North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715–1885

Abstract

Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. revisits a subject John Hope Franklin examined in 1943 in The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860. Franklin's core tenet was that the state's “free Negro” inhabitants formed “a caste within a caste,” their lives limited and determined by racial discrimination (John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1943, p. 164). Milteer's premise, conversely, is that free status was a more important attribute than race. He argues that throughout the period before 1865, “the legal position of free people of color generally remained closer to that of whites than to that of slaves” (p. 2). Milteer's demotion of race as a signifier begins, appropriately, with a deconstruction of the concept of race. Understanding race as a cultural construct rather than a biological fact is not new. (Franklin remarked in passing that many of the state's “free Negroes” had white fathers.) But for Franklin, racial identity, however arbitrarily determined, was fixed. Milteer depicts racial identity as fluid and contingent. He provides numerous examples of individuals and families who, over time were alternately described, or defined themselves, as Black, mulatto, Indian, or (more rarely) white, as their neighbors and circumstances either allowed or demanded.