H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Law@h-net.msu.edu (December, 2003).

Judith Kelleher Schafer. _Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission
and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862_. Baton Rouge, La.:
Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xxiv + 204 pp. Notes,
bibliography, illustrations and index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-8071-2862-7.

Reviewed by Thomas N. Ingersoll <INGERSOLLT@aol.com>, The Ohio State
University, Lima

            The Dog Days of the 1850s in New Orleans

For over two decades, Judith Kelleher Schafer has been mining
Louisiana's antebellum judicial records, hauling up the golden
nuggets buried in their stories, and molding them into revealing
vignettes of slave society in the Old South.  In the past, she has
published numerous articles and a large book, _Slavery, the Civil
Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana, in 1994_,[1] an imaginative
treatment of the court records in the early antebellum period.  In
the present volume, she continues her history until the period of
1861, focusing on free blacks in New Orleans.  She is one of a
growing number of historians who believe we can understand slavery
best by paying special attention to free blacks.  Out of her case
files, step individual slaves demanding manumission, and free blacks
defending their freedom, in a period of mounting white antagonism
toward them in New Orleans and throughout the slave South.

Schafer shows that free blacks doggedly used the judicial system
throughout the period to gain and preserve their freedom, bravely
facing all-white local trial courts.  In particular, New Orleans
free blacks responded enthusiastically to a brief liberalizing of
slave manumission policy in 1855.  They soon found themselves
transformed into resisters, when the state's governing powers
sharply tightened manumission rights again, beginning in 1857.  The
New Orleans legislature--along with that of other states--was
reacting to the great slave insurrection scare that began in 1856,
when the Republican Party ran its first presidential candidate.
This scare would reach a pinnacle in the election of 1860.  Under
its shadow, many industrious free blacks experienced a white
backlash in the South because of their supposed subversive ties to
slaves, a bond arising from African Americans' kinship, and the
common experience of prejudice.  In this slim volume, Schafer
dispassionately describes the growth and virulence of a campaign of
white terror directed at New Orleans' free blacks in the final years
before the Civil War.

The free blacks of the Crescent City play a special role in American
history because of the debate about their distinctive condition
there.  Under a policy established by the French population's
Spanish rulers (in force from 1769 to 1807), the most industrious
and lucky slaves were able to buy their freedom backed up by
authority.  Masters also made ordinary, gratuitous manumissions of
slaves, similar to the liberal practice Ira Berlin discovered in
Virginia and other states at this time.[2] So a combination of the
two phenomena made the town's free blacks a comparatively large
urban population, constituting about one seventh of the parish at
its height in 1810.  This policy had been in no sense humanitarian:
it was a shrewd maneuver by the Spanish to divide the black
population, while the crown vigorously promoted the Atlantic slave
trade to Louisiana from the 1760s to 1803.  Since the self-purchase
policy never had a principled basis, and since the planters had
always disliked and resisted it when they could, it was easy for the
combined Franco-Hispano-Anglo planter class to overturn it in 1806
after the Spanish left.

Schafer begins her story in 1806, showing that slaves and would-be
emancipators suddenly faced harsh restrictions on manumissions,
which slowed the development of the free black population.  At the
same time, given the gradual deterioration and collapse of sugar
production in the parish, its slave population declined toward the
vanishing point.  Both slaves and free blacks were quickly
submerging--even by 1830--into a sea of white immigrants from
France, Ireland, Germany, and the other states.  So in 1857, free
blacks were the vulnerable targets of the white majority's hostility
in an atmosphere of sectional bitterness.

Whatever slight advantages Louisiana free blacks may have had in the
judicial system by comparison to other states, Schafer shows that
their disadvantages were much the same as existed elsewhere in the
South.  The "Free People of Color" were under legal injunction to
show no disrespect toward any white person, and judges could reduce
a free black to slavery for misbehavior.  They were exposed to white
kidnappers under cover of the relentless campaign by masters to
recover runaway slaves.  Schafer reports that even though Louisiana,
like most states, had a law against kidnapping free blacks into
slavery, there was not a single prosecution for that crime despite
the evidence she presents that kidnapping was a serious problem.  At
the lowest level of race relations, the white police behaved
coarsely toward free blacks, and scoffed at the principle of habeas
corpus by arbitrarily keeping them locked up for months for minor
infractions or just to make them prove they were free.

Their vulnerability grew as free blacks formed a smaller fraction of
the whole population, reduced to about seven percent of New Orleans'
1860 population of 144,601.  Moreover, they were becoming lighter in
color as a group because so few manumissions of unmixed blacks
occurred, and both conditions tended to set their community apart
from its supportive social network among slaves.  Legal restrictions
reduced their contacts with other free blacks by limiting their
travel outside the state, and by a new law in 1859 requiring black
sailors to remain on vessels that put into the Port of New Orleans.

The reader finds nicely mapped out here the changing conditions of
manumission.  From the comparatively liberal slave manumission
policy of the late colonial period, the rights of slaves to obtain
freedom and of masters to give it to them declined drastically with
the new Slave Code of 1806.  Despite the many restrictions, a few
slaves did continue to gain freedom in antebellum times, either by
contracting for self-purchase or by the master's gratuitous
manumission for service.  Schafer devotes a fine chapter to
testamentary manumissions.

