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"A Richmond Reader: 1733-1983" and "Don't Carry Me Back!: Narratives by Former Virginia Slaves"
Dr. Maurice Duke, Editor,
Member, A.C.O.R.N. African-American Architecture Project
A BRIEF NOTE ON SLAVES AND FREE PERSONS OF COLOR IN ANTE AND POST BELLUM RICHMOND
One needs to be careful when using such terms as "free blacks," or "free persons of color" when speaking of African Americans in both ante bellum as well as post bellum Richmond. The reasons for this go to the heart of discrimination against all African Americans, regardless of legal status, in the eras both preceding and following the Civil War.
Census figures note that in 1860 Richmond had a population of almost 38,000, over a third of which was black: 11,699 were listed as slaves, 2,576 as free persons of color. Although the facts are precise, social attitudes and legal constrictions collectively directed toward these people are not. Further, one should not make the mistake of believing that the defeat of the South eradicated these constrictions. In many ways, post bellum blacks lived practically the same as they had before the war.
The 1859 Richmond "Charters and Ordinances" spells out specifically a number of legal restrictions imposed upon both free and enslaved African Americans. In a series of twenty-seven separate categories, the Richmond City Council formulated the laws that governed the daily lives of its black citizens. Most of the ordinance is aimed at slaves; however, a number of them apply to free blacks as well.
For example, African Americans, free or enslaved, were not allowed to walk on the grounds of the Capitol Square, or in any cemetery reserved for whites. They were not allowed to smoke "on any public street or other public place," or to carry a walking cane, unless they were infirm or carrying one for their owner or employer. If there was insufficient room on a sidewalk for whites and blacks to pass each other, the blacks had to step into the street to afford unhindered passage to the whites. Additionally, no more than five African Americans were allowed to congregate as a group on street corners. Further, all free blacks above the age of twenty-one had to have at all times a copy of their "register," proving that they were indeed free. Moreover, blacks were forbidden to "use provoking language, or use or make insolent or menacing gestures to a white person," and were further enjoined from possessing firearms or "offensive" knives or swords. Laws and ordinances of these kinds-and they were myriad throughout the entire South--constricted the free as well as the enslaved. Moreover, they bred social attitudes that markedly governed society in the decades following the Civil War, many of them remaining with us even to the present day.
It follows that it would be erroneous, therefore, to assume that Emancipation brought overnight changes in social attitudes entrenched in laws that in some cases went back to 1705. That was the year the General Assembly organized into one body all laws affecting African Americans in the Commonwealth.
The terms "slave" and "freeman" cannot be easily differentiated. In many ways, all African Americans have had their lives and aspirations formulated by legal, moral, social and historic constrictions that belie the term "free," in the immediate post war era and far beyond.