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Covering the colonial period to the Civil War and spanning all of the northern United States, this text documents the antebellum northern black experience. It demonstrates the central role of the black community in successfully managing the tensions born of assimilation and cultural difference.

African Americans --- Free African Americans --- Free Afro-Americans --- Free blacks --- History --- History. --- Free Black people

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With this reinsertion of individual free blacks into the neighborhood, community, and county, he exposes a different, more complicated image of the lives of free people of color.

Free African Americans --- Free Afro-Americans --- Free blacks --- African Americans --- Social conditions --- History --- Albemarle County (Va.) --- Albemarle Co., Va. --- Race relations. --- Free Black people

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Between Slavery and Freedom explores one of the central ironies of racial dynamics in this nation's history from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War.

Free African Americans --- Free Afro-Americans --- Free blacks --- African Americans --- History. --- Social conditions. --- Attitudes --- History --- United States --- Race relations --- Free Black people

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Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a 'moral contagion' of abolitionism and black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves. Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement. The sailors, their captains, abolitionists, and British diplomatic agents protested this treatment. They wrote letters, published tracts, cajoled elected officials, pleaded with Southern officials, and litigated in state and federal courts. By deploying a progressive and sweeping notion of national citizenship - one that guaranteed a number of rights against state regulation - they exposed the ambiguity and potential power of national citizenship as a legal category. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized the robust understanding of citizenship championed by Antebellum free people of color, by people afflicted with 'moral contagion'.

Free African Americans --- Free Blacks --- Merchant mariners, Black --- Free Negroes --- Free people of color --- Free persons of color --- Blacks --- Black merchant mariners --- Merchant mariners --- Free Afro-Americans --- Free blacks --- African Americans --- Legal status, laws, etc. --- History --- United States --- Foreign relations --- Black people --- Free Black people --- Negro Seamen Acts

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No American city’s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was home to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were “negroes,” free people of color were gensde couleur libre, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’s creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes” throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandated segregation lumped together descendants of slaves with descendants of free people of color. Much of the recent scholarship on New Orleans examines what race relations in the antebellum period looked as well as why antebellum Louisiana’s gens de couleur enjoyed rights and privileges denied to free blacks throughout most of the United States. This book, however, is less concerned with the what and why questions than with how people of color, acting within institutions of power, shaped those institutions in ways beyond their control. As its title suggests, Making Race in the Courtroom argues that race is best understood notas a category, but as a process. It seeks to demonstrate the role of free people of African-descent, interacting within the courts, in this process.

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations. --- LAW / Legal History. --- HISTORY / United States / General. --- Louisiana Purchase --- Louisiana --- Free African Americans --- Free Afro-Americans --- Free blacks --- African Americans --- Social aspects. --- History --- Legal status, laws, etc. --- Free Black people --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination