“To Be Licensed to Remain in This State”: The Shifting State of Freedom Among Free People of Color in Antebellum Natchez, Mississippi

 

Both literal and figurative movement facilitated freedom for free people of color at critical times during their lives in Natchez, Mississippi prior to the Civil War. For people of African descent in Natchez and throughout the United States, the concept of movement embodied a complex multiplicity of meanings.  In the literal sense, people migrated from one geographical area to another.  Movement also involved non-physical passage between legal states as individuals transitioned from enslavement to manumission. The act of becoming free was often precipitated by the catalyst of violence, namely, sexual violence, particularly for women who had children with white fathers. Movement for free people of color sometimes also entailed a metaphysical migration across the so-called color line. Passing as white or Indian provided protection against the violence of racial oppression and could be used as a tool to escape and avoid enslavement by manipulating the ambiguity of “race.”  Those who successfully passed for something other than black navigated their way through a minefield of increasing restrictions, personal and state-sponsored acts of violence, and the looming potential for re-enslavement, property loss, and deportment from the state. This paper centers on how one free woman of color, Harriet Johnson, experienced all these varied aspects of movement.

I argue that movement was a critical theme in that freedom for people of African descent in North America prior to the abolishment of slavery was not always a permanent state, but marked with fluidity—a tenuous and unstable purgatory that existed in various degrees between the poles of enslavement and freedom. The state of freedom itself was not fixed or monolithic. Instead, it was a continuum with permeable boundaries that made free people of color susceptible to re-enslavement for a barrage of offenses.  This paper explores how Johnson successfully navigated this shifting and uncertain terrain.