself felt; and even at the risk of increasing the group whose presence was feared to no small degree, the solons of North Carolina proceeded to carry the Revolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusion.

While the Constitution of North Carolina, which was completed on December 23, 1776, cannot be described as altogether liberal, so far as the free Negro was concerned it was about as liberal as he could have expected. His status was by no means degraded in this frame of government, and while the use of the term freeman was to be interpreted in a number of ways, there were times—down to 1835—when it was interpreted to the advantage of the free Negro. The franchise clauses provided:

That all Freemen of the Age of twenty-one Years who have been Inhabitants of any one County within the State twelve months immediately preceding the Day of election and possessed of a Freehold within the same County of fifty