Cheesy Grits: Charleston's Free Persons of Color

Who were Charleston's "Free Persons of Color"? A simple description works well here: "Free Persons of Color" were those persons who had African ancestry but who were not slaves; they were free.

Free Persons of Color were found wherever there were slaves throughout the "New World." According to the U.S. census, in 1860, there were very nearly 4 million slaves in the U.S. and nearly 500,000 Free Persons of Color. A surprising number of them lived in the South in the very heart of chattel slavery. In 1861, Charleston's population totaled 48,409: 26,969 white, 17,655 slaves, and 3,785 "free colored."



How did slaves become free in the South before the Civil War? There were a number of different routes to freedom for the African-ancestored:

• If your mother was a Free Person of Color, then you were born free by virtue of her freedom.
• If you were born into slavery, then you or a family member might be able to earn enough money to purchase your freedom.
• Your master could choose to manumit you directly—manumission being the legal process through which the legal status of "free" was conferred.
• Your master could choose to manumit you according to the conditions of his/her last will and testimony.
• You could be manumitted by a direct action of government, e.g., as a reward for a particular service.

Examples of all of the above could be found amongst Charleston's Free Persons of Color.

Many of Charleston's Free Persons of Color were also mixed-race, most often—but not always—the offspring of white male slave-owners and black female slaves. While many of these relationships were indeed non-consensual, i.e., rape, not all of them were.

Regardless of the nature of the relationship, white slave-owners seem to have resisted the idea that their own flesh and blood should be enslaved, so they would provide for the manumission/emancipation and subsequent well-being of their mixed-race children, sometimes including the children's mother. Such provision might be immediate emancipation, or by the terms and conditions of a last will and testament, and generally included both cash and property. Sometimes these assets were placed in trust; other times, they were turned over directly to the heirs.

In consequence, many of these mixed-race families had access to resources, training, and opportunities that were forbidden to slaves. They were able to move about far more freely than slaves, which meant that in South Carolina, most of them gravitated toward Charleston, where the opportunities for independent life were generally the greatest.

Although Free Persons of Color could not become professionals, e.g., doctors and lawyers, they could become tradesmen and artisans, and they did—with alacrity and gusto. As we've already seen from the example of the Thornes, they became tailors, carpenters, dressmakers/mantua-makers, and machinists. Others became brick masons, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and even lumber dealers. Some of them accumulated considerable wealth and property. Including, alas, slaves.

As artisans and tradesmen and women, they served all of Charleston, both white and black. That they had both white and black ancestry placed them between the mainstreams of both, while at the same time giving them extraordinarily broad access to the whole Charleston marketplace.

Another consequence of the betwixt-and-between niche occupied by these mixed-race Free Persons of Color was social stratification: being considered neither white nor black, they tended to socialize primarily amongst themselves. They attended the same churches, were members of the same social clubs and their children tended to marry other mixed-race children who were similarly situated. This stratification created a group of people who understood both the privileges and the risks of their unique position and who banded together for social support in the ways available to them.

An outstanding example of this banding together was the Brown Fellowship Society, formed in 1790. Many of the mixed-race Free Persons of Color at that time were attending Charleston's St. Philip's Episcopal Church, where they were permitted to attend and worship alongside Charleston's white Episcopalians; however, because they were not white, they could not be buried in the St. Philip's churchyard. The rector of St. Philip's at the time, Rev. Thomas Frost, suggested that they form their own burial society, which they did. They purchased land on Pitt Street, just below Boundary Street (now Calhoun) for their burial ground; the Brown Fellowship Cemetery began operations there in 1794.

But the Brown Fellowship Society rather quickly evolved into something more than just a burial society: if a member died without a sufficient estate to provide for his family, the Brown Fellowship Society would support the family until the children reached the age at which they could be apprenticed to a trade—at which point, the Society would arrange the apprenticeship. In sum, the Brown Fellowship Society became a social insurance organization, providing not only for burials but for the welfare of the surviving family members.

There were other social and benevolent groups for Charleston's Free Persons of Color community as well: the Friendly Union, the Minor's Moralist Society, and the Humane Brotherhood, to name just three. And there were literary and other kinds of social societies as well—in fact, the whole range of these groups makes for a fascinating study of social relations across antebellum Charleston. But that's beyond the reach of this casual family history blog. We will, however, hear more about the Brown Fellowship Society when we trace Rebecca Thorne Howard's husband's family, the Howards.

And so back to the story of the Thornes, also members of this group of mixed-race Free Persons of Color, although not members of the Brown Fellowship Society. How did they come by their freedom?


Sources:

The Charleston 1861 census figures come from a census conducted by the city itself. The full census is available here.

Bernard Powers has quite literally written the book on the social history of black Charlestonians (both free and enslaved) during the nineteenth century. Its title is succinct: Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (University of Arkansas Press: 1994). I don't think I'm overstating the matter in calling it "encyclopedic." Some of the information in this post on the Brown Fellowship Society and the other social societies came from Powers, p. 51-2.