Free_Blacks_In_Antebellum_Period

Free Blacks In Antebellum Period In 1860, roughly half a million free people of African descent resided in the United States. Known alternately as free Negroes, free blacks, free people of color, or simply free people (to distinguish them from post-Civil War freedpeople), they composed less than 2 percent of the nation's population and about 9 percent of all blacks. Although the free black population was increasing during the antebellum years, it was growing far more slowly than either the white or the slave population, so that it was a shrinking proportion of American society. But free Negroes were important far beyond their numbers. They played a pivotal role in society during slave times and set precedents for both race relations and relations among black people when slavery ended. Their status and treatment were harbingers of the postemancipation world. Often the laws, attitudes, and institutions that victimized free blacks during the slave years - political proscription, segregation, and various forms of debt peonage - became the dominant modes of racial oppression once slavery ended. Similarly, their years of liberty profoundly influenced the pattern of postemancipation black life. They moved in disproportionate numbers into positions of leadership in black society when slavery ended. For example, nearly half of the twenty-two black men who served in Congress between 1869 and free, black, south, negroes, slavery, blacks, slaves, political, slave, color, whites, upper, states, population, negro, economic, relations, people, north, emancipation, skilled, american, urban, society, social, revolution, own, orleans, often, northern, new, men, institutions, although, years