Navigating through a Hierarchical Society: Free People of Color in 19th-Century North Carolina

Historians have depicted the post-Revolutionary South as a society strictly bifurcated into black and white. In this depiction of southern life, free people of color and slaves formed one community while all whites fell into a separate community. This paper contends that in North Carolina such a structured divide never existed and instead free people of color were highly incorporated into society. Daily life for North Carolina’s free people of color involved regular interaction with people of varying racial categorizations, social positions, and family backgrounds. Free people of color, whites, and slaves lived as neighbors, prayed in the same churches, worked on the same land, and sometimes socialized together. Economic hardship placed most free people of color in a lower class than the most influential whites, and some other free people of color. At the same time, free status positioned all free people of color above enslaved people, who were at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Free people of color sometimes worked and lived side by side with enslaved people, but on some occasions free people of color owned and leased slaves in order to extract their labor.

At the local level free people of color and whites regularly interacted in relationships of mutual dependence. The most influential whites depended on both other whites and free people of color to buy their goods and services and work their property. Free people of color required business from all groups of people in order to succeed. Outside of the realm of commerce, free people of color and whites built personal relationships simply because they were neighbors. Long shared histories that stretched back into the colonial era bound together many white and non-white families. Shared drinks and other forms of socialization further cemented these bonds.