White Neighbors, a "Good Black, and Useful Men": Free Blacks, Local Knowledge, and the Law in Antebellum Virginia

In December 1847, James Munroe, a former slave who had purchased his own freedom only a few months earlier, petitioned the Virginia General Assembly seeking permission to remain in the state. Munroe’s owners had moved to Memphis, Tennessee years earlier, agreeing to let him live as if free in Albemarle. By 1847, he had spent years working in and around the University of Virginia, saving money to purchase his own freedom. Years of living as an effectively masterless slave had aroused no visible opposition or concern among whites in Albemarle. His petition, however, sparked an argument in his home county of Albemarle regarding free blacks that pitted laissez-faire whites against a much smaller but very vocal anti-free black contingent. Those pro-slavery ideologues, newly vocal at the time, were challenging the more fluid system of race relations privileging local knowledge and context over state laws regarding free blacks that had predominated in Albemarle County since the Revolution. Munroe’s experiences over the next thirteen years—submitting two residency petitions that included the signatures of over two hundred white citizens along with detailed written testimonials from many whites that attested to Munroe’s good behavior, hard work, and trustworthiness; continuing to live and work in Albemarle well into the 1850s; purchasing and freeing his wife and two children; moving to Ohio; and returning to Albemarle in 1860 to purchase and free a third child—highlight the importance of community knowledge and reputation in creating the space in which James Munroe and other free people of color could maneuver and sometimes thrive in a slave society.