In 1852, a more unstable and dangerous period for free blacks began,
when the state legislature enacted a law requiring any emancipated
slave to leave the state.  Manumitters and the manumitted pressured
the state to grant exceptions, which led to a new law in 1855
ordering district courts to hear all suits for emancipation, and
decide on both manumission and the question of exile for each
applicant.  Schafer looks at the 159 suits to free 289 slaves in the
sixteen months the policy was in force.  Most of the evidence shows
a free black community under full siege, by contrast with the
situation in 1806.  The majority were self-supporting individuals, a
few were rich (free blacks made up almost half of the 159
manumitters who sought the courts' permission to free their slaves),
and they maintained strong solidarity in their metropolitan sub
community.  Despite the signs of their success, however, they now
faced strong job competition from recent Irish and German
immigrants, and they faced a white upper class fearful they would
respond to the supposed radical ideological message of the
Republican Party by conspiring to rebel.

As a result, early in 1857 the lawmakers in Baton Rouge put an end
to the brief window of opportunity, voting to prohibit manumission
altogether.  They later went to the logical extreme in 1859.
Although Louisiana's government had adopted various laws to
discourage non-Louisiana free blacks from settling in the state,
authorities now actively expelled those who had settled there
anyway.  More drastically, in 1857 the governor urged the
legislature to expel all free blacks, in imitation of states like
Arkansas.  The Louisiana legislature did not go that far, but in
1859 they enacted a law strongly encouraging all free blacks to
choose masters and voluntarily reenslave themselves.

Some free blacks reacted to the politically-charged white racial
campaign by flight, if they could afford it, fearing that white
violence might break out against them.  Contemporaries estimated
that five hundred people went to the Republic of Haiti, up to five
hundred families went to the Republic of Mexico (where the
revolutionaries had abolished slavery in the 1820s), and some went
to other states.  Only seventeen applied for reenslavement before
the arrival of the US Army closed the local courts in 1862.

An apt epilogue comments on the fact that many able-bodied free
black men in New Orleans volunteered to fight for the Confederacy in
1861.  (Louisiana declined their services but bragged to the rest of
the country that they had offered.)  Since one might wonder how an
oppressed minority could serve with the oppressor, Schafer explains
that most of the volunteers were property-owners seeking to protect
the city from destructive foreign invasion like other householders.
They were also in false hopes that their service could reduce the
persecution.  As it happened, only when the US Army arrived were
they enabled to begin the next, long phase of their struggle, which
would lead to bloody battles in the streets of New Orleans after the
war, and-after the US Army left-a century of Jim Crow and white
lynching to keep all African Americans hemmed in by law.

This tragic tale Schafer chooses to relate in her usual restrained
tone, which in this case comes off very effectively as hushed
horror.  The reader becomes increasingly breathless with indignant
surprise as the long catalog of abusive laws and legal abuses
rumbles off her pages.  She tells the story in a highly economical
165 pages of text.

It is possible to take issue with a few aspects of this book.  As is
typical of Schafer's other work, she shows a slight inclination to
fit her arguments into the historiography of slavery in Louisiana.
She cites some scholars working in the field, others not.  That
imbalance reflects a weak enunciation of the thesis.  Here and
there, she alludes to the debate about whether Louisiana represents
a genuine anomaly in the Deep South because of supposed white
liberalism on race.  From the evidence of scattered remarks, one
might almost think she agrees with that view, except that everything
about her story contradicts it so thoroughly.

New Orleans had always been a typical Deep South slave society
concerning race relations, although its urban character made it
increasingly atypical after 1803.  In that regard, it is worth
noting that Schafer makes no attempt to suggest that the state's
Anglophone authorities were more reactionary and Francophone
authorities more liberal on the question of free blacks.  It appears
that slaveholders were in nearly perfect sync with other white
southerners in degrading, scapegoating and persecuting free blacks,
but Schafer does not attempt to make that argument, nor to place
what happened in the mid-1850s within the context of national
events.  She does suggest briefly that the anti-free black campaign
began when northern abolitionists "whipped up antislavery sentiment
in the North" (p. 8) but that unfortunately seems to imply that the
northern radicals must share the blame for the backlash in New
Orleans, without assisting a more general argument.  Finally,
Chapter Two concerns an attorney, Jean Charles David, who seems to
have tried to specialize in suits for freedom by blacks, whose
practice may have been unscrupulous.  The purpose of this chapter is
unclear.  It seems to suggest that he worked cheaply, indicating yet
another problem for free blacks: many of them could afford only the
worst representation.

The strengths much outweigh the flaws, and one might consider this
book for classroom use in a variety of legal history courses or
upper division surveys about slavery.  The author is deeply
committed to allowing her case files to speak for themselves, and
has looked at all the cases she could find concerning free blacks in
this period.  Her constant effort to keep contemporary individual
free blacks and slaves in the forefront makes Schafer's book about
people rather than about vague forces or concepts.  The story line
has a chronological sensibility that is sweeping yet sure-footed.
Her careful distinction between law and judicial practice is a model
worthy of emulation by any legal historian.  This volume deserves a
wide audience

Notes:

[1]. _Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana_
(Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).

[2]. Ira Berlin, _Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the
Antebellum South_. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 51-78.

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