Bonds of Freedom: Pursuing Life and Liberty in Virginia’s Free Black Communities

After 1806, Virginia law denied newly emancipated Afro-Virginians the right to remain in their home communities after more than one year of freedom.  By 1860, however, perhaps as many as 20,000 free Afro-Virginians lived in the state illegally, having successfully forged the necessary social and economic bonds within their neighborhoods to help avoid, delay, or overcome prosecution for violating the state’s expulsion law.  Free blacks wove themselves and their loved ones into the social and economic worlds of their neighborhoods in ways that maintained relations with family and friends and built upon the personal reputations they had established while enslaved.  Free Afro-Virginians defined their liberty not only in terms of the future—the educational, economic, and social opportunities freedom promised—but also in terms of their individual pasts and their desire to enhance the lives they had already forged in slavery.  If, in the abstract, the goal of newly freed people was to expand their possibilities and maximize their liberty in all respects, for many, freedom lost much of its meaning without at least some continuity with their past.

Through data gathered in Virginia county court records, including will books, court minutes, and ended papers in chancery and law causes, this paper attempts to illuminate how free blacks who illegally resided in Virginia claimed, defined, and defended their liberty by maintaining interracial social and economic bonds in their neighborhoods.  Those extraordinary instances in which free Afro-Virginians were prosecuted under the expulsion law (and, as a result even sought to enslave themselves) reveal contests in which the reputations of free Afro-Virginians and their black and white allies were pitted against those of individual whites who had offered evidence against them.  Free people tapped into often extensive interracial networks they had cultivated to recognize and affirm their illicit freedom in court.